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

by Annie Jacobsen

  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 and held the position of Troop Leader (Truppfuehrer),” read one memo. When bringing him to America, the army stated, “This Command is cognizant of Mr. Salmon’s Nazi activities and certain allegations made by some of his associates in Europe,” namely, that during the war Emil Salmon had been involved in burning down a synagogue in his hometown of Ludwigshafen. But Emil Salmon was now at Wright Field because the Army Air Forces found his knowledge and expertise “difficult, if not impossible, to duplicate.” Emil Salmon built aircraft engine test stands.

  For various press events, the army provided photographs of some of the more wholesome-looking German scientists—definitely no one with a dueling scar. There were pictures of white-haired men playing chess, window-shopping outside a Dayton, Ohio, toy store, smoking cigarettes, and sunning themselves on army grounds. To be invited to the open house, a reporter had to agree in advance to clear his or her story with army censors before going to press. 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.

  The news stories about the scientists at Wright Field generated a flurry of response, including newspaper editorials and letters to congressmen. A Gallup Poll the following week revealed that most Americans believed that bringing one thousand more German scientists to America was a “bad idea.” Journalist and foreign affairs correspondent Joachim Joesten was outraged by the very idea of Paperclip, writing in the Nation, “If you enjoy mass murder, but also treasure your skin, be a scientist, son. It’s the only way, nowadays, of getting away with murder.” Rabbi Steven S. Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress, penned a scathing letter to Secretary of War Patterson that was made public. “As long as we reward former servants of Hitler, while leaving his victims in D. P. [displaced-persons] camps, we cannot even pretend that we are making any real effort to achieve the aims we fought for.” Eleanor Roosevelt became personally involved in protesting Operation Paperclip, organizing a conference at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel with Albert Einstein as honored guest. The former First Lady urged the United States government to suspend visas for all Germans for twelve years. When professors at Syracuse University learned that a new colleague, Dr. Heinz Fischer, an expert in infrared technology and a former member of the Nazi Party, had been sent by the army to work in one of their university laboratories under a secret military contract, they wrote an editorial for the New York Times. “We object not because they are citizens of an enemy nation, but because they were and probably still are Nazis.”

  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?” The society, which counted William L. Shirer and Darryl Zanuck among its members, urged all fellow Americans to contact the War Department and demand that Hitler’s scientists be sent home.

  One engineer at Wright Field actually was about to be sent home. But tunnel engineer Georg Rickhey’s downfall came not because of the demands made by the public but because of the actions by a fellow German.

  In the fall of 1946, of the 233 Nazi scientists in America, 140 were at Wright Field. With that many single men living together in isolation, the Hilltop became divided into social cliques. The Nazi businessman Albert Patin continued to serve as Colonel Putt’s ears and eyes among the Germans, reporting to Putt about the Germans’ needs and complaints. In this arrangement Patin wielded power at the Hilltop. With the arrival of former Mittelwerk general manager Georg Rickhey, in the summer of 1946, Albert Patin saw a business opportunity. Rickhey was a former employee of the Speer ministry. He served as the general manager of the Mittelwerk slave labor facility in Nordhausen where the V-2 rockets were built. Colonel Beasley of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey had evacuated Rickhey to London, and after that work was completed, Rickhey was hired to work at Wright Field. When asked by military intelligence officers what his job was, Rickhey said, “Giving my knowledge and experience in regard to planning, construction and operating underground factories.”

  Georg Rickhey was a tunnel engineer, and his value to the U.S. military was the knowledge he had gained while overseeing vast underground building projects for the Reich. A memo in Rickhey’s dossier, written by the army’s Office of the Deputy Director of Intelligence, kept his most powerful negotiating secret a secret: “He was in charge of all tunnel operations directly under Hitler’s headquarters in Berlin.” Georg Rickhey had overseen the building of the Führerbunker, where Hitler lived the last three months and two weeks of his life. With its more than thirty rooms, cryptlike corridors, multiple emergency exits, and hundreds of stairs, all located more than thirty feet under Berlin, the Führerbunker was considered an engineering tour de force. The army was impressed by how well Hitler’s Führerbunker had withstood years of heavy Allied bombing and was interested in learning from Georg Rickhey how to build similar underground command centers of its own.

  As the Cold War progressed, the U.S. Army would begin the secret construction of such facilities, notably ones that could continue to function in the aftermath of a chemical, biological, or nuclear attack. It would take decades for journalists to reveal that, starting in the early 1950s, several sprawling, multifloor, underground command centers had been secretly built for this purpose, including one in the Catoctin Mountains, called Raven Rock Mountain Complex, or Site R, and another in the Blue Ridge Mountains, called Mount Weather.

  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. At Wright Field, Rickhey was meant to start consulting with American engineers on underground engineering projects for the army. But that work was slow and Rickhey was given a second job. Despite poor English skills, Rickhey was put in charge of examining V-2 documents captured at Nordhausen and, in his words, the “rendering of opinions on reports.”

  In the late summer of 1946 Albert Patin and Georg Rickhey started running a black market operation at the Hilltop, selling booze and cigarettes to their colleagues at premium prices. Rickhey had years of experience in wartime black market operations. Military intelligence would later learn that during the war, what little rations the slave laborers were allotted by the Speer ministry, Rickhey would sometimes sell off at a price. At Wright Field, Rickhey and Patin’s black market business quickly expanded, and t
he men enlisted outside assistance from Rickhey’s sister, Adelheid Rickhey, who was living in a hotel in New Jersey at the time. Adelheid Rickhey agreed to move to Ohio to help the men expand their black market business into Dayton and beyond. Because the Germans’ mail was monitored, it did not take long for the higher-ups at Wright Field to learn what was going on, but the Army Air Forces took no action against either man. The business continued into the fall of 1946, when it came to a head.

  In their private time Rickhey and Patin liked to gamble. They also liked to drink. The two men regularly hosted parties at the Hilltop, staying up late drinking and playing cards. One night, in the fall of 1946, a sixty-three-year-old German aircraft engineer named Hermann Nehlsen decided he had had enough. It was a little after midnight during the second week of October when Rickhey, Albert Patin, and a third man were playing cards. The noise woke up Hermann Nehlsen, who knocked on the door and told the three cardplayers to quiet down. After Nehlsen’s second request was ignored, he opened the door, walked into the room, and turned off the lamp on the card table. Rickhey, by Nehlsen’s account, was drunk. As Nehlsen was leaving, Rickhey lit a candle and laughed at his German colleague. A man “could still play cards with a good kosher candle,” Rickhey joked.

  The incident was a tipping point for Hermann Nehlsen, and he went to Colonel Putt to file a formal complaint against the two men. There was more to the story, Nehlsen told Colonel Putt. Rickhey was a war criminal. He had been the primary person behind a mass hanging at Nordhausen, the hanging by crane of a dozen prisoners, and had bragged about it on the ship ride coming over to the United States. As for Albert Patin, Hermann Nehlsen told Colonel Putt he was an ardent Nazi as well, a member of the SA. Patin’s companies used slave laborers from concentration camps. What Hermann Nehlsen did not know was that Colonel Putt was not interested in the past histories of the German scientists in the Army Air Forces’ employ. Or that Putt had a gentleman’s agreement with Albert Patin and had been using him to keep an eye on the other Germans at the Hilltop. Colonel Putt said he would look into the allegations. Instead, Putt had Nehlsen watched for future security violations. Hermann Nehlsen remained angry about the incident and wrote so in a letter to a friend in New York City named Erwin Loewy. Perhaps Nehlsen knew that all of his mail was read by military screeners, or maybe he did not. Either way, what Nehlsen wrote to Loewy caught the eye of Wright Field mail censors. Nehlsen’s letter was turned over to the intelligence division to be analyzed. Several weeks later, Hermann Nehlsen violated security and left Wright Field for a weekend visit with a relative in Michigan. Colonel Putt reported the violation to Air Material Command headquarters and arranged to have Nehlsen transferred to Mitchel Field, an air force base in New York.

  But Hermann Nehlsen’s letter to Erwin Loewy about Georg Rickhey had a life of its own. It made its way to Army Air Forces Headquarters, in Washington, D.C., where it was read by Colonel Millard Lewis, Executive Assistant Chief of Air Staff-2. The allegations were serious, Colonel Lewis decided. They involved alleged war crimes. Lewis sent a memorandum to the director of intelligence for the War Department General Staff summarizing the situation and advising that an investigating officer be assigned to look into the matter. “Mr. Nehlsen stated that Dr. Georg Rickhey, age 47, specialist in the field of engineering and production of guided missiles, was employed in the underground plant at Nordhausen as a strong Nazi Party member, where in 1944, twelve foreign workers were strung up on a cross beam and raised by a crane in the presence of the group of workers,” and killed, read Colonel Lewis’s memorandum. “One of the group who acted as an observer asserted that Dr. Rickhey was the chief instigator for the execution.” The Pentagon assigned an Air Corps Major named Eugene Smith to look into the Georg Rickhey case.

  Back at Wright Field, Colonel Putt likely believed that the allegations against Rickhey had fallen by the wayside. Meanwhile, Hermann Nehlsen had been banished to Mitchel Field. In January 1947 Putt recommended that Rickhey be given a long-term military contract for employment at Wright Field. That request was authorized, and on April 12, 1947, Georg Rickhey signed a new, five-year contract with the War Department. Separately, and without Putt’s knowledge, the Rickhey investigation was moving forward. At Army Air Forces Headquarters in Washington, Major Eugene Smith made preparations to travel to various military bases for interviews. It was Smith’s job to talk to Rickhey’s former colleagues from Nordhausen, to write up his findings, and to file a report. Colonel Putt did not learn about this investigation until Major Smith arrived at Wright Field. Putt suggested Major Smith discuss Rickhey’s case with Captain Albert Abels, the officer in charge of the Paperclip scientists at the Hilltop, so that Abels could clear things up. Abels told Major Smith that the stories were “petty jealousy” between scientists. Just gossip among men. Major Smith was unconvinced. He headed to Mitchel Field to interview Hermann Nehlsen and other German scientists who might have knowledge regarding the Rickhey case.

  Hermann Nehlsen stood by his original story. “In 1944, twelve foreign workers were simultaneously hanged by being strung up on a cross beam and raised by a crane in the presence of the workers,” Nehlsen swore in an affidavit. “Dr. Rickhey was the chief instigator for the execution,” meaning it was Rickhey’s idea to hang the men. A second witness emerged at Mitchel Field, a former engineer on the Nordhausen rocket assembly lines named Werner Voss. Voss also testified that Rickhey was involved in the hangings, and he provided important new details that added context to the executions. Shortly before the hangings, Voss said, British airplanes had dropped leaflets urging the Nordhausen slave laborers to revolt. A group of them did revolt, and those men were among the ones hanged. The execution was a public event, Voss said, meant to intimidate other slave workers into subservience. These were serious allegations of war crimes. Major Smith needed corroboration, and for that, he headed to Fort Bliss, Texas. Smith had been told by the army that he would be able interview Wernher von Braun as well as some of the other men who had worked closely with Georg Rickhey inside the Nordhausen tunnels.

  At Fort Bliss, in the evenings, the German rocket specialists gathered in a clubhouse built in a grove of cottonwood trees. There, they played cards while drinking American cocktails and beer. They strung hammocks between the trees and enjoyed balmy desert nights. Once a month, most of the Germans went into El Paso as a group to shop and have a restaurant meal. The nightmarish environment at Nordhausen, which the majority of the rocket engineers had participated in, must have seemed like another world—until Major Smith arrived to take official depositions for the U.S. Army and ask the men to recollect what those days had been like.

  Major Smith’s first interviews would be with Wernher von Braun and his brother Magnus von Braun. But after Major Smith arrived at Fort Bliss, he was told that both von Braun brothers were out of town. Smith interviewed Günther Haukohl instead. Haukohl had been the original designer of the Nordhausen rocket assembly line and, like Wernher von Braun, was an officer with the SS. Günther Haukohl told Major Smith that he had no clear memories about what happened in the tunnels in the last months of the war, but, yes, prisoners were abused. Rickhey’s involvement is “probably a rumor,” Haukohl said. V-2 engineers Hans Palaoro and Rudolph Schlidt seconded Haukohl’s position, repeating the idea that the end of the war was nothing but a blur. Engineer Erich Ball, who also worked on the rocket assembly lines at Nordhausen, told Major Smith that he had witnessed two sets of prisoner hangings in the tunnels but that Georg Rickhey had not been involved in either of them. Major Smith accepted that the men might not be able to remember details about what had gone on, but surely as engineers they could remember the layout of the facility. Smith asked Haukohl, Schlidt, Palaoro, and Ball to use their engineers’ precision and help him create an accurate illustration of the work spaces inside the Nordhausen tunnels, including where the rockets were assembled and where the hangings occurred. This was an important artifact for the investigation.

  Next, Major Smith interviewed t
he former Mittelwerk operations director Arthur Rudolph. Like Georg Rickhey, Arthur Rudolph had authority over the Mittelwerk’s Prison Labor Supply office, which was the unit responsible for getting food rations to the slave laborers. In his interview, Arthur Rudolph first denied ever seeing prisoners abused. Major Smith showed Arthur Rudolph the illustration that had been drawn by Rudolph’s Nordhausen colleagues Haukohl, Schlidt, Palaoro, and Ball. Major Smith pointed out to Arthur Rudolph that Rudolph’s office was directly adjacent to where the twelve so-called political prisoners had been hanged from the crane. As Arthur Rudolph continued to deny ever seeing prisoners abused, Smith found his testimony increasingly suspicious. Everyone else interviewed admitted to having seen some prisoner abuse. Rudolph was adamant: “I did not see them punished, beaten, hung or shot,” he told Major Smith.