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

by Annie Jacobsen

As for Dr. Wagner, the navy felt it needed to keep him happy so that his work would continue to bear scientific fruit. To soften the reality of his being a prisoner, his incarceration was called “voluntary detention.” Wagner and his assistants required a classified but comfortable place to work, the navy noted in an intelligence report, ideally in “an ivory tower or a gilded cage where life would be pleasant, the guards courteous, the locks thick but not too obvious.”

Patterson’s letter to the president’s chief of staff, which was not shared with President Truman, prompted a meeting at the Pentagon by the War Department General Staff. The group agreed on a temporary policy. Contracts would be given to a limited number of German scientists “provided they were not known or alleged war criminals.” The scientists were to be placed in protective military custody in the United States, and they were to be returned to Germany as quickly as possible after their classified weapons work was complete.

According to Nazi ideology, Untermenschen—subhumans, as they were called, a designation that included Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Poles, Slavs, Russian prisoners of war, the handicapped, the mentally ill, and others—were no different from white mice or lab rabbits whose bodies could thereby be experimented on to advance the Reich’s medical goals. “The sub-human is a biological creature, crafted by nature,” according to Heinrich Himmler, “which has hands, legs, eyes, and mouth, even the semblance of a brain.

“It sometimes seems as if the Nazis had taken special pains in making practically every nightmare come true,” Dr. Alexander later told his wife, comparing Reich medicine to something out of a dark German fairy tale.

Luftwaffe reports used the words “guinea pigs,” “large pigs,” and “adult pigs” as code words for their human subjects.

As it turned out, military intelligence objected to hiring Dr. Benzinger and Dr. Ruff, on the grounds that both men had been hard-core Nazi ideologues. But in the following month, army intelligence determined that the doctors’ work at Heidelberg would be “short term,” and both men were cleared for U.S. Army employment.

Stripped of their power, small details spoke volumes to Dolibois. Göring was terrified of thunderstorms. Keitel was obsessed with sunbathing and staring at his reflection in Ashcan’s only mirror, in its entrance hall. Robert Ley was repeatedly reprimanded for masturbating in the bathtub. Joachim von Ribbentrop, named by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda as the best-dressed man in Germany for nine consecutive years, was a lazy slob. Day in and day out, John Dolibois interviewed them. “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 greatest challenge for Dolibois and his fellow interrogators was determining, or trying to determine, who was lying and who was telling the truth. “Cross-examination. Playing one prisoner off the other,” according to Dolibois, was a tactic that worked best.

“You said yesterday that a [Farben employee] ‘alluded’ to you that the poisonous gasses [sic] and the chemicals manufactured by IG Farben were being used for the murder of human beings held in concentration camps,” Major Tilley reminded von Schnitzler in their interview. “So I understood him,” von Schnitzler replied. “Didn’t you question those employees of yours further in regard to the use of these gases?” “They said they knew it was being used for this purpose,” von Schnitzler said. “What did you do when he told you that IG chemicals were being used to kill, to murder people held in concentration camps?” Major Tilley asked. “I was horrified,” said von Schnitzler. “Did you do anything about it?” “I kept it for [sic] me because it was too terrible,” von Schnitzler confessed.

Colonel Andrus assembled his fifty-two Nazi prisoners in one room. Before the film began, he addressed them with the following words: “You know about these things and I have no doubt many of you participated actively in them. We are showing them to you not to inform you of what you already know, but to impress on you the fact that we know of it, too.”

“We felt no moral scruples about the possible future use of our brainchild,” von Braun later told New Yorker magazine writer Daniel Lang. “We were interested solely in exploring outer space. It was simply a question with us of how the golden cow could be milked most successfully.”

At Nuremberg, while the doctors from Heidelberg remained incarcerated in one wing of the prison awaiting trial, preparations of another kind were also going on. The trial of the major war criminals was over. On the morning of October 1, the judges took turns reading the verdicts: nineteen convictions and three acquittals of the twenty-two accused major war criminals (one, Bormann, in absentia). That same afternoon, the tribunal pronounced what sentences would be imposed: twelve death sentences, three life sentences, and four lengthy prison terms. Albert Speer, the only defendant who pled guilty, was sentenced to twenty years.

One by one the Nazis were hanged. At 4:00 a.m. the bodies were loaded onto two trucks and driven to a secret location just outside Munich. Here, at what was later revealed to be the Dachau concentration camp, the bodies of these perpetrators of World War II and the Holocaust were cremated in the camp’s ovens. Their ashes were raked out, scooped up, and thrown into a river.

“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.”

“We object not because they are citizens of an enemy nation, but because they were and probably still are Nazis.”

“Certainly not wishing to jeopardize the legitimate needs of the national defense, and not advocating the policy of hatred and vengeance toward our former enemies, we nevertheless believe that a large-scale importation of German scientists… is not in keeping with the best objectives of American domestic and foreign policy,” the members of FAS wrote. One American scientist was more forthright. “Certainly any person who can transfer loyalties from one idealology [sic] to another upon the shifting of a meal ticket is not better than Judas!” he said.

Had the war been fought to allow Nazi ideology to creep into our educational and scientific institutions by the back door?” Their final question struck at the dark heart of the Nazi scientist program. “Do we want science at any price?”

But General Taylor reminded the tribunal and the world that one of the central purposes of the trial was to establish a record of proof of the crimes, “so that no one can ever doubt that they were fact and not fable;

Servatius had located a Life magazine article, published in June of 1945, that described how OSRD conducted experiments on eight hundred U.S. prisoners during the war. Servatius read the entire article, word for word, in the courtroom. None of the American judges was familiar with the article, nor were most members of the prosecution, and its presentation in court clearly caught the Americans off guard. Because the article specifically discussed U.S. Army wartime experiments on prisoners, it was incredibly damaging for the prosecution.

Sometime in the spring of 1947, scientists at Edgewood Arsenal began conducting human experiments with tabun nerve agent. All soldiers used in these experiments were so-called volunteers, but the men were not made privy to the fact that they were being subjected to low-level concentrations of tabun.

His seminal vision for psychochemical warfare—a term he coined—was to incapacitate a man with drugs on the battlefield but not to kill him. Greene believed that in this way the face of warfare could change from barbaric to human.

Greene proposed that an immediate “search be made for a stable chemical compound which would cause mental abnormalities of military significance.” He sought drugs that made people irrational.

For the CIA, using drugs to incapacitate individuals had many more applications than just on the battlefield, and the Agency began developing programs of its own.

The physician was Dr. Kurt Blome, the former deputy surgeon general of the Third Reich. He had just been acquitted of war crimes at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial. Now he was back on the Paperclip list.

Another colleague, Dr. John Nelson, found that despite “long training in the care of animals, [Traub] went out of his way to be cruel to animals.” This troubled Nelson, who felt that “any person who is cruel to animals shows little distinction and difference to his treatment of his fellow human beings.”

Werner Stoll, a colleague of Hoffmann’s (and the son of Sandoz chief chemist, Arthur Stoll), repeated Albert Hofmann’s original LSD experiment and concluded, “modified LSD-25 was a psychotropic compound that was nontoxic and could have enormous use as a psychiatric aid.”

Soon the army and the navy would all be experimenting with LSD as a weapon, and the CIA would be experimenting with LSD as a means of controlling human behavior, an endeavor that soon came to be known as mind control.

A number of these photographs survived the war, which made public dealings with Schieber impossible.

In an attempt to save the SS money and address the growing problem of food shortages among slave laborers, Schieber designed a “nourishment” program called Eastern Nutrition (Östliche Kostform). It was tested at the Mauthausen concentration camp. For a period of six months, starting in December 1943, a group of one hundred and fifty slave laborers were denied the watery broth they usually received and instead were fed an artificial paste designed by Schieber and made up of cellulose remnants, or pieces of used clothing. One hundred and sixteen of the one hundred and fifty test subjects died.

General Loucks’s secret Saturday roundtable at his house in Heidelberg with the Nazi chemists remained hidden from the public for six decades. Here was a brigadier general with the U.S. Army doing business with a former brigadier general of the Third Reich allegedly in the interests of the United States. It was a Cold War black program that was paid for by the U.S. Army but did not officially exist. There were no checks and no balances. Operation Paperclip was becoming a headless monster.

It was here in Oberursel that the CIA first began developing “extreme interrogation” techniques and “behavior modification programs” under the code names Operation Bluebird and Operation Artichoke. The unorthodox methods the CIA and its partner agencies explored included hypnosis, electric shock, chemicals, and illegal street drugs.

“Heroic endurance” was a euphemism for suicide.

The two men went to Alaska and oversaw bacteria being sprayed out of airplanes to see how the pathogens would disperse in an environment similar to that of a harsh Russian winter. “We used a spore,” Cournoyer explained, “which is very similar [to] anthrax, so to that extent we did something that was not kosher. Because we picked it up all over [the United States] months after we did the tests.”

But the CIA was not bound to the same NATO policies as were the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and so the CIA continued to do what it had been doing—namely,

A compromise was reached between U.S. officials and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s office whereby the JIOA and the CIA agreed to stop recruiting new scientists but could continue to work with the scientists who remained on the original, President Truman–approved, thousand-person list.

Albert Speer died in a London hotel room in 1981. He was in town doing an interview for the BBC. “One seldom recognizes when the Devil puts his hand on your shoulder,”

Like so many of those involved in Operation Paperclip decades ago, Griffin looks past Debus’s former commitment to Nazi Party ideology. He only sees the scientist. “What do you say when people ask you about Kurt Debus’s Nazi past?” I asked. “Not a single person has asked me this question in [twenty-three] years,” Griffin said.

But when we finally spoke on the telephone the conversation quickly took a bizarre turn. Paul G. Schreiber insisted that the declassified documents I had accessed from the National Archives and elsewhere, and reported in Operation Paperclip, were fabricated; that they were all part of a Soviet plot, engineered by the KGB, to malign his father, the former surgeon general of the Third Reich, who was anticommunist. “Father was a good man,” Paul G. Schreiber insisted. “All he ever wanted to do was teach. Father looked down on Hitler. With my own ears, I heard father called Hitler a ‘Schweinehund,’” or pig-dog, Paul G. Schreiber said.