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John Kyle Day, Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 2, September 2024, Pages 387–388, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae162
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Jonna Perrillo's new book is excellent. Educating the Enemy takes a unique perspective on and makes an important contribution to the historical scholarship on World War II and the ensuing Cold War. The University of Chicago Press should be congratulated for publishing this work.
Educating the Enemy is a study of the widely known Operation Paperclip. Immediately after World War II, the U.S. government brought Nazi rocket scientists to Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, to develop propulsion technology for its military arsenal. Instead of focusing upon the more well-known military, political, or technological consequences of this program, Perrillo concentrates on its social ramifications. Educating the Enemy studies the lives of the scientists' families, particularly the German children who were uprooted from their war-torn homeland and brought to El Paso to matriculate in the city's public schools. For Perrillo, these Operation Paperclip children entered the El Paso school system at a particularly auspicious time in U.S., Latin American, and world history. While the United States fought and won the most lethal conflict in world history ostensibly to defeat the destructive insanity of Nazi racial ideology that was brought to fruition with the Holocaust, these German children matriculated in a community fraught with glaring contradictions to this noble endeavor. That is, the children whose parents had been at the epicenter of the Nazi war machine, its political program, and its use of slave labor and death camps, were brought into a city with an ensconced caste system that imposed de facto discrimination against the city's majority Mexican American population. For Perrillo, the lives and experiences of the Operation Paperclip children allows scholars a window into the social and racial dynamics of postwar America, the American South, the American borderlands, and especially west Texas. These German children were schooled in a Texas border city that both discriminated against the Black American soldiers of Fort Bliss and the city's Black residents, and confined the region's Mexican American majority to lives of poverty and dependency due to residential segregation and educational policies that overwhelmingly favored the Anglo minority. Though directly linked to the Nazi party's racial policies and to the deaths of American soldiers on European battlefields, the German families were almost immediately treated as a part of the Anglo minority, thus enjoying the full benefits of American citizenship. The majority of El Pasoans (particularly the city's Mexican American majority) were confined to substandard housing and educational facilities, menial labor, and permanent subservient status. Perrillo convincingly demonstrates that the expediencies of the Cold War quickly dissipated the concerns of American officials over the loyalties of the German scientists and their families, while American racial discrimination immediately propelled their children to the top of the social hierarchy.
