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

by Annie Jacobsen

Some officials believed that by endorsing the Paperclip program they were accepting the lesser of two evils—that if America didn’t recruit these scientists, the Soviet Communists surely would.

Operation Paperclip left behind a legacy of ballistic missiles, sarin gas cluster bombs, underground bunkers, space capsules, and weaponized bubonic plague.

Von Braun and Dornberger, wearing crisp tuxedos, each with a Knight’s Cross from Hitler dangling around his neck, read telegrams of congratulations to Nazi officials as the group toasted their success with flutes of champagne. In the eyes of the Reich, Hitler’s rocketeers had good reason to celebrate. In Antwerp at 3:20 p.m., a V-2 rocket had smashed into the Rex Cinema, where almost 1,200 people were watching a Gary Cooper film. It was the highest death toll from a single rocket attack during the war—567 casualties.

in Disney’s popular film Fantasia, these mountains had meaning. They were where forces of evil gathered to do their handiwork. But at the end of the Second World War, the Reich’s secret, subterranean penal colony at Nordhausen was fact, not fiction.

The first group of 107 slave laborers arrived at the Mittelwerk in late August 1943. They came from the Buchenwald concentration camp, located fifty miles to the southeast. The wrought-iron sign over the Buchenwald gate read Jedem das Seine, “Everyone gets what he deserves.” Digging tunnels was hard labor, but the SS feared prisoners might revolt if they had mining tools, so the men dug with their bare hands.

war crimes investigators determined that approximately half of the sixty thousand men eventually brought to Nordhausen were worked to death.

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

“Prisoners were hanged up to 57 in one day,” read one war crimes report. “They were hanged in the tunnels with the help of an electrically controlled crane, a dozen at a time, their hands bound behind their back, a piece of wood was put in their mouth… to prevent shouting.”

Von Braun, still requiring medical attention and encumbered by a heavy cast, was taken to the Alps in a private car. Dornberger and his staff drove themselves, fleeing the Harz in a small convoy.

As soldiers pushed forward into Germany, accompanying them were more than three thousand scientific and technical experts with the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee, or CIOS, the joint British-American program that had been established in London the summer before.

Spearheading Top Secret missions for British intelligence was a group of commandos called 30 Assault Unit, led by Ian Fleming, the personal assistant to the director of British naval intelligence and future author of the James Bond novels.

“The deadly Jewish-Bolshevik enemy with his masses is beginning his final attack,” he told troops on the eastern front, in a last appeal on April 15. The Russians were determined to exterminate all German people, Hitler promised, “the old men and children will be murdered, women and girls will be degraded as barracks whores.” Everybody else would be marched off to Siberia.

Major General Knerr sent a memo to the War Department in Washington, D.C., explaining that using Luftwaffe technology to fight the war in Japan was imperative. He added that the scientists’ Nazi Party membership needed to be overlooked. “Pride and face saving have no place in national insurance,” wrote Knerr.

Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, had been established by Himmler on March 20, 1933. It was originally a place where Communists and other political enemies of National Socialism, the ideology of the Nazi Party, were sent.

It was May 2, 1945, and although Hitler was dead, the German Reich had not yet surrendered. Allies feared members of a fanatical resistance group, the Werewolves, were lurking in Bavaria, planning a final attack.

At this point, Tilley wrote in his CIOS report, he was surprised at how “highly emotional” Schmitz became. What Tilley did not yet know was that he was looking at Schmitz’s secret photo album that chronicled the building history of Farben’s labor concentration camp, IG Auschwitz, from the very start. In May of 1945, almost no one, including Major Tilley, had any idea what really had happened at Auschwitz—that at least 1.1 million people had been exterminated there.

Captain Clement Wells, spotted a blue-tipped object—hidden in the back of Himmler’s mouth. When Dr. Wells tried to remove it, Himmler jerked his head back and bit down. The vial contained poison. Within seconds, the prisoner collapsed. Now Heinrich Himmler was dead. An assistant to Dr. Wells noted in his diary, “[T]his evil thing breathed its last breath at 23:14.”

the Russians were coming. That much was real. Nordhausen had been liberated by the Americans and was originally designated to be part of the American zone. Stalin protested, saying Russia had lost seventeen million men in the war and deserved greater reparations for greater losses sustained. The Allies agreed to turn over a large swath of American-held German territory to the Soviets on June 1. This territory included all of Nordhausen and everything in it.

For all the effort and moral compromise that went into Special Project V-2, the Red Army would now have no shortage of wonder weapons parts to choose from. The underground slave labor factory at Nordhausen was still virtually intact. Thousands of machine tools sat on the assembly lines ready to manufacture more parts.

As a war crimes investigator, Dr. Alexander was one of the first American servicemen to learn that the Reich had first sterilized and then euthanized nearly its entire population of mentally ill persons, including tens of thousands of children, under the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring.

Doctors at Dachau had frozen people to death, in tubs of ice-cold water, to see if they could be unfrozen and brought back to life. These experiments were apparently meant to simulate conditions that Luftwaffe pilots went through after they’d been shot down over the English Channel, Bigelow said.

Most disturbing to Alexander were a group of photographs showing what happened in the course of the experiments as healthy young men—classified by the Nazis as Untermenschen—were strapped into a harness inside the low-pressure chamber and subjected to explosive decompression. These photographs, astonishing in their sadism, were essentially before, during, and after pictures of murder in the name of medicine.

There were photographs of yet another of Dr. Strughold’s Luftwaffe colleagues, Dr. Ernst Holzlöhner, holding prisoners down in tubs of icy water while their body temperatures were recorded as they died.

Stripped of their power, small details spoke volumes to Dolibois. Göring was terrified of thunderstorms. Keitel was obsessed with sunbathing and staring at his reflection in Ashcan’s only mirror, in its entrance hall. Robert Ley was repeatedly reprimanded for masturbating in the bathtub. Joachim von Ribbentrop, named by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda as the best-dressed man in Germany for nine consecutive years, was a lazy slob. Day in and day out, John Dolibois interviewed them.

After a healthy ape was injected with a tiny amount of Preparation 9/91—just 1/10th of a milligram per kilo of body weight—the ape died in less than an hour. Next, Gross tested the substance on an ape inside an inhalation chamber. He watched this healthy ape die in sixteen minutes.

In his report to Göring, Krauch called tabun “the weapon of superior intelligence and superior scientific-technological thinking.” The beauty in the nerve agent, Krauch told Göring, was that it could be “used against the enemy’s hinterland.” Göring agreed, adding that what he liked most about chemical weapons was that they terrified people.

Dyhernfurth produced a second nerve agent, one that was even more potent than tabun, called sarin. Sarin was an acronym pieced together from the names of four key persons involved in its development: Schrader and Ambros from IG Farben and, from the German army, two officers named Rüdiger and Linde. Krauch told Major Tilley that the Dyhernfurth plant had fallen into Russian hands.

Tilley had also learned that the gas used to murder millions of people at Auschwitz and other concentration camps, Zyklon B, was a Farben product. Farben owned the patent on Zyklon B, and it was sold to the Reich by an IG Farben company.

Himmler’s area of greatest fascination, said Blome, was bubonic plague.

The longest any of the rats swam for was thirty minutes. Of those released a little over a half-mile from shore, only a third reached land. As far as Blome was concerned, Himmler’s U-boat dispersal idea was not practical.

Colonel Andrus racked his brain for ideas. How to make guilty men talk? “To jog the prisoners’ memories back to the reality of their grave situation we decided to show them atrocity films taken at Buchenwald.”

The lights went down and the first frames of the documentary footage flickered across the screen. Colonel Andrus watched his prisoners. Hans Frank, governor general of occupied Poland, the lawyer and PhD largely responsible for the murder of the Jewish population there, put a handkerchief to his mouth and gagged. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the former champagne salesman who became Hitler’s foreign minister and pressured foreign states to allow the deportation of Jews in their territories to extermination camps in the east, got up from his chair and walked out of the room. Albert Kesselring, commander of the Luftwaffe invasions into Poland, France, and the Soviet Union, who also led the Battle of Britain, turned white. Hermann Göring sighed as if bored. Julius Streicher, the schoolteacher who became Hitler’s mouthpiece and encouraged readers to exterminate the Jews, sat on his chair “clasping and unclasping his hands.”

U.S. Army signal intelligence engineers spent several days running hundreds of yards of wires through the house, under floorboards, behind walls, inside furniture cushions and lighting fixtures. In a final touch, they wired the garden for sound. The engineers burrowed through the backyard garden and attached tiny microphones to a single tree above the sitting area. All wires connected back to a recording machine capable of laying audio tracks down onto gramophone records. This was high technology in the summer of 1945.

At the Ashcan detention center, Göring, von Papen, Kesselring, and Admiral Horthy were loaded into an ambulance, a common means of transport after the war, and driven away. Black curtains had been drawn across the vehicle windows so the prisoners couldn’t see where they were being taken. For hours, the ambulance drove around in what Andrus called a “circuitous route,” covering fifty miles of terrain but never leaving Luxembourg. When the ambulance pulled up to the Germanic-looking house and unloaded the Nazis, Göring was thrilled.

When the British learned about the U.S. Army’s intentions to hire the German rocket scientists, they asked to first be allowed to conduct two rocket exploitation projects of their own. The Americans agreed and released into British custody a group of scientists, engineers, and technicians including Wernher von Braun, Walter Dornberger, and Arthur Rudolph. The first British project was called Operation Backfire, a V-2 field test that took place on Germany’s north coast, at a former Krupp naval gun range in Cuxhaven.

“The British pulled a sneaky on us,” explained Major Staver, who attended Operation Backfire. The Americans were not permitted to take Dornberger back after the Operation; instead, Dornberger was declared “on loan” and was taken to England. There, he and von Braun were “interrogated for a week by the British and then kept behind barbed wire in Wimbledon for four and one-half weeks while waiting to be picked up by the Americans.” Eventually, von Braun was returned but General Dornberger was not. Instead, he was issued a brown jumpsuit with the letters “PW” for Prisoner of War stenciled on the back.

The Americans were not permitted to take Dornberger back after the Operation; instead,

But often the fog rolled in, and the island was soaked in a thick, dense mist for days at a time. To pass the time the scientists stayed indoors and played Monopoly, which they called the “capitalists’ game.” Still, it was impossible to deny that Fort Strong took on a penal colony feel, as Kolm recalled. Soon the Germans started calling their new home Devil’s Island.

In the immediate aftermath of the German surrender, the Joint Intelligence Committee was focused on the emerging Soviet threat. Between June 15, 1945, and August 9, 1945, the JIC wrote and delivered sixteen major intelligence reports and twenty-seven policy papers to the Joint Chiefs. “The most important JIC estimates involved the military capabilities and future intentions of the USSR,”

In September 1945, the JIC advised the Joint Chiefs that the Soviet Union would postpone “open conflict” with the West in the immediate future but only so it could rebuild its military arsenal and by 1952 be back at fighting strength. After this date, said the JIC, the Soviets would be ready and able to engage the United States in “total war.”

What the Germans craved most was respect, and this eluded them. During the war Hitler’s scientists and industrialists had been treated with great admiration by the Reich. Most scientists enjoyed financial reward. But here at Wright Field, many of the Germans’ American counterparts looked down on them with disdain. “The mere mention of a German scientist is enough to precipitate emotions in Air Corp personnel ranging from vehemence to frustration,” one manager stated in an official classified report.

Armstrong’s discovery gave way to a major milestone in aviation medicine. Working with Heim on more tests, he inserted a viewing tube into the artery of a test animal. The two men took data on what happens to a mammal’s body at forty thousand, fifty thousand, and finally sixty-five thousand feet. They were the first to witness that body fluids boil at sixty-three thousand feet. This point would become known as the Armstrong line. This is the altitude beyond which humans cannot survive without a pressure suit.

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.

Schreiber was brought forth as a witness to show that, after the Nazis’ crushing defeat at Stalingrad, the Third Reich was planning to retaliate by conducting a major biological warfare offensive against Soviet troops. This was the first time information about biological warfare was being presented at the trial. The Allies were not informed that Schreiber was going to be a witness.

While the gallows were being built, drama unfolded in the prison. Göring had requested death by firing squad instead of hanging—to be hanged was something he considered beneath him. His plea was considered by the Allied Control Commission and rejected. The night before he was to be hanged, Göring swallowed a brass-and-glass vial of potassium cyanide that he had skillfully managed to keep hidden for eighteen months. In a suicide note, he explained how he had managed to keep the vial hidden from guards by alternating its hiding place, from his anus to his flabby navel. War crimes investigator Dr. Leopold Alexander would later learn that it was Dr. Rascher of the notorious Dachau experiments who had originally prepared Göring’s suicide vial for him.

The Society for the Prevention of World War III—a group of several thousand writers, artists, scholars, and journalists—did not mince words in their December journal. The group had been set up during the war to advocate for harsh punitive measures against a nation they perceived as inherently aggressive and militaristic, and against individuals they believed had substantially profited from the Nazi regime. “These German ‘experts’ performed wonders for the German war effort. Can one forget their gas chambers, their skill in cremation, their meticulous methods used to extract gold from the teeth of their victims, their wizardry in looting and thieving?”

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.

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. Since war’s end, the army’s Chemical Corps had received 530 tons of tabun, courtesy of the British, who had seized the Reich’s colossal cache from the Robbers’ Lair. But the Chemical Corps had yet to produce much tabun on its own, which is why Dr. Fritz Hoffmann had been brought to America under Operation Paperclip.

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.” 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.

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.