The signature matched, and Captain Selvester sent for the most senior interrogator in Camp 31, a Captain named Smith. Once Smith arrived, Selvester ordered Himmler searched again. This time British soldiers found two vials of poison hidden in Himmler’s clothes. It was medicine to treat stomach cramps, Himmler said. Captain Smith ordered a second physical exam of the prisoner, and the camp’s doctor, Captain Clement Wells, spotted a blue-tipped object—hidden in the back of Himmler’s mouth. When Dr. Wells tried to remove it, Himmler jerked his head back and bit down. The vial contained poison. Within seconds, the prisoner collapsed. Now Heinrich Himmler was dead. An assistant to Dr. Wells noted in his diary, “[T]his evil thing breathed its last breath at 23:14.”
The war in Europe was over. Germans called it die Stunde Null, zero hour. Cities lay in ruins. Allied bombing had destroyed more than 1.8 million German homes. Of the 18.2 million men who had served in the German army, navy, Luftwaffe, and the Waffen-SS, a total of 5.3 million had been killed. Sixty-one countries had been drawn into a war Germany started. Some 50 million people were dead. The Third Reich was no more.
Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler were dead. Albert Speer was in custody. So were Siegfried Knemeyer and Dr. Kurt Blome. Otto Ambros was under house arrest in Gendorf, with no one in CIOS or Alsos yet having figured out who he really was. Wernher von Braun, Walter Dornberger, and Arthur Rudolph were in custody, working toward contracts with the U.S. Army. Georg Rickhey had a job in London, translating documents for the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey.
The future of war and weapons hung in the balance. What would happen to the Nazi scientists? Who would be hired and who would be hanged? In May 1945 there was no official policy regarding what to do with any of them. “The question who is a Nazi is often a dark riddle,” an officer with the Third Army, G-5, wrote in a report sent to SHAEF headquarters in May. “The question what is a Nazi is also not easy to answer.”
Over the next few months, critical decisions about what to do with Hitler’s former scientists and engineers would be made, almost always based on an individual military organization’s needs and justified by perceived threats. Official policy would follow, one version for the public and another for the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). A headless monster called Operation Paperclip would emerge.
PART II
“The scale on which science and engineering have been harnessed to the chariot of destruction in Germany is indeed amazing. There is a tremendous amount to be learnt in Germany at the present time.”
—W. S. Farren, British aviation expert with the
Royal Aircraft Establishment
CHAPTER SIX
Harnessing the Chariot of Destruction
What to do about Hitler’s former scientists? The fighting had stopped, and the Allied forces were transitioning from a conquering army to an occupying force. Germany was to be disarmed, demilitarized, and denazified so its ability to make war would be reduced to nil, and science and technology were at the very heart of the matter. “Clearly German science must be curbed,” noted Army Air Forces Lieutenant Colonel John O’Mara, in the CIOS report he authored on the rise of the Luftwaffe. “But how?” World War I had ended with a peace treaty that, among other restrictions, “sought to prevent the rise of German Air Power by forbidding powered flight. The result,” explained O’Mara, “was as ludicrous as it was tragic.” By the time Germany started World War II, its air force was the most powerful in the world. The mistake could not be repeated, and the U.S. procedural guidelines for an occupied Germany, contained in a directive known as JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) 1076, promised to nullify Germany’s appetite for war. All military research was to cease. Scientists were rounded up and taken to detention centers for extensive questioning.
Across the former Reich, SHAEF had set up internment centers where more than fifteen hundred scientists were now being held separate from other German prisoners of war. The U.S. Army had approximately 500 scientists in custody in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in the Bavarian Alps, including the von Braun and Dornberger group; there were 444 persons of interest detained in Heidenheim, north of Munich; 200 were in Zell am See, in Austria; 30 kept at Château du Grande Chesnay, in France. The U.S. Navy had 200 scientists and engineers at a holding facility in Kochel, Germany, including many wind tunnel experts. The Army Air Forces had 150 Luftwaffe engineers and technicians in Bad Kissingen, Germany, a majority of whom had been rounded up by Colonel Donald Putt. CIOS had 50 scientists, including Werner Osenberg, in Versailles. But there was no clear policy regarding what lay ahead for the scientists, engineers, and technicians in Allied custody, and General Eisenhower sought clarification on the issue. From Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force in France, he sent a cable to the War Department General Staff in Washington, D.C., asking for specific direction about longer-term goals. “Restraint and control of future German scientific and technical investigations are clearly indicated,” General Eisenhower wrote, “but this headquarters is without guidance on the matter and is in no position to formulate long-term policy.” Were these men going to be detained indefinitely? Interrogated and released?
The War Department responded to Eisenhower’s cable by letting him know his query was considered a “matter of urgency.” Tentative responsibility was assigned to the Captured Personnel and Materiel Branch of the Military Intelligence Service, Europe. Now that group was in charge of overseeing the scientists’ basic needs, including living quarters, food, and in some cases pay. But it would be another two weeks before the War Department would get back to General Eisenhower with any kind of a statement regarding policy. In the meantime, a number of events were unfolding—in America and in Germany—that would affect the decision making of the War Department General Staff.
In the absence of policy, ideas were floated at the Pentagon. Some, like Major General Kenneth B. Wolfe, of the Army Air Forces, took matters into their own hands. General Wolfe was chief of engineering and procurement for Air Technical Service Command at Wright Field, and he supported Major General Knerr and Colonel Putt in their quest for capturing Luftwaffe spoils discovered at Völkenrode. But General Wolfe envisioned an even bigger science exploitation program and felt strongly that policy needed to be set now. Wolfe flew to SHAEF headquarters in France to meet with Eisenhower’s deputy, General Lucius D. Clay, to promote his idea.
General Clay told General Wolfe that he was not opposed to such a program but that now was hardly a good time to broach it. “Besieged by the countless demands and the chaotic conditions relevant to ending the war, and the burdensome complexities of planning for the peace, [Clay] considered such efforts six months premature,” explains historian Clarence Lasby. General Clay told General Wolfe to come back and talk to him in six months. Instead, Wolfe set out for Nordhausen, Germany, where his colleague at the Pentagon, Colonel Gervais William Trichel, was running Special Mission V-2, the Top Secret scientific intelligence operation for the U.S. Army Ordnance, Rocket Branch.
Inside the abandoned rocket production facility in the underground tunnel complex at Nordhausen, Special Mission V-2 was just getting under way. When General Wolfe saw the vast numbers of V-weapons left behind, he became even more convinced that a U.S. program to exploit Nazi science had to happen now. Upon his return to Washington, D.C., General Wolfe wrote to General Clay with a revised idea. Not only did the United States military need to act immediately to capture Nazi armaments, Wolfe said, but America needed to hire the “German scientists and engineers” who had created the weapons and put them to work in America. “If steps to this end are taken, the double purpose of preventing Germany’s resurgence as a war power and advancing our own industrial future may be served.” Clay did not respond; he had already told General Wolfe to back off for six months. Meanwhile, the work that was going on at Nordhausen under the auspices of Special Mission V-2 would greatly influence the future of all the Nazi science programs that would follow.
The man in charge of Special Mission V-2, twenty-eight-year-old Maj
or Robert B. Staver, was no stranger to the military significance of the Nazis’ rockets. While preparing for Special Mission V-2 in London the winter before, Staver was nearly killed by one. He and a British colleague had been working inside an office at 27 Grosvenor Square one afternoon in February when a loud blast knocked both of them to the floor. Staver went to the window and saw a “big round cloud of smoke where a V-2 had exploded overhead.” Watching pieces of burning metal rain down from the sky, Staver did a few calculations in his head and determined that the V-2 had likely been heading “very directly” at the building in which he was working when it blew up prematurely. A few weeks later, Major Staver was asleep in a hotel room near the Marble Arch when he was thrown out of bed by an enormous blast. A V-2 had landed in nearby Hyde Park and killed sixty-two people.
The near-death experiences made him ever more committed to Special Mission V-2. For six weeks Staver worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, studying aerial photographs of Nordhausen supplied to him by the British and otherwise learning everything he could about the V-weapons. As soon as the Allied forces liberated the tunnel complex, Major Staver would be one of the first intelligence officers inside.
Now, finally, here he was at Nordhausen. It was May 12, 1945, and though his mission was almost complete, time was running out, because the Russians were headed into this area soon. By U.S. Army calculations, they would most likely arrive in eighteen days from Berlin.
U.S. Army Ordnance believed that the V-2 rocket could help win the Pacific war, and for nearly two weeks Staver had been hard at work. He had overseen the collection of four hundred tons of rocket parts, which had been loaded onto railcars for delivery to the port at Antwerp, from where they would be shipped to the United States. But with his degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University, Staver knew that the V-2 rocket was a lot more than the sum of its parts. Without blueprints or technical drawings, it was highly unlikely that American engineers could simply cobble the rocket components together and make the V-2 fly. The drawings and blueprints had to have been stashed somewhere near Nordhausen. If only Major Staver could find a German scientist to bribe, he might be able to find out where the crucial documents were hidden.
For two weeks now Staver had been traveling through the Harz Mountains touring underground weapons factories, searching for a clue or a lead as to who might know more about the V-2 document stash. Locals told a wide variety of stories. Some spoke of paperwork going up in flames. Others talked about truckloads of metal trunks being hidden away in abandoned buildings, in beer gardens, and in castle walls. But this was all hearsay. No one could produce a concrete lead, and it was not exactly difficult to understand why. War crimes investigators were also in Nordhausen asking locals lots of questions. And as Staver trolled for rocket scientists, American GIs continued to dig mass graves for the thousands of corpses found at Nordhausen-Dora slave labor camp. The entire town of Nordhausen still smelled of death.
While driving around on his hunt, Staver kept boxes stashed in the back of his army jeep, filled with cigarettes, alcohol, and cans of Spam. These valuable black market goods worked well in exchange for information, and finally, Staver got the lead he was looking for. A source told him that there was a V-2 rocket scientist by the name of Karl Otto Fleischer who lived nearby. Fleischer had been an engineer inside the Nordhausen tunnels as well as the Wehrmacht’s business manager, and he knew a lot more than he was letting on. Fleischer reported directly to General Dornberger; he knew things. Staver drove to the scientist’s residence with a proposition more powerful than a can of Spam.
Major Staver told Karl Otto Fleischer that he could cooperate or go to jail. Important V-2 documents had been hidden somewhere around Nordhausen, Staver said. If anyone knew, Fleischer did, Staver surmised. Dieter Huzel and Bernhard Tessmann had indeed told Fleischer about the document stash in the Dörnten mine before they fled for the Bavarian Alps. But Fleischer’s allegiance was to his colleagues, so he lied to Staver and said he had no idea what Staver was talking about. He pointed the finger at another colleague, an engineer and von Braun deputy named Dr. Eberhard Rees. Ask Rees, Fleischer said. He was the former chief in charge of the Peenemünde assembly line.
When interviewed by Staver, Dr. Eberhard Rees played his own disinformation card, using Major Staver’s influence to help spring a third colleague from jail. Walther Riedel, chief of V-2 rocket motor and structural design, had been one of the four men honored at the Castle Varlar event the previous December. Now Riedel was receiving rough treatment in a jail eighty miles away, in Saalfeld. He had been mistaken by military intelligence as having been Hitler’s biological weapons chief. Agents with the Counter Intelligence Corps had knocked out several of Riedel’s front teeth. His security report listed him as “an active Nazi who wore the uniform and the party badge. Ardent.” Riedel joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and was a member of five Nazi organizations.
In a series of interviews with Riedel, Major Staver found him to be a strange bird. Riedel was obsessed with outer space vehicles, which he called “passenger rockets.” In one interview, Riedel insisted he’d designed these passenger rockets for “short trips around the moon,” and that he’d been pursuing “space mirrors which would be used for good and possibly evil.” Riedel said he knew of at least forty rocket scientists besides himself who should be brought to America to complete this groundbreaking work. If the Americans didn’t act, Riedel said, the Russians surely would. Staver asked Riedel if he knew where the V-2 technical drawings were hidden. Riedel said he had no idea.
Staver was working on a number of problems, all compounded by the fact that the Russians were coming. That much was real. Nordhausen had been liberated by the Americans and was originally designated to be part of the American zone. Stalin protested, saying Russia had lost seventeen million men in the war and deserved greater reparations for greater losses sustained. The Allies agreed to turn over a large swath of American-held German territory to the Soviets on June 1. This territory included all of Nordhausen and everything in it.
But Staver had more to worry about than the Russians. On May 18, 1945, an airplane arrived carrying a physicist and ordnance expert named Dr. Howard Percy “H. P.” Robertson. Robertson had been a team leader for Operation Alsos, and now he served President Eisenhower as chief of the Scientific Intelligence Advisory Section under SHAEF. Dr. H. P. Robertson told Major Staver that he intended to take rocket engineers Fleischer, Riedel, and Rees to Garmisch-Partenkirchen for interrogation, where they would be held alongside General Dornberger and Wernher von Braun until the War Department General Staff decided on a policy regarding Nazi scientists.
Major Staver refused to give up Fleischer, Riedel, and Rees. They were his charges, he told Robertson. As far as exploiting Nazi science for American use, Staver and Robertson saw eye to eye. But as far as giving Nazi scientists special privileges, the two men were on opposite sides of the aisle. The idea outraged Robertson, who saw Nazi scientists as amoral opportunists who were “hostile to the Allied cause.”
Dr. Robertson was a mathematical physicist who had taken a leave of absence from a professorship at Princeton University to help in the war effort. He was a jovial, gentle man who liked crossword puzzles, Ivy League football matches, and scotch. Robertson spoke German fluently and was respected by Germany’s academic elite not just for his scientific accomplishments but because he had studied, in 1925, in Göttingen and Munich. Before the war, Dr. Robertson counted many leading German scientists as his friends. World War II changed his perspective, notably regarding any German scientist who stayed and worked for Hitler.
While at Princeton, Dr. Robertson had become friendly with Albert Einstein. The two men worked on theoretical projects together and spent time discussing Hitler, National Socialism, and the war. Einstein, born in Germany, had worked there until 1933, becoming director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics and professor at the University of Berlin. But when Hitler came to power, Einstein immediately renounced
his citizenship in defiance of the Nazi Party and immigrated to the United States. Dr. Robertson shared Einstein’s core view. It had been the duty of German scientists to protest Hitler’s racist policies, beginning in 1933. Anyone who had served the Reich’s war machine was not going to be given a free pass by H. P. Robertson now.
Determined to keep the Nazi scientists in his custody, Staver played the Russian card. Robertson may have been anti-Nazi, but he was also deeply patriotic. With access to secret Alsos intelligence information, Robertson was well aware that Russian rocket development was a legitimate and growing threat. Both men knew that in as little as twelve days, the Russians would arrive in Nordhausen. If Staver was not able to locate the V-2 documents by then, the Russians would eventually find them. Major Staver appealed to Dr. Robertson, arguing that his keeping Fleischer, Riedel, and Rees was the army’s last and best shot at locating the hidden V-2 documents. Ultimately, Dr. Robertson agreed. In a final appeal, Staver asked Robertson if there was anything Robertson could offer up that might help him in his search for the V-2 stash. Some clue or detail that Staver might be overlooking?
Indeed there was. Dr. Robertson’s fluency in science and his familiarity with German scientific intelligence had thus far made him an extremely effective interrogator of the Nazi scientific and military elite. Wehrmacht generals, SS officers, and scientists were notoriously eager to speak with him. Listening to Staver, Dr. Robertson had an idea. He pulled a small writing pad out of his shirt pocket and looked over his notes. During an earlier interrogation of a rocket scientist named von Ploetz, Robertson had gotten an interesting lead. He decided to share it with Major Staver.