The convoy arrived in Oberursel. Like many other army interrogation facilities across the American zone in postwar Germany, the one in Oberursel had been an important Third Reich military post during the war. Oberursel had a particularly storied past. This Dulag Luft, or Durchgangslager (terms for air force prisoner of war camp, or transit camp), had functioned as the sole interrogation and evaluation center for the Luftwaffe. It was here that Nazi interrogators had questioned every Allied pilot who had been shot down during the war. The Luftwaffe’s lead interrogator, Hanns Scharff, kept a diary. “Every enemy aviator who is captured… will be brought to this place for questioning. It makes no difference whether he is taken prisoner at the front lines or whether he comes dangling down from the sky in the most remote location… he comes to Oberursel,” wrote Scharff.
Physically, things had not changed much since Oberursel had changed hands. The interrogation facility centered around a large half-timber “mountain house” that served as an officers’ club. Nearby there were fourteen buildings for officer housing. The prisoners’ barracks, a large U-shaped building, contained 150 solitary jail cells. This building had been called “The Cooler” during the war, and it was the place where interrogator Hanns Scharff did most of his work with captured Allied pilots. Now it was the new home for thirty-three former Ashcan internees, at least for a while.
Dolibois turned his charges over to the guard detail at Oberursel. His orders said to return to Luxembourg and wait for new orders. Setting out for Ashcan, he rode in the lead jeep with an enlisted man. A little less than an hour south of Frankfurt, Dolibois came upon a row of U.S. Army trucks stopped along the side of the road. One of the soldiers stepped into the road and signaled for Dolibois’s convoy to stop. John Dolibois climbed out of his jeep. He became overwhelmed by a horrific stench, “sickeningly sweet, nauseating,” he later recalled. He heard retching. Several of the men in his convoy had gotten out of their vehicles and were now throwing up along the side of the road.
“What is that horrible smell?” Dolibois asked a soldier behind the wheel of one of the stalled vehicles. “What in God’s name are you hauling?”
The captain climbed out of his jeep. He did not say a word but motioned for Dolibois to follow him behind one of the two-and-a-half-ton trucks. In silence, the captain untied a rope and flipped back a sheet of canvas that had obscured the cargo from view until now. Dolibois stared into the body of the truck. It took him a moment for him to realize what he was looking at: rotting corpses. “Putrefied,” he recalled. “Most were naked. Some still wore the pajama-like striped pants, the concentration camp uniforms, now just rotting rags. It was the most horrible sight I had ever seen.”
The army captain spoke in a flat, emotionless tone. “There are thousands of them, five truck loads,” he told Dolibois. “We’re hauling them from one mass grave to another. Don’t ask me why.” These were bodies from Dachau. Corpses found upon liberation. The army captain’s convoy had come to a standstill after one of the vehicles had broken down. They’d been waiting at the roadside for an escort when Dolibois’s convoy from Oberursel had arrived. The captain asked Dolibois if his group could escort them to the next military station down the road. Dolibois agreed. “I found myself leading a bizarre caravan: six empty ambulances, an empty weapons carrier, followed by five two-and-a-half-ton trucks loaded with the obscenity of the Nazi final solution,” remembered Dolibois. The dead bodies were being taken to a proper burial spot on orders from the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS).
Back at Ashcan the world appeared different to him now. There, the rest of Hitler’s inner circle remained, men “directly responsible for that ghastly transport,” said Dolibois. If John Dolibois ever had a shred of doubt about the degree of barbarism and the collective guilt of the men he had spent three months interrogating at Ashcan, in that moment there was no hesitation anymore. At age ninety-three, John Dolibois says, “I still smell that foul odor of death.”
But in August 1945, there was barely any time for the young interrogator to process what he had witnessed. Back at Ashcan he fell into bed and slept hard. Come morning, John Dolibois received new orders from Colonel Andrus. There was still a group of Nazi Bonzen at Ashcan. Dolibois was to be on the team that would move them to the Nuremberg prison. Colonel Andrus had selected John Dolibois to fly with the remaining members of the Nazi high command on a transport plane.
Dawn, August 12, 1945. The sun had not yet risen in the sky. Ashcan’s last group of Nazis were escorted out of the classified interrogation facility and driven in ambulances a short distance to the airport at Luxembourg City. A C-47 transport plane idled on the tarmac, stripped down to its bare bones. Inside the aircraft, a single row of seats ran down each side. There was a honey bucket toilet and a urinal attached to a door at the back of the airplane. To Dolibois, it seemed as if Colonel Andrus was nervous. “Something was cooking,” Dolibois recalled. Security was always on the colonel’s mind. “Aha!” Dolibois realized what it was. “Kaltenbrunner!”
Ernst Kaltenbrunner was considered the most dangerous Nazi among the high command. At 6′4″, he was a giant man with a massive frame, a pockmarked face, and a huge head with seven or eight deep dueling scars running across both sides of his forehead, cheeks, and chin. He drank and smoked heavily and was missing teeth. Kaltenbrunner was described by the British journalist Rebecca West as looking like “a particularly vicious horse.” He held a doctorate in law and specialized in secret police work. He was the head of the Reich Security Main Office and chief of the security police and the security services. He was as actively involved in concentration camp crimes as any Nazi had been. According to the OSS, even Heinrich Himmler was frightened of him.
If anyone was going to “cause trouble on the flight to Nuremberg,” Dolibois explains, Colonel Andrus was worried that Ernst Kaltenbrunner might. “Special precautions needed to be taken.” Kaltenbrunner would be handcuffed to Dolibois’s left wrist. “If he starts to run or goes for the door,” Colonel Andrus told Dolibois, “shoot!” Colonel Andrus wished John Dolibois “good luck” during the flight and said that he would see him once they landed in Nuremberg. Colonel Andrus would be traveling in a different airplane.
During the flight Kaltenbrunner did not run for the door. Instead, he wanted to talk. He told Dolibois that he desired for the young interrogator to understand that he, Kaltenbrunner, was not responsible for war crimes. “He felt the need to explain about the Jews,” Dolibois recalled, with Kaltenbrunner saying, “admittedly, he hated them, but he said that he had not been involved in their treatment in concentration camps. In fact, he claimed to have remonstrated with Hitler on the treatment of the Jews.” As the airplane prepared to land in Nuremberg, Kaltenbrunner said what so many Nazis repeated after the war. “I am a soldier and I only obeyed orders,” he told Dolibois.
“I didn’t argue with him, I just listened,” Dolibois said. “Kaltenbrunner was a ruthless killer determined to save his own skin. His soft talk did not change my mind about him, but it helped pass the time.” When the aircraft finally touched the ground, Dolibois felt a huge wave of relief. The prisoners were unloaded, and Colonel Andrus assumed control of them once again. Without looking back, Dolibois hurried on to the transport plane. The plane taxied down the runway and took flight. Dolibois sat alone in the empty airplane. The weeks of interrogating the Nazi high command were over. The Nazis he had just flown with would now be tried for war crimes at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg. A majority of them would be hanged.
Back at Ashcan, when Dolibois returned to his quarters to pack his bags, he came across a strange sight. Standing by the edge of the perimeter fence, not far from where Dolibois had first pulled up to this place in an army jeep three months before, he spotted a middle-aged man, apparently a local, with his hands in his pockets and a beret on his head. The man just stood there, shouting out in the direction of the Palace Hotel. Dolibois took a moment to pause and listen so he could make out what the man was sayi
ng.
“Hallo Meier! Hallo Meier!” the man shouted, again and again. “Wie gehts in Berlin?”
It took a moment for the significance of what the man was doing to register with Dolibois. The phrase translated into English as “Hello, Meier! Hello, Meier! So, how’s it going in Berlin?” The beauty of the moment dawned on him. In the early days of the war, Hermann Göring was so confident the Third Reich would win the war that he’d famously bragged to the German people, “If the British and the Americans ever bomb Berlin, my name is Meier.”
The image of the middle-aged Luxembourger taunting Göring was a perfect end to this chapter in John Dolibois’s life. The man was enjoying himself so much Dolibois felt no need to tell him that Göring was gone. Besides, Hermann Göring was never coming back.
In Washington, on July 6, 1945, in a classified memorandum with the subject heading “Exploitation of German Specialists in Science and Technology in the United States,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff finally approved—on paper—a Nazi scientist program. President Truman was not made aware of the initiative. The governing body that had been assigned to “exercise general supervision” over the program and to “formulate general policies for procurement, utilization and control of specialists” was the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department, G-2. A five-page memo was sent out to eight agencies within the War Department outlining “principles and procedures” governing the classified program. The three most important points were that “certain German specialists… could be utilized to increase our war making capacity against Japan and aid our postwar military research,” that “no known or alleged war criminals should be brought to the United States,” and that “the purpose of this plan should be understood to be temporary military exploitation of the minimum number of German specialists necessary.” According to this initiative, as soon as the jobs were completed “the specialists would be returned to Europe.” Participants, it was noted, should be hereafter referred to as “eminent German specialists” as opposed to “German scientists,” because not all the Nazis being requested for program approval had degrees in science. Included in the mix were Nazi bureaucrats, businessmen, accountants, and lawyers. The project also now had an official code name, Operation Overcast. The name Paperclip would not be used for another eight months.
Military agencies that were interested in hiring German specialists were to submit their requests to the assistant chief of staff, G-2. “Only the most compelling argument should bring a German specialist to this country,” the initiative stated, and only the “chosen, rare minds whose continuing intellectual productivity we wish to use” would be approved. The British would be made aware of the program, in general terms. At some point after the first large group of scientists had arrived in the United States, a “suitable” press release would be generated by the War Department so as to “avoid possible resentment on the part of the American public.”
A list of desired German scientists—“List I”—accompanied the memo. It included 115 rocket specialists. When the British learned about the U.S. Army’s intentions to hire the German rocket scientists, they asked to first be allowed to conduct two rocket exploitation projects of their own. The Americans agreed and released into British custody a group of scientists, engineers, and technicians including Wernher von Braun, Walter Dornberger, and Arthur Rudolph.
The first British project was called Operation Backfire, a V-2 field test that took place on Germany’s north coast, at a former Krupp naval gun range in Cuxhaven. Operation Backfire was designed to analyze technical data about the V-2 by having the Nazi rocket engineers fire four rockets, also taken piecemeal from Nordhausen, at a target in the North Sea. This would allow the British to evaluate various technical elements, from how the rocket was launched to its flight controls and fuels. Arthur Rudolph, the former Mittelwerk operations director, was considered an expert in launch techniques, and to his biographer, he later recalled a scene from Operation Backfire: “The V-2 ran on alcohol of the same chemistry as that appearing in say, Jack Daniels and Old Grandad [sic]. The people at the test site apparently knew that.” One night, according to Rudolph, a group of British and German V-2 technicians got drunk together on the rocket fuel. A British officer came upon the group arm in arm, “apparently comrades now, and lustily singing, Wir Fahren gegen England, or ‘We Will March Against England.’ ” General Dornberger was not part of the drinking and singing. The British kept him on a short leash, away from the test firing and always under a watchful eye. The British had alternative plans for Walter Dornberger. They were not interested in the knowledge Dornberger possessed. They wanted to try him for war crimes. After the test, he would not be returned to the Americans as the British had originally promised.
“The British pulled a sneaky on us,” explained Major Staver, who attended Operation Backfire. The Americans were not permitted to take Dornberger back after the Operation; instead, Dornberger was declared “on loan” and was taken to England. There, he and von Braun were “interrogated for a week by the British and then kept behind barbed wire in Wimbledon for four and one-half weeks while waiting to be picked up by the Americans.” Eventually, von Braun was returned but General Dornberger was not. Instead, he was issued a brown jumpsuit with the letters “PW” for Prisoner of War stenciled on the back. Under armed guard, he was taken to the London District Cage near the Windermere Bridge for interrogation. From there, General Dornberger was transferred first to a castle in Wales and then to Special Camp XI in Island Farm, South Wales, where he was an extremely unpopular prisoner.
“Walter Dornberger was definitely the most hated man in the camp,” Sergeant Ron Williams, a prison guard, recalled. “Even his own people hated him. He never went out to the local farms to work like other prisoners.” Wherever General Dornberger went while he was at Special Camp XI, he required an escort. The British feared that other prisoners might kill him.
On the morning of September 12, 1945, Wernher von Braun, Dr. Eberhard Rees, and five midlevel V-2 rocket engineers left their U.S. Army–sponsored housing, in the town of Witzenhausen, for the last time. The men climbed into two army jeeps, headed for France. The Germans knew they were heading to the United States to work. They were not aware that their driver, First Lieutenant Morris Sipser, spoke German. As First Lieutenant Sipser drove the group to their destination in Paris, he listened to von Braun crack crass anti-American jokes. The jeep crossed over the Saar River into France, and Sipser overheard von Braun say to his colleagues, “Well, take a good look at Germany, fellows. You may not see it for a long time to come.” In Washington, Operation Overcast had been approved as a “temporary” program, but von Braun, ever the visionary, had the foresight to see that many of the rocketeers and engineers were heading to America to stay. “We felt no moral scruples about the possible future use of our brainchild,” von Braun later told New Yorker magazine writer Daniel Lang. “We were interested solely in exploring outer space. It was simply a question with us of how the golden cow could be milked most successfully.”
After arriving in Paris, the Germans were taken to the officers’ club at Orly Airport for dinner. Accompanying von Braun, Rees, and the five other V-2 engineers were four scientists from the Hermann Göring Research Institute, handpicked by Colonel Putt and headed for Wright Field. They were Theodor Zobel, Rudolph Edse, Wolfgang Noggerath and Gerhard Braun. Luftwaffe test pilot Karl Baur was also with the group; he had served as aircraft manufacturer Messerschmitt’s chief Me-262 test pilot. Accompanying him he had his mechanic, Andreas Sebald. A little before 10:00 p.m., the Germans boarded a C-54 military transport plane waiting on the tarmac in the pouring rain.
“Quickly the plane moved through the clouds and a beautiful, clear sky with a moonlight night greeted us,” Karl Baur wrote in his diary. “For the first time—I cannot recall the number of years—I enjoyed a flight as a passenger.”
After a stop to refuel on the island of Santa Maria, in the Azores, the aircraft crossed the Atlantic, refueled in Newf
oundland, and landed at New Castle Airport in Wilmington, Delaware, at 2:00 a.m. on September 20, 1945. Because the Germans were under military custody, they could not be traditionally processed by Customs. After a few hours, the sixteen Germans boarded a second, smaller airplane and were flown to the Naval Air Station at Squantum, in Quincy, Massachusetts.
At the naval base the Germans were loaded into sedans and driven out to the edge of dock, where a troopship waited for them. They boarded the vessel and made a short trip to a chain of small islands in Boston Harbor, the Harbor Islands, and out to the far end to a gravel shoal off Nixes Mate, where they were obscured from civilian view. There, a small Boston whaler idled on the sea. Its captain was named Corky, and the twenty-one-year-old intelligence officer who would take charge of the Germans was named Henry Kolm. Each German scientist was lowered down into the little Boston whaler by a harness hanging from a rope. “They were all seasick as can be,” Kolm later recalled.
Fort Strong, on an island in the middle of Boston Harbor, had been used as a training camp during the Civil War and remained in use on and off through World War I. The fortresslike nature of the coastal defense facility made it an ideal place for a secret military program like Operation Overcast. When the first German scientists arrived in September 1945, the fortress was still under army control but had not been used for nearly thirty years. Thick weeds grew in between the gun blocks and pedestal mounts. The administration and observation buildings had fallen into disrepair. But the army barracks was easily converted into what would become known as the Operation Overcast hotel. German prisoners of war were moved onto the island to work as staff, including as translators, cooks, bakers, and tailors. Kolm’s job was to process the scientists, which included fingerprinting, medical examinations, and coordination with the FBI. This all took time, and the Germans were not known for patience. Before long an insidious unease settled in among the scientists, Kolm recalled.