Dirk Knemeyer is an American father, husband, entrepreneur, and businessman. By his own admission, he spends a good deal of his time thinking philosophically about concepts of “identity,” “science,” “time,” and “life.” When I first met him, Dirk Knemeyer shared with me that he had never before spoken publicly about his grandfather’s wartime activities, and that most members of his family go out of their way to maintain silence about Siegfried Knemeyer’s high ranking in the Nazi Party. “For the most part the family’s position is: Do not discuss Siegfried’s [past] with anyone, particularly not a journalist,” Dirk Knemeyer says. “But what do you do when you have documents in your attic, as I do, praising your grandfather and his excellent work, and signed by people like Hermann Göring and Albert Speer?”
I find no easy answer to this question. The conundrum therein is one of the notions that made me want to learn much more about Operation Paperclip.
“Siegfried’s life is complicated,” Dirk Knemeyer says of his grandfather. “I am someone [who is] more interested in learning the truth about the past than denying it. Besides, some things are unwise to ignore.”
I asked Knemeyer if he would share with me some of his grandfather’s documents that were stored in boxes in his own attic. He said he would think about it. Eventually he agreed. Thank you, Dirk Knemeyer.
I wish to thank Dr. Götz Blome, Gabriella Hoffmann, Paul-Hermann Schieber, and Rolf Benzinger for their time and their transparency. The indomitable John Dolibois, whom I admire: Thank you for taking the time with me on so many different points. Dr. Jens Westemeier assisted me with all things German in this book and located some very difficult to find documents in numerous German archives; thank you, Jens. I thank the author and historian Clarence Lasby for sharing his insights with me. Lasby first began his book Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War (1971) in the 1960s, as an extension of his college thesis—decades before the truth about the German scientists’ Nazi past was revealed under the Freedom of Information Act. Lasby’s access to documents was seminal. As we have seen, many of these documents have since disappeared from various collections—been destroyed or lost.
In addition to interviews and oral history recordings, the foundations of this book are from military and civilian archives in the United States and Germany. Countless individuals were helpful, the following notably so: Lynn O. Gamma of the Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell Air Force Base; Michael Jenack, INSCOM Freedom of Information/Privacy Act Office; Richard L. Baker and Clifton P. Hyatt, U.S. Army Military History Institute; Werner Renz, Fritz Bauer Institute; Leon Kieres, Instytut Pamieci Narodowej, Poland; Dorothee Becker, Wollheim Commission, Goethe University; Joerg Kulbe and Regine Heubaum, Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial; Peter Gohle, Bundesarchiv Ludwigsburg; Dr. Matthias Röschner, Deutsches Museum Archive; Christina Wooten, U.S. Air Force; Lanessa Hill, United States Army Garrison, Fort Detrick; Michael Fauser, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; Bert Ulrich and Allard Beutel, NASA.
At the National Archives and Records Administration, I would like to thank David Fort and Amy Schmidt. At Harvard Medical School, at the Center for the History of Medicine at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Jessica B. Murphy graciously helped me to petition the Harvard Medical School privacy board, which in turn petitioned the Department of Defense to declassify files under the Freedom of Information Act—with success. Many thanks, Jessica. At the Historical and Special Collections at the Harvard Law School Library, I thank Lesley Schoenfeld for her help with The Alexander Papers; Margaret Peachy and David Ackerman for copying historical film footage of Dr. Leopold Alexander and Telford Taylor at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial; Adonna Thompson, Duke University Medical Center Archives; David K. Frasier, The Lilly Library Manuscript Collection, Indiana University; Lynda Corey Claassen, Mandeville Special Collections Library, UC–San Diego; John Armstrong, Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University Libraries; Carol A. Leadenham; Hoover Institution Archives; Loma Karklins, the Caltech Archives; Anne Coleman, Archives and Special Collections, M. Louis Salmon Library, University of Alabama in Huntsville; Dr. Martin Johnson, The Thalidomide Trust, England; Jen Stepp at Stars and Stripes; Brett Exton, Island Farm; Nick Greene, the Village Voice; author Danny Parker, who helped me locate documents at the National Archives and also a very obscure document at the Landeskirchliches Archiv in Stuttgart; Julia Kiefaber, who translated many German trial transcripts and wartime Nazi Party documents; Larry Valero, with the Intelligence and National Security Studies Program at the University of Texas at El Paso; John Greenewald, founder and curator of the Black Vault.
In Germany, Manfred Kopp graciously drove me around Oberursel, taking me to the old Camp King facilities and safe houses that were once used for classified programs, including Operations Bluebird, Artichoke, and MKUltra. Together with Maria Shipley, we journeyed to Schloss Kransberg, formerly the Dustbin Interrogation Center. Jens Hermann was most helpful in showing us around the castle and its grounds. The journalist and author Egmont Koch generously shared his findings on Camp King and the CIA’s Artichoke program with me. Thanks to John Dimel for lending me a rare unpublished copy of The History of Camp King, and to investigative journalist Eric Longabardi for sharing his reporting on U.S. Army chemical weapons tests with me. I thank Michael Neufeld for answering questions about Wernher von Braun, Walter Dornberger, and Arthur Rudolph. Neufeld is curator of the Department of Space History at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and the author of several books and papers on German rocket scientists, including monographs for NASA, all of which helped me tremendously.
I thank Albert Knoll, director of the archive and library at the Dachau concentration camp, for making the documents and photographs of medical murder experiments that were carried out at Dachau during the war available for my review, and also for showing me blueprints and maps of Experimental Cell Block Five. Riot police commissioner Mathias Korn and police historian Anna Naab took me around the expansive former SS training area grounds, which are adjacent to the Dachau concentration camp, including areas not open to the public. Thanks to them, I was able to go into the buildings used by the U.S. military to prosecute the Dachau war crimes trials, and to see where Georg Rickhey was tried and acquitted. Dr. Harald Eichinger, the warden of Landsberg Prison, gave me a comprehensive tour of that famous facility (still in use today), where Hitler wrote Mein Kampf and where the convicted Nuremberg war criminals were briefly imprisoned—until they were either hanged or granted clemency by U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy.
An author is nothing without a team. Thank you, John Parsley, Jim Hornfischer, Steve Younger, Nicole Dewey, Liz Garriga, Heather Fain, Amanda Brown, Malin von Euler-Hogan, Janet Byrne, Mike Noon, Ben Wiseman, and Eric Rayman. Thank you, Alice and Tom Soininen, Kathleen and Geoffrey Silver, Rio and Frank Morse, and Marion Wroldsen. And my fellow writers from group: Kirston Mann, Sabrina Weill, Michelle Fiordaliso, Nicole Lucas Haimes, and Annette Murphy.
The interviews I did with Gerhard Maschkowski I shall never forget. Thank you, Gerhard.
The only thing that makes me happier than finishing a book is the daily joy I get from Kevin, Finley, and Jett. You guys are my best friends.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Annie Jacobsen was a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Times Magazine and is the author of the New York Times bestseller Area 51. A graduate of Princeton University, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
These brief character descriptions include information pertaining to the narrative of Operation Paperclip. Military titles refer to the highest rank achieved by individuals within the timeframe of this story. The term “Dr.” is used to identify medical doctors.
William J. Aalmans: Post-war investigator with the U.S. War Crimes Division, he arrived on scene at the V-2 tunnel complex in Nordhausen shortly after it was liberated. Found the telephone list that implicated Georg Rickhey and Arthur Rudolph in slave lab
or and served on the prosecution staff during the Dora-Nordhausen war crimes trial.
Dr. Leopold Alexander: Boston psychiatrist and neurologist sent to post-war Germany to investigate medical crimes. He later served as expert consultant during the Nuremberg doctors’ trial and co-authored the Nuremberg Code.
Otto Ambros: IG Farben chemist, codiscover of sarin gas and Buna synthetic rubber, he was awarded one million reichsmarks by Hitler as a scientific achievement award. Served the Reich as chief of the Committee-C for chemical warfare, manager of IG Farben’s slave labor factory at Auschwitz and manager of the Dyhernfurth poison gas facility. He was tried and convicted at Nuremberg, and after an early release he worked for the U.S. chemical corporation W. R. Grace, the U.S. Department of Energy, and other European government and private sector business concerns.
Major General Dr. Harry G. Armstrong: Set up the post-war U.S. Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg, employing fifty-eight Nazi doctors, thirty-four of whom followed him to the U.S. Air Force School of Aviation Medicine in Texas, where he served as commandant. He was the second surgeon general of the U.S. Air Force.
Colonel Burton Andrus: U.S. Army commandant at Central Continental Prisoner of War Enclosure Number 32, code-named “Ashcan,” the interrogation facility where the major Nazi war criminals were interned after the war. Later, as governor of the Nuremberg Prison, he oversaw the hangings of the convicted high command Nazis.
Herbert Axster: Nazi lawyer, accountant and chief of staff on V-weapons under General Dornberger. Axster and his wife Ilse were among the few individuals in Operation Paperclip to be outed by the pubic as ardent Nazis. Forced to leave army employ, he opened a law firm in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Harold Batchelor: U.S. Army expert in weaponized bubonic plague and codesigner of the Eight Ball aerosol chamber at Camp Detrick. As a member of the Special Operations Division, he and Frank Olson conducted covert field tests across America using a pathogen that simulated how bioweapons would disperse. Consulted with Dr. Blome in Heidelberg after the Nuremberg doctors’ trial.
Werner Baumbach: Wartime general of the bombers for the Luftwaffe. Chosen by Albert Speer and Heinrich Himmler to pilot each man’s escape from Germany. Originally part of Operation Paperclip, he instead went to South America, where he died in a plane crash.
Dr. Hermann Becker-Freyseng: Nazi aviation physiologist under Dr. Strughold who oversaw medical murder experiments on prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp. He was tried at Nuremberg, convicted, and sentenced to twenty years. Granted clemency, he was released in 1952.
Dr. Wilhelm Beiglböck: Nazi aviation physiologist who oversaw salt water experiments at Dachau, he removed a piece of prisoner Karl Höllenrainer’s liver without anesthesia, one of the many crimes for which he was tried and convicted at Nuremberg. Sentenced to fifteen years, Beiglböck was granted clemency in 1951 and returned to Germany to work at a hospital.
Colonel Peter Beasley: Officer with the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey sent to post-war Germany to locate engineers with knowledge about how underground weapons facilities were engineered. Recruited Georg Rickhey for Operation Paperclip.
Colonel Dr. Robert J. Benford: Commanding officer at the U.S. Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center, he oversaw the research efforts of fifty-eight Nazi doctors working in Heidelberg.
Dr. Theodor Benzinger: Wartime department chief of the Experimental Station of the Air Force Research Center in Rechlin and chief of medical work in the research department of the Technical Division of the Reich Air Ministry. An ardent Nazi and member of the SA (Storm Troopers) with rank of medical sergeant major, he was hired to work at the U.S. Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg, then arrested, imprisoned at Nuremberg, listed as a defendant in the doctors’ trial, and mysteriously released. Under Operation Paperclip he worked for the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.
Dr. Kurt Blome: Deputy surgeon general of the Reich, deputy chief of Reich’s Physicians’ League, and member of the Reich Research Council, he served as chief of the Reich’s bioweapons facilities in Nesselstedt, Poland, and in Geraberg, Germany. An “Old Fighter” Nazi Party member, he wore the Golden Party Badge and was a lieutenant general in the SA (Storm Troopers). The JIOA tried but failed to bring him to America; he worked for the U.S. Army at Camp King, in Oberursel, Germany.
William J. Cromartie: U.S. Army bacteriological warfare expert and officer with Operation Alsos.
Kurt Debus: V-weapons flight test director and member of the SS, he turned a colleague over to the Gestapo for making anti-Nazi remarks. Under Operation Paperclip he served as part of the von Braun rocket team at Fort Bliss, Texas and became the first director of NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center, in Florida.
John Dolibois: U.S. Army officer with military intelligence who interrogated many of the Nazi Party high command interned at Ashcan, including Hermann Göring and Albert Speer. He was trained by General William Donovan in the art of interrogation.
Major General William J. Donovan: Founding director of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA. After the German surrender Donovan kept an office at Camp King, in Oberursel, Germany, where he oversaw Nazis writing reports for the U.S. Army.
Major General Walter Dornberger: Wartime German general in charge of V-weapons development and the technical staff officer in the Nordhausen slave labor tunnels. He was arrested by the British for war crimes, interned in England, and later released into U.S. custody. Under Operation Paperclip he worked for the U.S. Air Force and then Bell Aircraft Corporation. Until the late 1950s he acted as a missile and space-based weapons consultant to the Joint Chiefs, carrying a Top Secret clearance and visiting the Pentagon frequently.
Captain R. E. F. Edelsten: British officer assigned to the joint British-U.S. interrogation center at Castle Kransberg, code-named “Dustbin.”
Donald W. Falconer: U.S. biological weapons explosives expert who consulted with Dr. Blome shortly after Blome’s acquittal at Nuremberg. Colleague of Frank Olson at Camp Detrick.
Karl Otto Fleischer: Allegedly the V-weapons business manager in Nordhausen, he played an important role in revealing to Major Staver the whereabouts of a key document stash after the German surrender. Under Operation Paperclip he worked at Fort Bliss, Texas, until it was learned he was not a scientist but worked in food services for the Reich’s missile program.
Dr. Karl Gebhardt: Himmler’s personal physician and chief surgeon of the staff of the Reich Physician SS and police, he was in charge of sulfa experiments at Ravensbrück, administrated by Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber. He was convicted at the doctors’ trial at Nuremberg, sentenced to death and hanged in the courtyard at Landsberg Prison.
Lieutenant General Reinhard Gehlen: Hitler’s senior intelligence officer on the eastern front, he was hired by the U.S. Army to run the Gehlen Organization, a group that gathered intelligence on Soviet-bloc spies at Camp King. The organization was taken over by the CIA in 1949 and kept the majority of details classified until 2001.
Hermann Göring: Reichsmarschall, commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, and the long-serving designated successor to Hitler. As head of the Reich Research Council he was in charge of the coordination of all German research and streamlined Nazi science to weapons-related programs, making him the dictator of science.
Sidney Gottlieb: Director of the CIA’s Technical Services Staff, he oversaw the MKUltra program and, with his deputy Robert Lashbrook, covertly drugged bacteriologist Frank Olson with LSD during an Agency weekend retreat.
Samuel Goudsmit: American particle physicist and wartime scientific director of Operation Alsos. Born in Holland, Goudsmit spoke Dutch and German. He discovered documents in Nazi scientist Eugen Haagen’s Strasbourg apartment that revealed Reich doctors were conducting deadly human experiments on concentration camp prisoners.
John C. Green: Executive secretary for the Office of Publication Board, a division of the Commerce Department. He was instrumental in getting secret
ary of commerce Henry Wallaces to lobby President Truman to endorse Operation Paperclip.
L. Wilson Greene: Technical director of the Chemical and Radiological Laboratories at Edgewood, his secret monograph, entitled “Psychochemical Warfare: A New Concept of War,” was the genesis for the CIA’s MKUltra program. Colleagues with Paperclip chemist Fritz Hoffmann.
Dr. Karl Gross:Biological weapons researcher with the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS, he was assigned by Himmler to work with Dr. Blome at Posen, Poland, and Geraberg, Germany.
Dr. Eugen Haagen: Virologist and key developer in the Nazi bioweapons program, notably vaccine research. Inside Haagen’s Strasbourg apartment Alsos agents discovered the first evidence that Nazi doctors were experimenting on humans in concentration camps. Before the war Haagen codeveloped the yellow fever vaccine at the Rockefeller Institute in New York.
Alexander G. Hardy: Nuremberg prosecutor during the doctors’ trial. In 1951, Hardy and Dr. Alexander wrote to President Truman portraying U.S. Air Force Paperclip contract employee Dr. Walter Schreiber as a war criminal, sadist, and liar, leading to Schreiber’s expulsion from the U.S.
Major James P. Hamill: Wartime officer with the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps, he was in charge of the Paperclip group at Fort Bliss, Texas.
Heinrich Himmler: Reichsführer-SS, chief of police, and Reich commissar for the consolidation of the ethnic German nation, he championed medical experiments on human beings in concentration camps and oversaw the “sale” of more than half a million slave laborers to military and industrial concerns. Himmler’s all-inclusive powers gave him unparalleled responsibility for Nazi terror and atrocities.