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November 13 - December 14, 2020
At the age of thirty-seven, Albert Speer was now responsible for all science and technology programs necessary for waging war. Of the hundreds of weapons projects he was involved in, it was the V-2 that he favored most.
By 1939 the SS had masterminded a vast network of state-sponsored slavery across Nazi-occupied Europe through an innocuous-sounding division called the SS Business Administration Main Office. This office was overseen by Heinrich Himmler but required partnerships. These included many companies from the private sector, including IG Farben, Volkswagen, Heinkel, and Steyr-Daimler-Puch. The most significant partner was Albert Speer’s Ministry of Armaments and War Production.
The man in charge of “personnel” at the Mittelwerk, its general manager, was a forty-six-year-old engineer named Georg Rickhey, an ardent Nazi and party member since 1931. On Rickhey’s résumé, later used by the Americans to employ him, Rickhey described himself as “Mittelwerk General Manager, production of all ‘V’ and rocket weapons, construction of underground mass-production facilities, director of entire concern.” As general manager of the sprawling, subterranean enterprise, Rickhey was in charge of “renting” slaves from the SS. As a former Demag Armor Works executive, he had already
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“The SS began, in effect, a rent-a-slave service to firms and government enterprises at a typical rate of four marks a day for unskilled workers and six marks for skilled ones,” writes V-weapon historian Michael J. Neufeld. The slaves were disposable. When they died they were replaced. At Nordhausen the SS gave Rickhey a discount, charging the Mittelwerk between two and three reichsmarks per man, per day.
In December of 1944, with slave laborers dying by the thousands in the Mittelwerk tunnels and V-2 rockets crashing into civilian population centers, causing mayhem and terror across Europe, it would have been hard to imagine that some of those directly responsible would ever be regarded as individuals of great value to the United States. And yet in less than a year Arthur Rudolph, Georg Rickhey, Wernher von Braun, Major General Walter Dornberger, and other rocket engineers would secretly be heading to America to work.
Just as many of Hitler’s scientists would soon become American scientists, so would many of the Reich’s headquarters and command posts become key facilities used for Operation Paperclip. Castle Kransberg also had a storied past in the history of warfare. The structure dated from the eleventh century, but its original foundation had been built on top of the ruins of a ring-wall fortification constructed in the time of the Roman Empire. Battles had been waged in this region, on and off, for over two thousand years.
Castle Kransberg was grand and splendid, built piecemeal over the centuries to include watchtowers, half-timbered meeting halls, and stone walls. It had 150-odd rooms, including a wing that had been redesigned and renovated by Albert Speer in 1939, when Speer was still Hitler’s architect. At Hitler’s behest Speer added several state-of-the art defense features to Kransberg Castle, including a twelve-hundred-square-foot underground bunker complex, complete with poison gas air locks designed to protect inhabitants from a chemical warfare attack.
Auschwitz was the Reich’s largest extermination center. As a concentration camp it consisted of three separate but symbiotic camps: Auschwitz I, the main camp; Auschwitz II, the Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria; and Auschwitz III, a labor-concentration camp run by the chemical giant IG Farben. Since April 7, 1942, IG Farben had been building the Reich’s largest chemical plant at Auschwitz, using a workforce of slave laborers selected from the Auschwitz train car platforms. Farben called their facility “IG Auschwitz.” IG Auschwitz was the first corporate concentration camp in the Third
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At this facility, called Dyhernfurth after the small riverside village in which it was located, IG Farben produced chemical weapons—deadly nerve agents—on an industrial scale.
Camouflaged in a forest of pine trees, inside a large complex of underground bombproof bunkers, a workforce of 560 white-collar Germans and 3,000 slave laborers had been mass-producing, since 1942, liquid tabun—a deadly nerve agent the very existence of which was unknown to the outside world. Tabun was one of Hitler’s most jealously guarded secrets, a true wonder weapon of the most diabolical kind. Similar to a pesticide, the organophosphate tabun was one of the most deadly substances in the world.
Like the synthetic rubber and fuel factory at Auschwitz, the nerve agent production facility at Dyhernfurth was owned and operated by IG Farben, and here the Speer ministry worked with Farben to fill aerial bombs with tabun that could eventually be deployed from Luftwaffe planes.
Enough poison gas had been produced here to decimate the population of London or Paris on any given day.
The Dyhernfurth complex was a sprawling, state-of-the-art production plant. Speer’s Armaments and War Production Ministry had paid Farben nearly 200 million reichsmarks to build and operate it. The facility had been secretly and skillfully designed and managed by Otto Ambros. As he had done with IG Auschwitz, Ambros had overseen every element of this chemical weapons factory dating from the winter of 1941,
As Nazi Germany blended industry, war making, and genocide, few corporations were as central a player as IG Farben. The chemical concern was the largest corporation in Europe and the fourth largest corporation in the world. IG Farben owned the patent on Zyklon B. And perhaps no single person at Farben was as central a figure in this equation as Otto Ambros
There was a second scientist who played an important role in chemical weapons—a man who, like Otto Ambros, would be targeted for Operation Paperclip. This was SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Walter Schieber, a chemist by training, Speer’s deputy and director of the Armaments Supply Office. Schieber was a hard-core Nazi ideologue and a member of Reichsführer-SS Himmler’s personal staff.
group of documents would lead to what would become known as the Osenberg List. Dr. Werner Osenberg, a mechanical engineer, was a dedicated Nazi and member of the SS; he was also a high-ranking member of the Gestapo, the secret police. In June 1943 Osenberg was assigned by Göring to run the so-called Planning Office of the Reich Research Council, which was dedicated to warfare. Per a Führer decree of June 9, 1942, the Research Council’s charter read: “Leading men of science above all, are to make research fruitful for warfare by working together in their special fields.”
From the council’s Planning Office, Osenberg’s job was to coordinate a Who’s Who list of German scientists, engineers, doctors, and technicians. With bureaucratic precision Osenberg set to work, tracking down and cataloguing every scientist in Germany. Osenberg’s mission was to put these men into service for the Reich. In short order he had compiled a list of fifteen thousand men and fourteen hundred research facilities. All across Germany scientists, engineers, and technicians were recalled from the front lines, an act Hitler called the Osenberg Action.
Not only was this list a record of who had been working on what scientific project for the Reich, but it contained addresses, including one for Werner Osenberg himself. Goudsmit dispatched a team to a little town near Hannover. There, Alsos agents captured Osenberg and his complete outfit.
The Alsos officers packed up Osenberg’s office and took him to Paris, where he was put to work organizing information. Goudsmit was appalled by the hubris Osenberg displayed after he was installed in an office in a guarded facility in Versailles. “Here, Osenberg had set up business as usual; he merely had his secretary change the address on his letterhead to… “at Present in Paris,” Goudsmit explained after the war.
Since 1943, Siegfried Knemeyer had served as chief of all air force technical developments for the Luftwaffe. His title was technical adviser to Reichsmarschall Göring, who adored Knemeyer, calling him “my boy.” From aircraft engines to instruments, if a new component was being developed for the Luftwaffe, Göring wanted to know what Knemeyer had to say about it before he gave the project the go-ahead.
According to Nuremberg trial testimony, Speer instructed Knemeyer to hide Luftwaffe technical information in the forest outside Berlin. Stashing official documents was a treasonable offense, but according to Knemeyer’s personal papers, Speer and Knemeyer had agreed that Germany’s seminal scientific progress in aeronautics could not, under any circumstances, fall into Russian hands.
During the second week of April in 1945, four key facilities were seized—at Nordhausen, Geraberg, Völkenrode, and Raubkammer—each of which would lead to the capture of key scientists who would in turn become part of Operation Paperclip.
A number of high-ranking Farben executives were known to have houses in Heidelberg, but to date no one had been able to find Hermann Schmitz, the company’s powerful and secretive CEO. Schmitz was also a director of the Deutsche Reichsbank, the German central bank, and director of the Bank for International Settlements in Geneva.
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America’s wartime espionage agency and the precursor to the CIA.
Dr. Kurt Blome. He was deputy surgeon general of the Third Reich and vice president of the Reich’s Physicians’ League, Reichsärztekammer. He was believed to have reported directly to Göring and maybe even to Himmler, or to both.
Dr. Kurt Blome had been part of a top-tier group of Nazi doctors who focused on “hygiene.” This word connoted disease control but was also believed to have been used by the Reich as a euphemism for ethnic cleansing and extermination of Jews.
Beasley’s job was to locate the engineers who had built the fortified underground weapons facilities in the Harz. These bombproof bunkers were extraordinary engineering feats, and the USSBS was impressed with how so many of them had withstood relentless Allied air bombing campaigns.
Georg Rickhey was the liaison between the Mittelwerk and the Ministry of Armaments.
Beasley told the former general manager of the Mittelwerk, “[W]e accept you as an official of the German Government; we have patience and time and lots of people—you have lost the war and so as far as I am concerned you are a man who knows a lot about rockets. As an American officer, I want my country to have full possession of all your knowledge. To my superiors, I shall recommend that you be taken to the United States.” Rickhey embraced this news with open arms. He told Beasley that he was a scientist and only wanted to work in pleasant surroundings, like the United States.
Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler were dead. Albert Speer was in custody. So were Siegfried Knemeyer and Dr. Kurt Blome. Otto Ambros was under house arrest in Gendorf, with no one in CIOS or Alsos yet having figured out who he really was. Wernher von Braun, Walter Dornberger, and Arthur Rudolph were in custody, working toward contracts with the U.S. Army. Georg Rickhey had a job in London, translating documents for the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey.
In May 1945 there was no official policy regarding what to do with any of them. “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.”
Official policy would follow, one version for the public and another for the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). A headless monster called Operation Paperclip would emerge.
“The scale on which science and engineering have been harnessed to the chariot of destruction in Germany is indeed amazing. There is a tremendous amount to be learnt in Germany at the present time.” —W. S. Farren, British aviation expert with the Royal Aircraft Establishment
“Clearly German science must be curbed,” noted Army Air Forces Lieutenant Colonel John O’Mara, in the CIOS report he authored on the rise of the Luftwaffe.
SHAEF had set up internment centers where more than fifteen hundred scientists were now being held separate from other German prisoners of war. The U.S. Army had approximately 500 scientists in custody in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in the Bavarian Alps, including the von Braun and Dornberger group; there were 444 persons of interest detained in Heidenheim, north of Munich; 200 were in Zell am See, in Austria; 30 kept at Château du Grande Chesnay, in France. The U.S. Navy had 200 scientists and engineers at a holding facility in Kochel, Germany, including many wind tunnel experts. The Army Air
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General Wolfe wrote to General Clay with a revised idea. Not only did the United States military need to act immediately to capture Nazi armaments, Wolfe said, but America needed to hire the “German scientists and engineers” who had created the weapons and put them to work in America. “If steps to this end are taken, the double purpose of preventing Germany’s resurgence as a war power and advancing our own industrial future may be served.” Clay did not respond; he had already told General Wolfe to back off for six months. Meanwhile, the work that was going on at Nordhausen under the auspices
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Riedel joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and was a member of five Nazi organizations. In a series of interviews with Riedel, Major Staver found him to be a strange bird. Riedel was obsessed with outer space vehicles, which he called “passenger rockets.” In one interview, Riedel insisted he’d designed these passenger rockets for “short trips around the moon,” and that he’d been pursuing “space mirrors which would be used for good and possibly evil.” Riedel said he knew of at least forty rocket scientists besides himself who should be brought to America to complete this groundbreaking work.
Dr. Howard Percy “H. P.” Robertson. Robertson had been a team leader for Operation Alsos, and now he served President Eisenhower as chief of the Scientific Intelligence Advisory Section under SHAEF. Dr. H. P. Robertson told Major Staver that he intended to take rocket engineers Fleischer, Riedel, and Rees to Garmisch-Partenkirchen for interrogation, where they would be held alongside General Dornberger and Wernher von Braun until the War Department General Staff decided on a policy regarding Nazi scientists.
While at Princeton, Dr. Robertson had become friendly with Albert Einstein. The two men worked on theoretical projects together and spent time discussing Hitler, National Socialism, and the war. Einstein, born in Germany, had worked there until 1933, becoming director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics and professor at the University of Berlin. But when Hitler came to power, Einstein immediately renounced his citizenship in defiance of the Nazi Party and immigrated to the United States.
Denazification was an Allied strategy to democratize and demilitarize postwar Germany and Austria through tribunals in local civilian courts (Spruchkammern) that were set up to determine individual defendants’ standings. Each German who was tried was judged to belong in one of five categories, or classes: (1) major offenders; (2) party activists, militarists, and profiteers; (3) individuals who were less incriminated; (4) Nazi Party followers; (5) those who were exonerated.
Special Mission V-2 was declared a success. The U.S. Army Ordnance, Rocket Branch, now had one hundred rockets and fourteen tons of technical documents in its possession.
Dr. Herbert Wagner had been chief missile design engineer at Henschel Aircraft. He was the man behind the first guided missile used in combat by the Reich, the Hs 293. This remote-control bomb was the nemesis of the U.S. Navy and the British Royal Navy
On May 15, 1945, a Nazi submarine, identified in a New York Times headline as “the Japan-bound U-234,” surrendered itself to the USS Sutton in the waters five hundred miles off Cape Race, Newfoundland. Inside the submarine, which was en route to Japan, was a cache of Nazi wonder weapons, “said to contain what few aviation secrets may be left,” as well as “other war-weapon plans and pieces of equipment.” One of the wonder weapons on board was Dr. Wagner’s Hs 293 glider bomb, meant for use against the U.S. Navy in the Pacific. Additionally, there were drawings and plans for the V-1 flying bomb
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The scientist in the submarine was Dr. Heinz Schlicke, director of Naval Test Fields at Kiel. To the public he was only identified as a German “technician.” In fact, Dr. Schlicke was one of the most qualified Nazi scientists in the field of electronic warfare. His areas of expertise included radio-location techniques, camouflage, jamming and counterjamming, remote control, and infrared.
The navy wanted to hire Schlicke immediately,
Nazis were known to be breaking new ground were air-sea rescue programs, high-altitude studies, and decompression sickness studies. In other words, Nazi doctors were supposedly leading the world’s research in how pilots performed in extreme cold, extreme altitude, and at extreme speeds.
Dr. Alexander would unwittingly become one of the most important figures in the Nuremberg doctors’ trial. And he would inadvertently become a central player in one of the most dramatic events in the history of Operation Paperclip. That would take another seven years.
inside Dachau, in the secret barracks called Experimental Cell Block Five, that Luftwaffe doctors had conducted some of the most barbaric and criminal medical experiments of the war.
Leopold Alexander longed to be a doctor, like his father, Gustav. “One of the strongest unconscious motives for becoming a physician was the strong bond of identification with my father,” he once said, explaining the pull toward medicine. Gustav Alexander was an ear, nose, and throat doctor in turn-of-the-century Vienna, a distinguished scholar who published more than eighty scientific papers before Leopold was born. His mother, Gisela, was the first woman awarded a PhD in philosophy from the University of Vienna, the oldest university in the German-speaking world. From a young age Leopold led
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Out at sea, a strange event occurred. It happened in the middle of the long journey, when his ship was more than a thousand miles from land. A series of violent storms struck, sending passengers inside for days until finally the weather cleared. On the first clear day, Dr. Alexander ventured outside to play shuffleboard. Gazing out across the wide sea, he spotted an enormous single wave traveling with great speed and force, bearing down on his tiny steamship. There was no escape from what he quickly recognized as a tidal wave. Before Dr. Alexander could run back inside the ship, the President
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