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

by Annie Jacobsen

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.” —Unknown

Jedem das Seine.

John Risen Jones Jr.

Staff Sergeant Donald Schulz.

General Carl A. “Tooey” Spaatz,

Colonel Donald L. Putt.

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.

was Private First Class Fred Schneikert,

Second Lieutenant Walter Jessel

“The question who is a Nazi is often a dark riddle,” an officer with the Third Army, G-5, wrote in a report sent to SHAEF headquarters in May. “The question what is a Nazi is also not easy to answer.”

Army Air Forces Lieutenant Colonel John O’Mara,

Major Robert B. Staver,

For every German scientist that had taken up the U.S. Army’s offer to evacuate, between two and ten remained behind. The Soviet secret police began rounding up hundreds of former rocket scientists and engineers and put them back to work.

Major General Malcolm Grow,

Lieutenant Colonel Harry Armstrong,

Major Leopold Alexander,

army chaplain, Lieutenant Bigelow.

a Polish priest named Leo Michalowski.

Colonel W. R. Lovelace,

festivities, the remaining issues were finally agreed upon. Farben would pay the SS three reichsmarks a day for each laborer they supplied, which would go into the SS treasury, not to the slaves.

When Dr. Wilhelm Hirschkind left, he had these words for Ambros: “I would look forward after the conclusion of the peace treaty [to] continuing our relations [in my position] as a representative of Dow.”

Henry Wallace was one of the nation’s greatest champions of the idea that Americans could find prosperity thanks to science.

“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating,” Chief U.S. Prosecutor Justice Robert H. Jackson famously declared, “that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

Harry Armstrong,

Erwin H. Nickles

They were the first to witness that body fluids boil at sixty-three thousand feet.

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.

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.

Almost no one in America had any idea that the U.S. Army had been developing biological weapons until January 3, 1946, when the War Department released a slim, sanitized government monograph called the Merck Report.

The record would remain secret from the public for another forty years. There was far too much at stake for the U.S. Army to allow the information about what had really gone on in the Nordhausen tunnel complex to get out to the public. The trial record would call attention to the backgrounds of the 115 rocket scientists at Fort Bliss. The future of the United States missile program was too important.

“The United States must decide upon a research and development program that will guarantee satisfactory results within the shortest possible time and at the least expense. Such a program must be set up even if its organization appears to violate American economic ideals and American traditions in arms development,” Dornberger wrote. At least it could be said that Dornberger remained true to his totalitarian-leaning principles—his belief that democratic ideals and traditions could be ignored in the quest for military supremacy.

“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.

Eventually they left Fort Bliss and Herbert Axster opened a law firm in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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.

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.

Charles E. Loucks

With the signing of the National Security Act by President Truman, on July 26, 1947, America’s armed services and intelligence agencies were restructured. The War Department was reconstituted into the Department of Defense, the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee became the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency was born.

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.

In 1947, Werner Stoll had published the first article on LSD, in the Swiss Archives of Neurology. Stoll’s second paper, entitled “A New Hallucinatory Agent, Active in Very Small Amounts,” was published two years later, in 1949. But General Loucks did not see LSD as a psychiatric aid but rather as a weapon, an incapacitating agent with enormous potential on the battlefield. 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.

Charles B. King,

In June 1950, North Korean forces, supported by Communist benefactors, moved across the 38th parallel, marking the start of the Korean War.

Colonel William H. Speidel

Operation Paperclip in turn created a host of monstrous offspring, including Operations Bluebird, Artichoke, and MKUltra.

“War is the father of all things.” —Heraclitus

The army’s herbicidal warfare program during the Vietnam War started in August 1961 and lasted until February 1971.

On November 25, 1969, Nixon announced the end of all U.S. offensive biological warfare research and ordered that America’s arsenal was to be destroyed.

“Mankind already carries in its hands too many of the seeds of its own destruction,” said Nixon.

Instead, the fact that he was an officer with the SS remained a jealously guarded secret by all parties—von Braun, the U.S. military, and NASA until CNN journalist Linda Hunt broke the story in 1985.

After the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969, columnist Drew Pearson—whose fierce exposés of Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber had helped to banish the man from America—wrote in his column that von Braun had been a member of the SS.

In January 1994, President Clinton created the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to investigate and report on the use of human beings in medical research related to Cold War atomic tests. The Advisory Committee found many of these experiments to be criminal and to be in violation of the Nuremberg Code, including studies conducted by German doctors with the SAM.