PART 1:SECRET AGENDA:PROJECT PAPERCLIP

Secret Agenda 

The United States Government, 

Nazi Scientists and 

Project Paperclip 1945 to 1990

By Linda Hunt 1991
 

Prologue 

AMERICAN soldiers fighting in World War II had barely laid down their guns when hundreds of German and Austrian scientists, including a number implicated in Nazi war crimes, began immigrating to the United States. They were brought here under a secret intelligence project code-named "Paperclip." Ever since, the U.S. government has successfully promoted the lie that Paperclip was a short-term operation limited to a few postwar raids on Hitler's hoard of scientific talent. The General Accounting Office even claims that the project ended in 1947.1 

All of which is sheer propaganda. For the first time ever, this' book reveals that Paperclip was the biggest, longest-running operation involving Nazis in our country's history. The project continued nonstop until 1973-decades longer than was previously thought. And remnants of it are still in operation today.2 

At least sixteen hundred scientific and research specialists and thousands of their dependents were brought to the U. S. under Operation Paperclip. Hundreds of others arrived under two other Paperclip-related projects and went to work for universities, defense contractors, and CIA fronts. The Paperclip operation eventually became such a juggernaut that in 1956 one American ambassador characterized it as "a continuing U.S. recruitment program which has no parallel in any other Allied country."3 

The lie that Paperclip ended in the 1940s has conveniently concealed some of the most damning information about the project-in particular the shocking revelation that one of the intelligence officers who ran it was a spy. U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel William Henry Whaler, was the highest-placed American military officer ever convicted of espionage. Despite the extensive publicity devoted to Whalen's trial in the 1960s, exactly what he did for the joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) was not disclosed. This book reveals that in 1959 and 1960 Whalen was at the helm of the joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (J.I.O.A)-which means he was running Paperclip at the same time he was selling America's defense secrets to Soviet intelligence agents.4 

The full extent of the Soviet penetration of Paperclip remains unknown, since Whalen shredded thousands of documents. But this much is clear: justified as being run in the interest of national security, Paperclip instead posed a serious security threat. In addition to Whalen's activities, there is evidence that the Soviets had penetrated the project almost from the beginning. Almost anything was possible, given the J.I.O.A officers' lax investigations of the foreign scientists' backgrounds .5 

The legacy of Paperclip is said to be the moon rockets, jet planes, and other scientific achievements that were a product of postwar research in this country. This is true-as far as it goes. What the project's defenders fail to mention is that its legacy also includes the horrific psychochemical experiments conducted on American soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, the U.S. Army center for chemical warfare research. In this book you'll meet eight Paperclip scientists who worked at Edgewood between 1947 and 1966 developing nerve gas and psychochemicals such as LSD. But Edgewood's contribution to the Paperclip legacy could not have been made by the Germans alone. The disturbing truth is that American doctors were the ones who sifted through grim concentration camp reports and ultimately used Nazi science as a basis for Dachau-like experiments on over seven thousand U.S. soldiers.6 

Paperclip's legacy has its roots in the cold war philosophy espoused by the intelligence officers who ran the operation. Their motives, schemes, and coverup efforts are a logical focus for this book, since those are what shaped Paperclip from the beginning. Moreover, the military's secret agenda was far different from the one foisted on the American public. At its heart was an unshakable conviction that the end justified the means. The officers who ran Paperclip were determined to use any means necessary to keep Nazi scientists out of Russian hands, even if that meant violating U. S. laws and foreign policy. 

There may be no better example of the officers' brazen disregard for U.S. policies than the action they took in 1948. As first revealed in an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, J.I.O.A officers simply changed the records of those scientists they wanted, expunging evidence of war crimes and ardent nazism. Though this meant directly defying an order given by President Truman, J.I.O.A Director Bosquet Wev excused the action by asserting that the government's concern over "picayune details" such as Nazi records would result in "the best interests of the United States being subjugated to the efforts expended in beating a dead Nazi horse."7 

The repercussions of the J.I.O.A officers' actions are still being felt today. One example is retired NASA rocket engineer Arthur Rudolph, who left this country in 1984 rather than face war crimes charges. His case has attracted a bizarre assortment of defenders bent on bringing him back to the United States -including a U.S. congressman with alleged organized crime connections. On May 14, 1990, Congressman James A. Traficant of Ohio told a group of Rudolph's friends in Huntsville, Alabama, that the rocket scientist's problems were caused by a "powerful Jewish lobby" and warned: "If tonight it's Rudolph, who is it tomorrow?" That question undoubtedly made several of Rudolph's colleagues in the audience uncomfortable, since their wartime Nazi activities are also being scrutinized by justice Department prosecutors.8 

Other activities covered in this book that have not been examined up to now or that take on new significance in light of Paperclip's true history include: 

• the expansion of J.I.O.A's intelligence operation in 1948 to include Project National Interest, which brought a convicted Nazi war criminal, an ex-Nazi spy, and other ardent Nazis to the United States to work for universities and defense contractors; 

• how the CIA used National Interest as a cover to slip covert CIA operatives overseas into the United States; 

• how another J.I.O.A project, called "63," signed up Nuremberg defendant Kurt Blome, convicted Nazi war criminal Eduard Houdremont, and other notorious individuals while the J.I.O.A ran the operation out of a New York hotel; -details of a scheme by U.S. Air Force General Robert L. Walsh, Director of Intelligence, European Command, to intervene in court decisions involving ex-Nazi intelligence officers working for postwar U.S. intelligence in Germany; 

• details of another scheme by Walsh, who, as head of the Inter-American Defense Board, relocated notorious German General Walter Schreiber from the United States to Argentina; 

• how Whalen's Paperclip recruits in 1959 included a former Wehrmacht soldier who was working as a dishwasher in Canada; 

• how an alliance formed in 1985 between political extremist Lyndon LaRouche and former Paperclip scientists tried to shut down the justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit; 

• details of another scheme in 1986 to squelch the Justice Department's investigations of former Paperclip specialists Guenther Haukohl and Dieter Grau; 

• how NASA publicly honored those same men in a 1987 ceremony commemorating Wernher von Braun; 

• how Rudolph's friends tried to bring him back in 1990 to attend a NASA moon walk celebration, despite laws barring his entry into the United States. 

In essence this book deals with a hauntingly familiar and contemporary subject: a small group of men in the Pentagon who decided that they alone knew what was best for the country. "And that, I think, is the real danger then," said former U.S. congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, who authored the 1978 immigration law that bars Nazis from our shores. "We have agencies that think that they are a law unto themselves, that regardless of what the law of the land is, regardless of what the president of the United States says, they'll do whatever they think is best for themselves. And that's very dangerous."9

1 

The Beginning 

ON May 19, 1945, a military transport plane with windows blackened to hide its notorious cargo dropped out of the steely gray skies over Washington, D.C., and lurched down the landing field. As the propellers slowed and finally stopped, three figures stepped out of the aircraft. The first was a middle-aged man with a scarred face whose slight build belied his importance.1 

Herbert Wagner

Herbert Wagner had been the chief missile design engineer for the Henschel Aircraft Company and, more importantly, the creator of the HS-293, the first German guided missile used in combat during World War II. As of that moment, he and his two assistants were setting another historical precedent: they were the first German scientists to set foot on American soil at the end of the war.2 

Anxious to tap Wagner's expertise in the design of glider bombs for use against Japan, a U.S. Navy team smuggled him into the United States and then kept him hidden from immigration authorities so as to avoid troubling questions about his Nazi past. And no wonder. Wagner was reported to be an ardent member of the Sturmabteilung (the brown-shirted storm troopers) as well as four other Nazi organizations.3 

Wagner's surreptitious arrival marked the beginning of a massive immigration of Nazi scientists to the United States and a long, sordid chapter in postwar history. Had he been kept overseas, Wagner almost certainly would have been questioned closely about his Nazi past in a denazification court. Instead he and many of his colleagues were able to take advantage of Project Paperclip, which, in direct contravention of official U.S. policy, gave the Nazi scientists an opportunity to escape justice and start afresh in America.4 

Wagner's arrival actually predated the formal creation of Paperclip, though the effort to exploit Germany's scientific talent and resources was well underway by the time of the fall of the Third Reich. As Allied troops pushed inland from the beaches of Normandy in 1944, teams of scientific investigators trailed in their wake, roaming the battlefields in search of research installations that would yield up Hitler's scientific achievements and brain trust. 

The scientific teams were made up of U.S. Army, Navy, and Army Air Forces teams and Office of Strategic Services (OSS) intelligence agents attached to special military units called T-forces. At their peak the teams comprised more than ten thousand men scattered over the United Kingdom (where their command group, the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee [CIOS], was headquartered), France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and Nazi Germany. The teams' mission was to capture and interrogate Hitler's scientists, locate and microfilm documents, and confiscate all useful equipment found in laboratories and factories.5 

According to a journal kept by civilian scientist John Harris, in May 1945 one of those teams located a carefully camouflaged I. G. Farben chemical plant on the outskirts of the German town of Gendorf. The entrance to the plant was flanked by two large brick gateposts, which Harris estimated that a Sherman tank might squeeze through with six inches to spare. But there was no time for such niceties. The tank accompanying Harris's team simply smashed through the entrance, knocking over one of the gateposts and trailing yards of the wire fence that had surrounded the plant behind it.6 

The spoils that Harris and his colleagues discovered at Gendorf included some of the greatest scientific minds in Hitler's chemical warfare industry. One was Walter Reppe, an I. G. Farben director and pharmaceutical research expert. Even more impressive was Otto Ambros, a well-known chemist and Farben director who had come to Gendorf to construct a rubber plant nearby. Harris and the other members of the scientific team found Ambros to be a witty, "remarkably clever" man with an extraordinary command of the English language and a charming, personable manner.7 

It wasn't long, however, before they discovered another side to Ambros-one that was horrendously evil. He had overseen the use of concentration camp prisoners as slave labor when he was in charge of an I. G. Farben factory at Auschwitz concentration camp. It was a bitterly cruel irony, inasmuch as an I. G. Farben-dominated company manufactured the poison gas used to murder millions of Jews in the camps. By the time Ambros was shipped off to Munich for interrogation, he was already on the U.S. list of war criminals.8 

That dark side of Nazi science was inextricably linked to whatever benefits Hitler's technical brain trust had to offer, but from the beginning it was ignored by American military officers intent on exploiting German expertise. Even as one arm of the U.S. military was working to bring Nazi war criminals to justice after the war, another arm was using whatever means necessary to protect Nazi scientists and give them a safe haven in America. Ultimately this country paid a heavy price for that moral indifference. The methods and philosophies that the Nazi scientists brought with them resulted in serious breaches of U. S. security and the unthinkable horror of American soldiers being used as research guinea pigs in the same way that concentration camp prisoners had been used during the war. 

The idea behind the original exploitation project was basically sound. During the planning phase for the Normandy invasion it had become clear that ultimate victory depended on breaking the scientific, economic, and industrial structure of the Third Reich as well as defeating Hitler's troops in the field. German scientists had unleashed a technological war of a kind never seen before. Buzz bombs and V-2 rockets rained down on Great Britain, and in America the War Department was terrified at the thought that Hitler was close to developing an atomic bomb.9 

The main goal of the exploitation effort was to use the scientific intelligence it garnered to win the war against Nazi Germany and Japan. A secondary objective was to help advance the U.S. military's own technology once the war ended. One phase of the project, code-named "Safehaven," was designed to prevent Germans from escaping to other countries, primarily in Latin America, to continue their wartime research. Finally, the project would rectify an old mistake. Germany had been allowed to rearm after World War I. This time Washington policymakers were determined that Germany would be stripped bare, once and for all, of any technical and scientific capability to rearm and wage another war. 10 

When the exploitation project began, there was no thought of bringing German scientists to America. Indeed, there is strong evidence that President Franklin Roosevelt would have rejected the idea had it been presented to him at the time. Roosevelt already had turned down OSS chief William Donovan's request that the United States offer postarmistice privileges to Germans working for America's fledgling intelligence agency, which had recruited Schutzstaffel (SS) officers, members of the German Foreign Office, and high-ranking Abwehr intelligence agents. On December 1, 1944, Donovan asked the president if the recruits could be given special privileges, including "permission for entry into the United States after the war, the placing of their earnings on deposit in an American bank and the like." He acknowledged that only the president had the authority to approve the plan and asked for an immediate answer.11 

Roosevelt's blunt, one-paragraph answer would reverberate all the way into the 1980s, when revelations that U.S. intelligence had helped war criminals Klaus Barbie and Arthur Rudolph escape justice gave the president's words stinging irony. He wrote: 

I do not believe that we should offer any guarantees of protection in the post-hostilities period to Germans who are working for your organization. I think that the carrying out of any such guarantees would be difficult and probably be widely misunderstood both in this country and abroad. We may expect that the number of Germans who are anxious to save their skins and property will rapidly increase. Among them may be some who should properly be tried for war crimes or at least arrested for active participation in Nazi activities. Even with the necessary controls you mention I am not prepared to authorize the giving of guarantees.12 

Yet even before the war with Nazi Germany ended, and long before official Paperclip policies were set, members of the scientific teams were making unauthorized promises and cutting deals with German scientists whose names had appeared on war crimes "wanted" lists. In effect, the scientific teams wore blinders. Dazzled by German technology that was in some cases years ahead of our own, they simply ignored its evil foundation--which sometimes meant stepping over and around piles of dead bodies--and pursued Nazi scientific knowledge like a forbidden fruit. The teams often included American scientists and military personnel who were familiar with the Germans' work and tended to view them as colleagues. Occasionally the Germans even became their friends. 

Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash

The team whose mission it was to learn if Hitler's scientists had developed an atomic bomb was already in Europe looking for key nuclear physicists by the time the other scientific units arrived in 1944. Code-named "Alsos," the atomic bomb team was headed by U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash, whose long and highly controversial career ran the gamut from volunteering to fight in the 1918 Russian Revolution to being accused of running a CIA "special operations" unit which, according to testimony before Congress, "was responsible for assassinations and kidnappings as well as other `special operations.' " No evidence was presented at the hearing that the unit carried out assassinations while Pash was in charge. Pash was also security chief for the Manhattan Project during the development of the atomic bomb in the United States.13 

By the time Pash and Alsos's chief scientist, an American named Samuel Goudsmit, reached Strasbourg, France, Goudsmit was certain that the Germans had not yet completed their work on the bomb. Only a handful of men-Carl von Weizsacker, Werner Heisenberg, and a few others-even had the expertise to do the work. Moreover, in November 1944 Goudsmit found von Weizsacker's papers, proving that America's bomb project was at least two years ahead of Nazi Germany's. Nevertheless, when the Alsos team located physicist Rudolph Fleishman he was sent to the United States for interrogation. 14 

Although best known for tracking down German physicists, Alsos also investigated biological and chemical warfare. The University of Strasbourg was a major biological warfare research base, and Pash stayed in the home of the university's biological warfare chief, Eugen von Haagen, who had fled the area before Alsos arrived. Haagen had lived in America in the 1930s, working for the Rockefeller Institute in New York while participating in pro-Nazi German-American Bund activities in his spare time. In 1946, he was arrested and used as a witness for the prosecution at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, where he admitted that several Natzweiler concentration camp prisoners had died after he deliberately had infected them with spotted fever. In 1948 Haagen was offered a job as head of the medical department at the Institute of Medicine and Biology in Berlin. Later arrested by the British and turned over to the French, Haagen was convicted in 1954 by a French court and sentenced to twenty years imprisonment for his crimes. 15 

August Hirt

Goudsmit quickly discovered that a number of Haagen's colleagues at the University of Strasbourg were equally culpable in murder. The university was a model Nazi institution where many of the faculty were SS members whose chemical or biological warfare research consisted of horrific experiments on humans. Chief among them was professor of anatomy August Hirt, the official SS representative at the university, who provided other professors with prisoners for mustard gas experiments. The university proudly displayed Hirt's collection of skulls, which he had amassed by collaborating with Adolf Eichmann to kill Jews and send their still-warm bodies to the university for display. 16 

Kurt Blome

Alsos also interrogated Kurt Blome, Hitler's overall head of biological warfare, soon after his arrest as a war crimes suspect. (Blome's sordid Nazi past and subsequent employment in a Paperclip-related project are detailed in chapter 11.) When Alsos caught up with him, Blome admitted he had built a biological warfare laboratory at the request of ReichsfuhrerSS Heinrich Himmler. Power hungry and independent, Himmler planned to use biological warfare on Allied troops without Hitler's approval. He ordered Blome 'to conduct experiments on concentration camp prisoners to determine how effective a biological warfare attack would be against advancing Allied troops. But before he could begin, Blome told Alsos, Russian troops captured his laboratory.17 

While Hitler's atomic bomb project may have lagged behind America's, that wasn't the case with chemical warfare. Surprisingly, the exploitation project's valuable chemical warfare discoveries, and especially the Paperclip chemical warfare experts, have been ignored by historians, even though their discoveries were certainly equal to the scientific advancement of the V-2 rocket. Chemical Warfare Service teams investigated everything from nerve gas experiments to rifle ranges where shackled prisoners under the influence of mind-altering drugs staggered around with loaded guns looking for the target. The teams were shocked to discover that the Germans had invented three new nerve gases-Tabun, Sarin, and Soman-which were far more deadly than the mustard gases the Allies had at that time. The German gases were so superior that after the war Sarin became America's standard nerve gas, while the USSR chose Tabun.18 

Formulas and samples of these gases were discovered by a team of nineteen U.S., British, and Canadian chemical warfare experts that had targeted major German chemical warfare installations in the Munsterlager area. The team was headed by Commander A. K. Mills of the British Ministry of Aircraft Production. Mills's group tracked down a Wehrmacht experimental station at Raubkammer, a gas defense laboratory, a Luftwaffe chemical warfare experimental station, and several Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht chemical munition plants. The group was able to determine from captured documents and interrogations of German chemical warfare personnel that Tabun was produced at the rate of 1,000 tons a month at a factory in Dyhernfurth that was captured by the Russians.19 

Mills's team discovered that chemical warfare experiments had been conducted on both animals and humans in the captured facilities. At Raubkammer a main laboratory and nine annexes housed laboratory animals used in experiments, including dogs, cats, guinea pigs, apes, and horses. He also found four thousand photographs of mustard gas experiments conducted on men who appeared to be political prisoners from concentration camps. In some cases liquid mustard had been applied directly to the victims' skin, which resulted in oozing blisters, burns, and deep scars all over their bodies. At least six of them had died. 20 

The investigators also captured fourteen of Nazi Germany's major chemical warfare experts, including General Walter Hirsch, head of Wa Pruf 9, the Wehrmacht's main chemical warfare section. They were taken for interrogation to a detention camp where other chemical warfare experts were held, including SS Brigadier General Walter Schieber, who had overseen the chemical industry for Albert Speer's Armaments Ministry. Schieber would later work under Paperclip for a decade in West Germany, making nerve gas for the Chemical Division of European Command.21 

In another part of Nazi Germany, U. S. Army Air Forces teams were tracking down the scientists who designed Germany's highly advanced jet aircraft, underground bomb-proof shelters, parachutes, and anything else having to do with air combat. Air Corps Colonel Donald Putt headed a team that located the Hermann Goring Aeronautical Research Institute in Brunswick. The forty-year-old officer was a friendly, adventuresome man with a weatherbeaten face and a masters degree in aeronautical engineering. A veteran test pilot, Putt had helped supervise the development of the B-29 bomber at Wright Field air base near Dayton, Ohio.22 

Putt thought he knew all about aircraft, but he was stunned by what he found at Brunswick. "There was this plane with incredible swept-back wings," he recalled forty years later. "I'd never seen anything like it." What Putt had found was Adolf Busemann's swept-back wing aircraft, which became a prototype for the U.S. Air Force's swept-wing planes in later years.23 

The institute was one of Germany's largest scientific complexes, with twelve hundred specialists, five wind tunnels, and numerous laboratories. The specialists ran the gamut, from jet aircraft design to jet fuel, parachutes, and nearly every imaginable aeronautical invention. Putt gathered the Germans together and, without approval from higher authorities in the War Department, promised them jobs at Wright Field if they would go with him to a holding center for captured personnel in Bad Kissingen. He also promised to send their families to the United States, then instructed the scientists to sell all of their belongings and to travel light .24 

Other Army Air Forces teams were looking for Germany's leading experts in aero medicine. But some of the most significant information about their work was found when American troops "opened the gates of hell," in the words of the liberator of Dachau, Colonel Walter J. Fellenz, commanding officer of the 42d Infantry Division. The young American soldiers who broke through Dachau's iron gate found the reason they had been fighting the war when they saw the tortured faces of the half-starved crowd that cheered when they entered the camp .25 

While Fellenz's troops tended to the survivors, U. S. Army Major Leo Alexander sifted through documents to obtain names of the camp administrators and Nazi doctors-evidence that would be used later at Nuremberg. Alexander was a Boston psychiatrist whose medical expertise played a key role in the Nuremberg war crimes trials. He was the chief medical investigator and expert witness for the Nuremberg war crimes prosecution staff .26 

Dachau's Experimental Block number 5 was where Nazi scientists conducted medical experiments on the camp's defenseless prisoners. U.S. soldiers in the 363rd Medical Battalion were overwhelmed by the stench when they walked into the building. Parts of human bodies-arms, legs, organs of every type-were lying everywhere. Hundreds of innocent people had been murdered there in the name of science. And some of the men who conducted these experiments were the same respected scientists, university professors, and doctors that the A.A.F teams would later hire to work under Paperclip.27 

The experiments were ostensibly conducted to find ways to save the lives of Luftwaffe pilots who crashed at sea and were forced to live on seawater, or parachuted out of airplanes at high altitudes, or were exposed to extremely cold weather. Dachau inmates were deliberately infected with disease, force fed seawater, or starved for oxygen in a chamber.28 

In one experiment a group of Russian prisoners was frozen to death in vats of ice water in the camp yard during the winter. The prisoners endured excruciating pain before they died, as parts of their bodies slowly began to freeze. A Luftwaffe doctor, Sigmund Rascher, and University of Kiel Professor E. Holzlohner were among those conducting the experiments. They wanted to know if frozen flyers' lives could be saved if their bodies were thawed out.29 

While investigating this crime, one scientist whom Alexander talked with was Luftwaffe Colonel Hubertus Strughold, a Paperclip hire who today is touted as the "father of American space medicine." Strughold was wartime head of the Luftwaffe's Institute for Aviation Medicine in Berlin. Like von Haagen, Strughold also had lived in the United States, and his work in aviation physiology was widely known in American scientific and military circles. When Alexander asked him about the freezing experiments, Strughold said that he knew of them from a meeting he had attended in Nuremberg in 1942, and that he had heard a radio broadcast mentioning that Rascher was wanted in connection with the experiments. Other than that, Strughold said he knew nothing.30 

As Alexander continued his investigation, Himmler's SS records were found in a cave. They were a treasure trove of information that included Himmler's correspondence with Rascher and other individuals concerning the medical experiments at Dachau. As Alexander pieced the evidence together, he realized that Strughold had lied. Siegfried Ruff, another Paperclip hire and coauthor of a book with Strughold, was named in connection with high-altitude experiments. Ruff was head of the Department for Aviation Medicine at the German Experimental Institute for Aviation, the DVL (Deutsche Versuchsanstalt fur Luftfahrt). Holzlohner was identified as conducting the freezing tests, and several other names cropped up whom Alexander knew to be Strughold's close colleagues.31 

Alexander submitted two CIOS reports about the experiments to the Army's war crimes staff in which he noted his suspicion that Strughold had "covered up" the involvement "by his friend and co-worker Ruff, and by his colleague Holzlohner" in the Dachau experiments. By the time Alexander's reports wended their way to Nuremberg, however, Strughold was already sheltered under the protective wing of the U.S. Army Air Forces.32 

Significantly, a C.I.O.S team investigating aviation medicine was unimpressed with the value of Strughold's wartime work. Their final report concluded that Strughold and other Germans had suffered considerably from their isolation during the war, "since scientific achievements which they presented as new and revolutionary were in most cases long since attained by .the Allied investigators."33 

Meanwhile, U. S. Army Colonel Holger Toftoy was in charge of five Army Ordnance technical intelligence teams scouring the battlefields for weapons, equipment, and Hitler's rocket team. Like Colonel Putt, Toftoy had long been intrigued by technical matters. Before graduating from high school he had built an automobile from an old gasoline engine and bicycle parts. Now the West Point graduate was looking for the brains behind the rockets that blitzed London. 34 

Key members of the group that had been at the Peenemunde rocket base surrendered to the U.S. Army in a well-known story of their capture. One ordnance team member, Major Robert Staver, recalled that he was jubilant when the Army caught up with the Nazi rocket scientists. The most brilliant among them was the chief scientist and designer, who was only thirty-two years old. But Wernher von Braun's rocket career dated back to the 1930's, when he was the protege of Hermann Oberth, the father of German rocketry. Von Braun and four hundred other rocket experts were taken to Garmisch for interrogation by Toftoy and other members of the ordnance team .35 

As always, there was a dark side to the rocket scientists, too. This time it surfaced when American troops found the remains of Dora concentration camp inmates who had been starved, beaten, hanged, and literally worked to death as slaves in the Mittelwerk underground V-2 rocket factory. Colonel James L. Collins was leading an infantry unit toward Nordhausen when his liaison officer called him over the radio. "Colonel," he said, "you'd better get up here and see what we've got. It's terrible." By this time scenes from hell had become part of Collins's daily routine. But his mind reeled with horror at what he found at Camp Dora.36 

As Collins approached the huge, cave like entrance to the factory on the hill, six thousand bodies covered the ground. As far as he could see, row upon row of skin-covered skeletons were frozen solid in grotesque shapes, bearing bruises and wounds from beatings. "They had been starved to death," Collins recalled. "Their arms were just little sticks, their legs had practically no flesh on them at all." As the soldiers moved through the choking stench of death, they found the smoldering furnaces of Dora's crematory. The doors were still open where the SS had been shoving bodies in and burning them up, 37 

Yves Beon, a member of the French Resistance, was one of the few who survived that hell. He had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, imprisoned at Dora, and forced to work on the V-2 rocket. "We worked in the center of the mountain with no air, and just had one small piece of bread and margarine to eat all day," Beon recalled. "It was horrible."38 

The next day, as American troops tried to recover from the shock of their discovery, a soldier sat down on a filthy stoop and stared at a crumpled news report. A Dora survivor sitting next to him quietly reached out his thin hand and touched the tears streaming down his liberator's face. The soldier's commander in chief was dead. Franklin D. Roosevelt had guided the nation through an unprecedented four terms, from the Depression into the war. Now the burden of war passed to Harry S. Truman.39 

Members of the ordnance technical intelligence team, including Toftoy's aid, Major James Hamill, and Staver, arrived at the scene around the same time as an army war crimes unit. U.S. Army Major Herschel Auerbach had been sent to the site to investigate the crimes committed against the prisoners. His unit went one way, interrogating individuals and searching for evidence against those responsible for the deaths of twenty thousand Dora prisoners, while Hamill and Staver went in a different direction, to load up the V-2 rockets found in the tunnels, track down technical documents, and search the hills for rocket scientists who had worked in the Mittelwerk factory.40 

In the end, however, both groups ended up looking for the same men. Dora survivors told war crimes investigators that Mittelwerk personnel as well as the SS had harmed them. Particularly notorious was Mittelwerk's technical director, Albin Sawatzki. After Army M.P's had imprisoned Sawatzki in a makeshift pen in the camp yard, a Frenchman standing nearby became enraged upon seeing him. "That bastard nearly beat the life out of me a dozen times," the Frenchman yelled as he drew back his fist and smashed it into Sawatzki's face.41  

Sawatzki identified key Mittelwerk personnel and SS officers by name, and even told investigators where he thought they could be found. Sawatzki identified Georg Rickhey as Mittelwerk's general manager and said the Production Director Arthur Rudolph was one of the men responsible for the number of hours the prisoners were forced to work. He admitted that the prisoners had died from bad conditions, including food, exposure, and impure air in the factory. Sawatzki also brazenly admitted that he had "kicked some of the workers from time to time. "42 

Once again, however, the mind-set, opinions, and goals of the technical and scientific teams were so self-serving that Germans who should have been arrested as war crimes suspects escaped justice. Rickhey was arrested once, but was released. U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey Colonel Peter Beasley located Rickhey, struck up a friendship with him, and even moved into his house. After all, Rickhey possessed something that the colonel badly wanted. He had forty-two boxes of Mittelwerk management records that included information about V-2 rockets and bomb-proof shelters. Ignoring the potential those records held for evidence of war crimes, Beasley packed them-and Rickhey-off to London .43 

By the time Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945, Army Ordnance, CIOS, and other scientific teams had assessed nearly every primary technical and scientific target. But jealous rivalries erupted between the teams and among the four Allied nations, which were competing for the same spoils of war. That competition, particularly with the Soviets, would heighten when Germany was divided into four occupied zones.44 

As a result of that competition more than fifteen hundred German scientists and technicians were forced to leave their homes, and in some cases their families, and move to the U. S.controlled zone of Germany. Many were glass technicians from the Carl Zeiss factory in Jena, who were forcibly evacuated and interned in a camp for over a year. At least two members of Zeiss's group committed suicide over the ordeal. Ironically, while there was an outcry of protest after the war when Russian troops kidnapped scientists to work in the USSR, American authorities conveniently hid the fact that they had done virtually the same thing-and in violation of international law.45 

One of the most disturbing cases of forced relocation occurred toward the end of the war, when the Naval Technical Mission in Europe decided it wanted to exploit the skills of Wilhelm Eitel, the wartime head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's silicates department in Berlin. Even his colleagues considered Eitel an ardent Nazi who had won his position by collaborating with Wilhelm Frick to fire nine Jewish scientists in 1933, when Hitler banned Jews from positions in government and elsewhere. One of those scientists ended up in a concentration camp; the others were forced to flee Germany.46 

Russian troops were closing in on Berlin when an army colonel, Ralph Osborne, told Eitel to leave the city. Osborne was in charge of the Field Information Agency, Technical (FIAT), which later helped coordinate Paperclip operations in Europe. Eitel packed his bags and fled, abandoning his wife and five children to face the fast-approaching Soviet troops. His wife hanged herself instead. After the war Berlin police kept her suicide case open for years when they learned that Eitel had married his wife's sister soon after the suicide. But by then Eitel was safe in the United States, working for the Navy.47 

In addition to Eitel, the Navy team located torpedo and submarine experts and the staff of Peenemunde Aerodynamics Institute, including the institute's codirectors, Rudolf Hermann and Hermann Kurzweg, who worked in Kochel. The Peenemunde group had built two high-speed wind tunnels to test guided missiles and projectiles. The tunnels were a rare find. Both operated at more than twice the mach speed of any wind tunnel in America .48 

In May the Navy team traveled to the Bavarian village of Oberammergau looking for their key target-Herbert Wagner. Just weeks after they found him, he was ensconced in a Washington, D.C., hotel, being debriefed and given a new life.49 

It had taken the greatest war in history to put a stop to an unspeakable evil. And now the cutting edge of that nightmare was being transplanted to America.... 

footnotes Prologue

1. General Accounting Office, Nazis and Axis Collaborators Were Used to Further U.S. Anti-Communist Objectives in Europe-Some Immigrated to the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 28 June 1985). 

2. Federal Register, 10 August 1989. 

3. Ambassador James Conant to Secretary of State, 13 July 1956, State Department "Operation Paperclip" microfiche, Civil Reference Branch, RG 59, NARS (hereafter cited as State fiche). 

4. U.S. v. Whalen, CR 4360 (E.D. Va., 1966) (hereafter cited as Whalen). 

5. One example was Soviet mole Donald Maclean's influence over which scientists were hired. See John Loftus, The Belarus Secret (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982). 

6. For a good overview of the Edgewood experiments see Colonel James R. Taylor and Major William Johnson, Inspectors General, "Research Report Concerning the Use of Volunteers in Chemical Agent Research," pre pared for the Department of the Army, 21 July 1975 (obtained under the FOIA). See also U.S. v. Stanley, 483 U.S. 669 (1987) (hereafter cited as Stanley). 

7. Linda Hunt, "U.S. Coverup of Nazi Scientists," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 1985, p. 24. 

8. Traficant's speech at the Huntsville Holiday Inn, 12 May 1990, was sponsored by the Friends of Arthur Rudolph; for information on Traficant's Mafia ties see Dan Moldea, "Mafia and the Congressman," Washington Weekly, 19 April 1985. 

9. Author interview with Elizabeth Holtzman.

Notes:CHAPTER 1:THE BEGINNING 
1. For Navy mission history and activities see U.S. Naval Technical Mission in Europe, "Historical Data on NTME," and report summaries, RG 38, NARS; the Wagner description and Nazi records are in the Herbert Wagner JIOA dossier, RG 330, NARS. For general information see Clarence Lasby, Project Paperclip (New York: Atheneum, 1971). 
2. Lasby, Project Paperclip. 
3. For information about Wagner's entry date and avoidance of usual U.S. immigration procedure see the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) form in the Reinhard Lahde JIOA dossier, RG 330, NARS. Lahde was brought to the United States with Wagner. Wagner's Nazi records are in his JIOA dossier, RG 330, NARS. 
4. Lasby, Project Paperclip. 
5. Ibid.; John Gimbel, "U.S. Policy and German Scientists: The Early Cold War," Political Science Quarterly, 101 (1986). For CIOS history and OSS links see "Memorandum on the Establishment and Present Status of the Grey List Panel of the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee," 30 January 1945, entry 165, RG 226, NARS.
6. The report by John McArthur Harris, "Chemical Warfare Service," March to June 1945, is at AMHI. 
7. Ibid. 
8. For information on Ambros see the Nuremberg I. G. Farben case, U.S. v. Krauch et at., M892, RG 238, NARS (hereafter cited as Krauch). 
9. An overview of German science can be found in Leslie Simon, German Research in World War II (New York: John Wiley, 1947). OSS reports on German chemical warfare research are in RG 226, NARS. 
10. For a comprehensive history of the early exploitation project see Ralph Osborne, "History of the Field Information Agency, Technical (FIAT)," Ralph Osborne file, AMHI. Statistics and an overview are in "Final Report of FIAT," 1 July 1947, 321.01-77(FIAT), RG 260, WNRC; and "Bi-Weekly Progress Report Number 1 for FIAT," 4 July 1945, GBI/ FIAT/319.2, RG 260, WNRC. FIAT was established in July 1945 to wrap up CIOS responsibilties and oversee Paperclip in the European theater until 1947. Osborne was FIAT chief. 
11. William Donovan to President Franklin Roosevelt, 1 December 1944, RG 226, NARS. For information on individuals used by the OSS see Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden, Sub Rosa: The OSS and American Es pionage (New York: Reynado Hitchcock, 1946). Allen Dulles's testimony as "Mr. B" is in House Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, National Security Act of 1947, 80th Cong., lst sess., H.R. 2319, 27 June 1947. This hearing was not made public until 1982, when the 272 Notes Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence located the only existing transcript in CIA files during a committee review of CIA records. The original hearing was closed and the House's transcript was destroyed. See the introduction to the printed hearings for background. 
12. President Franklin Roosevelt, "Memorandum for General Donovan," undated but stamped as received by Donovan's office on 18 December 1944, RG 226, NARS. Charles A. Bane, Office of the Secretariat, suggested to Donovan that Roosevelt's reply should be summarized to the OSS in Stockholm, "which first raised the question." 
13. Pash's military career: Boris Pash file, HI; Boris Pash, The Alsos Mission (New York: Award House, 1969); U.S. Army Intelligence Center, History of the Counter Intelligence Corps (Fort Holabird, Md.: USAIC, De cember 1959), vol. 8, pt. 3, "CIC With the Alsos Mission," INSCOM. CIA "special operations" unit: from Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, Final Report, bk. 4, 94th Cong., 2d sess., report no. 94-755 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1976), pp. 128-33 (hereafter cited as Senate Select Committee, Final Report, no. 94-755). 
14. Samuel A. Goudsmit, Alsos (New York: Henry Schuman, 1947). 
15. Ibid. Haagen's testimony is in U.S. v. Brandt et al., M887, RG 238, NARS (hereafter cited as Brandt). Postwar job: Haagen's INSCOM dossier; French trial: in "2 German Doctors Sentenced," The New York Times, 15 May 1954. 
16. Goudsmit, Alsos. Information about Hirt and chemical warfare experiments is in Brandt. 
17. Alsos interrogation: in the Kurt Blome INSCOM dossier XE001248. Arrest reports: in Blome's Nuremberg arrest file, RG 238, NARS. 
18. A comparison of the Allies' mustard gas with Tabun, Sarin, and Soman is in Taylor and Johnson, "Use of Volunteers in Chemical Agent Research." (Note: the classified chapter 9 of this report, "Intelligence Corps LSD Testing," was obtained under a separate FOIA request from INSCOM, "Project Derby Hat.") 
19. A. K. Mills, "Investigation of Chemical Warfare Installations in the Munsterlager Area, Including Raubkammer," CIOS report no. 8, NIH. 
20. Ibid. 
21. Ibid. Identification of some detained individuals is found in "Final Report of FIAT"; Chemical Corps Historical Studies, "History of German Chemical Warfare in World War II," pt. 1, no. 2, RG 338, NARS; and Walter Schieber INSCOM dossier XE001005. 
22. Author interview with retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Donald Putt. Notes 273 
23. Putt interview; Donald Putt to Commanding General, AAF, "Report on Events and Conditions Which Occurred During Procurement of Foreign Technical Men for Work in the U.S.A.," 25 September 1945, located in the appendix of documents attached to Department of the Air Force, History of the AAF Participation in Project Paperclip, May 1945March 1947 (Wright Field, Ohio: Air Materiel Command, 1948), 4 vols., BOL (hereafter cited as AAF Participation in Project Paperclip). This history is valuable because its appendix contains AAF documents not found elsewhere concerning Paperclip, Wright Field, and the AAF Aero Medical Center. 
24. Ibid.
25. Yaffa Eliach and Brana Gurewitsch, The Liberators (Brooklyn: Center for Holocaust Studies Documentation and Research, 1981). 
26. Alexander's background and findings are in Brandt. 
27. Eliach and Gurewitsch, Liberators. 
28. Brandt. 
29. Ibid. 
30. Leo Alexander, "Neuropathology and Neurophysiology, Including Electrcencephalography, in Wartime Germany," CIOS report L-170, found in Brandt records; Leo Alexander, "The Treatment of Shock From Pro longed Exposure to Cold, Especially in Water," CIOS report, USSR exhibit 435, International Military Tribunal, NARS. 
31. Regarding Himmler's files see Alexander, "Treatment of Shock." 
32. Ibid. 
33. Ibid.; CIOS, "Aviation Medicine, General Medicine, Veterinary Medicine, Chemical Warfare," item nos. 24 and 25, file no. XXVII, WNRC. 
34. Toftoy biography is from CMH. On Peenemunde generally see Lasby, Paperclip; Frederick Ordway and Mitchell Sharpe, The Rocket Team (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982); David Irving, The Mare's Nest (London: Panther Books, 1985); Walter Dornberger, V-2 (New York: Viking, 1985); and Dieter Huzel, From Peenemunde to Canaveral (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962). 
35. Major Robert Staver letter to the author, 4 September 1985. 
36. Author interview with retired Brigadier General James L. Collins. See also Linda Hunt, producer/reporter, "Nazi Coverup," a fourpart series by the CNN Special Assignment I-Team, first broadcast in March 1986. 
37. Ibid. 
38. Author interview with Yves Beon. 
39. Soldiers' reactions to Roosevelt's death are in the concentration camp film reel Nordhausen, a U.S. Army Signal Corps film, NARS. 
40. Robert Staver letter to author; author interview with Herschel Auer- 274 Notes bach. Auerbach located dental records of SS officers that were used later for identification purposes in U.S. v. Andrae et al., M1079, RG 153 and RG 338, NARS (hereafter cited as Andrae). For a short history of Dora by war crimes staff see William Aalmann, "Dora"-Nordhausen Labor-Concentration Camps and Information on the Nordhausen War Crimes Case, prosecution staff booklet, in Andrae. For Dora survivors' perspective see Jean Michel, Dora (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979); Jean Michel, De L'Enfer Aux Etoiles (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1985); and Yves Beon, La planete Dora (France: Editions du Seuil, 1985). See also Linda Hunt, "Arthur Rudolph, NASA and Dora," Moment, April 1987; and Josef Garliriski, Hitler's Last Weapons (New York: Times Books, 1978). 
41. Victor Bernstein, "I Saw the Bodies of 3000 Slaves Murdered by Nazis," PM, 17 April 1945. 
42. Sworn Statement of Albin Sawatzki, 14 April 1945, prosecution exhibit, Andrae. 
43. Information about the elusive forty-two boxes of documents and Rickhey's relationship with Beasley is in Rickhey's testimony, Andrae. 
44. Osborne, "History of the Field Information Agency, Technical." 
45. Carl Zeiss to USFET Headquarters, "Report on Evacuated Scientists From Carl Zeiss Jena," 17 July 1946, G-2 Paperclip "Top Secret" files, RG 319, WNRC. 
46. See Wilhelm Eitel INSCOM dossier XE061886 and JIOA dossier, RG 330, NARS, for numerous statements regarding Eitel, especially the OMGUS memo to the S-2 Branch, 27 February 1949, and the Robert Have man statement. For the fate of Jewish scientists see Bernt Engelmann, Germany Without,7ews (New York: Bantam Books, 1984). 
47. Ibid. 
48. S. M. Hastings, "The NSWC/WOL Wind Tunnels," NSWC pamphlet, August 1979, ONH. For Navy mission history and activities see U.S. Naval Technical Mission in Europe, "Historical Data on NTME," and report summaries, RG 38, NARS. 
49. Entry dates are in the Herbert Wagner JIOA dossier, RG 330, NARS.