Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber was the surgeon general of the Third Reich. “The most sinister crime in which Schreiber is involved is the introduction of intravenous lethal phenol injections,” explained war crimes investigator Dr. Leopold Alexander, “as a quick and convenient means of executing troublemakers.” Paperclip contracts: U.S. Army, Camp King, Germany; U.S. Air Force, Texas. (NARA)
Dr. Kurt Blome was Hitler’s biological weapons maker and the deputy surgeon general of the Third Reich. He had nearly completed a bubonic plague weapon when the Red Army captured his research institute in Poland. Paperclip contract: U.S. Army, Camp King, Germany. (NARA)
Erich Traub was a virologist, microbiologist, and doctor of veterinary medicine. He weaponized rinderpest (cattle plague) at the request of Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS, traveling to Turkey to acquire a black market sample of the virus during the war. Paperclip contract: Naval Research Institute, Maryland. (NARA)
Major General Walter Dornberger was in charge of V-weapons development for the Reich. Arrested by the British and held for nearly two years on war crimes charges, Dornberger was released into U.S. custody with the warning that he was a “menace of the first order.” Paperclip contract: U.S. Army Air Forces. (NARA)
Arthur Rudolph specialized in V-weapons assembly and served as operations director at the slave labor facility in Nordhausen. In America he would become known as the Father of the Saturn Rocket. “I read Mein Kampf and agreed with lots of things in it,” Rudolph told journalist John Huber in 1985. “Hitler’s first six years, until the war started, were really marvelous.” Paperclip contract: U.S. Army, Texas. (NARA)
Georg Rickhey oversaw tunnel operations for Hitler’s Führerbunker headquarters in Berlin. On the V-2 program he was general manager of the slave labor facility and appeared as a defendant in the Nordhausen war crimes trial. Paperclip contract: U.S. Army Air Forces, Ohio. (NARA)
Kurt Debus was a V-weapons engineer who oversaw mobile rocket launches as well as those at Peenemünde. An ardent Nazi, he wore the SS uniform to work. In America, Debus became the first director of NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Paperclip contract: U.S. Army, Texas. (NARA)
Otto Ambros was Hitler’s most valuable chemist, codiscover of sarin gas (the “a” in sarin denotes his name), and chief of the Reich’s Committee-C for chemical warfare. The U.S. Army coveted his knowledge. Tried at Nuremberg, Ambros was convicted of mass murder and slavery, then granted clemency by High Commissioner John J. McCloy. Paperclip contracts: U.S. Department of Energy. (NARA)
Friedrich “Fritz” Hoffmann was a chemist and philosopher. When captured by Allied forces he carried a paper signed by a U.S. diplomat stating he was anti-Nazi. In America, Hoffmann synthesized Nazi nerve gas stockpiles and worked in the CIA’s assassination-by-poison program. Paperclip contract: U.S. Army Chemical Corps, Maryland. (NARA)
Jürgen von Klenck was a chemist, SS officer, and deputy chief of the Committee-C for chemical warfare. Surprised by how much information von Klenck provided, his interrogators concluded “that a lesser secret has been admitted to deflect the investigation from a more important secret.” Paperclip contracts: U.S. Army, Heidelberg. (NARA)
Dr. Hubertus Strughold was in charge of the Aviation Medical Research Institute of the Reich Air Ministry in Berlin. Despite being sought for war crimes, he was hired by the U.S. Army Air Forces and became America’s Father of Space Medicine. He went to great lengths to whitewash a dubious past. “Only the janitor and the man who took care of the animals,” were members of the Nazi party, he told a journalist in 1961, referring to his Institute, which was filled with hardcore Nazis. Paperclip contracts: U.S. Army Air Forces, Heidelberg; U.S. Air Force, Texas. (NARA)
Dr. Theodor Benzinger directed the Experimental Station of the Air Force Research Center, Rechlin, under Hermann Göring and was an officer with the SA (Storm Troopers). While working for the U.S. Army in Heidelberg, Benzinger was arrested, imprisoned at Nuremberg, and listed as one of the defendants in the doctors’ trial. Shortly thereafter he was mysteriously released. Paperclip contracts: U.S. Army Air Forces, Heidelberg; Naval Medical Research Institute, Maryland. (NARA)
Dr. Konrad Schäfer was a physiologist and chemist who developed a wartime process to separate salt from seawater in sea emergencies. Medical experiments at the Dachau concentration camp were based on the Schäfer Process. He was tried at Nuremberg and acquitted. Paperclip contracts: U.S. Army Air Forces, Heidelberg; U.S. Air Force, Texas. (NARA)
Dr. Hermann Becker-Freyseng was an aviation physiologist who worked under Dr. Strughold in Berlin and oversaw medical experiments on prisoners at Dachau. He was tried and convicted at Nuremberg, then contributed to Strughold’s U.S. Army work from his prison cell. Paperclip contract: U.S. Army Air Forces, Heidelberg. (NARA)
Dr. Siegfried Ruff directed the Aero Medical Division of the German Experimental Station for Aviation Medicine in Berlin and was a close colleague and coauthor of Dr. Strughold. At Dachau, Ruff supervised medical murder experiments. Tried at Nuremberg and acquitted. Paperclip contract: U.S. Army Air Forces, Heidelberg. (NARA)
Siegfried Knemeyer was chief of German Air Force technical developments under Hermann Göring. Hailed one of the Reich’s top ten pilots, Albert Speer asked Knemeyer to pilot his escape to Greenland. Paperclip contract: U.S. Army Air Forces, Ohio. (NARA)
Walther Riedel was an engineer with the V-weapons design bureau and part of the von Braun rocket team. His Army interrogator classified him as an “ardent Nazi,” but after Riedel threatened his handler that he would go work for the Russians he was hired and brought to America. Paperclip contract: U.S. Army, Texas. (NARA)
Emil Salmon, aircraft engineer and SS officer, was implicated in the burning down of a synagogue during the war. “This Command is cognizant of Mr. Salmon’s Nazi activities and certain allegations made by some of his associates in Europe,” wrote the U.S. Army Air Forces, but they found Salmon’s expertise “difficult, if not impossible, to duplicate.” Paperclip contract: U.S. Army Air Forces, Ohio.
Harry Armstrong set up the U.S. Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center in Germany and hired fifty-eight Nazi doctors to continue work they had been doing for the Reich. The Center violated the Potsdam Accord and was shut down after two years. Thirty-four Nazi doctors followed Armstrong to the U.S. Air Force School of Aviation Medicine in Texas. (U.S. Air Force)
Charles E. Loucks holding an incendiary bomb. Loucks oversaw the Paperclip scientists working on chemical weapons at Edgewood Arsenal. After being transferred to U.S. Occupied Germany, Loucks created an off-book working group on sarin production and invited Hitler’s former chemists and Himmler’s right-hand man to weekly roundtable discussions at his home. (Papers of Charles E. Loucks, U.S. Army Military History Institute)
Donald L. Putt, accomplished test pilot and engineer, was one of the first wartime officers to arrive at Hermann Göring’s secret aeronautical research center at Völkenrode. Amazed by what he saw, Putt recruited dozens of Nazi scientists and engineers for Operation Paperclip and oversaw their work at Wright Field. (U.S. Air Force)
John Dolibois, a young U.S. Army officer and fluent German speaker, worked for military intelligence (G-2). He interrogated the major war criminals of the Nazi Party at the “Ashcan” internment facility in Luxembourg. (Collection of John Dolibois)
Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS, and his entourage during a tour of the Mauthausen concentration camp. Himmler’s SS oversaw a vast network of state-sponsored slavery across Nazi-occupied Europe through an innocuous sounding division called the SS Business Administration Main Office. Reich slaves produced armaments, including the V-2 rocket. (USHMM)
Albert Speer (left), Adolf Hitler, and a cameraman in Paris. As minister of Armaments and War Production, Speer was responsible for all warfare-related science and technology for the Third Reich, starting in February 1942. (NARA)
As the Third Reich crumbled, Nazis stashed huge troves of scientific treasure, secret documents, and g
old in salt mines across Germany. The 90th Infantry Division discovered this enormous cache of Reichsbank money and SS documents in Merkers, Germany. (NARA)
American liberators stand at the entrance of the Nordhausen underground tunnel complex where V-2 slave laborers assembled rockets. (U.S. Air Force)
In this rare photograph, IG Farben employees are seen fencing for sport at the corporation’s Auschwitz facility and within sight of the three large chimneys of the death camp’s crematoria. The sign behind the fencers reads, “Company Sporting Club, IG Auschwitz.” Farben’s plant was also called Auschwitz III or Buna-Monowitz. (Fritz Bauer Institute)
Otto Ambros laughing with his attorney during the Nuremberg trial against IG Farben executives. Ambros served as Manager of IG Auschwitz and also managed the Reich’s Dyhernfurth poison gas facility in Silesia. (NARA)
In this previously unreleased photograph, Nazi doctors and scientists working for the U.S. Army Air Forces in Heidelberg gather with American officers for a group photograph circa 1946, prior to the arrest of five doctors on war crimes charges. Bottom row: at far left is Dr. Siegfried Ruff (arrested), at center is Richard Kuhn, third from right is Dr. Hubertus Strughold; Second row: third from left is Konrad Schäfer (arrested); Top row: third from left is Dr. Theodor Benzinger (arrested), far right (in tie) is Hermann Becker-Freyseng (arrested). (U.S.A.F School of Aerospace Medicine)
Dr. Kurt Blome consulting with his lawyer at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial. Dr. Konrad Schäfer sits behind Blome. (NARA)
At the Nuremberg doctors’ trial, defendant Dr. Kurt Blome frowns (at center). Behind him are (left to right) doctors Hermann Becker-Freyseng, Georg Weltz, Konrad Schäfer, Waldemar Hoven, Wilhelm Beiglböck. To Blome’s right is Karl Gebhardt, the SS doctor who performed experiments on Janina Iwanska and was hanged. (NARA)
Dr. Wilhelm Beiglböck oversaw the salt water experiments at Dachau and removed a piece of prisoner Karl Höllenrainer’s liver without anesthesia. During the trial, Höllenrainer, one of the only experiment survivors, tried to stab Beiglböck. (NARA)
Dr. Leopold Alexander, war crimes investigator and expert consultant at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial, explains to the judges the nature of the medical experiment performed on Jadwiga Dzido at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Paperclip doctor Walter Schreiber was in charge of the experiments. (NARA)
After being acquitted at Nuremberg, Dr. Konrad Schäfer took over Strughold’s U.S. Army job in Germany while his Paperclip contract was sorted out. In Texas, Schäfer tried and failed to make the Mississippi River drinkable. His superiors found him “singularly unsuccessful in producing any finished work and has displayed very little real scientific acumen.” Schäfer was asked to leave the country but refused because he had already received his immigrant’s visa per Operation Paperclip. (NARA)
The IG Farben building in Frankfurt was taken over by the U.S. Army and became home to various American military and political organizations during the Cold War. Today it is Johann Wolfgang Goethe University. (Author’s collection)
Castle Kransberg, outside Frankfurt, was Göring’s Luftwaffe headquarters. The Allies captured it, code named it “Dustbin,” and interrogated Nazi scientific and industrial elite here. (Author’s collection)
Hitler’s nerve gas–proof bunker underneath Castle Kransberg was designed by Albert Speer. In the event the Reich used chemical weapons, Hitler’s high command assumed the Allies would retaliate in kind. (Author’s collection)
Hitler wrote Mein Kampf at Landsberg Prison in 1924. After the war, it became home to 1,526 convicted Nazi war criminals until John J. McCloy granted clemency to the majority of those convicted at Nuremberg. (Author’s collection)
The unmarked graves of hanged Nazi war criminals mark the church lawn at Landsberg Prison. (Author’s collection)
The Cathedral inside Landsberg Prison, where convicted Nazi war criminals were allowed to pray. The benches were built at an angle so guards could observe individuals. (Author’s collection)
Camp King was used as a Cold War black site. The CIA, Army, Air Force, and Naval Intelligence shared access to Soviet spies kept prisoner here using “extreme interrogation” techniques and “behavior modification programs,” as part of CIA Operations Bluebird and Artichoke. Doctors Schreiber and Blome were Camp King Post physicians under Paperclip contracts from 1949 to 1952. (Author’s collection)
John J. McCloy (center) with President Truman. McCloy championed the Nazi scientist program from its first days in May 1945. Between his tenure as assistant secretary of war and high commissioner of Germany, McCloy served as president of the World Bank. (NARA)
Charles E. Loucks with German scientists and others at a party at Edgewood Arsenal. Loucks befriended Nazi scientist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Kuhn, who introduced Loucks to LSD, which was later tested on hundreds of soldiers at Edgewood and used in the Army’s Psychochemical Warfare program and the CIA’s MKUltra mind-control program. (Papers of Charles E. Loucks, U.S. Army Military History Institute)
SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schieber served on Reichsführer-SS Himmler’s personal staff and was chief of the Armaments Supply Office in the Speer Ministry where he oversaw tabun and sarin production. Shown here in 1951, Schieber worked for the U.S. Army and for the CIA as part of Operation Paperclip. (Collection of Paul-Hermann Schieber)
The “Eight Ball,” at Camp Detrick. Airtight, bombproof, and weighing 131 tons, this one-million-liter chamber allowed Detrick’s scientists to understand how aerosolized biological agents would work at different altitudes in the open air. Monkeys and human test subjects sat inside. (U.S. Army)
Fritz Hoffmann, the CIA’s poison master, relaxes on his front lawn in suburban Maryland, circa 1948. (Collection of Gabriella Hoffmann)
Paperclip rocket scientists and specialists at Fort Bliss, Texas, circa 1946. Some were sent home when the Army learned they did not all have “rare minds.” Karl Otto Fleischer, for example, claimed to have been the Wehrmacht’s business manager when in reality he was in charge of food services. (NASA)
A V-2 rocket carrying the first monkey astronaut, Albert, blasts off at White Sands, New Mexico. (NASA)
Wernher von Braun and Kurt Debus confer during the countdown for a Saturn launch in 1965. (NASA)
Arthur Rudolph holds a model of the Saturn V rocket, which launched man to the moon in 1969. In 1983 the Department of Justice began its investigation of Rudolph on war crimes charges. He was told to prepare to stand trial or to renounce his U.S. citizenship and leave the country. Rudolph left. (NASA)
Von Braun and his team at the Redstone Arsenal in 1958. Pictured from left are Ernst Stuhlinger, Helmut Hoelzer, Karl Heimburg, E. D. Geissler, E. W. Neubert, Walter Haeussermann, von Braun, W. A. Mrazek, Hans Hueter, Eberhard Rees, Kurt Debus, and Hans Maus. (NASA)
Kurt Debus, director of NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center, in an undated photo. According to his U.S. government security report, during the war Debus turned a colleague over to the Gestapo for making anti-Nazi remarks. The National Space Club in Washington, D.C., oversees the annual Dr. Kurt H. Debus Award. (NASA)
Albert Einstein accepting his certificate of American citizenship in 1940. One of Germany’s most famous pre-war scientists, Einstein left Nazi Germany just months after Hitler took power, declaring that science and justice were now in the hands of “a raw and rabid mob of Nazi militia.” He appealed to President Truman to cancel Paperclip, calling anyone who served Hitler unfit for U.S. citizenship. (Library of Congress, World-Telegram)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The idea for Operation Paperclip first took hold while I was reading documents about two Nazi aircraft designers, Walter Horten and Reimar Horten, both of whom play a role in my previous book, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base. In this research, I occasionally came across the name Siegfried Knemeyer, a senior adviser to the Horten brothers but, more notably, a man with quite a title from World War II: technical adviser to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. Not
knowing much about Operation Paperclip back then, I was very surprised when I learned that just a few years after the war’s end, Siegfried Knemeyer was living in America working for the U.S. Air Force, and that he would eventually be awarded the U.S. Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Service Award—the highest civilian award given by the DoD. In 2010, I located Siegfried Knemeyer’s grandson, Dirk Knemeyer, and asked if he would meet with me for an interview. He agreed.