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

by Annie Jacobsen

The U.S. Army had been interested in stockpiling tabun ever since it obtained its first sample from the Robbers’ Lair, in the British zone in Germany, in May of 1945.

To General Loucks, moving forward on military programs considered vital to U.S. national security was more important than dredging up an individual’s Nazi past.

The hallucinatory agent that Loucks was after in Switzerland would be the ultimate “incapacitation chemical” also sought by L. Wilson Greene at Edgewood “to knock out not kill.” The chemical, said Loucks, was called “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide,” or LSD.

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.

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.

The incendiary bombs that Colonel Loucks oversaw at Rocky Mountain Arsenal during World War II would now be replaced by M34 cluster bombs filled with sarin gas. The Top Secret program was code-named Gibbett-Delivery.

“Very early in its existence the SIC undertook to define scientific intelligence, delineate areas of particular interest and establish committees to handle these areas,” wrote SIC chairman Dr. Karl Weber, in a CIA monograph that remained classified until September 2008. “Priority was accorded to atomic energy, biological warfare, chemical warfare, electronic warfare, guided missiles, aircraft, undersea warfare and medicine”—every area involving Operation Paperclip scientists.

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.

In June 1950, North Korean forces, supported by Communist benefactors, moved across the 38th parallel, marking the start of the Korean War. The idea that the Communists were also about to invade Western Europe took hold in the Pentagon.

“Due to the threat of impending hostilities in Europe and the possibility that forces of the USSR may rapidly overrun the continent, this command is concerned with the problem of the immediate implementation of an evacuation program for German and Austrian scientists.” Were these scientists to “fall into enemy hands… they would constitute a threat to our national security.” Air force intelligence recommended to JIOA that it initiate a “mass procurement effort” in Germany.

The Korean War sparked a new fire under Operation Paperclip.

to a new JIOA program being fast-tracked out of the Pentagon, named Accelerated Paperclip but called Project 63 in the field:

Much to everyone’s surprise, the offers made under Accelerated Paperclip were rejected by many of the German scientists who were approached.

The Peck Panel had finished its review process and recommended “substantial reductions of sentences” in the majority of cases involving lengthy prison terms. As for those who had been handed death sentences, the panel advised McCloy to consider each case individually.

At Nuremberg, the judges had ordered the confiscation of property of convicted war criminals whose money was so often earned on the backs of slave laborers, tens of thousands of whom had been worked to death. Now, the Peck Panel suggested that this confiscation order be rescinded.

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 first principle of the Nuremberg Code was that informed voluntary consent was required in absolute terms.

Beecher traveled to Germany to observe what was happening at Camp King. He was a colleague of Dr. Leopold Alexander’s in Boston and, like Alexander, was an outspoken advocate of the Nuremberg Code, the first principle of which is informed consent. And yet in one of the stranger Cold War cases of dissimulation, Dr. Beecher was a participant in secret, government-sponsored medical experiments that did not involve consent.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Olson had traveled across the United States overseeing field tests that dispersed biological agents from aircraft and crop dusters in San Francisco, the Midwest, and Alaska.

JIOA officials became furious as they watched the CIA poach German scientists and technicians from the Accelerated Paperclip lists.

It is as true today as it was when World War II ended that America relies upon the advancement of science and technology—and industry—to prepare for the next war.

Eisenhower cautioned Americans to be wary of “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

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 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].’”

Shortly after the Korean War ended with an armistice on July 27, 1953, the Chemical Corps began releasing public service announcements to educate Americans about chemical warfare.

Later that same year, Edgewood chemists found an even more lethal killer, “a toxic insecticide that penetrated the skin like snake venom,” explains Jonathan Tucker. This nerve agent was code-named VX (the V stood for venomous)—a battlefield killer that was three times more toxic than sarin when inhaled and one thousand times more lethal when it came in contact with the skin.

In other situations it behooved the CIA to locate and weaponize a poison where death came after a delay, sometimes with an incubation period of about eight or twelve hours, sometimes much longer. The SO Division’s Agent Branch worked to find poisons that could make a target mildly ill for a short or long period of time followed by death, very ill for a short or long time followed by death, or any number of combinations, including mild to extreme illness followed by death.

Through the lens of history, it is remarkable to think that U.S. biological warfare and chemical warfare programs grew so quickly to the size they did. But the Pentagon was able to keep the scope and cost of these weapons programs secret from Congress in much the same way that it was able to keep the damaging details of Operation Paperclip secret from the public. Everything was classified.

America’s Cold War biological and chemical weapons programs existed in the shadows, and the majority of the Nazi scientists who worked on them maintained anonymity for decades.

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.

The Saturn V rocket would need its own launch complex and hangar. Cape Canaveral, on Florida’s east coast, was chosen as the perfect site. On July 1, 1962, NASA activated its Launch Operations Center there, naming Kurt Debus as director. Debus was the ardent Nazi who, during the war and on his own volition, had turned an engineering colleague over to the Gestapo for making anti-Hitler remarks. To house the giant Saturn rocket, NASA constructed the Vertical Assembly Building on nearby Merritt Island. The structure would soon become the most voluminous building in the world—larger than the Pentagon and almost as tall as the Washington Monument. It was designed by Bernhard Tessmann, former facilities designer at Peenemünde and Nordhausen, and one of the two men who, at war’s end, stashed the V-2 documents in the Dörnten mine.

The experiments were designed to determine how soldiers and airmen would perform on the nuclear battlefield. The AEC and the DoD agreed that subjecting soldiers to blast and radiation effects of various-sized atomic bombs was required to accurately prepare for a nuclear war.

In the midst of the scandal, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle telephoned Ambros at his home in Mannheim, Germany, and asked Ambros about his 1948 conviction at Nuremberg for mass murder and slavery. “This happened a very long time ago,” Ambros told the reporter. “It involved Jews. We do not think about it anymore.”

There is a broad misconception in America that there exists some kind of automatic declassification system that requires the government to reveal its secret programs after thirty or fifty years. In reality, the most damaging programs often remain classified for as long as they can be kept secret.

In 2005, in a final report to Congress, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, the Interagency Working Group determined that “[t]he notion that they [the U.S. military and the CIA] employed only a few ‘bad apples’ will not stand up to the new documentation.” In hindsight, wrote the Interagency Working Group, the government’s use of Nazis was a very bad idea, and “there was no compelling reason to begin the postwar era with the assistance of some of those associated with the worst crimes of the war.” And yet history now shows us that that is exactly what the American government did—and continued to do throughout the Cold War.

Otto Ambros lived until 1990, to the age of ninety-two. After his death, the chemical conglomerate BASF, on whose board of directors he had served, lauded him as “an expressive entrepreneurial figure of great charisma.”

The National Space Club Florida Committee, one of three committees of the National Space Club in Washington, D.C., gives out a similarly prestigious space-related award called the Dr. Kurt H. Debus Award. This annual award is named in honor of Operation Paperclip’s Kurt Debus, who became the first director of the Kennedy Space Center. Kurt Debus is the scientist who, during the war, was an enthusiastic member of the SS, wore the SS uniform to work, and turned a colleague over to the Gestapo for making anti-Nazi remarks and failing to give Debus the Nazi salute.

Included on this list, which had been in Colonel Benford’s possession, were seven Nazi doctors hired under Operation Paperclip: Theodor Benzinger, Kurt Blome, Konrad Schäfer, Walter Schreiber, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, Siegfried Ruff, and Oskar Schröder. The fact became instantly clear: U.S. Army intelligence knew all along that these doctors were implicated in murder yet chose to classify the list and hire the doctors for Operation Paperclip.