Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

by Annie Jacobsen

Under Operation Paperclip, which began in May of 1945, the scientists who helped the Third Reich wage war continued their weapons-related work for the U.S. government, developing rockets, chemical and biological weapons, aviation and space medicine (for enhancing military pilot and astronaut performance), and many other armaments at a feverish and paranoid pace that came to define the Cold War.

The men profiled in this book were not nominal Nazis. Eight of the twenty-one—Otto Ambros, Theodor Benzinger, Kurt Blome, Walter Dornberger, Siegfried Knemeyer, Walter Schreiber, Walter Schieber, and Wernher von Braun—each at some point worked side by side with Adolf Hitler,

Six of the twenty-one stood trial at Nuremberg, a seventh was released without trial under mysterious circumstances, and an eighth stood trial in Dachau for regional war crimes. One was convicted of mass murder and slavery, served some time in prison, was granted clemency, and then was hired by the U.S. Department of Energy. They came to America at the behest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Some officials believed that by endorsing the Paperclip program they were accepting the lesser of two evils—that if America didn’t recruit these scientists, the Soviet Communists surely would. Other generals and colonels respected and admired these men and said so.

To those who read Goethe, here was the place where the witches and the devil collided at Brocken Mountain. Even in America, in Disney’s popular film Fantasia, these mountains had meaning. They were where forces of evil gathered to do their handiwork. But at the end of the Second World War, the Reich’s secret, subterranean penal colony at Nordhausen was fact, not fiction.

Among the liberating soldiers was an infantry sharpshooter, a private first class named John Risen Jones Jr. In his bag he carried a camera, a gift given to him by his family before he shipped off to war. Expensive and sleek-looking, Jones’s Leica III was one of the first portable 35 mm cameras ever made.

Doing the Leo point when I read it was a Leica

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.

Each day brought atrocious new information. “It sometimes seems as if the Nazis had taken special pains in making practically every nightmare come true,”

“Almost all the men at Ashcan were eager to talk,” Dolibois recalls. “They felt neglected if they hadn’t been interrogated by someone for several days.… Their favorite pastime was casting blame.”

The lights went down and the first frames of the documentary footage flickered across the screen. Colonel Andrus watched his prisoners. Hans Frank, governor general of occupied Poland, the lawyer and PhD largely responsible for the murder of the Jewish population there, put a handkerchief to his mouth and gagged. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the former champagne salesman who became Hitler’s foreign minister and pressured foreign states to allow the deportation of Jews in their territories to extermination camps in the east, got up from his chair and walked out of the room. Albert Kesselring, commander of the Luftwaffe invasions into Poland, France, and the Soviet Union, who also led the Battle of Britain, turned white. Hermann Göring sighed as if bored. Julius Streicher, the schoolteacher who became Hitler’s mouthpiece and encouraged readers to exterminate the Jews, sat on his chair “clasping and unclasping his hands.” When the film was over, no one said a word. A little while later, Walter Funk, the fifty-five-year-old former minister of the war economy and president of the Reichsbank, asked to see Colonel Andrus alone.

Two personal changes in von Braun were afoot. The first was that he joined an Evangelical Christian church and became “born again,” something he rarely discussed in public. The second was that he decided to marry his first cousin, Maria von Quistorp, the daughter of his mother’s brother, Alexander von Quistorp. Von Braun was nearly twice her age—she had just turned eighteen in the summer of 1946—and she lived in Germany. From Texas, von Braun began making plans to bring his future bride to the United States.

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.

When asked by Time magazine to comment on the hangings, executioner John C. Woods had this to say: “I hanged those ten Nazis… and I am proud of it… I wasn’t nervous.… A fellow can’t afford to have nerves in this business.… The way I look at this hanging job, somebody has to do it.”

Some Nazis were hanged. Others now had lucrative new jobs.

Rabbi Steven S. Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress, penned a scathing letter to Secretary of War Patterson that was made public. “As long as we reward former servants of Hitler, while leaving his victims in D. P. [displaced-persons] camps, we cannot even pretend that we are making any real effort to achieve the aims we fought for.”

When professors at Syracuse University learned that a new colleague, Dr. Heinz Fischer, an expert in infrared technology and a former member of the Nazi Party, had been sent by the army to work in one of their university laboratories under a secret military contract, they wrote an editorial for the New York Times. “We object not because they are citizens of an enemy nation, but because they were and probably still are Nazis.”

Eisenhower’s famous warning is well known and often paraphrased. But he also delivered a second warning in his farewell speech, not nearly as well known. Eisenhower told the American people that, indeed, science and research played a crucial role in national security, “[y]et, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

I wonder if they knew how hard this speech went the next day

“I pressed this line of questions further by asking him whether he had any particular people in mind when he warned us about ‘the danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.’” York was surprised when Eisenhower “answered without hesitation: ‘(Wernher) von Braun and (Edward) Teller [father of the hydrogen bomb].’”

After the death of Frank Olson, the SO Division continued its LSD mind control schemes. But Sidney Gottlieb, the man who had suggested poisoning Frank Olson at the CIA safe house in Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, was assigned to also work on the CIA’s assassination-by-poison program.

It always comes back to this mfer

Another CIA target was Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of Congo,

Crossover between my two books rn

Two days prior, Ambassador Devlin had received a Top Secret cable from CIA director Allen Dulles. “We wish give every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possiblity [sic] resuming govermental position,” Dulles wrote. Ambassador Devlin knew to be on the lookout for a visitor who would introduce himself as “Joe from Paris.” This was Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb’s plan was to inject the botulinum toxin into Lumumba’s toothpaste tube with a hypodermic syringe. Ideally, Lumumba would brush his teeth and eight hours later he’d be dead. But while in Léopoldville, Gottlieb could get nowhere near Prime Minister Lumumba, who was living in a house on a cliff high above the Congo River. Lumumba was constantly surrounded by bodyguards. After several days, the botulinum toxin lost its potency. Gottlieb mixed it with chlorine, tossed it into the Congo River, and left Africa. Patrice Lumumba died in January of the following year, beaten to death—allegedly by Belgian mercenaries.

The Disney contract offered a wider road to fame and von Braun signed on. The first Disneyland TV broadcast in which von Braun appeared, in 1955, called Man in Space,

In 1960, von Braun and a group of approximately 120 Operation Paperclip scientists, engineers, and technicians were transferred from the army to the newly established National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, with a mandate to build the Saturn rockets designed to take man to the moon.

According to Michael J. Neufeld, the U.S. government knew that Dr. Kaul had served as legal adviser on Die Gefrorenen Blitze, and that Kaul’s goal in interviewing von Braun was “to broadcast the connection between the rocket engineer, the SS and the concentration camps.” NASA’s moon program would never survive that kind of publicity, and the State Department denied Dr. Friedrich Kaul a visa.

I prefer Gerhard Maschkowski’s take on what matters and what lasts. Maschkowski was the Jewish teenager fortuitously spared the gas chamber at Auschwitz because he was of use to IG Farben as a slave laborer at their Buna factory. I was interviewing Maschkowski one spring afternoon in 2012 when I asked

“What matters, what lasts?” He chuckled and smiled. He pushed back the sleeve on his shirt and showed me his blue-ink Auschwitz tattoo. “This lasts,” he said. “But it is also a record of [the] truth.”