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November 3 - November 19, 2018
John Risen Jones Jr.
Hermann Göring Aeronautical Research Center at Völkenrode.
Many of the Reich’s elite medical doctors passed through the laboratory here. The work that was performed in Experimental Cell Block Five was science without conscience: bad science for bad ends. That at least six Nazi medical doctors involved in this research at Dachau would be among the first scientists given contracts by the U.S. Army would become one of the darkest secrets of Operation Paperclip.
Heinrich Himmler. Still, Captain Selvester followed
Major Robert B. Staver,
Dr. Howard Percy “H. P.” Robertson.
Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson
German physiologist named Dr. Hubertus Strughold.
Only later did FIAT interrogators learn about this meeting. Major Tilley’s suspicions
were now confirmed. A group inside the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service, including his former partner, Lieutenant Colonel Tarr, did indeed have an ulterior motive that ran counter to the motives of CIOS, FIAT, and the United Nations War Crimes Commission. Tilley’s superior at Dustbin, Major Wilson, confirmed this dark and disturbing truth in a classified military intelligence report on the Ambros affair. “It is believed that the conflict between FIAT… and Lt-Col Tarr was due to the latter’s wish to use Ambros for industrial chemical purposes” back in the United States.
All documents regarding the Ambros affair would remain classified for the next forty years,...
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That this officer was also participating in meetings with the fugitive and a representative from the Dow Chemical Company was scandalous.
In 1945, the Chemical Warfare Service was also in charge of the U.S. biological weapons program, the existence of which remained secret from the American public. The program was robust; if the atomic bomb failed to end the war in Japan, there were plans in motion to wage biological warfare against Japanese crops.
Fort Strong, on an island in the middle of Boston Harbor,
scientists was specifically and strategically aimed at achieving military supremacy over the Soviet Union before the Soviet Union was able to dominate the United States.
Kept secret from the public was an astonishing hypocrisy. Less than 150 miles from the Nuremberg courtroom, several of the physicians who had participated in, and many others who were accessory to, these criminal medical experiments were now being employed by the U.S. Army at the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center, the classified research facility in Heidelberg.
would remain one of the best-kept secrets of Operation Paperclip for decades to come. Here, starting on September 20, 1945,
Konrad Schäfer, one of Strughold’s protégés in Berlin, aimed to solve that conundrum. Schäfer worked “in co-operation with IG Farben to create Wolfen, a mixture from barium and silver zeolith,” he later explained, which he synthesized into “a tablet named Wolfatit [which] was developed to separate the salt in a residue.”
“Thirst and Thirst Quenching in Emergency Situations at Sea,” described saltwater medical experiments conducted on prisoners inside Experimental Cell Block Five.
A copy of the list was given to the commander of the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center, Robert J. Benford. Five doctors working at the center starting in the fall of 1945 were on the list: Theodor Benzinger, Siegfried Ruff, Konrad Schäfer, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, and Oskar Schröder. Instead of firing these physicians suspected of heinous war crimes, the center kept the doctors in
The list remained secret from the public until 2012, when the Department of Defense (DoD) agreed to declassify it for this book.
By the end of January 1946, 160 Nazi scientists had been secreted into America. The single largest group was comprised of
2 launchings would take place about eighty miles away, on the White Sands Proving Ground, and getting there meant a long and beautiful ride. An army bus took scientists around the Franklin Mountains, through El Paso, and along the Rio Grande to Las Cruces.
When the first V-2 was launched, in April 1946, it climbed to three miles. Although one of the fins fell off, von Braun felt inspired to draft a memo to Robert Oppenheimer, director of Los Alamos, proposing the idea of merging his missile with the atomic bomb. The memo turned into a proposal, “Use of Atomic Warheads in Projected Missiles,”
Colonel Putt sent Patin’s summary of complaints to Air Force Headquarters in Washington, to the attention of Brigadier General John A. Samford. In his own cover letter, Putt requested that immediate action be taken to “improve the morale [of the Germans] and save the existing situation.”
In reality the Soviets had gotten to where they were in atomic bomb development not because of any German rare minds but by stealing information from American scientists at Los Alamos. Not until 1949 would the CIA learn that the Russian mole was a British scientist named Klaus Fuchs, who worked on the Manhattan Project.
Robert Patterson, now secretary of war, shifted from being weary of the Nazi scientist program to becoming its champion.
Only a year earlier, Patterson had called the German scientists “enemies… capable of sabotaging our war effort,” and had warned the Joint Chiefs of Staff that “[b]ringing them to this country raises delicate questions.”
The logic was simple. If we don’t get them, the Russians will.
General Joseph T. McNarney, was told to draft a list of one thousand top scientists in Germany who were to be brought to the United States at once so the Russians couldn’t get them.
The meeting resulted in a clever workaround. Army Intelligence officers reviewing the OMGUS security reports
could discreetly attach a paperclip to the files of the more troublesome cases. Those files would not be presented to the State Department
So from now on, the Nazi scientist program would be called Operation Paperclip.
After analyzing the Soviet’s “neurotic view of world affairs,” Kennan warned his bosses at the State Department that “in the long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence” with the Soviet Union. The two nations were destined to become steadfast enemies, Kennan said.
The idea of “peaceful coexistence of communist and capitalist nations is impossible,” Clifford wrote.
Truman gave his official approval of the program and agreed that Operation Paperclip should be expanded to include one thousand German scientists and technicians and allow for their eventual immigration to the United States.
Operation Paperclip was transitioning from a temporary program to a long-term one. Former enemies of the state would now be eligible for coveted U.S. citizenship.
“Preparations envisaged on our part and our plans must be on this basis.” In other words, for the United States to prepare for “total war” with the Soviets, America had to maintain military supremacy in all areas of war fighting, including chemical warfare, biological warfare, atomic warfare, and any other kind of warfare the other side dreamed up. Copies of the classified report were sent out to thirty-seven or thirty-eight people,
Clearly, no discreet paperclip attached to Blome’s file would be able to whitewash the reality of his inner-circle role as deputy surgeon
Merck Report.
Top Secret program had been “cloaked in the deepest wartime secrecy, matched only by the Manhattan Project for developing the Atomic Bomb.”
Dr. Kurt Blome had information that was coveted by the bacteriologists at Camp Detrick, and plans were being drawn up to interview him.
What was known, from earlier press coverage, was that these proceedings would put lurid Nazi science on trial. In the words of chief prosecutor General Telford Taylor, Nazi doctors had become proficient in the “macabre science” of killing. Torturous medical experiments conducted on concentration camp prisoners included freezing experiments, high-altitude tests, mustard gas research, seawater drinkability tests, malaria research, mass sterilization, and euthanasia.
The New York Times called the doctors’ crimes “beyond the pale of even the most perverted medicine” and cautioned that some details were difficult to report because they were impossible to comprehend.
Perfectly healthy people, “Jews and Slavs,” had been murdered at the request of SS physician Dr. August Hirt for a university skeleton collection of the Untermenschen. This was the same anatomist named by Dr. Eugen Haagen in papers discovered by Alsos officers in Strasbourg in November 1944....
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On October 12, 1946, the Stars and Stripes newspaper, which operated from inside the Pentagon, listed the individual names of the doctors charged—a
Nuremberg Palace of Justice,
The family moved into a large, drafty farmhouse on Yellow Springs Road. Doris Knemeyer hated provincial life in Dayton, Ohio. In Berlin, the Knemeyers had a grand home in the Charlottenburg district,
Albert Einstein was the most esteemed figure to publicly denounce Operation Paperclip. In an impassioned letter, written on behalf of his FAS colleagues, Einstein appealed directly to President Truman. “We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous.… Their former eminence as Nazi Party members and supporters raises the issue of their fitness to become American citizens and hold key positions in American industrial, scientific and educational institutions.” Another important
Brigadier General Telford Taylor
