Over 100 German and Austrian engineers and scientists who helped craft the V-2 missile were brought to West Texas as part of Operation Paperclip.
The post-World War II intelligence program aimed to study and gather insights from the minds who crafted the deadly war weapon and bolster the U.S. Army’s missile program.
Nearly 150 children accompanied these Nazi scientists to El Paso and were educated in El Paso schools.
The 2022 book Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands explores the vastly different systems that educated these immigrant children and El Paso’s majority ethnic Mexican student population.
Author Jonna Perrillo, a professor of English education at the University of Texas at El Paso, said students in El Paso schools were highly segregated.
“The El Paso school system was over 60% Mexican and Mexican American children at the time, but you wouldn’t know it looking at a class picture from … where the Paperclip children ended up,” she said.
Perrillo said language education was one of the biggest disparities that existed within the schools.
Teachers often used positive reinforcement with Paperclip children who spoke German and corporal punishment with children who spoke Spanish.
“Like Paperclip children, the majority of Mexican American children came to school in El Paso speaking often very little English or sometimes none,” she said. “But in (these) children, this was seen as a behavioral problem. Not just an academic challenge, but something that said a great deal about them as citizens or not.”
