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

by Annie Jacobsen

Eventually, physicians and chemists from Operation Paperclip would work on jointly operated classified programs code-named Chatter, Bluebird, Artichoke, MKUltra, and others. LSD, the drug that induces paranoia and unpredictability and makes people see things that are not really there, would become a strange allegory for the Cold War.

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.

With Accelerated Paperclip’s newest policy in place, Class I offenders could now be put on a JIOA list. This included Dr. Schreiber, still serving as post physician at Camp King. Another Class I offender was Dr. Kurt Blome, former deputy surgeon general of the Third Reich and Hitler’s biological weapons expert. The sword and the shield. Finally, there was Dr. Otto Ambros, the war criminal convicted at Nuremberg of slavery and mass murder. In the winter of 1951, Otto Ambros was placed on the JIOA list for Accelerated Paperclip even though he was still incarcerated at Landsberg Prison.

John J. McCloy commuted ten of the fifteen death sentences. This meant that ten men condemned by International Military Tribunal judges—including the commander of the Malmédy Massacre, considered one of the war’s worst atrocities against prisoners of war, and several SS officers who had overseen the mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen—would be released back into society within one and seven years.

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 issue of being an ardent Nazi had lost first position and was relegated down to section six.

At the doctors’ trial, Janina Iwanska had delivered much of her testimony with Dr. Alexander standing beside her, pointing to her injuries and providing the judges with a professional medical analysis of what had been done to her by Nazi doctors during the war. Iwanska’s testimony was generally regarded as among the most powerful evidence presented at the trial. At Ravensbrück she had had her legs broken by Waffen-SS surgeon Dr. Karl Gebhardt and pieces of her shinbones removed. Dr. Gebhardt then ordered that Iwanska’s surgical wounds be deliberately infected with bacteria to cause gangrene, so he could treat them with sulfa drugs to see if the drugs worked. It was nothing short of a miracle that Janina Iwanska survived. Now, nine years later, she continued to suffer great physical pain. She walked with a limp because of the decimation of her shinbones. The purpose of the trip to the United States was to allow Iwanska to undergo surgery, at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, to help alleviate this pain.

In 1962, the JIOA was officially disbanded. What remained of the Paperclip program was taken over by the Research and Engineering Department at the Pentagon. Under the DoD Reorganization Act of 1958, this new office had been created to handle the military’s scientific and engineering needs under a scientific director who reported to the Secretary of Defense. The act also gave a home to the Pentagon’s new in-house, cutting-edge science agency—the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, later renamed DARPA—with a D for defense.

As had Dornberger, von Braun worked carefully to whitewash his Nazi past. He knew never to speak of the fact that he had become a Nazi Party member in 1937. When a reporter once asked him, incorrectly, about his joining the party “in 1942,” von Braun put his scientist’s precision aside and chose not to correct the newsman. Instead von Braun did what he always did—he said that he’d been coerced into joining the Nazi Party. Never did von Braun speak of the SS cavalry unit he joined, in 1933, or that he was made an SS officer in 1944 and wore the SS officer’s uniform, with its swastika on the armband and its cap with the death’s-head image. With a revelation like that, he could have been deported under the Internal Security Act of 1950, which was meant to keep Communists out of the country but also covered anyone who had held membership in a “totalitarian dictatorship.” 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.

Around von Braun’s neck was the Knight’s Cross, bestowed upon him by Albert Speer at the Castle Varlar event. The book, published by Deutscher Militärverlag, portrayed von Braun as an ardent Nazi and included detailed pages about the murderous conditions at the slave labor facility at Nordhausen, where von Braun oversaw work, and at the Dora-Nordhausen concentration camp, which supplied the slave laborers.

After the Apollo space program ended, von Braun moved into the private sector. In his new life as a defense contractor, he traveled the world and met its leaders, including Indira Gandhi, the Shah of Iran, and Crown Prince Juan Carlos of Spain. In 1973, he decided to take up flying, and in June of that year he applied to get his pilot’s license with the Federal Aviation Administration. This required a physical and a body X-ray, which revealed a dark shadow on his kidney. Von Braun had terminal cancer but would live for another four years. The year before he died, there was a motion inside the Ford White House to award Wernher von Braun the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The idea almost passed until one of President Ford’s senior advisers, David Gergen, famously wrote, in a note passed to colleagues, “Sorry, but I can’t support the idea of giving [the] medal of freedom to [a] former Nazi whose V-2 was fired into over [sic] 3000 British and Belgian cities. He has given valuable service to the US since, but frankly he has gotten as good as he has given.” Von Braun was awarded the Medal of Science instead. He died on June 16, 1977.

In the spring of 1953, for an atomic test series called Operation Upshot-Knothole, soldier volunteers were asked to perform duck-and-cover drills inside five-foot-deep trenches that had been dug into the desert floor several miles from ground zero. The men were specifically instructed not to look at the atomic blast. But curiosity got the better of at least one young officer, a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant identified in declassified records as “S.H.” Instead of facing away from the blast, the lieutenant looked over his left shoulder in the direction of the atomic bomb when it detonated with a force of 43 kilotons. “He didn’t wear his goggles and he looked,” Colonel Pickering told President Clinton’s Advisory Committee in 1994. Because light enters the eye through the cornea and is refracted when it hits the lens, Pickering explained, images are flipped upside down. As a result, the image of an inverted nuclear fireball was seared on the lieutenant’s retina “forever,” leaving what Pickering described as “probably one of the most beautiful images of a fireball you’d ever see in your life.” Pickering said that doctors at the SAM kept a photograph of the man’s eyeball for their collection. The Advisory Committee determined that the SAM continued its classified flashblindness studies until at least 1962 but that most of the records had been lost or destroyed.

In the late 1950s, Ambros was also elected chairman of the advisory committee for a German company called Chemie Grünenthal. Grünenthal was about to market a new tranquilizer that promised pregnant women relief from morning sickness. The drug, called thalidomide, was going to be sold under the brand name Contergan. Otto Ambros served on the board of directors of Grünenthal. In the late 1950s, very few people knew that Grünenthal was a safe haven for many Nazis, including Dr. Ernst-Günther Schenck, the inspector of nutrition for the SS, and Dr. Heinz Baumkötter, an SS captain (Hauptsturmführer) and the chief concentration camp doctor in Mauthausen, Natzweiler-Struthof, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. Ten months before Grünenthal’s public release of thalidomide, the wife of a Grünenthal employee, who took the drug to combat morning sickness, gave birth to a baby without ears. No one linked the birth defect to the drug, and thalidomide was released by the company. After several months on the market, in 1959, Grünenthal received its first reports that thalidomide caused polyneuropathy, or nerve damage, in the hands and feet of elderly people who took the drug. The drug’s over-the-counter status was changed so that it now required a prescription. Still, thalidomide was marketed aggressively in forty-six countries with a label that stated it could be “given with complete safety to pregnant women and nursing mothers without any adverse effect on mother and child.” Instead,...

The origins of thalidomide were never accounted for. Grünenthal had always maintained that it lost its documents that showed where and when the first human trials were conducted on the drug. Then, in 2008, the Thalidomide Trust, in England, headed by Dr. Martin Johnson, located a group of Nazi-era documents that produced a link between thalidomide and the drugs researched and developed by IG Farben chemists during the war. Dr. Johnson points out that Grünenthal’s 1954 patents for thalidomide cryptically state that human trials had already been completed, but the company says it cannot offer that data because it was lost, ostensibly during the war. “The patents suggest that thalidomide was probably one of a number of products developed at Dyhernfurth or Auschwitz-Monowitz under the leadership of Otto Ambros in the course of nerve gas research,” Dr. Johnson says.