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

by Annie Jacobsen

In 1926, von Greim was hired by Chiang Kai-shek to set up the Chinese air force in Canton, China.

Born in 1905, Benzinger was described, in his army intelligence dossier, as “an old school Prussian, willful, self-serving and willing to get what he wants by any means.”

He and his wife, Ilse Benzinger, were members of the NSV, the Nazi Party’s so-called social welfare organization, which was overseen by Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Ilse was active in NSV-sponsored programs like Mother and Child, whereby unwed German mothers could birth Aryan children on bucolic baby farms.

In addition to researching aviation medicine, Benzinger became a pilot and served as a colonel in the Luftwaffe. He flew reconnaissance and combat missions over the British Isles. In 1939, showing “bravery before the enemy” Benzinger was awarded the Iron Cross, Class I and Class II.

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.

By the end of January 1946, 160 Nazi scientists had been secreted into America. The single largest group was comprised of the 115 rocket specialists at Fort Bliss, Texas, led by Wernher von Braun.

the first V-2 was launched, in April 1946, it climbed to three miles. Although one of the fins fell off, von Braun felt inspired to draft a memo to Robert Oppenheimer, director of Los Alamos, proposing the idea of merging his missile with the atomic bomb. The memo turned into a proposal, “Use of Atomic Warheads in Projected Missiles,” submitted to the army. In it, von Braun discussed building a rocket that could carry a two-thousand-plus-pound nuclear payload a distance of one thousand miles.

at Wright Field. There, five hundred employees sorted, catalogued, indexed, and put on microfiche some 1,500 tons of German documents captured by Alsos, CIOS, and T-Forces after the war. So abundant was the material that more than one hundred thousand technical words had been added to the Air Material Command’s English-language dictionary.

Hiring Patin for a U.S. Army Air Forces contract meant ignoring his past. His armaments factories used slave labor, which was a war crime. In an autobiographical report for Putt, Albert Patin admitted that many of the people in his six-thousand-person workforce were slave laborers supplied by Heinrich Himmler’s SS.

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.

The Soviet Union, wrote the JIC, sought world domination and would begin by bringing other nations into Soviet control to isolate the capitalist world. JIC saw a future war with the Soviet Union as being of apocalyptic proportion.

In a war “with the Soviet Union we must envisage complete and total hostilities unrestricted in any way on the Soviet part by adherence to any international convention or humanitarian principals,” noted JCS 1696. “Preparations envisaged on our part and our plans must be on this basis.” In other words, for the United States to prepare for “total war” with the Soviets,

Blome’s American counterpart in wartime plague-weapon research was a left-leaning bacteriologist named Dr. Theodor Rosebury. During the war, the biological weapons work Rosebury conducted was so highly classified that it was considered as secret as atomic research. He had worked at a research facility outside Washington, D.C., called Camp Detrick. It was like Posen, only bigger. Detrick had 2,273 personnel working on Top Secret biological warfare programs. Like Blome, Rosebury worked on bubonic plague. Rosebury’s colleagues worked on 199 other germ bomb projects, including anthrax spore production, plant and animal diseases, and insect research, in an effort to determine which bugs were the most effective carriers of certain diseases. Almost no one in America had any idea that the U.S. Army had been developing biological weapons until January 3, 1946,

America may have won the war with the mighty atomic bomb, but biological weapons were the poor man’s nuclear weapon.

Schreiber’s vast knowledge of and experience with hygiene-related epidemics made his expertise highly valuable to the Nazi Party. He was put in charge of the research to fight infectious disease, and also in remedial means to defend against outbreaks. In this way, he became privy to Reich medical policy from the top down. In 1942, Hermann Göring also put General Schreiber in charge of protection against gas and bacteriological warfare, which is how he came to be in charge of the Reich’s program to produce vaccines.

Shortly after midnight in the early morning hours of October 16, 1946, three sets of gallows had been built and painted black. Each had thirteen stairs leading up to a platform and crossbeam from which a noose with thirteen coils hung. The executioner was Master Sergeant John C. Woods, a man whose credentials included hanging 347 U.S. soldiers over a period of fifteen years for capitol crimes including desertion. At 1:00 a.m. Colonel Andrus read the names of the condemned out loud. After each name, a bilingual assistant said, “Tod durch den Strang,” or death by the rope.

Was the old German proverb true? Jedem das Seine. Does everyone get what he deserves?

Operation Paperclip was now officially a “denial program,” meaning that any German scientist of potential interest to the Russians needed to be denied to the Russians, at whatever cost. There were now 233 Paperclip scientists in the United States in military custody.

Alexander Lippisch, inventor of the Messerschmitt Me 163 jet fighter,

One American officer, assigned as a spokesman for the Germans, told reporters he so enjoyed working with German scientists, “I wish we had more of them.”

Other German scientists at Wright Field were kept away from reporters, particularly those men who had been members of Nazi Party paramilitary squads like the SA and the SS. In aerodynamicist Rudolf Hermann’s intelligence file, it was written that during the war, while working inside the wind tunnels in Kochel, Bavaria, Hermann had held morning roll calls in his brown SA uniform, and that he often gave speeches in support of Hitler.

The information in engineer Emil Salmon’s OMGUS security report was even more incriminating. At the aircraft factory where he had worked, Salmon had been known to carry a rifle and wear an SS uniform. “He also belonged to the Storm Troops [sic] (SA) from 1933–1945...

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.

In the fall of 1946, of the 233 Nazi scientists in America, 140 were at Wright Field.

Georg Rickhey’s expertise in underground engineering was not limited to the construction of the Führerbunker. During the war, he had also served as a director of the Reich’s Demag motorcar company, where he oversaw the construction of a massive underground facility where tanks had been assembled. And as general manager of the Mittelwerk, he oversaw the construction of the rocket assembly facility near Nordhausen. In his army intelligence dossier, it was noted that Rickhey had overseen the underground construction of more than 1,500,000 square feet of space.

“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.

“Prison life is ideal for controlled laboratory work with humans,” Servatius read, quoting American doctors who had been interviewed by Life reporters. The idea that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, and that both nations had used human test subjects during war, was unsettling. It pushed the core Nazi concept of the Untermenschen to the side. The Nuremberg prosecutors were left looking like hypocrites.

Blome allegedly knew more about bubonic plague research than anyone else in the world. But, given his former position in Hitler’s inner circle, coupled with the fact that Blome had worn the Golden Party Badge, bringing him to America as part of Operation Paperclip remained too difficult for the U.S. Army to justify. But as the Cold War gained momentum and intense suspicion of the Soviets increased, even someone like Kurt Blome would eventually be deemed eligible for Operation Paperclip.

Chemical Corps finally imported its first German scientist, an expert in tabun nerve agent synthesis named Dr. Friedrich “Fritz” Hoffmann. 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.

The man in charge of the tabun nerve agent program for the Chemical Corps was Colonel Charles E. Loucks, commander of the Army Chemical Center at Edgewood Arsenal, in Maryland.

Major Loucks spent the first year of World War II refining the U.S. military’s standard-issue gas mask. He even worked with Walt Disney and the Sun Rubber Company to transform the spooky, apocalyptic-looking face protector into a more kid-friendly version with a Mickey Mouse face.

Fortunately, World War II ended without the use of chemical weapons, but experts like Charles Loucks were caught off guard when they learned just how outperformed America’s chemists had been by Hitler’s. With the discovery that the Nazis had mass-produced previously unknown agents like tabun and sarin gas came the realization that if Germany had initiated chemical warfare it would have been a grossly uneven match.

Through their own version of Operation Paperclip, a parallel exploitation program called Operation Osoaviakhim, the Soviets captured German chemist Dr. von Bock and members of his team. The group was taken to Chemical Works No. 91,

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. A new age was dawning for the controversial Paperclip program.

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.

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. Some of the tests took place in Utah, at the Dugway Proving Ground. Other tests took place inside Edgewood’s “gassing chamber for human tests,”

Greene noticed that, after soldiers were put in the “gassing chamber,” they became “partially disabled for from one to three weeks with fatigue, lassitude, complete loss of initiative and interest, and apathy.”

Dr. L. Wilson Greene saw in this a new kind of warfare. He sat down and began outlining his idea for America’s war-fighting future in an opus that would become known as “Psychochemical Warfare: A New Concept of War.”

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

If anyone could find and prepare the ideal incapacitating agent for the battlefield, Hoffmann could. He began a broad spectrum of research on everything from well-known street drugs to highly obscure toxins from the third world. There was mescaline, obtained from the peyote cactus and used by Native American Indians, with side effects ranging from divination to boredom. He studied fly agaric, a hallucinogenic mushroom found on the barren slopes of Mongolia and rumored to facilitate contact with the spirit world, and piruri, a toxic vegetable leaf from Australia, used by Aborigines, that was found to suppress thirst. Yaxee and epena, from Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil, caused people to see things that weren’t really there. It was a drug that for centuries had been “used by primitive tribes to escape the realities of their plight by using hallucinogenic properties.”

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.

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.

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 controvers...

Dr. Traub was a virologist, microbiologist, and professor and a doctor of veterinary medicine.

Before the war, Traub was given the opportunity to stay in America and continue his research full-time. He chose to return to Germany, citing loyalty to the Reich. In 1939, Traub was drafted into the Wehrmacht, Veterinary Corps, and in 1940, he was elevated to captain and fought in the campaign against France. He was a member of several Nazi organizations, including the Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrerkorps (NSKK), or National Socialist Motor Corps; the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV); and the Reichsluftschutzbund (RLB), or State Air Protection Corps. Dr. Traub’s talents as a virologist had been identified, and he had been pulled back from the front lines and assigned to biological weapons work.

Kuhn was a chemical weapons expert for the Reich and developed soman nerve agent. Soman was even deadlier than sarin and tabun but considered too delicate and therefore too costly to industrialize.

Richard Kuhn had a connection with a scientist in Switzerland with whom General Loucks was particularly interested in working. The scientist had been investigating a little-known incapacitating agent that was far more potent than anything the Chemical Corps was working on at the time. This Swiss chemist had recently given a lecture, “New Hallucinatory Agent,” to a gathering of the Swiss Society of Psychiatry and the Association of Physicians in Zurich. On December 16, 1948, General Loucks took a trip to Switzerland.

General Loucks revealed that this Swiss chemist referred to him by Richard Kuhn had been Professor Werner Stoll, a psychiatric researcher at the University of Zurich. 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. Stoll did not discover LSD. That distinction went to Albert Hofmann, a chemist for Sandoz pharmaceutical company in Basel. 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.” 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. Eventually, physicians and chemists from Operation Paperclip would work on jointly oper...

Schieber was a Nazi Bonzen, a big wheel. He was unattractive, fat, and wore a Hitler mustache and false teeth. Since the 1920s he had been regarded as one of Hitler’s Alte Kämpfer, the Old Fighters, trusted members of Hitler’s inner circle who wore the Golden Party Badge. Dr. Schieber was also a loyal SS man and served on the personal staff of Heinrich Himmler. SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Walter Schieber had been a dedicated and loyal member of the Nazi Party since 1931. He had also been frequently photographed alongside Hitler, Himmler, Bormann, and Speer as part of the inner circle.

Schieber could be part of Operation Paperclip as long as no one knew who Schieber really was. Unlike standard operating procedure with Operation Paperclip applicants, there was to be no photograph of SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Walter Schieber attached to his intelligence file.