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

by Annie Jacobsen

  Was Schreiber’s testimony focused against Dr. Kurt Blome out of some kind of personal rivalry or vendetta? On the witness stand, Schreiber also fingered a number of other Reich medical doctors, none of whom was on trial. In addition to naming Kramer and Holzlöhner as organizers of the freezing experiments, Schreiber said that a man called Dr. Ding “had artificially infected [KZ prisoners] with typhus using typhus-infected lice” and that the “talented surgeon” Dr. Karl Gebhardt had “carried out cranium operations on Russian prisoners of war and had killed the prisoners at certain intervals in order to observe the pathological changes.” Schreiber testified that the “Defendant Goering had ordered these experiments,” and that the “Reichsführer-SS Himmler had kindly made available the subjects for the experiments.” But in a disproportionate amount of his testimony Schreiber circled back to Dr. Blome’s plague research for the Reich.

  Dr. Hans Laternser was given an opportunity to cross-examine the witness. Laternser asked Schreiber if his testimony for the Russian assistant prosecutor was prepared. Schreiber said no.

  “Was any advantage promised to you for making this report?” Laternser asked.

  “No, nothing was promised me. I would refuse to allow anybody to hold out advantages to me,” Schreiber said.

  “Well, let us assume that such a devilish idea as actually to use bacteria did exist. Would that not have involved your troops in serious danger?” Laternser asked.

  “Not only our troops, but the whole German people; for the refugees were moving from East to West. The plague would have spread very swiftly to Germany.”

  “I have one more question, Witness. Did you ever write down your objections to this bacteriological warfare?” Dr. Laternser asked.

  Schreiber said, “Yes, in the memorandum which I mentioned before.”

  Dr. Laternser asked, “When did you submit that memorandum?”

  “In 1942; may I now—”

  “That is enough,” Laternser interrupted. He’d caught Schreiber in a lie. “The conference took place in July 1943!”

  Laternser had no further questions. The tribunal adjourned. Perhaps embarrassed by the fact that their star witness had been caught in a lie, the Russians did not call Schreiber back to the stand. Dr. Alexander made yet another attempt to interview him, again without success. The Russians said they were sorry, but Dr. Schreiber had already been transported back to Moscow. It was a curious event, but something did result from Schreiber’s bizarre testimony. Two days later, a military vehicle pulled into the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Service Center at Darmstadt, where Blome had been employed by the army as a post doctor. Dr. Blome was arrested and taken to the prison complex at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice. A “confidential change of status report” now listed him as a prisoner in the custody of the 6850 Internal Security Detachment, Nuremberg, where Colonel Burton Andrus served as prison commandant.

  Circumstance had altered Blome’s future. He was off the Paperclip list and instead placed on a list of defendants who would face prosecution at the upcoming Nuremberg doctors’ trial.

  One hundred and fifty miles from Nuremberg, at the Army Air Forces classified research facility in Heidelberg, the massive undertaking forged ahead. For an entire year now, day in and day out, fifty-eight German physicians in white lab coats had been working on an array of research projects in state-of-the-art laboratories studying human endurance, night vision, blood dynamics, exposure to bomb blast, acoustic physiology, and more. They all reported to Dr. Strughold, who reported to the facility’s commanding officer, Colonel Robert J. Benford. High-ranking military officers regularly visited the facility, including its two founders, General Malcolm Grow and Colonel Harry Armstrong. Grow was working in Washington, D.C., as the air surgeon (soon to be the first surgeon general of the U.S. Air Force). Harry Armstrong had returned to Texas where he was now commandant at the School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Randolph Field.

  Working alongside the Nazi doctors in Heidelberg were dozens of army translators preparing English-language versions of the physicians’ reports. By September 1946 there were over a thousand pages of documents completed. Soon everything would be compiled into a two-volume monograph for the Army Air Forces entitled German Aviation Medicine, World War II.

  Work progressed well for Strughold’s staff of doctors in Heidelberg until the institute was thrown into psychological chaos. On September 17, 1946, military security officers with the Counter Intelligence Corps, 303 Detachment, arrived at the center with five arrest warrants in hand. Doctors Theodor Benzinger, Siegfried Ruff, Konrad Schäfer, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, and Oskar Schröder were wanted by the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, for “War Crimes as suspect.” The men were arrested and taken to the prison complex at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, to the same wing where Dr. Blome was already incarcerated. If any of this were to come to light—that the U.S. Army Air Forces had been employing war crimes suspects and had them conducting military research at a facility inside Germany, expressly prohibited by Allied peace agreements—Harry Armstrong’s institute would be shut down, Operation Paperclip would be exposed, and the U.S. Army would have an international scandal on its hands.

  The Nazi doctors’ trial was the first of the so-called subsequent trials to take place after the trial of the major war criminals at Nuremberg. It began on December 9, 1946. Unlike with the first trial, the twenty-three defendants at the doctors’ trial—twenty doctors and three SS bureaucrats—were virtually unknown figures in the eyes of the American public. What was known, from earlier press coverage, was that these proceedings would put lurid Nazi science on trial. In the words of chief prosecutor General Telford Taylor, Nazi doctors had become proficient in the “macabre science” of killing. Torturous medical experiments conducted on concentration camp prisoners included freezing experiments, high-altitude tests, mustard gas research, seawater drinkability tests, malaria research, mass sterilization, and euthanasia. The New York Times called the doctors’ crimes “beyond the pale of even the most perverted medicine” and cautioned that some details were difficult to report because they were impossible to comprehend. The New York Times cited one particularly grotesque example. Perfectly healthy people, “Jews and Slavs,” had been murdered at the request of SS physician Dr. August Hirt for a university skeleton collection of the Untermenschen. This was the same anatomist named by Dr. Eugen Haagen in papers discovered by Alsos officers in Strasbourg in November 1944. Hirt, an expert in dinosaur anatomy, had committed suicide before the trial. The defendants ran the gamut from “the dregs of the German medical profession” to doctors who had once been internationally esteemed, like Dr. Kurt Blome.

  On October 12, 1946, the Stars and Stripes newspaper, which operated from inside the Pentagon, listed the individual names of the doctors charged—a list that included the five Luftwaffe doctors who had been arrested at the U.S. Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center: Theodor Benzinger, Siegfried Ruff, Konrad Schäfer, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, and Oskar Schröder. In a matter of weeks, these physicians had gone from being employed by the U.S. Army to being tried by the U.S. military for war crimes. The ultimate judicial punishment was on the line: Each doctor faced a possible death sentence.

  The following week, inside the prison complex at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, there was a strange occurrence involving Dr. Benzinger. In Benzinger’s pretrial investigation he admitted being aware of the fact that medical experiments were taking place at concentration camps and that nonconsenting test subjects had been murdered in the process. Benzinger also admitted that he had attended the October 1942 conference in Nuremberg, “Medical Problems of Sea Distress and Winter Distress,” where data from murdered people was openly discussed among ninety Luftwaffe doctors. During Benzinger’s Nuremberg incarceration, prosecutors revealed to him that they had a new detail regarding his accessory to medical crimes, namely, the “motion picture of the record of the [medical murder] experiments” that had been shown at a private screening at the Air Ministry.
Benzinger did not deny that he had been one of a select group of doctors invited by Himmler to attend this film screening; nor did he deny that he was one of nine persons chosen by Himmler to host the event. Benzinger was part of an elite inner circle of Luftwaffe doctors favored by the Reichsführer-SS, he conceded, but that was not a crime. But prosecutors also had a document that suggested Benzinger was far more implicated in the crimes than he let on. “After the showing of the film, most of the spectators withdrew and a small group of doctors remained behind [including] Benzinger. They asked Rascher… for a verbal report on the experiments,” the document read. Benzinger insisted that all he did was listen. That there was no evidence of his having participated in any of the medical murders and that there were no documents and no eyewitnesses that could prove otherwise.

  On October 12, 1946, Dr. Theodor Benzinger was announced as a defendant in the forthcoming doctors’ trial. And then, just eleven days later, on October 23, 1946, Benzinger was released from the Nuremberg prison without further explanation. He was returned directly to the custody of the Army Air Forces, as stated in his declassified Nuremberg prisoner file. After spending a little over a month in the Nuremberg jail, Benzinger was back in Heidelberg continuing his U.S. Army research work. There was no explanation as to why Benzinger was dropped from the list of defendants in the upcoming doctors’ trial. It would take decades for an important clue to be revealed, by Nuremberg trial expert and medical history professor Paul Weindling. As it turned out, in the fall of 1946, Benzinger had recently completed a paper on pilot physiology concerning stratospheric, or extremely high-altitude, aircraft. “The US [Army] Air Forces, Wright Field circulated his report on this topic in October 1946—just weeks after his detention and release” from the prison complex at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, Weindling explains. The suggestion is that perhaps someone in the Army Air Forces felt Benzinger’s expertise was more in the “national interest” than was trying him for war crimes. One of the Nuremberg prosecutors, a Boston attorney named Alexander G. Hardy, was outraged when he learned of Benzinger’s release and insisted that the “interrogations were sloppy.”

  Back at the AAF Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg, the arrests of the five doctors on war crimes charges had everyone on edge. The classified programs taking place there began to quietly wind down. While Doctors Ruff, Schäfer, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, and Schröder faced judgment at Nuremberg, thirty-four of the doctors remaining at the center prepared for shipment to the United States under Operation Paperclip. One of the first doctors in the group to head to America for work, in February 1947, was Dr. Theodor Benzinger.

  At Nuremberg, while the doctors from Heidelberg remained incarcerated in one wing of the prison awaiting trial, preparations of another kind were also going on. The trial of the major war criminals was over. On the morning of October 1, the judges took turns reading the verdicts: nineteen convictions and three acquittals of the twenty-two accused major war criminals (one, Bormann, in absentia). That same afternoon, the tribunal pronounced what sentences would be imposed: twelve death sentences, three life sentences, and four lengthy prison terms. Albert Speer, the only defendant who pled guilty, was sentenced to twenty years.

  The doctors from Heidelberg were housed in a separate wing of the prison where pretrial interviews would continue for another two months. Also in custody inside the prison complex at the Palace of Justice was Dr. Otto Ambros. Ambros would be tried in a subsequent trial, Case VI or the Farben trial, which was scheduled to begin in the summer of 1947.

  As commandant of the facility, Colonel Burton Andrus was in charge of all prisoners, including those who were soon to be hanged. The condemned had roughly two weeks to live. Andrus described the surreal atmosphere of the last days at Nuremberg for the Nazis who had been sentenced to death. Ribbentrop, Kaltenbrunner, Frank, and Seyss-Inquart took communion and made a last confession to Father O’Conner, the Nuremberg priest. Göring bequeathed his shaving brush and razor to the prison barber. Streicher penned six letters. Ribbentrop read a book. Keitel requested that a German folk song be played on the organ as he was hanged. “On the night of 14th October, I made arrangements for the tightest security to be put around the prison,” Colonel Andrus recalled. “I wanted the condemned men to know only at the very last minute that their time had come to be hanged.”

  The Nuremberg gymnasium was chosen as the location where the executions would take place. Each night, the U.S. Army prison guards played basketball there to blow off steam. The night before the gallows were constructed Andrus allowed the usual game to go on. “Late at night,” remembered Andrus, “when the sweating players had trotted off to their showers, the grim-faced execution team passed through a door specially cut into the catwalk wall, and began their tasks in the gymnasium. A doorway had been cut into the blind side of the building so that no prisoner would see scaffolding being carried in.” The condemned prisoners were also shielded from seeing the stretchers that would soon carry their corpses away.

  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.

  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.

  One by one the Nazis were hanged. At 4:00 a.m. the bodies were loaded onto two trucks and driven to a secret location just outside Munich. Here, at what was later revealed to be the Dachau concentration camp, the bodies of these perpetrators of World War II and the Holocaust were cremated in the camp’s ovens. Their ashes were raked out, scooped up, and thrown into a river.

  When asked by Time magazine to comment on the hangings, executioner John C. Woods had this to say: “I hanged those ten Nazis… and I am proud of it… I wasn’t nervous.… A fellow can’t afford to have nerves in this business.… The way I look at this hanging job, somebody has to do it.”

  So it went, just one year and a few months after the end of World War II.

  Some Nazis were hanged. Others now had lucrative new jobs. Many, like the four German doctors from the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center at Heidelberg, now awaiting trial at Nuremberg, were in the gray area in between. Was the old German proverb true? Jedem das Seine. Does everyone get what he deserves?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Science at Any Price

  The same week that the major war criminals convicted at Nuremberg were hanged and their ashes thrown into a river, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson called Samuel Klaus into his office at the State Department to discuss Operation Paperclip. At issue was the fact that JIOA had circulated a new Top Secret directive, JIOA 257/22. The way in which Paperclip participants’ would now receive visas had officially been changed. Instead of allowing State Department representatives to conduct preexaminations in Europe prior to visa issuance, as was required by law, that process would be completed here in America by the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). “The Department of State would accept as final, the investigation and security reports p
repared by JIOA, for insuring final clearance of individuals concerned,” wrote JIOA director Colonel Thomas Ford. Acheson and Klaus were both aware that JIOA had wrested control of how visas were issued and had done so in defiance of U.S. law. But the president had signed off on the directive. 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. The State Department was told to expect to receive, in the coming months, their visa applications and those of their family members. The information contained within the scientists’ OMGUS security dossiers promised to be the “best information available.” Samuel Klaus knew this vague new language meant military intelligence officers could withhold damaging information about certain scientists from State Department officials. The pipeline to bring ardent Nazis and their families into the United States was open wide.

  Three weeks later the New York Times reported for the first time that there were Nazi scientists living in America under a secret military program. Its sources were the Russian army’s Berlin-based newspaper, Tägliche Rundschau, and the Russian-licensed East German newspaper Berliner Zeitung. In a follow-up article, an anonymous source told the newspaper that “one thousand additional German scientists” were on the way. “All were described as volunteers and under contract,” the article reported. “Their trial periods are generally six months, after which they can apply for citizenship and have their dependents brought to the United States.” Newsweek magazine revealed that the secret military program’s classified name was Project Paperclip.

  Rather than deny the story, the War Department decided to go public with a sanitized version of its program. They would also make several scientists at Wright Field “available to press, radio and pictorial services.” An open house was organized with army censors releasing details and photographs that would foster the appearance that all of the German scientists in the United States were benign. At Wright Field the “dirigible expert” Theodor Knacke gave a demonstration with a parachute. The eighty-year-old Hugo Eckener, former chairman of the Zeppelin Company, explained to reporters that thanks to his army contract he was now working with Goodyear on a new blimp design. Alexander Lippisch, inventor of the Messerschmitt Me 163 jet fighter, was photographed in a suit holding up a scale model of a sleek, futuristic, delta-wing jet, his hawkline nose staring down the end of the airplane. The emphasis on Lippisch was not that his jet fighter held records for Allied shoot-downs in the war but that his aircraft set international records for speed. Ernst Eckert, an expert in jet fuels, discussed high-speed gas turbines in his thick German accent. It was by mistake that the War Department allowed Eckert to chat with reporters, considering that his JIOA file listed him as a Nazi ideologue and former member of the SS and the SA. The program was becoming unwieldy, and no matter how hard the JIOA tried to maintain control, they could not keep an eye on all things. 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.”