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

by Annie Jacobsen

Henry Wallace had been staunchly anti-Nazi during the war. Preceding Truman in the vice presidency, Wallace had publicly called Hitler a “supreme devil operating through a human form.” In another famous speech, he had likened Hitler to Satan seven times. That Henry Wallace was encouraging President Truman to endorse the German scientist program in the name of economic prosperity gave Operation Overcast a future. Henry Wallace was exactly what the JIOA had been waiting for.

Post article revealed that the only man believed to have survived the freezing experiments had been located by Dr. Leo Alexander. Most of the other victims—the so-called Untermenschen whom the Nazi doctors had experimented on—died in the process or were killed. It was likely that this sole surviving victim, a Catholic priest, would provide witness testimony in the Nuremberg courts. Americans were rapt. 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. This laboratory, dreamed up by Colonel Harry Armstrong and Major General Malcolm Grow at a meeting in France in the spring of 1945, would remain one of the best-kept secrets of Operation Paperclip for decades to come. Here, starting on September 20, 1945, fifty-eight doctors handpicked by Dr. Strughold had been working on medical research projects begun for the Third Reich. Some of the data the Nazi doctors were using in their new Army research had been obtained in experiments in which test subjects had been murdered.

Because conducting military research inside Germany was a violation of Allied Control Council Law 25 of the Potsdam Accord, the Aero Medical Center’s classified nature shielded the Nazi doctors from chance exposure. The codirectors of the secret research facility, Colonel Harry Armstrong and Dr. Hubertus Strughold, were alike in many ways, so much so that some saw the two men as mirror images of one another. The growing success of the Aero Medical Center would prove to be a launching point for each man’s meteoric postwar career. Armstrong would eventually be promoted to U.S. surgeon general of the air force. Strughold would become the father of U.S. space medicine.

In 1937, Captain Harry Armstrong was considered one of America’s aviation medicine pioneers. On October 2 of that year he attended the Aero Medical Association’s first international convention, which took place in the Astor Gallery of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. There, he and Heim reported the results of their recent studies at Wright Field. One of the doctors most interested in these studies was the Luftwaffe physician representing Germany, Dr. Hubertus Strughold. The two men, Armstrong and Strughold, were pioneers in the same field. “We hit it off immediately,” remembered Harry Armstrong decades later. That fortuitous meeting would profoundly shape Strughold’s post-Nazi career.

The list of suicides was long, but the number of German doctors believed to have been involved in war crimes was even longer. The U.S. war crimes office for the chief counsel wrote up a list of doctors involved in medical research that resulted in “mercy killings,” a euphemism used by the Reich for its medical murder programs. The list was classified with a strict caveat that access to it remain “restricted for 80 years from the date of creation.” This meant that, by the time the world would know who was on this list, it would be the year 2025, and everyone named would be dead.

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 its employ and the list was classified. The list remained secret from the public until 2012, when the Department of Defense (DoD) agreed to declassify it for this book.

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. In response to the perception that the Soviets were getting all the “important German scientists,” the Joint Intelligence Committee proposed to the JIOA that three changes be implemented in the Nazi scientist program, effective immediately. The first was to do everything possible in Germany to prevent more scientists from working for the Russians. The second was that the U.S. Army was to make sure that German scientists and their families were given whatever it was they were asking for, including American visas. Third, a list was drawn up proposing that as many as one thousand additional Germans be brought to America for weapons-related research.

With the new information about the Soviets, 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.” Now he stated in a memorandum that “the War Department should do everything possible to clear away obstacles that may be raised in the State Department.”

The thorniest issue had to do with getting the State Department to approve certain individuals who had clearly been Nazi ideologues, including members of the SS and SA. Also at issue were those men who received high awards for their important contributions to the Nazi Party. These were people that by regulation were entirely ineligible for citizenship. The meeting resulted in a clever workaround. Army Intelligence officers reviewing the OMGUS security reports of certain scientists could discreetly attach a paperclip to the files of the more troublesome cases. Those files would not be presented to the State Department right away. Instead, those men would remain under military custody in America, most likely for a longer period of time than some of their fellows. As a result, the Nazi scientist program got a new code name. Operation Overcast had apparently been compromised after the families of the German scientists starting calling their U.S. military housing Camp Overcast. So from now on, the Nazi scientist program would be called Operation Paperclip.

On August 30, 1946, the undersecretary of the State Department, Dean Acheson, asked President Truman to make a decision on Paperclip. If the president did not act quickly, Acheson wrote, many of the German scientists “may be lost to us.” After four days of deliberation 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. With presidential approval official, the attorney general was able to expedite the proposed changes to the program. A new JIOA contract was drawn up, allowing scientists who had been in the United States for six months to sign on for another year, and with the government maintaining the right to renew the contract for another five years. 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.

America’s bioweapons program needed to continue, the Merck Report made clear. America may have won the war with the mighty atomic bomb, but biological weapons were the poor man’s nuclear weapon. Biological weapons could be made by just about any country “without vast expenditures of money or the construction of huge production facilities.” A bioweapon could be hidden “under the guise of legitimate medical or bacteriological research,” the report said. The Merck Report was written by George W. Merck, a forty-eight-year-old chemist and the owner of Merck & Co., a pharmaceutical manufacturer in New Jersey. Merck had served Presidents Roosevelt and Truman as civilian head of the U.S. biological warfare effort during the war. Merck & Co. made and sold vaccines, notably the first commercial U.S. smallpox vaccine, in 1898, and, in 1942, it manufactured penicillin G, among the first general antibiotics. During World War II, U.S. soldiers received smallpox vaccines. The man diagnosing the bioweapons threat, George Merck, was also the man whose company might sell the government the solution to combat the threat. In 1946 this was not looked upon with the same kind of scrutiny as it might have been decades later, because America’s military-industrial complex had yet to be broadly revealed.

On October 12, 1946, the Stars and Stripes newspaper, which operated from inside the Pentagon, listed the individual names of the doctors charged—a list that included the five Luftwaffe doctors who had been arrested at the U.S. Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center: Theodor Benzinger, Siegfried Ruff, Konrad Schäfer, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, and Oskar Schröder. In a matter of weeks, these physicians had gone from being employed by the U.S. Army to being tried by the U.S. military for war crimes. The ultimate judicial punishment was on the line: Each doctor faced a possible death sentence.

After spending a little over a month in the Nuremberg jail, Benzinger was back in Heidelberg continuing his U.S. Army research work. There was no explanation as to why Benzinger was dropped from the list of defendants in the upcoming doctors’ trial. It would take decades for an important clue to be revealed, by Nuremberg trial expert and medical history professor Paul Weindling. As it turned out, in the fall of 1946, Benzinger had recently completed a paper on pilot physiology concerning stratospheric, or extremely high-altitude, aircraft. “The US [Army] Air Forces, Wright Field circulated his report on this topic in October 1946—just weeks after his detention and release” from the prison complex at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, Weindling explains. The suggestion is that perhaps someone in the Army Air Forces felt Benzinger’s expertise was more in the “national interest” than was trying him for war crimes.

Emil Salmon had been involved in burning down a synagogue in his hometown of Ludwigshafen. But Emil Salmon was now at Wright Field because the Army Air Forces found his knowledge and expertise “difficult, if not impossible, to duplicate.” Emil Salmon built aircraft engine test stands.

To be invited to the open house, a reporter had to agree in advance to clear his or her story with army censors before going to press. The military placed its own article in the Stars and Stripes purporting to tell the official story: None of the Germans had ever been Nazis; the men were under strict supervision here in the United States; they were all outstanding scientists and technicians “vital to national security”; they were moral family men.

A Gallup Poll the following week revealed that most Americans believed that bringing one thousand more German scientists to America was a “bad idea.”

“If you enjoy mass murder, but also treasure your skin, be a scientist, son. It’s the only way, nowadays, of getting away with murder.”

The incident was a tipping point for Hermann Nehlsen, and he went to Colonel Putt to file a formal complaint against the two men. There was more to the story, Nehlsen told Colonel Putt. Rickhey was a war criminal. He had been the primary person behind a mass hanging at Nordhausen, the hanging by crane of a dozen prisoners, and had bragged about it on the ship ride coming over to the United States. As for Albert Patin, Hermann Nehlsen told Colonel Putt he was an ardent Nazi as well, a member of the SA. Patin’s companies used slave laborers from concentration camps. What Hermann Nehlsen did not know was that Colonel Putt was not interested in the past histories of the German scientists in the Army Air Forces’ employ. Or that Putt had a gentleman’s agreement with Albert Patin and had been using him to keep an eye on the other Germans at the Hilltop. Colonel Putt said he would look into the allegations. Instead, Putt had Nehlsen watched for future security violations.

On August 7, 1947, Georg Rickhey appeared as one of nineteen defendants in the Dora-Nordhausen trial. The Nazis were charged with the deaths of at least twenty thousand laborers who were beaten, tortured, starved, hanged, or worked to death while being forced to build V-2 rockets. The trial, which took place inside a former SS barracks adjacent to the Dachau concentration camp, lasted four months and three weeks. The prosecution requested that Wernher von Braun be allowed to testify at the trial, but the army said it was too much of a security risk to allow von Braun to travel to Germany. The Russians could kidnap him, the U.S. Army said. They did not say that von Braun had recently traveled to Germany to marry his cousin and bring

her back to Texas with him.

Opposition to Operation Paperclip gained momentum with America’s scientific elite. On February 1, 1947, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) met in New York City to ask President Truman to put an end to it. The American scientists saw the Nazi scientist program as a “drastic step in the search for military power.” When it was learned that some of the one thousand additional German scientists on the Paperclip recruiting list were being hired for short-term military work followed by longer-term positions at American universities, many were outraged.

Albert Einstein was the most esteemed figure to publicly denounce Operation Paperclip.

“Was it wise, or even compatible with our moral standards to make this bargain, in light of the fact that many of the Germans, probably the majority, were die-hard Nazis?” Bethe and Sack asked. “Did the fact that the Germans might save the nation millions of dollars imply that permanent residence and citizenship could be bought? Could the United States count on [the German scientists] to work for peace when their indoctrinated hatred against the Russians might contribute to increase the divergency between the great powers? 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?”

This information was first passed on to Rabbi Stephen Wise of the American Jewish Congress and then to the press. “These scientists and their families are supposed to have been ‘screened,’ Wise wrote to the War Department. “The Axsters prove that this ‘screening’ is a farce and the War Department ‘screeners’ are entirely incapable of performing this task.” The Department of Justice withdrew Herbert Axster’s application for legal immigration, but the Axsters were not sent home. Eventually they left Fort Bliss and Herbert Axster opened a law firm in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The War Department cabled USFET demanding an explanation as to how the Axsters got through the screening process. A classified cable was sent back, stating that a few “ardent Nazis” may have slipped into the program based on “unavailability of records” immediately after the war.

It was June 27, 1947, and Karl Höllenrainer stood trembling in the hushed courtroom. Small in stature, dark-haired, and nervous, he was a broken man. “Now, witness,” asked U.S. Prosecutor Alexander G. Hardy, “for what reason were you arrested by the Gestapo on May 29, 1944?” “Because I am a Gypsy of mixed blood,” Höllenrainer said. Höllenrainer’s crime was that he had fallen in love with and married a German girl, a violation of the infamous Nuremberg law that prohibited a non-Aryan from marrying or having sexual relations with a German citizen. After being arrested, Höllenrainer was sent to three different concentration camps, first Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, and finally Dachau, where he was selected to take part in the seawater experiments being performed by Luftwaffe. At Dachau, Höllenrainer was deprived of food, forced to drink chemically processed seawater, and then monitored for signs of liver failure and madness. One experiment among the many stood out in his memory. Without using anesthesia, a Luftwaffe doctor had removed a piece of Karl Höllenrainer’s liver in order to analyze it.

Dr. Blome’s wife, Bettina, a physician and bestselling author. Frau Blome meticulously researched experiments that were conducted by the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during the war. This included malaria experiments on Terre Haute federal prison inmates. She also uncovered Dr. Walter Reed’s famous nineteenth-century yellow fever research for the U.S. Army, in which volunteer human test subjects had died. The defense counsel, Robert Servatius, picked up on this theme of U.S. Army human experimentation where Blome’s wife left off. 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. “Prison life is ideal for controlled laboratory work with humans,” Servatius read, quoting American doctors

One report pertained to rocket engineer Kurt Debus. Debus was an ardent Nazi. He had been an active SS member who, according to the testimony of colleagues, wore his Nazi uniform to work. Most troublesome was the revelation in his OMGUS security report that during the war he had turned a colleague, an engineering supervisor named Richard Craemer, over to the Gestapo for making anti-Nazi remarks and for refusing to give Debus the Nazi salute.

specifics of the incident made it impossible for the European Intelligence Division of the U.S. Army to cast Kurt Debus as an apolitical scientist trying to survive in a fascist world. Debus had gone out of his way to have a colleague arrested by the Gestapo. Craemer was subsequently prosecuted for treason.

Then, on March 9, 1947, journalist Drew Pearson reported the most outrageous news story about Operation Paperclip to date. According to Pearson, the U.S. Army had offered Farben executive Karl Krauch a Paperclip contract while he was incarcerated at Nuremberg. Krauch was the lead defendant in the upcoming war crimes trial. He had served as Göring’s plenipotentiary for chemical production and had advocated for the use of nerve agents against the Allies. Krauch was the man who galvanized his fellow German industrialists to mobilize resources to help the Nazis go to war.

A new age was dawning for the controversial Paperclip program. On the one hand, it struggled to hold up a false face of scientific prowess behind which lay a tawdry group of amoral war opportunists, many of whom were linked to war crimes. But just as von Braun admitted to New Yorker writer Daniel Lang that what he really cared most about was seeing “how the golden cow could be milked most successfully,” the newly created CIA saw the Paperclip scientists in similar quid pro quo terms. There was advantage to be had in using men who had everything to lose and were, at the same time, uniquely focused on personal gain. In Operation Paperclip the CIA found a perfect partner in its quest for scientific intelligence. And it was in the CIA that Operation Paperclip found its strongest supporting partner yet.

“Psychochemical Warfare: A New Concept of War.” In the monograph, Greene wrote, “The trend of each major conflict, being characterized by increased death, human misery, and property destruction, could be reversed.” 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. Incapacitating agents were “gentle” weapons; they knocked a man out without permanent injury. With psychochemical warfare, Greene explained, America could conquer its enemies “without the wholesale killing of people or the mass destruction of property.” Greene was not proposing to use low levels of tabun gas on the battlefield. He was talking about using other kinds of incapacitating agents, drugs that could immobilize or temporarily paralyze a person, “hallucinogenic or psychotomimetic drugs… whose effects mimic insanity or psychosis.” “There can be no doubt that their will to resist would be weakened greatly, if not entirely destroyed, by the mass hysteria and panic which would ensue,” Greene explained.

Dr. Greene’s idea of psychochemical warfare would have a profound effect on the future of the U.S. Army’s Chemical Corps, but it would also greatly affect the direction of the newest civilian intelligence organization in Washington, the CIA. The Agency had deep pockets and big ideas. 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. Fritz Hoffmann and L. Wilson Greene were at the locus of a growing partnership being forged between the Chemical Corps and the CIA. Soon, biological warfare experts from Camp Detrick would also be brought into the fold. This particular biological weapons program, which would be run by a group called Special Operations Division, or SO Division, was fueled by Operation Paperclip and would develop into one of the most controversial and collaborative efforts in the history of the CIA.

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. Eventually, physicians and chemists from Operation Paperclip would work on jointly operated classified programs code-named Chatter, Bluebird, Artichoke, MKUltra, and others. LSD, the drug that induces paranoia and unpredictability and makes people see things that are not really there, would become a strange allegory for the Cold War.

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.

Walter Schieber was further linked to the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of slave laborers through the various chemical weapons programs that were carried out at Farben’s multiple production plants. Schieber was not tried at Nuremberg but was used as a witness for the prosecution instead. During the war, with his expertise as a chemist, SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Walter Schieber was the Speer ministry’s liaison to IG Farben and he oversaw the industrial production of tabun and sarin gas.

Years later Colonel Loucks explained to the army historian what the photograph meant to him. “Driving one day in a Jeep from Yokohama to Tokyo, I stopped along the side of a road. The incendiary attacks had done their work,” Loucks explained. The area “was all burned out; a wasteland all the way through. We dropped tens of thousands of them [incendiary bombs] on the whole area between Yokohama and Tokyo.” Out there in the Japanese countryside, said Loucks, “I noticed a great stack of incendiary bombs—small ones. I went over to take a look at them. They looked like something that we had made at Rocky Mountain. Sure enough, they were. Here in one place they had a great stack of them. They were burned out but the bodies were still there because they didn’t burn. They stacked them up in this big high pile. I had a picture of me standing beside them, because I had been responsible for the manufacturing of them. That was just one of those incidents that didn’t mean anything, but I just happened to see what had happened to some of our incendiary bombs that were over there.”

Similarly, Loucks expressed detachment as far as Dr. Schieber was concerned, as evidenced in his journal entries. It was as if Loucks could not, or would not, see Schieber in the context of the millions of Jews murdered on the direct orders of Schieber’s closest wartime colleagues. What interested Loucks about Schieber was what an effective chemical weapons maker he was.

One week later, General Loucks told Schieber that he had been authorized to pay him 1,000 marks a month for consulting work. Schieber gave Loucks the contact information for the six chemists and technicians who would join him in his efforts to explain precisely how to produce sarin gas. On December 11, 1948, Loucks hosted the first roundtable meeting of Hitler’s chemists in his Heidelberg home, secrecy assured. For the next three months, the chemists met every other Saturday at Loucks’s home. There, they created detailed, step-by-step reports on how to produce industrial amounts of sarin gas. They drew charts and graphs and made lists of materials and equipment required.

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.

For Operation Paperclip, moving a scientist from military custody to immigrant status required elaborate and devious preparation, but in the end the procedure proved to be infallible. Scientists in the southwestern or western United States, accompanied by military escort, were driven in an unmarked army jeep out of the country into Mexico either at Nuevo Laredo, Ciudad Juárez, or Tijuana. With him, each scientist carried two forms from the State Department, I-55 and I-255, each bearing a signature from the chief of the visa division and a proviso from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Section 42.323 of Title 22, signifying that the visa holder was “a person whose admission is highly desirable in the national interest.” The scientist also had with him a photograph of himself and a blood test warranting that he did not have any infectious diseases. After consulate approval, the scientist was then let back into the United States, no longer under military guard but as a legal U.S. immigrant in possession of a legal visa. The pathway toward citizenship had begun. If the scientist lived closer to the East Coast than the West Coast, he went through the same protocols, except that he would exit the United States into Canada instead of Mexico and reenter through the consulate at Niagara Falls.

Of the ninety-one thousand Germans taken prisoner by the Soviets, only five thousand would come out of the prison camps alive.

The premise of the Accelerated Paperclip program was to move “especially dangerous top level scientists” out of Germany in a “modified Denial Program” that needed to be kept away from the Soviets at all costs. The high commissioner’s office began working with army intelligence to “evacuate” 150 of these scientists, code-named the “K” list, from Germany to the United States. A group of American officers called the Special Projects Team would be dispatched to recruit the “K” list scientists. The Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a prodigious $1 million procurement budget to help entice these “especially dangerous top level scientists” to come to America, the equivalent of approximately $10 million in 2013.

With Accelerated Paperclip’s newest policy in place, Class I offenders could now be put on a JIOA list. This included Dr. Schreiber, still serving as post physician at Camp King. Another Class I offender was Dr. Kurt Blome, former deputy surgeon general of the Third Reich and Hitler’s biological weapons expert. The sword and the shield. Finally, there was Dr. Otto Ambros, the war criminal convicted at Nuremberg of slavery and mass murder. In the winter of 1951, Otto Ambros was placed on the JIOA list for Accelerated Paperclip even though he was still incarcerated at Landsberg Prison.

For Otto Ambros, this would mean that he could keep what remained of the gift, from Adolf Hitler, of 1 million reichsmarks, a figure that has never been revealed before. McCloy spent several months considering the panel’s recommendations. During this time he was deluged with letters from religious groups and activists in Germany urging for the war criminals’ release. McCloy sent a cable from Frankfurt to Washington asking for counsel from the White House. The White House advised McCloy that the decision was his to make. John J. McCloy commuted ten of the fifteen death sentences. This meant that ten men condemned by International Military Tribunal judges—including the commander of the Malmédy Massacre, considered one of the war’s worst atrocities against prisoners of war, and several SS officers who had overseen the mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen—would be released back into society

The single most important element governing justification of Accelerated Paperclip/Project 63 was now stated on page one: “Based on available records… Subjects have not been in the past and are not at the present time members of the Communist Party.” The issue of being an ardent Nazi had lost first position and was relegated down to section six.

At the doctors’ trial, Janina Iwanska had delivered much of her testimony with Dr. Alexander standing beside her, pointing to her injuries and providing the judges with a professional medical analysis of what had been done to her by Nazi doctors during the war. Iwanska’s testimony was generally regarded as among the most powerful evidence presented at the trial. At Ravensbrück she had had her legs broken by Waffen-SS surgeon Dr. Karl Gebhardt and pieces

of her shinbones removed. Dr. Gebhardt then ordered that Iwanska’s surgical wounds be deliberately infected with bacteria to cause gangrene, so he could treat them with sulfa drugs to see if the drugs worked. It was nothing short of a miracle that Janina Iwanska survived. Now, nine years later, she continued to suffer great physical pain. She walked with a limp because of the decimation of her shinbones. The purpose of the trip to the United States was to allow Iwanska to undergo surgery, at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, to help alleviate this pain. Dr. Gebhardt had been Major General Dr. Schreiber’s direct subordinate at Ravensbrück. Gebhardt had been one of the twenty-three defendants tried at the doctors’ trial. He was convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged in the courtyard at Landsberg Prison in June, 1948. Dr. Schreiber was working for the U.S. Air Force in Texas.

With the assistance of Dr. Hubertus Strughold, Harry Armstrong had personally recruited fifty-eight former Nazi doctors for work at the U.S. Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg, five of whom had been arrested for war crimes, four of whom were tried at Nuremberg, two of whom were convicted at Nuremberg, and one of whom was acquitted and then rehired by the U.S. Air Force to work in America before being revealed as incompetent and fired. That said nothing of the thirty-four doctors who had since been hired to work at the School of Aviation Medicine, many of whom were Nazi ideologues as well as former members of the SS and the SA.

On May 22, 1952, Dr. Schreiber and his family were flown by military aircraft from Travis Air Force Base, in California, to New Orleans, Louisiana. There, they boarded a ship bound for Argentina. When they arrived in Buenos Aires, they were taken by car to the American consulate and given documents that allowed them to stay. The arrangements were made by General Aristobulo Fidel Reyes. The air force paid for police protection for Dr. Schreiber and his family during the transition. It was important that the Schreibers’ resettlement in South America go smoothly. There were too many American officials whose reputations would never survive if the facts were revealed.

Unknown to Frank Olson, the CIA was expanding its Artichoke program in new ways, including expanding its use of LSD in “unconventional interrogations” through covert means. Strapping a suspected Soviet spy to a chair and dosing him with drugs, as was done at Camp King’s Haus Waldorf, was one approach to getting a spy to spill his secrets. But the CIA wondered what would happen if an enemy agent were to be given an incapacitating agent like LSD on the sly, without knowing he had been drugged. Would this kind of amnesia be effective? Could it produce loyalty? How much, if any, of the experience would be remembered? These were questions the CIA wanted answered. The director of the Technical Services Staff, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a stutterer with a club foot, decided that the first field tests should be conducted on men from the SO Division without them knowing about it. One of those targeted for experimentation was Dr. Frank Olson.