The Paper Clips Project is a project by middle school students from the small southeastern Tennessee

Tennessee

Tennessee is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States. It has a population of 6,346,105, making it the nation's 17th-largest state by population, and covers , making it the 36th-largest by total land area...

 city of Whitwell

Whitwell, Tennessee

Whitwell is a city in Marion County, Tennessee, United States. The population was 1,660 at the 2000 census. It is part of the Chattanooga, TN–GA Metropolitan Statistical Area.-History:...

 who created a monument for the Holocaust victims in Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

. It started in 1998 as a simple 8th-grade project and evolved into one gaining worldwide attention. At last count, over 30 million paper clip

Paper Clip

"Paper Clip" is a 1995 episode of The X-Files television series. It was the second episode broadcast in the show's third season. Paper Clip concludes the story regarding the agents' possession of a digital tape containing government secrets on extraterrestrials.- Plot :Continuing from the previous...

s had been received. Paper Clips, an award-winning documentary film

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 about the project, was released in 2004 by Miramax Films

Miramax Films

Miramax Films is an American entertainment company known for distributing independent and foreign films. For its first 14 years the company was privately owned by its founders, Bob and Harvey Weinstein...

.
In 1998 Whitwell Middle School principal Linda M.