Operation Paperclip and Why Hans Kammler Vanished

The unanswered question at the centre of my book, The Flights of the Eagles

Most people know Operation Paperclip as the “Nazi scientist recruitment programme” that brought men like Wernher von Braun into American service. Von Braun would put American astronauts on the Moon. What is less discussed is the competition between Allied intelligence agencies to capture, protect, and exploit high-ranking SS officials before anyone else could reach them.

Which leads inevitably to the strangest figure of all: Hans Kammler.

Kammler was not a scientist. He was the SS’s chief of secret weapons construction - the man responsible for facilities, engineering networks, and the bureaucratic machinery behind the V-2. By 1945 he knew everything about how to make the tunnels, the scientists, the political pressures, and the crimes. He did not know about the actual science behind the rockets.

And then it seemed until recently he vanished.

Not “vanished” in the sense of being blown apart in a field somewhere. Vanished as in:-

• no body

• no prison record

• no Allied interrogation file

• contradictory testimonies

• convenient stories that fall apart under scrutiny

• and a long shadow cast by people in Britain and America who had every incentive to make him disappear
  

This isn’t conspiracy. It’s documented ambiguity - the kind that appears only when powerful people panic.

My novel The Flights of the Eagles deals with the era where these kinds of decisions were made, and the machinery of British and American intelligence was at its most compromised. It’s fiction, but it’s rooted in the historical rot that surrounded the end of the war - the kind of rot that makes a man like Kammler simply evaporate from the record. But how?

I'll reveal what I think happened to him and why the standard explanations simply fail.

If you’re interested in the intersection between history, secrecy, and political cowardice, you’ll find more of it here soon.