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For Kevin
PROLOGUE
This is a book about Nazi scientists and American government secrets. It is about how dark truths can be hidden from the public by U.S. officials in the name of national security, and it is about the unpredictable, often fortuitous, circumstances through which truth gets revealed.
Operation Paperclip was a postwar U.S. intelligence program that brought German scientists to America under secret military contracts. The program had a benign public face and a classified body of secrets and lies. “I’m mad on technology,” Adolf Hitler told his inner circle at a dinner party in 1942, and in the aftermath of the German surrender more than sixteen hundred of Hitler’s technologists would become America’s own. What follows puts a spotlight on twenty-one of these men.
Under Operation Paperclip, which began in May of 1945, the scientists who helped the Third Reich wage war continued their weapons-related work for the U.S. government, developing rockets, chemical and biological weapons, aviation and space medicine (for enhancing military pilot and astronaut performance), and many other armaments at a feverish and paranoid pace that came to define the Cold War. The age of weapons of mass destruction had begun, and with it came the treacherous concept of brinkmanship—the art of pursuing dangerous policy to the limits of safety before stopping. Hiring dedicated Nazis was without precedent, entirely unprincipled, and inherently dangerous not just because, as Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson stated when debating if he should approve Paperclip, “These men are enemies,” but because it was counter to democratic ideals. The men profiled in this book were not nominal Nazis. Eight of the twenty-one—Otto Ambros, Theodor Benzinger, Kurt Blome, Walter Dornberger, Siegfried Knemeyer, Walter Schreiber, Walter Schieber, and Wernher von Braun—each at some point worked side by side with Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, or Hermann Göring during the war. Fifteen of the twenty-one were dedicated members of the Nazi Party; ten of them also joined the ultra-violent, ultra-nationalistic Nazi Party paramilitary squads, the SA (Sturmabteilung, or Storm Troopers) and the SS (Schutzstaffel, or Protection Squadron); two wore the Golden Party Badge, indicating favor bestowed by the Führer; one was given an award of one million reichsmarks for scientific achievement.
Six of the twenty-one stood trial at Nuremberg, a seventh was released without trial under mysterious circumstances, and an eighth stood trial in Dachau for regional war crimes. One was convicted of mass murder and slavery, served some time in prison, was granted clemency, and then was hired by the U.S. Department of Energy. They came to America at the behest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Some officials believed that by endorsing the Paperclip program they were accepting the lesser of two evils—that if America didn’t recruit these scientists, the Soviet Communists surely would. Other generals and colonels respected and admired these men and said so.
To comprehend the impact of Operation Paperclip on American national security during the early days of the Cold War, and the legacy of war-fighting technology it has left behind, it is important first to understand that the program was governed out of an office in the elite “E” ring of the Pentagon. The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) was created solely and specifically to recruit and hire Nazi scientists and put them on weapons projects and in scientific intelligence programs within the army, the navy, the air force, the CIA (starting in 1947), and other organizations. In some cases, when individual scientists had been too close to Hitler, the JIOA hired them to work at U.S. military facilities in occupied Germany. The JIOA was a subcommittee of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which provided national security information for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The JIC remains the least known and least studied U.S. intelligence agency of the twentieth century. To understand the mind-set of the Joint Intelligence Committee, consider this: Within one year of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the JIC warned the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the United States needed to prepare for “total war” with the Soviets—to include atomic, chemical, and biological warfare—and they even set an estimated start date of 1952. This book focuses on that uneasy period, from 1945 to 1952, in which the JIOA’s recruitment of Nazi scientists was forever on the rise, culminating in Accelerated Paperclip, which allowed individuals previously deemed undesirable to be brought to the United States—including Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber, the surgeon general of the Third Reich.
Operation Paperclip left behind a legacy of ballistic missiles, sarin gas cluster bombs, underground bunkers, space capsules, and weaponized bubonic plague. It also left behind a trail of once-secret documents that I accessed to report this book, including postwar interrogation reports, army intelligence security dossiers, Nazi Party paperwork, Allied intelligence armaments reports, declassified JIOA memos, Nuremberg trial testimony, oral histories, a general’s desk diaries, and a Nuremberg war crimes investigator’s journal. Coupled with exclusive interviews and correspondence with children and grandchildren of these Nazi scientists, five of whom shared with me the personal papers and unpublished writings of their family members, what follows is the unsettling story of Operation Paperclip.
All of the men profiled in this book are now dead. Enterprising achievers as they were, just as the majority of them won top military and science awards when they served the Third Reich, so it went that many of them won top U.S. military and civilian awards serving the United States. One had a U.S. government building named after him, and, as of 2013, two continue to have prestigious national science prizes given annually in their names. One invented the ear thermometer. Others helped man get to the moon.
How did this happen, and what does this mean now? Does accomplishment cancel out past crimes? These are among the central questions in this dark and complicated tale. It is a story populated with Machiavellian connivers and men who dedicate their lives to designing weapons for the coming war. It is also a story about victory, and what victory can often entail. It is rife with Nazis, many of whom were guilty of accessory to murder but were never charged, and lived out their lives in prosperity in the United States. In the instances where a kind of justice is delivered, it rings of half-measure.
Or perhaps there is a hero in the record of fact, which continues to be filled in.
PART I
“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
—Unknown
CHAPTER ONE
The War and the Weapons
It was November 26, 1944, and Strasbourg, France, was still under attack. The cobblestone streets of this medieval city were in chaos. Three days before, the Second French Armored Division had chased the Germans out of town and officially liberated the city from the Nazis, but now the Allies were having a difficult time holding the enemy back. German mortar rounds bombarded the streets. Air battles raged overhead, and in the center of town, inside a fancy apartment on Quai Klébar, armed U.S. soldiers guarded the Dutch-American particle physicist Samuel Goudsmit as he sat in an armchair scouring files. The apartment belonged to a German virus expert named Dr. Eugen Haagen, believed to be a key developer in the covert Nazi biological weapons program. Haagen had apparently fled his apartment in a hurry just a few days prior, leaving behind a framed p
hotograph of Hitler on the mantel and a cache of important documents in the cabinets.
Goudsmit and two colleagues, bacteriological warfare experts Bill Cromartie and Fred Wardenberg, had been reading over Dr. Haagen’s documents for hours. Based on what was in front of them, they planned to be here all night. Most of Strasbourg was without electricity, so Goudsmit and his colleagues were reading by candlelight.
Samuel Goudsmit led a unit engaged in a different kind of battle than the one being fought by the combat soldiers and airmen outside. Goudsmit and his team were on the hunt for Nazi science—German weaponry more advanced than what the Allies possessed. Goudsmit was scientific director of this Top Secret mission, code-named Operation Alsos, an esoteric and dangerous endeavor that was an offshoot of the Manhattan Project. Goudsmit and his colleagues were far more accustomed to working inside a laboratory than on a battlefield, and yet here they were, in the thick of the fight. It was up to these men of science to determine just how close the Third Reich was to waging atomic, biological, or chemical warfare against Allied troops. This was called A-B-C warfare by Alsos. An untold number of lives depended on the success of the operation.
Samuel Goudsmit had qualities that made him the mission’s ideal science director. Born in Holland, he spoke Dutch and German fluently. At age twenty-three he had become famous among fellow physicists for identifying the concept of electron spin. Two years later he earned his PhD at the University of Leiden and moved to America to teach. During the war, Goudsmit worked on weapons development through a government-sponsored lab at MIT. This gave him unique insight into the clandestine world of atomic, biological, and chemical warfare and had put him in this chair, reading quickly in the flickering candlelight. Just days before, Goudsmit’s team had captured four of Hitler’s top nuclear scientists and had learned from them that the Nazis’ atomic bomb project had been a failure. This was an unexpected intelligence coup for Alsos—and a huge relief. The focus now turned to the Reich’s biological weapons program, rumored to be well advanced.
Goudsmit and his team of Alsos agents knew that the University of Strasbourg had been doubling as a biological warfare research base for the Third Reich. Once a bastion of French academic prowess, this four-hundred-year-old university had been taken over by the Reich Research Council, Hermann Göring’s science organization, in 1941. Since then, the university had been transformed into a model outpost of Nazi science. Most of the university’s professors had been replaced with men who were members of the Nazi Party and of Heinrich Himmler’s SS.
On this November night, Goudsmit made the decision to have his team set up camp in Professor Haagen’s apartment and read all the documents in a straight shot. Alsos security team members set their guns aside, organized a meal of K-rations on the dining room table, and settled in to a long night of cards. Goudsmit and the biological weapons experts Cromartie and Wardenberg sat back in Professor Haagen’s easy chairs and worked on getting through all the files. Night fell and it began to snow, adding confusion to the scene outside. Hours passed.
Then Goudsmit and Wardenberg “let out a yell at the same moment,” remembered Goudsmit, “for we had both found papers that suddenly raised the curtain of secrecy for us.” There in Professor Haagen’s apartment, “in apparently harmless communication, lay hidden a wealth of secret information available to anyone who understood it.” Goudsmit was not deciphering code. The papers were not stamped Top Secret. “They were just the usual gossip between colleagues… ordinary memos,” Goudsmit recalled. But they were memos that were never meant to be found by American scientists. The plan was for the Third Reich to rule for a thousand years.
“Of the 100 prisoners you sent me,” Haagen wrote to a colleague at the university, an anatomist named Dr. August Hirt, “18 died in transport. Only 12 are in a condition suitable for my experiments. I therefore request that you send me another 100 prisoners, between 20 and 40 years of age, who are healthy and in a physical condition comparable to soldiers. Heil Hitler, Prof. Dr. E. Haagen.” The document was dated November 15, 1943.
For Samuel Goudsmit the moment was a stunning reveal. Here, casually tucked away in a group of Haagen’s personal papers, he had discovered one of the most diabolical secrets of the Third Reich. Nazi doctors were conducting medical experiments on healthy humans. This was new information to the scientific community. But there was equally troubling information in the subtext of the letter as far as biological weapons were concerned. Haagen was a virus expert who specialized in creating vaccines. The fact that he was involved in human medical experiments made a kind of twisted sense to Goudsmit in a way that few others could interpret. In order to successfully unleash a biological weapon against an enemy force, the attacking army had to have already created its own vaccine against the deadly pathogen it intended to spread. This vaccine would act as the shield for its own soldiers and civilians; the biological weapon would act as the sword. The document Goudsmit was looking at was a little more than a year old. How much vaccine progress had the Nazis made since?
As Goudsmit stared at the documents in front of him, he was faced with a troubling reality. Once, Eugen Haagen had been a temperate man—a physician dedicated to helping people. In 1932 Dr. Haagen had been awarded a prestigious fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation, in New York City, where he had helped to develop the world’s first yellow fever vaccine. In 1937 he had been a contender for the Nobel Prize. Haagen had been one of Germany’s leading men of medicine. Now here he was testing deadly vaccines on once healthy prisoners from concentration camps supplied to him by Himmler’s SS. If a leading doctor like Haagen had been able to conduct these kinds of research experiments with impunity, what else might be going on?
Goudsmit and his colleagues scoured Dr. Haagen’s papers, paying particular attention to the names of the doctors with whom Haagen corresponded about his prisoner shipments, his vaccine tests, and his future laboratory plans. Goudsmit started putting together a list of Nazi scientists who were now top priorities for Alsos to locate, capture, and interview. Dr. Eugen Haagen would never become a Paperclip scientist. After the war he would flee to the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany and work for the Russians. But among the names discovered in his apartment were two physicians important to Operation Paperclip. They were Dr. Kurt Blome, deputy surgeon general of the Third Reich, and Surgeon General Walter Schreiber. Dr. Blome was in charge of the Reich’s biological weapons programs; Dr. Schreiber was in charge of its vaccines. The sword and the shield.
Before Hitler rose to power, Blome and Schreiber had been internationally renowned physicians. Had Nazi science also made monsters of these men?
Almost two weeks after the Alsos mission’s discovery at Strasbourg, three hundred miles to the north, in Germany, a party was under way. There, deep in the dark pine forests of Coesfeld, a magnificent moated eight-hundred-year-old stone castle called Varlar was being readied for a celebration. The castle was a medieval showpiece of the Münster region, resplendent with turrets, balustrades, and lookout towers. On this night, December 9, 1944, the banquet hall had been decorated in full Nazi Party regalia. Trellises of ivy graced the podium. Flags featuring Germany’s national eagle-and-swastika emblem hung from walls, a motif repeated in each china place setting where the guests of the Third Reich celebrated and dined.
Outside, on Castle Varlar’s grounds, the snow-covered fields were also being readied. For centuries the castle had been a monastery, its broad lawns used as sacred spaces for Benedictine monks to stroll about and consider God. Now, in the frigid December cold, army technicians made last-minute adjustments to the metal platforms of portable rocket-launch pads. On each sat a missile called the V-2.
The giant V-2 rocket was the most advanced flying weapon ever created. It was 46 feet long, carried a warhead filled with up to 2,000 pounds of explosives in its nose cone, and could travel a distance of 190 miles at speeds up to five times the speed of sound. Its earlier version, the V-1 flying bomb, had been raining terror down on cities acro
ss northern Europe since the first one hit London, on June 13, 1944. The V-2 rocket was faster and more fearsome. No Allied fighter aircraft could shoot down the V-2 from the sky, both because of the altitude at which it traveled and the speed of its descent. The specter of it crashing down into population centers, annihilating whoever or whatever happened to be there, was terrifying. “The reverberations from each [V-2] rocket explosion spread up to 20 miles,” the Christian Science Monitor reported. The V-weapons bred fear. Since the start of the war, Hitler had boasted about fearsome “hitherto unknown, unique weapons” that would render his enemies defenseless. Over time, and with the aid of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, references to these mysterious weapons had been consolidated in a singular, terrifying catchphrase: Nazi wonder weapons, or Wunderwaffe. Now, throughout the summer and fall of 1944, the V-weapons made the threat a reality. That the Nazis had unfurled a wonder weapon of such power and potential this late in the war made many across Europe terrified about what else Hitler might have. Plans to evacuate one million civilians from London’s city center were put in place as British intelligence officers predicted that a next generation of V-weapons might carry deadly chemical or biological weapons in the nose cone. England issued 4.3 million gas masks to its city dwellers and told people to pray.
Major General Walter Dornberger was the man in charge of the rocket programs for the German army’s weapons department. Dornberger was small, bald on top, and when he appeared in photographs alongside Himmler he often wore a long, shin-length leather coat to match the Reichsführer-SS. He was a career soldier—this was his second world war. He was also a talented engineer. Dornberger held four patents in rocket development and a degree in engineering from the Institute of Technology in Berlin. He was one of four honored guests at the Castle Varlar party. Later, he recalled the scene. “Around the castle in the dark forest were the launching positions of V-2 troops in [our] operation against Antwerp.” It had been Dornberger’s idea to set up mobile launch pads, as opposed to firing V-2s from fortified bases in the Reich-controlled part of France—a wise idea, considering Allied forces had been pushing across the continent toward Germany since the Normandy landings in June.