Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists and
Project Paperclip 1945 to 1990
By Linda Hunt
2
Project Paperclip 1945 to 1990
By Linda Hunt
2
Rules of the Game
IN the summer of 1945, as American troops coped with the chaos and ruin of what once had
been Hitler's Third Reich, the scientific teams held thousands of German scientists captive in
detention camps across Germany. The Hotel Wittelsbacher Hof in Bad Kissingen was no
exception, though it looked more like the site of a big scientific convention than a holding
center for Germans captured by the Army Air Forces. American jeeps arrived daily, bringing in
scientists of all ages, their luggage containing only the few personal belongings they had
hurriedly gathered together. These men, some 120 in number, were jet engine, wind tunnel, and
rocket fuel experts under Colonel Putt's control.1
Major General Hugh Knerr
Putt viewed his captives not as former enemies but as scientists whose technical know-how
could benefit the Air Corps. "The Germans were years ahead of us in aircraft design," Putt later recalled. Nazi Germany had barely surrendered when Putt began asking his superiors to
formulate a policy to bring the scientists to America. He quickly gained the support of Major
General Hugh Knerr, who soon would be named commanding officer of Wright Field air base.
Both Putt and Knerr believed that the Germans' knowledge would advance the A.A.F's own jet
design by a decade. Knerr sought War Department permission to send at least five Germans to
Wright Field, including Theodor Zobel, a designer whose innovative methods included
photographing airflow patterns around jet wings to help improve aircraft designs. Another was
Germany's preeminent supersonics expert, Adolf Busemann.2
But American interrogators in Putt's group were opposed to Knerr's idea, since they believed
that some of these Germans were ardent Nazis. One navy officer, H. M. Mott-Smith, had
already dropped the former co-director of Peenemunde's Aerodynamics Institute, Rudolf
Hermann, from a project involving the dismantling of the Kochel wind tunnel that was sent to
White Oaks, Maryland. Mott-Smith had found Hermann to be "untrustworthy and in some
respects incapable." Hermann's colleagues and other American officers in Putt's group also
shared this opinion. Mott-Smith's complaints increased after he learned that the Navy planned
to send Hermann to America. "Dr. Hermann was twice picked up by the C.I.C and investigated
for Nazi activities, the second time on accusation by one of his former associates of having
been instrumental in having the man sent to a concentration camp," he told his superiors.
Hermann later was cleared, but U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (C.I.C) agents then
interned his wife as an ardent Nazi. Once again Mott-Smith complained that Hermann's
"uncertain political sympathies, the proved Nazi sympathies of his wife, and the mistrust of him
by his subordinates" easily could damage the Navy's project. The Navy agreed and dropped
Hermann from its hiring list. Putt eventually brought him to Wright Field despite the damaging
reports. 3
Unaware of those controversies, War and State Department officials had not made a decision on numerous proposals sitting on their desks. These came not
only from Knerr and the Navy but also Colonel Toftoy and other Army Ordnance officers who
wanted to bring Wernher von Braun's rocket group to America. All of those involved in
discussions agreed that America should use the Germans' skills to win the war against Japan-if
steps were taken to eliminate security risks. "These men are enemies and it must be assumed
that they are capable of sabotaging our war effort," remarked Under Secretary of War Robert
Patterson.4
On the other hand, U.S. immigration laws at the time prohibited members of fascist groups
from entering the country. In addition, Joint Chiefs of Staff policy required that the commanding
general in the European theater "exclude from further research activity any persons
who previously held key positions in German war research." Ardent Nazis in charge of German
universities and scientific institutes were supposed to be replaced by those less politically
suspect. But now policymakers were being asked to approve proposals to bring some of those
same Germans to the United States and put them to work.5
The idea also conflicted with J.C.S policies regarding the prosecution of Nazi war criminals
and denazification of the general German population. When Justice Robert Jackson returned
from Europe shortly after his appointment as chief of counsel for the prosecution of war crimes,
he told President Truman, "I have assurances from the War Department that those likely to be
accused as war criminals will be kept in close confinement and stern control." Even with
Jackson's assurance, Under Secretary of War Patterson remained concerned that accused war
criminals might be included in the ranks of those the U.S. military now wanted to bring to
America .6
Ultimately the war against Japan proved to be the deciding factor. The JCS approved the
project, code-named "Overcast," and sent the rules of the game to commanders in the European
theater. The project's stated purpose was to temporarily exploit German and Austrian scientists
to "assist in shortening the Japanese war." It was limited to those few "chosen, rare minds" whose skills
could not be fully exploited in Europe. Once that exploitation was completed they were to be
returned immediately to Germany. The JCS acknowledged Patterson's concerns by including a
clause that specifically banned known or alleged war criminals, and this order: "If any
specialists who are brought to this country are subsequently found to be listed as alleged war
criminals, they should be returned to Europe for trial." It was an order that soon would be
ignored.7
Once Project Overcast was approved, a War Department spokesman made a terse public
announcement that "a number of carefully selected scientists and technologists are being
brought to the United States." He informed the press, however, that there would be "no
interviews, no itineraries, no pictures," and then refused to reveal any further information.8
Over the next few months, three military intelligence agencies formed a power base
enabling them to control the project's course for the next two decades and to hide their dubious
activities from the American public. These were the Joint Intelligence Committee (J.I.C), the
Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (J.I.O.A), and the Exploitation Branch under Army intelligence
(G-2) in the War Department General Staff (W.D.G.S).
It is important to keep in mind that the project was run by intelligence officers. While the
American public may have been told that the German scientists were considered valuable because
of their scientific skills, the intelligence officers running the project had a far different
agenda. They viewed the project as the intelligence exploitation of Germany, and along with
that, the Soviet Union and France. The decisions they made-often in secret-reflected that view.
Despite JCS policies, some of those brought to the United States under the project were a far
cry from being "scientists" or even Germans or Austrians. The scientists who did arrive were
interrogated about what they knew about the Soviet Union, and their mail was constantly
screened for intelligence information.
Lieutenant General Hoyt Vandenberg
The J.I.C was the intelligence arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, responsible for advising the
J.C.S on the intelligence problems and policies and furnishing intelligence information to the
J.C.S and the State Department. The J.I.C was composed of the Army's director of intelligence,
the chief of naval intelligence, the assistant chief of Air Staff-2, and a representative of the
State Department. They considered policy questions regarding the German scientist project and
recommended procedural changes to the J.C.S. The Army's director of intelligence always
played a key role in the project, since the policy made Army intelligence (G-2) administratively
responsible for many aspects of the program, including background investigations. Lieutenant
General Hoyt Vandenberg served in that position until June 1946, when President Truman
appointed him director of the Central Intelligence Group, which became the Central
Intelligence Agency in 1947.9
The J.I.O.A was established as a subcommittee of the J.I.C specifically to assume direct
responsibility for running the German scientist program until the J.I.O.A was disbanded in 1962.
The agency was comprised of a J.I.O.A Governing Committee, made up of one representative of
each member agency of the J.I.C, and an operational staff of military intelligence officers from
the different services. Army Colonel E. W. Gruhn was the first J.I.O.A director, a position that
generally rotated annually among the agency's military officers. J.I.O.A's duties included
administering the project's policies and procedures, compiling dossiers, and serving as liaison
to British intelligence officers running a similar project in Great Britain. In addition, J.I.O.A took
over many of C.I.O.S's activities when that agency was dissolved shortly after Nazi Germany's
surrender. J.I.O.A was responsible for collecting, declassifying, and distributing C.I.O.S and other
technical intelligence reports on German science and industry.10
Finally, the Exploitation Branch under G-2, W.D.G.S, was the implementing agency for the
project. The chief of this branch represented the Army's director of intelligence on the J.I.O.A
Governing Committee. This secret unit, which changed names several times, was part of the
Military Intelligence Division and had carried out many intriguing missions, a history that did
not change once it became involved with German scientists. First called Prisoner of War (P.O.W)
Branch and then Captured Personnel and Material (C.P.M) Branch, the agency was responsible
for directing "escape and evasion" activities that included interrogating enemy prisoners of war
and helping individuals friendly to the Allies escape from behind enemy lines.11
Lieutenant Colonel Monroe Hagood was head of the unit when Overcast was approved in
1945. He was overwhelmed with work and frustrated that his small staff of interrogators
received little support for numerous ongoing projects. Two months after the J.C.S approved the
policy, Assistant Secretary of War Robert A. Lovett furiously accused G-2 of ineptitude when
he learned that none of the German scientists had arrived. Hagood took the brunt of that
criticism and later complained that while his staff was expected to be responsible for half the
work needed to initiate Overcast, the War Department gave him no funds to accomplish the
task. 12
Hagood's biggest problem, however, was that his C.P.M Branch interrogation staff was too
small to take on yet another group of Nazis. They already were helping officers who smuggled
former intelligence experts, members of the German High Command, and high-ranking German
naval intelligence officers into Washington, where they were hidden from public view and
interrogated about the U.S.S.R.
On one side of Washington, Hitler's spy chief and Soviet expert General Reinhard Gehlen
and other members of his wartime intelligence staff were cloistered behind high fences in Fort
Hunt, Virginia. Under the direction of Major General Edwin Sibert, Army intelligence chief in
Germany, Gehlen and the others were interrogated, put in a room with hidden listening devices,
and left to talk among themselves as intelligence officers listened in. Along with Gehlen's
group, Fort Hunt also housed a combined C.P.M Branch and Navy project to interrogate four
German admirals, including Hitler's naval intelligence chief, Rear Admiral Otto Schulz, and sixteen other German Navy specialists on
the U.S.S.R, including Norbert von Baumbach, the former naval attache in Moscow. The commanding
officer of Fort Hunt, Lieutenant Colonel Montie Cone, later was involved in
Paperclip for over a decade.13
On the other side of the capital in Camp Ritchie, Maryland, a group of German High Command officers were interrogated and helped translate important captured German documents. One of these men was a notorious Nazi-Major General Gustav Hilger-who was on a U.S. Army war crimes wanted list while living at the camp. Hilger had been Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim Ribbentrop's informant on the operation of Einsatzgruppen, the S.S killing units that massacred hundreds of thousands of Jews. While Ribbentrop was hanged as a war criminal after the war, Hilger returned to Washington in 1948 under State Department auspices, living openly, with his name listed in the telephone directory. Others in the Washington area with Hilger in 1945 were: Kurt Zinneman, who headed the Russian section of the German War Economy Branch; General August Koestring, military attache in Moscow; and Nazi historian Peter-Heinz Seraphim, whose research on Jews was used avidly by Hitler's propaganda chief. 14
Hagood's overworked interrogators in C.P.M Branch were not the only source of delays. A British project called "Backfire" lasted through the summer. It was supposed to be a major effort to study the Germans' V-2 rocket launching techniques, but it soon turned into a fiasco tying up several of the main rocket experts. Hundreds of Allied officers and nearly a thousand Germans, including von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, gathered at an isolated area off the Dutch coast known as Cuxhaven. Entire units of officers spent months scouring an area from Paris to Berlin, digging up fields and rummaging through factories to find enough V-2 parts to reassemble rockets that were barely operational. The British released hundreds of German Wehrmacht officers and "tradesmen" from POW camps to work as construction crews at the launch site. The project's director even admitted that "it was necessary to give them better treatment than the normal P.W." to make them cooperate. By September only three rockets had been launched, and the JCS angrily told the British that they wanted von Braun and other rocket experts sent to America at once.15
In addition to the delays, Operation Backfire succeeded in blocking an investigation of Rudolph's wartime activities at Mittelwerk. Canadian Field Service (FS Sec) officers uncovered information that Rudolph was Mittelwerk's production director and that foreign slave labor there "has been very badly mishandled according to Dir. Rudolph's own words." They also suspected that another Mittelwerk engineer, Hans Lindenberg, "may be wanted" in connection with Rudolph's activities. But the officers were not allowed to interrogate them, due to what they called the "delicate situation" at Cuxhaven.16
The question then arose of what to do with General Walter Dornberger, who had headed the V-2 . operation at Peenemunde. He was separated from other Germans after trying to turn American and British officers against each other for his own benefit. During interrogation, he blithely mentioned that Russian, French, and Polish POWs had been used as forced laborers at Peenemunde. In fact, ten thousand foreign laborers had been imprisoned at a concentration camp in Karlshagen, located near the Peenemunde rocket base. The camp included political prisoners who had been taken from their countries by force to work as slave labor on V-2 rockets. Dornberger said that many of these prisoners had been killed when the Allies bombed the rocket base in 1943. Unfortunately, neither British nor American intelligence officers questioned Dornberger closely about the use of POWs and political prisoners as forced labor-and their possible mistreatment-in violation of international law.17
AAF General Knerr, of course, immediately pounced on the idea of bringing Dornberger to Wright Field, and once again his overenthusiasm for the Germans rankled other American officers. One general told Knerr not only that would he block AAF efforts to employ Dornberger, but that "in fact, we may trade him to the Russians for a dish of caviar." Dornberger's other critics were lined up at FIAT, the agency formed July 1 to oversee Overcast in the European theater. Everyone at FIAT loathed Dornberger and felt he should be interned as a menace. The British settled the matter by taking Dornberger to London, where they planned to hold war crimes trials of German militarists. Although Dornberger was interned in British POW camps for two years, he immediately went to work at Wright Field upon his release in 1947.18
On August 6 the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan followed by a second bomb three days later, quickly bringing the war to an end. Overcast specialists began to arrive in the United States from Germany a month later. They entered the country without visas, outside normal immigration procedures, but all had employment contracts in their pockets. Although they were supposed to be under tight military custody, Peenemunde's former guidance department chief, Ernst Steinhoff, wasn't even met at the boat. He ended up hitchhiking to his job at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.19
Interrogation centers were set up at Fort Strong, Massachusetts, located on an island in Boston Harbor, where the Germans were supposed to fill out forms and be interviewed. Most escaped close scrutiny. Herbert Axster, Dornberger's chief of staff at Peenemunde, recalled that the rocket group knew they were protected from the beginning. "We knew already that they wouldn't do anything to us, because they wanted something from us," Axster said.20
Most officers conducting the interrogations did not even inquire whether the new arrivals were ardent Nazis or wanted for war crimes. One officer, obviously suspicious of Rudolph, did comment on his form, "100% NAZI, dangerous type, security threat... ! ! Suggest internment." His remarks were put in Rudolph's file, discussed occasionally during security clearance investigations through the years, and generally ignored.21
It wasn't long before nearly 150 Overcast specialists were working at various military bases across the country under this lax policy. Rudolph, von Braun, and more than a hundred other former Peenemunde and Mittelwerk employees worked for Colonel Toftoy at Fort Bliss, Texas. Other rocket technicians joined Steinhoff at Aberdeen Proving Ground. Colonel Putt brought thirty additional jet aircraft and rocket fuel specialists to Wright Field. Torpedo and submarine specialists joined Herbert Wagner and the Navy's group at an isolated mansion in Long Island, New York. Twenty other recruits helped reassemble the huge Kochel wind tunnel in White Oak, Maryland.
A false myth persists to this day that only scientists and technicians were brought to the United States under this project, while many men in neither category were included from the beginning, in violation of the policy. For example, Armin Stelzner, who had served as a major in the Wehrmacht in Poland, France, and Africa during the war, worked under Overcast as a translator of documents dealing with high frequency communication at Aberdeen Proving Ground.22
Colonel Putt favored high-ranking militarists, and by mid December 1946, five Luftwaffe officers were employed at Wright Field to write a survey of the Luftwaffe's battles with the Soviets. The head of this group was General Herhudt von Rohden, commander of the Luftwaffe on the Russian front, who had worked for a U.S. military historian in Europe immediately following Nazi Germany's surrender.23
Herbert Axster was a patent attorney and a lieutenant colonel in the Wehrmacht in command of a unit fighting the Russians. In 1943 he met a director of Peenemunde while on furlough at his ranch near the rocket base. "All of a sudden I got a telegram from Dornberger telling me I'd been reassigned to be his chief of staff," Axster recalled. In 1945, von Braun and Colonel Toftoy told Axster he was going to America. "I said, `Why? I'm not a technician.' And Toftoy said, `The U.S. Army needs to know how Peenemunde was organized so we can organize our rocket program.' Of course, being chief of staff, I knew. And that's why I went to America. "24
Project Overcast was badly organized and lacked funds to accomplish even the minimum standards set for the project. Even the Germans complained about the situation. For example, Theodor Zobel and five other jet aircraft specialists arrived at Wright Field only to learn there was so little money allocated to the project that equipment damaged on the trip from Germany was not even replaced. Zobel angrily told Putt that he thought the entire project, "beginning with the extended enforced waiting period in Germany prior to arrival here, has been badly planned and carried out." The scientist was forced to rig lab apparatus in the corner of a warehouse, devising mounting platforms from empty cartons and crates." The situation did not improve when additional scientists arrived. Jet fuel expert Ernst Eckert said he sat idle for months because of inadequate library facilities and the AAF officers' failure to provide him with even pencils and paper.26
Meanwhile, one of J.I.O.A Director Gruhn's first actions as overall administrator of the project was to compile a hiring list of the best-qualified German and Austrian scientists that was used by both the United States and Great Britain as a recruitment tool for decades. Although this list has been mentioned in the past by journalists and historians, no one ever noted that it was partially compiled by Werner Osenberg, the notorious wartime commander of the Gestapo's scientific section. The decision to use Osenberg was made by U.S. Navy Captain Ransom Davis after consultation with the JCS.27
During the war, Osenberg was in charge of a special SS research council directly subordinate to Reichsmarshal Hermann Goring. Osenberg sent his Gestapo agents to investigate work in progress at scientific institutes and report back on each scientist's political reliability. From those reports and the Gestapo's files, Osenberg compiled a list of fifteen thousand names of scientists in the Third Reich. He wrote comments next to the scientists' names regarding their political affiliations, such as SS membership, and his opinion of their scientific abilities. Of course, those scientists who held fanatic Nazi views and SS membership were also those whom Osenberg considered to be the best qualified.28
Osenberg had been captured in 1945 by the Alsos team and Rules of the Game 33 interned in a camp in Germany. Soon after the J.I.O.A expressed interest in him, intelligence officers whisked him out of Germany to Versailles, France, where he set up business as usual, sifting through his files to suggest names of those he considered the best scientists in the Third Reich. 29
Not surprisingly, when J.I.O.A's hiring list began to circulate it caused an immediate uproar among American officers. One officer in Germany complained directly to the JCS that the list contained a "large number of former Nazis and mandatory unemployables." He was furious when he recognized the names of ardent Nazis he had just forced out of jobs in Germany, as JCS policy required.30
While Osenberg influenced the hiring of ardent Nazis, there is disturbing evidence suggesting that the project was penetrated by the Soviets from the beginning. Assistance in ear- marking which German scientists to recruit also was offered by Donald Maclean, the first secretary of the British Embassy in Washington and liaison for atomic secrets. Maclean was a Soviet mole. Among the top secret documents in J.I.O.A files is a letter advising that certain scientists were too unimportant to recruit. An attached list then contained derogatory comments about the qualifications of some of Germany's eminent nuclear physicists, including Otto Hahn and Carl von Weizsacker. The most striking comment is about Hahn, winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, who was judged on the list as having "negligible value."31
Members of the Joint Research and Development Board, headed by Dr. Vannevar Bush, were shocked when they saw the derogatory comments. J.I.O.A Director Gruhn had sent the comments to Bush and asked for an opinion of the scientists' eminence. As a result, Bush issued a scathing retort criticizing the military for not knowing even "elementary information on Germans whose names are as well known in scientific circles as Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin are in political circles." He emphasized that Hahn and von Weizsacker were "intellectual giants of Nobel Prize stature" and that their expertise would be of great value to America.32
Nevertheless, none of the physicists was placed on the list until the 1950's, although most worked as consultants under the project in Germany, and physicist Rudolph Fleishman was flown to the United States for interrogation prior to the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan. Major General Leslie Groves, as head of the Manhattan Project, had already told the director of intelligence that he was vehemently opposed to any of the German physicists working for the Manhattan Project, for security reasons. "If they are allowed to see or discuss the work of the [Manhattan] Project the security of our information could get out of control," Groves said. Of course, Groves had good reason to worry, since German-born Klaus Fuchs, another Soviet spy, had worked for the Manhattan Project during the war. Contrary to some published reports, Fuchs was not brought in under Paperclip. He fled Germany in 1934, worked in Great Britain, and then joined the bomb project in 1943, two years before Paperclip even existed.33
Another controversy ensued when French agents nearly exposed the well-kept U.S. secret that American officers were kidnapping scientists in the Soviet zone. The French asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff for permission to see J.I.O.A's list, supposedly to check the scientists' movements in the divided zones of occupied Germany. The list identified scientists from the well-known Carl Zeiss optical works in Jena who were forcibly taken out of the Soviet zone by U.S. officers in 1945. The French request came at an embarrassing time, since U.S. and British government officials were publicly criticizing the Soviets for kidnapping scientists, in violation of international law. Now the JCS was afraid that if the public learned of the Jena incident, it would expose America's activities as equally illegal.34
The Jena group had been locked up in a detention camp for a year. In 1946 the group filed a damage claim seeking return of personal property and scientific equipment that had been confiscated and sent to Wright Field. Carl Zeiss himself complained bitterly to U.S. officers that two men in his group already had committed suicide and another had returned vountarily to the Soviet zone as a result of their enforced idleness. J.I.O.A officers inquired about employing the entire Zeiss staff under Overcast, but the plan was dropped. Colonel J. A. Johnson, who headed the board of officers processing the Zeiss group's claims, said the group wasn't worth the trouble. According to Johnson, most were automobile mechanics who "hopped on the band wagon and were attempting to make a good thing of the situation." A handful were brought in later to work for the Air Force.35
By spring 1946, policymakers in Washington still were trying to decide what to do about the project, whose codename had been changed to Paperclip. High-ranking policymakers in the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC) worked on a policy to be submitted to President Truman.36 And the Joint Chiefs of Staff were getting opinions on the subject from everyone, including the British, whose own project was coordinated in Washington through the Combined Chiefs of Staff. In fact, the two countries' projects were tightly linked; they coordinated policies, shared hiring lists, and U.S. and British intelligence agencies screened the Nazi backgrounds of the scientists. At the time, the British were exploiting several groups of Germans in their own country. In March 1946 British intelligence also began dumping German scientists on British Commonwealth countries, including Canada and Australia. In Operation Matchbox, twenty Germans secretly were sent to Canada to work. They included four wartime I. G. Farben chemists and a man described later by Canadian investigators as the "number one Nazi in the dental trade during the war." Some of those men would be brought to America in the late 1950s under Paperclip. 37
Of course, the J.I.O.A Governing Committee already had begun to set their own agenda. Officers attending their weekly meetings in the summer of 1946 included U.S. Navy Captain Francis Duborg, G-2 Exploitation Branch chief Hagood, and on various occasions other officers, including Putt and Toftoy.
The group was led by forty-two-year-old Navy Captain Bosquet Wev, who had been named chairman of J.I.O.A's committee in early 1946. Wev was a career naval officer who had conducted antisubmarine operations against German subs along the entire coastline of America and the Caribbean during the war. He also had been a member of the occupying forces of Japan until November 1945, when he returned to America.38
Samuel Klaus was the State Department representative on the J.I.O.A Governing Committee, but the forty-two-year-old lawyer was no bureaucrat. He was amused once in Europe when children followed him because they thought that he with his bowler hat, cane, and mustache-was Charlie Chaplin. He once told his sister that he was like Javert, the detective in Les Miserables, in pursuit of justice, and his State Department career reflected that pursuit. During the war Klaus worked on the department's Safehaven project, tracing the intricate network of fronts and money-funneling operations used by German banks and corporations to smuggle their assets out of Nazi Germany before its collapse. He helped set up the State Department-run Berlin Document Center, which today still houses voluminous captured Nazi organization files. Klaus also conducted numerous investigations of human rights violations in Communist-bloc countries, riding through Armenia on horseback.39
Wev and Klaus clashed during the very first meeting and their relationship went downhill from there. Wev was, to put it bluntly, a loose cannon. He often tried to maneuver himself into a position where he could make decisions he did not have the authority to make, without the knowledge of either the State Department or the J.I.O.A Governing Committee. In one meeting, he and Hagood accused Klaus of being uncooperative because he did not obtain Wev's permission to attend a meeting in the War Department. Klaus sarcastically informed them that the assistant secretary of state, who had arranged the meeting, was no doubt empowered to meet with the assistant secretary of war without clearing it first with a lowly Navy captain.40
Klaus and other State officials deliberately were kept out of the loop from the beginning. He complained that the J.I.O.A and G-2 Exploitation Branch made decisions behind his back and refused to give him and Assistant Secretary of State General John Hilldring a list of the Germans employed under the project. "The situation therefore is one in which the State Department bears a public as well as governmental responsibility for a program over which it has in actual fact no control and not even any information," Klaus remarked. He also was shocked when he learned that the Navy had no money to employ scientists but wanted to bring them to America to work for private industry. Klaus thought it was unfair to expect the American taxpayer to foot the bill so that large corporations could hire new employees.41
In June Army Director of Intelligence Vandenberg's replacement came on board the project. Major General Stephen J. Chamberlin would be a significant figure in the early stages of Paperclip. This cold warrior knew how to play the game. His decisions, philosophy, and goals would set the project on its fateful course. The fifty-seven-year-old career officer had been General Douglas MacArthur's intelligence chief of planning and operations for the Pacific campaign. As director of intelligence Chamberlin served directly under Army Chief of Staff General Dwight Eisenhower until reassigned to another post in October 1948.42
While the S.W.N.C.C debated a new policy that still would include only scientists or technicians, the intelligence community had other ideas. Hagood's C.P.M Branch, A.A.F officers Putt and Knerr and Army Colonel Toftoy were among eleven officers holding meetings on their own-without Klaus-to work on changes they wanted made in the new project. Their agenda included expanding the category of people to include prisoners of war, militarists, SS officers, and anyone else who they thought would be of use to the military. One proposal would have included 558 German P.O.W's held in the United States since the beginning of World War II. Some of these Germans already worked at Wright Field as cooks, waiters, and busboys; others cared for the animals used in mustard gas experiments at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland. But the secretary of war opposed the idea and ordered the prisoners returned to Germany.43
One month after that proposal fell through, Hagood, Putt, and others in the Washington group, in conjunction with U. S. Army intelligence officers in Germany, secretly approved a scheme to include SS officers and former high ranking officials of the Third Reich who already were employed by Army intelligence in Germany. They would have to be smuggled into America, since their backgrounds clearly violated U.S. immigration laws. Although the identities of these dubious recruits are not known, the fact that Lieutenant Colonel Dale Garvey was among those involved in this plot in Germany gives some idea of the scurrilous group of individuals being discussed. Garvey was commander of Region IV of the 970th Army C.I.C in Germany and one of the officers who later approved the Army C.I.C's recruitment of Klaus Barbie.44
After the meeting, Hagood prepared a report for his superiors Chamberlin and Eisenhower-but the group carefully expunged information they said was so "controversial" it would delay action if the generals knew the full story. Hagood then told Garvey and other intelligence agents in Germany to expedite procedures and begin shipping the Nazis as soon as the revised Paperclip policy was approved .45
It was not surprising that no one mentioned this plot to Klaus during the official J.I.O.A meeting held later the same day. Yet Klaus certainly suspected that something was going on behind his back, judging from his comments in a memo. "I gathered in the course of the meeting that there had been meetings of the group to which I had not been invited," Klaus noted suspiciously.46
The intelligence officers quickly forged ahead with the schemes they had hatched in Klaus's absence. On July 30 Chamberlin asked Chief of Staff Eisenhower to approve a plan to smuggle in thirty ex-Nazi experts on the USSR among a thousand "scientists" in the new project. Chamberlin told Eisenhower that the Military Intelligence Division's experience in bringing similiar groups to America -Gehlen, Hilger, and others-"has proved that valuable intelligence on Russia and Russian dominated countries can be developed more rapidly by this method than any other. "47
Exactly one month later, Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson sent a copy of Paperclip policy to the White House. The policy Truman was asked to approve expanded the project to include up to one thousand German and Austrian scientists or technicians whose scientific qualifications made their exploitation vital to the "interest of national security." The policy (S.W.N.C.C 257/22) also spelled out procedures the War Department was required to follow. The specialists would be under military custody, since they would enter the United States without visas. The War Department would screen their backgrounds and assure that "the best possible information" about their qualifications was submitted to the State and Justice Departments for visa consideration. Employment contracts would provide for their return to Germany if they were found not to be qualified or acceptable for permanent residence.
While war criminals were obviously excluded, one clause in the policy banned those active in nazism or militarism as well:
No person found by the Commanding General, U.S.F.E.T, to have been a member of the Nazi party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazism or militarism shall be brought to the U.S. here under. Acheson told the president that since the State, War, and Navy Departments had approved the policy, "I recommend your approval. "48
At the same time, across the Potomac, Fort Hunt bustled with activity as Hagood's CPM Branch and other intelligence officers gathered in buildings isolated from the main area. Here, five aliens sifted through microfilm of captured records and were quizzed by interrogators. U.S. intelligence had used the German scientist project as a cover to bring the men to America. By no stretch of the imagination could they be called scientists. The new arrivals were Gehlen's spies, three Russian and two German intelligence experts on the Soviet Union.49
In the White House, Truman looked over Acheson's memo about Paperclip. The acting secretary had assured the president that the Germans were merely scientists whose skills would benefit America's technology and that the War Department would exclude "persons with Nazi or militaristic records." On September 3 Truman gave Paperclip his official approval.50
CHAPTER 2: RULES OF THE GAME
1. U.S. Air Force Historical Office, "The Command and Project `Paperclip,' " History of the Air Research and Development Command, vol. 1, chap. 9, 1954 (hereafter cited as Air Research and Development Command) (obtained from BOL under the FOIA).
2. Putt interview.
3. H. M. Mott-Smith to Navy Department, Bureau of Ordnance, 19 February 1945, G-2 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC.
4. Secretary of War Robert Patterson to Secretary, General Staff, 28 May 1945, G-2 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC.
5. Allied Control Authority, Control Council law no. 25, 29 April 1946. A copy of the law is in the G-2 Paperclip "Top Secret" files, RG 319, WNRC. Law no. 25 states that "senior officials or scientists who were members of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) or members of other Nazi organizations with more than nominal participation in its activities shall be removed and their replacement effected only by persons with suitable political records." Prohibited research included nuclear physics, poison gas, and rocket propulsion.
6. Telford Taylor, Final Report to the Secretary of the Army (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 15 August 1949).
7. AAF Headquarters, "Exploitation of German Specialists in Science and Technology in the U. S." in the appendix of AAF Participation in Project Paperclip.
8. War Department, Bureau of Public Relations, "German Scientists Brought to U.S.," 9 October 1945, G-2 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC.
9. JIC Charter/JCS 1569/1, CCS 334 JIC, 19 December 1942, sec. 6, RG 218, NARS.
10. "Basic Directive, JIOA," CCS 471.9, 1 May 1945, sec. 4, RG 218, NARS. A copy of the JIOA charter is located in the appendix of AAF Participation in Project Paperclip.
11. Lieutenant Colonel Monroe Hagood to Director of Intelligence, "Transfer of Escape and Evasion and P/W Interrogation Responsibility and Operations From Intelligence Group," 14 October 1946, G-2 Paperclip "Top Secret" files, RG 319, WNRC. For a history of the G-2 POW Branch see U. S. Army Intelligence Center and School, The Evolution of American Military Intelligence (Fort Huachuca, Ariz.: USAICS, May 1973); and Lloyd Shoemaker, The Escape Factory (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990).
12. Assistant Secretary of War Robert A. Lovett to Major General Hugh J. Knerr, 4 October 1945, in the appendix of AAF Participation in Project Paperclip.
13. For project code names, lists of Gehlen's group, CPM/Navy and Hilger groups in the United States, travel schedules, U.S. agents who escorted them out of the country, a detailed description of facilities at Fort Hunt and Camp Ritchie, Cone memos, Hagood memos, including complaints of overworked staff, a discussion of MIS-X and MIS-Y activities, and other information on CPM Branch activities, see the G-2 Paperclip "Top Secret" files, RG 319, WNRC (declassified per author's FOIA request) and regular G-2 Paperclip files for the years 1945 and 1946, RG 319, WNRC. 276 Notes For published sources on general POW interrogations at Fort Hunt see John H. Moore, The Faustball Tunnel (New York: Random House, 1978). Gehlen's views are in Reinhard Gehlen, The Service (New York: World Publishing, 1972).
14. Hilger's later trip to Washington is discussed in Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European ,Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), pp. 703 and 707; and Christopher Simpson, Blowback (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988). On German intelligence in Russia see David Kahn, Hitler's Spies (New York: Macmillan, 1978).
15. For detailed reports, lists of names of both the rocket group and POWs, Backfire activities, statistics of three launches, and other information see the Backfire collection of documents in OMGUS/FIAT records, RG 260, WNRC. Launch statistics are also in a one-page summary of Backfire in the Hans Friedrich JIOA dossier, RG 330, NARS.
16. A memo concerning the attempt to interrogate Rudolph and mentioning Hans Lindenberg is in Arthur Rudolph INSCOM dossier AE529655.
17. Brigadier General George McDonald to Major General Hugh J. Knerr, 3 November 1945, in the appendix of AAF Participation in Project Paperclip; and Garlinski, Hitler's Last Weapons.
18. McDonald to Knerr, 3 November 1945. "Memorandum on Dornberger," 2 October 1945, in the Walter Dornberger IRR dossier, RG 319, NARS. British POW ID cards: in the Walter Dornberger G-2 dossier, RG 319, WNRC.
19. Regarding Steinhoff see Bill Gross, "Pioneer Range Scientist Dies," Missile Ranger, 4 December 1987.
20. Author interview with Herbert Axster.
21. Qualification sheet noting "100% NAZI" in the Arthur Rudolph INSCOM dossier.
22. Background on Armin Stelzner is in Basic Personnel Record, Stelzner IRR dossier X8856123, RG 319, NARS.
23. Regarding Luftwaffe General von Rohden see General Carl Spaatz to Under Secretary of War Kenneth C. Royall, 18 December 1945; General George McDonald to General Spaatz, 13 February 1946; Assistant Secretary of War Howard C. Petersen to Commanding General, AAF, 27 February 1946, all in the appendix of AAF Participation in Project Paperclip.
24. Axster interview.
25. For several reports and memos regarding confrontations between Putt and Zobel, including problems caused by Putt's original promises to the group, see the appendix of AAF Participation in Project Paperclip.
26. Author interview with Ernst Eckert.
27. Captain Ransom K. Davis to Op-23 JIS, 5 March 1946 (CCS 471.9, 1 May 1945, sect. 4), RG 218, NARS. Notes 277
28. Goudsmit, Alsos. Osenberg's files are in G-2 1918-51 files, RG 319, WNRC.
29. Goudsmit, Alsos.
30. USFET to joint Chiefs of Staff, 17 July 1946, G-2 Paperclip "Top Secret" files, RG 319, W.N.R.C.
31. On British spies see Loftus, Belarus Secret; and Alti Rodal, Nazi War Criminals in Canada (Ottawa: Canadian Government Inquiry on War Criminals, 1986).
32. JIOA to Joint Research and Development Board, 9 September 1947; and joint Research and Development Board to JIOA, n.d., both in JIOA administrative files, RG 330, NARS. On 22 January 1946 Bush wrote Pres ident Truman about his objections to Paperclip and said, "The replacement of qualified American scientists and technicians, who are prevented by the military personnel policies from utilizing their skills, by imported German scientists and technicians seems to me decidedly unwise." Bush was afraid that the Germans would take jobs away from qualified American scientists. Truman replied on 24 January 1946: "I was morally certain that our home boys would not want any competition." Both letters are in the Paul G. Hoffman papers, HST.
33. Memo, Major General Leslie Groves to Director of Intelligence, 2 November 1946, JIOA administrative files, RG 330, NARS.
34. 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; and JCS 1363/21, in SWNCC 257/17. Seethe SWNCC 257 series concerning the "Exploitation of German and Austrian Scientists." The Scholarly Resources' microfilm edition of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC) on Paperclip decisions is available at NARS.
35. Major George Collins, "Memorandum for Director JIOA," 9 August 1946, G-2 Paperclip "Top Secret" files, RG 319, WNRC.
36. See the SWNCC 257 series on microfilm at NARS.
37. German scientist project: see Rodal, Nazi War Criminals in Canada, pp. 327-42. Rodal also found evidence of U.S. and British intelligence establishing an "anti-Soviet spy network by smuggling known Nazi collab orators out of Eastern Europe without the Canadian government's knowledge" (p. 448). On the Australian government's participation in a British Commonwealth nations "cover-up which allowed Nazi war criminals to escape justice" see The Australian, 10 August 1985.
38. Rear Admiral Bosquet Wev file, ONH.
39. Author interview with Ida Klaus.
40. Samuel Klaus, "Memorandum to the Files," 24 April 1946 and 6 May 1946; and Samuel Klaus, "Memorandum for the Record, JIOA meeting June 11, 1946"-all in State Department microfiche (hereafter cited as State fiche), RG 59, NARS. 278 Notes
41. Memo, Samuel Klaus to Mr. Panuch, 20 June 1946, State fiche, RG 59, NARS.
42. U.S. Army biography of Major General Stephen J. Chamberlin, CMH.
43. For a discussion of the secretary of war's disapproval of retaining 558 POWs in United States see "Notes for Army-Navy Conference on Exploitation of Prisoners of War for Scientific and Intelligence Purposes," 5 April 1946, in G-2 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC.
44. Proposal to include those with "too-close" Nazi connections, SS, and General Staff specialists is included in "Exploitation of Prisoners of War," memo, in ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Samuel Klaus, "Memorandum for the Files," 21 May 1946, memo regarding a JIOA meeting the same day, State fiche, RG 59, NARS.
47. On Chamberlin's request to Eisenhower for permission to include thirty intelligence specialists "within the 1000 German and Austrian specialists" see Major General Stephen J. Chamberlin to Chief of Staff, 30 July 1946, ID 383.7, in G-2 Paperclip "Top Secret" files, RG 319, WNRC.
48. Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson, "Memorandum for the President," memo to Harry S. Truman, 30 August 1946; and SWNCC 257/ 22, in the SWNCC 257 series.
49. On the "Use of Paperclip as a Cover for Volunteer Foreign Specialists on Russian intelligence by This Division and CNI" and the five men at Fort Hunt, see Lieutenant Colonel H. B. St. Clair, Exploitation Branch, to Chief, Intelligence Group, 25 September 1946. On Hagood asking Chamberlin to take action to get three remaining men out of the United States, see Lieutenant Colonel Monrce Hagood to Director of Intelligence, 14 October 1946. Both documents are in G-2 Paperclip "Top Secret" files, RG 319, WNRC.
50. Acheson memo; and SWNCC 257/22.
On the other side of the capital in Camp Ritchie, Maryland, a group of German High Command officers were interrogated and helped translate important captured German documents. One of these men was a notorious Nazi-Major General Gustav Hilger-who was on a U.S. Army war crimes wanted list while living at the camp. Hilger had been Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim Ribbentrop's informant on the operation of Einsatzgruppen, the S.S killing units that massacred hundreds of thousands of Jews. While Ribbentrop was hanged as a war criminal after the war, Hilger returned to Washington in 1948 under State Department auspices, living openly, with his name listed in the telephone directory. Others in the Washington area with Hilger in 1945 were: Kurt Zinneman, who headed the Russian section of the German War Economy Branch; General August Koestring, military attache in Moscow; and Nazi historian Peter-Heinz Seraphim, whose research on Jews was used avidly by Hitler's propaganda chief. 14
Hagood's overworked interrogators in C.P.M Branch were not the only source of delays. A British project called "Backfire" lasted through the summer. It was supposed to be a major effort to study the Germans' V-2 rocket launching techniques, but it soon turned into a fiasco tying up several of the main rocket experts. Hundreds of Allied officers and nearly a thousand Germans, including von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, gathered at an isolated area off the Dutch coast known as Cuxhaven. Entire units of officers spent months scouring an area from Paris to Berlin, digging up fields and rummaging through factories to find enough V-2 parts to reassemble rockets that were barely operational. The British released hundreds of German Wehrmacht officers and "tradesmen" from POW camps to work as construction crews at the launch site. The project's director even admitted that "it was necessary to give them better treatment than the normal P.W." to make them cooperate. By September only three rockets had been launched, and the JCS angrily told the British that they wanted von Braun and other rocket experts sent to America at once.15
In addition to the delays, Operation Backfire succeeded in blocking an investigation of Rudolph's wartime activities at Mittelwerk. Canadian Field Service (FS Sec) officers uncovered information that Rudolph was Mittelwerk's production director and that foreign slave labor there "has been very badly mishandled according to Dir. Rudolph's own words." They also suspected that another Mittelwerk engineer, Hans Lindenberg, "may be wanted" in connection with Rudolph's activities. But the officers were not allowed to interrogate them, due to what they called the "delicate situation" at Cuxhaven.16
The question then arose of what to do with General Walter Dornberger, who had headed the V-2 . operation at Peenemunde. He was separated from other Germans after trying to turn American and British officers against each other for his own benefit. During interrogation, he blithely mentioned that Russian, French, and Polish POWs had been used as forced laborers at Peenemunde. In fact, ten thousand foreign laborers had been imprisoned at a concentration camp in Karlshagen, located near the Peenemunde rocket base. The camp included political prisoners who had been taken from their countries by force to work as slave labor on V-2 rockets. Dornberger said that many of these prisoners had been killed when the Allies bombed the rocket base in 1943. Unfortunately, neither British nor American intelligence officers questioned Dornberger closely about the use of POWs and political prisoners as forced labor-and their possible mistreatment-in violation of international law.17
AAF General Knerr, of course, immediately pounced on the idea of bringing Dornberger to Wright Field, and once again his overenthusiasm for the Germans rankled other American officers. One general told Knerr not only that would he block AAF efforts to employ Dornberger, but that "in fact, we may trade him to the Russians for a dish of caviar." Dornberger's other critics were lined up at FIAT, the agency formed July 1 to oversee Overcast in the European theater. Everyone at FIAT loathed Dornberger and felt he should be interned as a menace. The British settled the matter by taking Dornberger to London, where they planned to hold war crimes trials of German militarists. Although Dornberger was interned in British POW camps for two years, he immediately went to work at Wright Field upon his release in 1947.18
On August 6 the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan followed by a second bomb three days later, quickly bringing the war to an end. Overcast specialists began to arrive in the United States from Germany a month later. They entered the country without visas, outside normal immigration procedures, but all had employment contracts in their pockets. Although they were supposed to be under tight military custody, Peenemunde's former guidance department chief, Ernst Steinhoff, wasn't even met at the boat. He ended up hitchhiking to his job at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.19
Interrogation centers were set up at Fort Strong, Massachusetts, located on an island in Boston Harbor, where the Germans were supposed to fill out forms and be interviewed. Most escaped close scrutiny. Herbert Axster, Dornberger's chief of staff at Peenemunde, recalled that the rocket group knew they were protected from the beginning. "We knew already that they wouldn't do anything to us, because they wanted something from us," Axster said.20
Most officers conducting the interrogations did not even inquire whether the new arrivals were ardent Nazis or wanted for war crimes. One officer, obviously suspicious of Rudolph, did comment on his form, "100% NAZI, dangerous type, security threat... ! ! Suggest internment." His remarks were put in Rudolph's file, discussed occasionally during security clearance investigations through the years, and generally ignored.21
It wasn't long before nearly 150 Overcast specialists were working at various military bases across the country under this lax policy. Rudolph, von Braun, and more than a hundred other former Peenemunde and Mittelwerk employees worked for Colonel Toftoy at Fort Bliss, Texas. Other rocket technicians joined Steinhoff at Aberdeen Proving Ground. Colonel Putt brought thirty additional jet aircraft and rocket fuel specialists to Wright Field. Torpedo and submarine specialists joined Herbert Wagner and the Navy's group at an isolated mansion in Long Island, New York. Twenty other recruits helped reassemble the huge Kochel wind tunnel in White Oak, Maryland.
A false myth persists to this day that only scientists and technicians were brought to the United States under this project, while many men in neither category were included from the beginning, in violation of the policy. For example, Armin Stelzner, who had served as a major in the Wehrmacht in Poland, France, and Africa during the war, worked under Overcast as a translator of documents dealing with high frequency communication at Aberdeen Proving Ground.22
Colonel Putt favored high-ranking militarists, and by mid December 1946, five Luftwaffe officers were employed at Wright Field to write a survey of the Luftwaffe's battles with the Soviets. The head of this group was General Herhudt von Rohden, commander of the Luftwaffe on the Russian front, who had worked for a U.S. military historian in Europe immediately following Nazi Germany's surrender.23
Herbert Axster was a patent attorney and a lieutenant colonel in the Wehrmacht in command of a unit fighting the Russians. In 1943 he met a director of Peenemunde while on furlough at his ranch near the rocket base. "All of a sudden I got a telegram from Dornberger telling me I'd been reassigned to be his chief of staff," Axster recalled. In 1945, von Braun and Colonel Toftoy told Axster he was going to America. "I said, `Why? I'm not a technician.' And Toftoy said, `The U.S. Army needs to know how Peenemunde was organized so we can organize our rocket program.' Of course, being chief of staff, I knew. And that's why I went to America. "24
Project Overcast was badly organized and lacked funds to accomplish even the minimum standards set for the project. Even the Germans complained about the situation. For example, Theodor Zobel and five other jet aircraft specialists arrived at Wright Field only to learn there was so little money allocated to the project that equipment damaged on the trip from Germany was not even replaced. Zobel angrily told Putt that he thought the entire project, "beginning with the extended enforced waiting period in Germany prior to arrival here, has been badly planned and carried out." The scientist was forced to rig lab apparatus in the corner of a warehouse, devising mounting platforms from empty cartons and crates." The situation did not improve when additional scientists arrived. Jet fuel expert Ernst Eckert said he sat idle for months because of inadequate library facilities and the AAF officers' failure to provide him with even pencils and paper.26
Meanwhile, one of J.I.O.A Director Gruhn's first actions as overall administrator of the project was to compile a hiring list of the best-qualified German and Austrian scientists that was used by both the United States and Great Britain as a recruitment tool for decades. Although this list has been mentioned in the past by journalists and historians, no one ever noted that it was partially compiled by Werner Osenberg, the notorious wartime commander of the Gestapo's scientific section. The decision to use Osenberg was made by U.S. Navy Captain Ransom Davis after consultation with the JCS.27
During the war, Osenberg was in charge of a special SS research council directly subordinate to Reichsmarshal Hermann Goring. Osenberg sent his Gestapo agents to investigate work in progress at scientific institutes and report back on each scientist's political reliability. From those reports and the Gestapo's files, Osenberg compiled a list of fifteen thousand names of scientists in the Third Reich. He wrote comments next to the scientists' names regarding their political affiliations, such as SS membership, and his opinion of their scientific abilities. Of course, those scientists who held fanatic Nazi views and SS membership were also those whom Osenberg considered to be the best qualified.28
Osenberg had been captured in 1945 by the Alsos team and Rules of the Game 33 interned in a camp in Germany. Soon after the J.I.O.A expressed interest in him, intelligence officers whisked him out of Germany to Versailles, France, where he set up business as usual, sifting through his files to suggest names of those he considered the best scientists in the Third Reich. 29
Not surprisingly, when J.I.O.A's hiring list began to circulate it caused an immediate uproar among American officers. One officer in Germany complained directly to the JCS that the list contained a "large number of former Nazis and mandatory unemployables." He was furious when he recognized the names of ardent Nazis he had just forced out of jobs in Germany, as JCS policy required.30
While Osenberg influenced the hiring of ardent Nazis, there is disturbing evidence suggesting that the project was penetrated by the Soviets from the beginning. Assistance in ear- marking which German scientists to recruit also was offered by Donald Maclean, the first secretary of the British Embassy in Washington and liaison for atomic secrets. Maclean was a Soviet mole. Among the top secret documents in J.I.O.A files is a letter advising that certain scientists were too unimportant to recruit. An attached list then contained derogatory comments about the qualifications of some of Germany's eminent nuclear physicists, including Otto Hahn and Carl von Weizsacker. The most striking comment is about Hahn, winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, who was judged on the list as having "negligible value."31
Members of the Joint Research and Development Board, headed by Dr. Vannevar Bush, were shocked when they saw the derogatory comments. J.I.O.A Director Gruhn had sent the comments to Bush and asked for an opinion of the scientists' eminence. As a result, Bush issued a scathing retort criticizing the military for not knowing even "elementary information on Germans whose names are as well known in scientific circles as Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin are in political circles." He emphasized that Hahn and von Weizsacker were "intellectual giants of Nobel Prize stature" and that their expertise would be of great value to America.32
Nevertheless, none of the physicists was placed on the list until the 1950's, although most worked as consultants under the project in Germany, and physicist Rudolph Fleishman was flown to the United States for interrogation prior to the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan. Major General Leslie Groves, as head of the Manhattan Project, had already told the director of intelligence that he was vehemently opposed to any of the German physicists working for the Manhattan Project, for security reasons. "If they are allowed to see or discuss the work of the [Manhattan] Project the security of our information could get out of control," Groves said. Of course, Groves had good reason to worry, since German-born Klaus Fuchs, another Soviet spy, had worked for the Manhattan Project during the war. Contrary to some published reports, Fuchs was not brought in under Paperclip. He fled Germany in 1934, worked in Great Britain, and then joined the bomb project in 1943, two years before Paperclip even existed.33
Another controversy ensued when French agents nearly exposed the well-kept U.S. secret that American officers were kidnapping scientists in the Soviet zone. The French asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff for permission to see J.I.O.A's list, supposedly to check the scientists' movements in the divided zones of occupied Germany. The list identified scientists from the well-known Carl Zeiss optical works in Jena who were forcibly taken out of the Soviet zone by U.S. officers in 1945. The French request came at an embarrassing time, since U.S. and British government officials were publicly criticizing the Soviets for kidnapping scientists, in violation of international law. Now the JCS was afraid that if the public learned of the Jena incident, it would expose America's activities as equally illegal.34
The Jena group had been locked up in a detention camp for a year. In 1946 the group filed a damage claim seeking return of personal property and scientific equipment that had been confiscated and sent to Wright Field. Carl Zeiss himself complained bitterly to U.S. officers that two men in his group already had committed suicide and another had returned vountarily to the Soviet zone as a result of their enforced idleness. J.I.O.A officers inquired about employing the entire Zeiss staff under Overcast, but the plan was dropped. Colonel J. A. Johnson, who headed the board of officers processing the Zeiss group's claims, said the group wasn't worth the trouble. According to Johnson, most were automobile mechanics who "hopped on the band wagon and were attempting to make a good thing of the situation." A handful were brought in later to work for the Air Force.35
By spring 1946, policymakers in Washington still were trying to decide what to do about the project, whose codename had been changed to Paperclip. High-ranking policymakers in the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC) worked on a policy to be submitted to President Truman.36 And the Joint Chiefs of Staff were getting opinions on the subject from everyone, including the British, whose own project was coordinated in Washington through the Combined Chiefs of Staff. In fact, the two countries' projects were tightly linked; they coordinated policies, shared hiring lists, and U.S. and British intelligence agencies screened the Nazi backgrounds of the scientists. At the time, the British were exploiting several groups of Germans in their own country. In March 1946 British intelligence also began dumping German scientists on British Commonwealth countries, including Canada and Australia. In Operation Matchbox, twenty Germans secretly were sent to Canada to work. They included four wartime I. G. Farben chemists and a man described later by Canadian investigators as the "number one Nazi in the dental trade during the war." Some of those men would be brought to America in the late 1950s under Paperclip. 37
Of course, the J.I.O.A Governing Committee already had begun to set their own agenda. Officers attending their weekly meetings in the summer of 1946 included U.S. Navy Captain Francis Duborg, G-2 Exploitation Branch chief Hagood, and on various occasions other officers, including Putt and Toftoy.
The group was led by forty-two-year-old Navy Captain Bosquet Wev, who had been named chairman of J.I.O.A's committee in early 1946. Wev was a career naval officer who had conducted antisubmarine operations against German subs along the entire coastline of America and the Caribbean during the war. He also had been a member of the occupying forces of Japan until November 1945, when he returned to America.38
Samuel Klaus was the State Department representative on the J.I.O.A Governing Committee, but the forty-two-year-old lawyer was no bureaucrat. He was amused once in Europe when children followed him because they thought that he with his bowler hat, cane, and mustache-was Charlie Chaplin. He once told his sister that he was like Javert, the detective in Les Miserables, in pursuit of justice, and his State Department career reflected that pursuit. During the war Klaus worked on the department's Safehaven project, tracing the intricate network of fronts and money-funneling operations used by German banks and corporations to smuggle their assets out of Nazi Germany before its collapse. He helped set up the State Department-run Berlin Document Center, which today still houses voluminous captured Nazi organization files. Klaus also conducted numerous investigations of human rights violations in Communist-bloc countries, riding through Armenia on horseback.39
Wev and Klaus clashed during the very first meeting and their relationship went downhill from there. Wev was, to put it bluntly, a loose cannon. He often tried to maneuver himself into a position where he could make decisions he did not have the authority to make, without the knowledge of either the State Department or the J.I.O.A Governing Committee. In one meeting, he and Hagood accused Klaus of being uncooperative because he did not obtain Wev's permission to attend a meeting in the War Department. Klaus sarcastically informed them that the assistant secretary of state, who had arranged the meeting, was no doubt empowered to meet with the assistant secretary of war without clearing it first with a lowly Navy captain.40
Klaus and other State officials deliberately were kept out of the loop from the beginning. He complained that the J.I.O.A and G-2 Exploitation Branch made decisions behind his back and refused to give him and Assistant Secretary of State General John Hilldring a list of the Germans employed under the project. "The situation therefore is one in which the State Department bears a public as well as governmental responsibility for a program over which it has in actual fact no control and not even any information," Klaus remarked. He also was shocked when he learned that the Navy had no money to employ scientists but wanted to bring them to America to work for private industry. Klaus thought it was unfair to expect the American taxpayer to foot the bill so that large corporations could hire new employees.41
In June Army Director of Intelligence Vandenberg's replacement came on board the project. Major General Stephen J. Chamberlin would be a significant figure in the early stages of Paperclip. This cold warrior knew how to play the game. His decisions, philosophy, and goals would set the project on its fateful course. The fifty-seven-year-old career officer had been General Douglas MacArthur's intelligence chief of planning and operations for the Pacific campaign. As director of intelligence Chamberlin served directly under Army Chief of Staff General Dwight Eisenhower until reassigned to another post in October 1948.42
While the S.W.N.C.C debated a new policy that still would include only scientists or technicians, the intelligence community had other ideas. Hagood's C.P.M Branch, A.A.F officers Putt and Knerr and Army Colonel Toftoy were among eleven officers holding meetings on their own-without Klaus-to work on changes they wanted made in the new project. Their agenda included expanding the category of people to include prisoners of war, militarists, SS officers, and anyone else who they thought would be of use to the military. One proposal would have included 558 German P.O.W's held in the United States since the beginning of World War II. Some of these Germans already worked at Wright Field as cooks, waiters, and busboys; others cared for the animals used in mustard gas experiments at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland. But the secretary of war opposed the idea and ordered the prisoners returned to Germany.43
One month after that proposal fell through, Hagood, Putt, and others in the Washington group, in conjunction with U. S. Army intelligence officers in Germany, secretly approved a scheme to include SS officers and former high ranking officials of the Third Reich who already were employed by Army intelligence in Germany. They would have to be smuggled into America, since their backgrounds clearly violated U.S. immigration laws. Although the identities of these dubious recruits are not known, the fact that Lieutenant Colonel Dale Garvey was among those involved in this plot in Germany gives some idea of the scurrilous group of individuals being discussed. Garvey was commander of Region IV of the 970th Army C.I.C in Germany and one of the officers who later approved the Army C.I.C's recruitment of Klaus Barbie.44
After the meeting, Hagood prepared a report for his superiors Chamberlin and Eisenhower-but the group carefully expunged information they said was so "controversial" it would delay action if the generals knew the full story. Hagood then told Garvey and other intelligence agents in Germany to expedite procedures and begin shipping the Nazis as soon as the revised Paperclip policy was approved .45
It was not surprising that no one mentioned this plot to Klaus during the official J.I.O.A meeting held later the same day. Yet Klaus certainly suspected that something was going on behind his back, judging from his comments in a memo. "I gathered in the course of the meeting that there had been meetings of the group to which I had not been invited," Klaus noted suspiciously.46
The intelligence officers quickly forged ahead with the schemes they had hatched in Klaus's absence. On July 30 Chamberlin asked Chief of Staff Eisenhower to approve a plan to smuggle in thirty ex-Nazi experts on the USSR among a thousand "scientists" in the new project. Chamberlin told Eisenhower that the Military Intelligence Division's experience in bringing similiar groups to America -Gehlen, Hilger, and others-"has proved that valuable intelligence on Russia and Russian dominated countries can be developed more rapidly by this method than any other. "47
Exactly one month later, Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson sent a copy of Paperclip policy to the White House. The policy Truman was asked to approve expanded the project to include up to one thousand German and Austrian scientists or technicians whose scientific qualifications made their exploitation vital to the "interest of national security." The policy (S.W.N.C.C 257/22) also spelled out procedures the War Department was required to follow. The specialists would be under military custody, since they would enter the United States without visas. The War Department would screen their backgrounds and assure that "the best possible information" about their qualifications was submitted to the State and Justice Departments for visa consideration. Employment contracts would provide for their return to Germany if they were found not to be qualified or acceptable for permanent residence.
While war criminals were obviously excluded, one clause in the policy banned those active in nazism or militarism as well:
No person found by the Commanding General, U.S.F.E.T, to have been a member of the Nazi party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazism or militarism shall be brought to the U.S. here under. Acheson told the president that since the State, War, and Navy Departments had approved the policy, "I recommend your approval. "48
At the same time, across the Potomac, Fort Hunt bustled with activity as Hagood's CPM Branch and other intelligence officers gathered in buildings isolated from the main area. Here, five aliens sifted through microfilm of captured records and were quizzed by interrogators. U.S. intelligence had used the German scientist project as a cover to bring the men to America. By no stretch of the imagination could they be called scientists. The new arrivals were Gehlen's spies, three Russian and two German intelligence experts on the Soviet Union.49
In the White House, Truman looked over Acheson's memo about Paperclip. The acting secretary had assured the president that the Germans were merely scientists whose skills would benefit America's technology and that the War Department would exclude "persons with Nazi or militaristic records." On September 3 Truman gave Paperclip his official approval.50
CHAPTER 2: RULES OF THE GAME
1. U.S. Air Force Historical Office, "The Command and Project `Paperclip,' " History of the Air Research and Development Command, vol. 1, chap. 9, 1954 (hereafter cited as Air Research and Development Command) (obtained from BOL under the FOIA).
2. Putt interview.
3. H. M. Mott-Smith to Navy Department, Bureau of Ordnance, 19 February 1945, G-2 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC.
4. Secretary of War Robert Patterson to Secretary, General Staff, 28 May 1945, G-2 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC.
5. Allied Control Authority, Control Council law no. 25, 29 April 1946. A copy of the law is in the G-2 Paperclip "Top Secret" files, RG 319, WNRC. Law no. 25 states that "senior officials or scientists who were members of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) or members of other Nazi organizations with more than nominal participation in its activities shall be removed and their replacement effected only by persons with suitable political records." Prohibited research included nuclear physics, poison gas, and rocket propulsion.
6. Telford Taylor, Final Report to the Secretary of the Army (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 15 August 1949).
7. AAF Headquarters, "Exploitation of German Specialists in Science and Technology in the U. S." in the appendix of AAF Participation in Project Paperclip.
8. War Department, Bureau of Public Relations, "German Scientists Brought to U.S.," 9 October 1945, G-2 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC.
9. JIC Charter/JCS 1569/1, CCS 334 JIC, 19 December 1942, sec. 6, RG 218, NARS.
10. "Basic Directive, JIOA," CCS 471.9, 1 May 1945, sec. 4, RG 218, NARS. A copy of the JIOA charter is located in the appendix of AAF Participation in Project Paperclip.
11. Lieutenant Colonel Monroe Hagood to Director of Intelligence, "Transfer of Escape and Evasion and P/W Interrogation Responsibility and Operations From Intelligence Group," 14 October 1946, G-2 Paperclip "Top Secret" files, RG 319, WNRC. For a history of the G-2 POW Branch see U. S. Army Intelligence Center and School, The Evolution of American Military Intelligence (Fort Huachuca, Ariz.: USAICS, May 1973); and Lloyd Shoemaker, The Escape Factory (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990).
12. Assistant Secretary of War Robert A. Lovett to Major General Hugh J. Knerr, 4 October 1945, in the appendix of AAF Participation in Project Paperclip.
13. For project code names, lists of Gehlen's group, CPM/Navy and Hilger groups in the United States, travel schedules, U.S. agents who escorted them out of the country, a detailed description of facilities at Fort Hunt and Camp Ritchie, Cone memos, Hagood memos, including complaints of overworked staff, a discussion of MIS-X and MIS-Y activities, and other information on CPM Branch activities, see the G-2 Paperclip "Top Secret" files, RG 319, WNRC (declassified per author's FOIA request) and regular G-2 Paperclip files for the years 1945 and 1946, RG 319, WNRC. 276 Notes For published sources on general POW interrogations at Fort Hunt see John H. Moore, The Faustball Tunnel (New York: Random House, 1978). Gehlen's views are in Reinhard Gehlen, The Service (New York: World Publishing, 1972).
14. Hilger's later trip to Washington is discussed in Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European ,Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), pp. 703 and 707; and Christopher Simpson, Blowback (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988). On German intelligence in Russia see David Kahn, Hitler's Spies (New York: Macmillan, 1978).
15. For detailed reports, lists of names of both the rocket group and POWs, Backfire activities, statistics of three launches, and other information see the Backfire collection of documents in OMGUS/FIAT records, RG 260, WNRC. Launch statistics are also in a one-page summary of Backfire in the Hans Friedrich JIOA dossier, RG 330, NARS.
16. A memo concerning the attempt to interrogate Rudolph and mentioning Hans Lindenberg is in Arthur Rudolph INSCOM dossier AE529655.
17. Brigadier General George McDonald to Major General Hugh J. Knerr, 3 November 1945, in the appendix of AAF Participation in Project Paperclip; and Garlinski, Hitler's Last Weapons.
18. McDonald to Knerr, 3 November 1945. "Memorandum on Dornberger," 2 October 1945, in the Walter Dornberger IRR dossier, RG 319, NARS. British POW ID cards: in the Walter Dornberger G-2 dossier, RG 319, WNRC.
19. Regarding Steinhoff see Bill Gross, "Pioneer Range Scientist Dies," Missile Ranger, 4 December 1987.
20. Author interview with Herbert Axster.
21. Qualification sheet noting "100% NAZI" in the Arthur Rudolph INSCOM dossier.
22. Background on Armin Stelzner is in Basic Personnel Record, Stelzner IRR dossier X8856123, RG 319, NARS.
23. Regarding Luftwaffe General von Rohden see General Carl Spaatz to Under Secretary of War Kenneth C. Royall, 18 December 1945; General George McDonald to General Spaatz, 13 February 1946; Assistant Secretary of War Howard C. Petersen to Commanding General, AAF, 27 February 1946, all in the appendix of AAF Participation in Project Paperclip.
24. Axster interview.
25. For several reports and memos regarding confrontations between Putt and Zobel, including problems caused by Putt's original promises to the group, see the appendix of AAF Participation in Project Paperclip.
26. Author interview with Ernst Eckert.
27. Captain Ransom K. Davis to Op-23 JIS, 5 March 1946 (CCS 471.9, 1 May 1945, sect. 4), RG 218, NARS. Notes 277
28. Goudsmit, Alsos. Osenberg's files are in G-2 1918-51 files, RG 319, WNRC.
29. Goudsmit, Alsos.
30. USFET to joint Chiefs of Staff, 17 July 1946, G-2 Paperclip "Top Secret" files, RG 319, W.N.R.C.
31. On British spies see Loftus, Belarus Secret; and Alti Rodal, Nazi War Criminals in Canada (Ottawa: Canadian Government Inquiry on War Criminals, 1986).
32. JIOA to Joint Research and Development Board, 9 September 1947; and joint Research and Development Board to JIOA, n.d., both in JIOA administrative files, RG 330, NARS. On 22 January 1946 Bush wrote Pres ident Truman about his objections to Paperclip and said, "The replacement of qualified American scientists and technicians, who are prevented by the military personnel policies from utilizing their skills, by imported German scientists and technicians seems to me decidedly unwise." Bush was afraid that the Germans would take jobs away from qualified American scientists. Truman replied on 24 January 1946: "I was morally certain that our home boys would not want any competition." Both letters are in the Paul G. Hoffman papers, HST.
33. Memo, Major General Leslie Groves to Director of Intelligence, 2 November 1946, JIOA administrative files, RG 330, NARS.
34. 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; and JCS 1363/21, in SWNCC 257/17. Seethe SWNCC 257 series concerning the "Exploitation of German and Austrian Scientists." The Scholarly Resources' microfilm edition of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC) on Paperclip decisions is available at NARS.
35. Major George Collins, "Memorandum for Director JIOA," 9 August 1946, G-2 Paperclip "Top Secret" files, RG 319, WNRC.
36. See the SWNCC 257 series on microfilm at NARS.
37. German scientist project: see Rodal, Nazi War Criminals in Canada, pp. 327-42. Rodal also found evidence of U.S. and British intelligence establishing an "anti-Soviet spy network by smuggling known Nazi collab orators out of Eastern Europe without the Canadian government's knowledge" (p. 448). On the Australian government's participation in a British Commonwealth nations "cover-up which allowed Nazi war criminals to escape justice" see The Australian, 10 August 1985.
38. Rear Admiral Bosquet Wev file, ONH.
39. Author interview with Ida Klaus.
40. Samuel Klaus, "Memorandum to the Files," 24 April 1946 and 6 May 1946; and Samuel Klaus, "Memorandum for the Record, JIOA meeting June 11, 1946"-all in State Department microfiche (hereafter cited as State fiche), RG 59, NARS. 278 Notes
41. Memo, Samuel Klaus to Mr. Panuch, 20 June 1946, State fiche, RG 59, NARS.
42. U.S. Army biography of Major General Stephen J. Chamberlin, CMH.
43. For a discussion of the secretary of war's disapproval of retaining 558 POWs in United States see "Notes for Army-Navy Conference on Exploitation of Prisoners of War for Scientific and Intelligence Purposes," 5 April 1946, in G-2 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC.
44. Proposal to include those with "too-close" Nazi connections, SS, and General Staff specialists is included in "Exploitation of Prisoners of War," memo, in ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Samuel Klaus, "Memorandum for the Files," 21 May 1946, memo regarding a JIOA meeting the same day, State fiche, RG 59, NARS.
47. On Chamberlin's request to Eisenhower for permission to include thirty intelligence specialists "within the 1000 German and Austrian specialists" see Major General Stephen J. Chamberlin to Chief of Staff, 30 July 1946, ID 383.7, in G-2 Paperclip "Top Secret" files, RG 319, WNRC.
48. Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson, "Memorandum for the President," memo to Harry S. Truman, 30 August 1946; and SWNCC 257/ 22, in the SWNCC 257 series.
49. On the "Use of Paperclip as a Cover for Volunteer Foreign Specialists on Russian intelligence by This Division and CNI" and the five men at Fort Hunt, see Lieutenant Colonel H. B. St. Clair, Exploitation Branch, to Chief, Intelligence Group, 25 September 1946. On Hagood asking Chamberlin to take action to get three remaining men out of the United States, see Lieutenant Colonel Monrce Hagood to Director of Intelligence, 14 October 1946. Both documents are in G-2 Paperclip "Top Secret" files, RG 319, WNRC.
50. Acheson memo; and SWNCC 257/22.
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