Wernher’s screening report said, “Attitude characterized by the following quote: ‘I always was a German and still am.’ Considers Germany dead as a nation. Only German hope: To cooperate with western Allies to act as bulwark against eastern hordes, and as beachhead for US and British forces in the coming struggle.” Jessel felt that although von Braun recognized Germany’s defeat, he didn’t see anything wrong with Germany’s actions during the war. He seemed to have adopted the rhetoric of the Nazi party — that Germany was the victim, that the V-2 was a defensive weapon, and that Germany and the US should have joined forces to battle the Soviet Union. He seemed totally convinced that war with the Soviet Union was inevitable over the short term, and he was amazed that the Allies failed to see that Germany had been trying to save Western civilization.
Jessel went on to warn that von Braun was conspiring with Dornberger to withhold information, and that he felt that it would be absurd to give the rocket group security clearances. He called von Braun a security threat, and recommended that he be detained for War Crimes review by Military Intelligence. But the advanced programs that Wernher had effectively promoted left LtC. Toftoy and his superiors just as bedazzled as Speer and Hitler had been. As a result, they repeatedly ignored both Jessel’s advice and the incriminating information subsequently provided by Wernher himself.
In the course of the interrogation process, each of the men was required to fill out a detailed questionnaire that included their education, professional and technical training, employment, and involvement with the Nazi party. When von Braun heard that the focus of the session was his personal history, he was glad he wasn’t going to be pestered about missing documents yet again. But when he started answering the questions, he decided he would rather be dodging technical questions. It was like walking through a minefield.
One of the questions concerned his membership in the Nazi party. Wernher admitted he was a member, but said he had been forced to join the Nazi party in 1939. Nazi party records later revealed that he had voluntarily joined the Nazi party two years earlier, in November 1937.135 He was asked about his membership in the SS, and he gave a similar answer — he had been forced to join the SS as a lieutenant in 1941. That too was incorrect, as SS records indicated that he had rejoined the SS on 1 May 1940 after enlisting as an SS reservist while in college. As it turned out, neither 1940 nor 1941 were ideal answers given that membership in the SS after 1 September 1939 was a criminal offense under war crimes regulations.
Those were just the warmup questions. The hard ones came after Wernher had recounted his educational history. What was his position and where was he employed? He had multiple titles and responsibilities, and he really didn’t want to highlight his connection to Mittelwerk, Bleicherode, or CCDC-Mittelbau. He decided to keep it simple, and gave his current position as Technical Director at the Army facility at Peenemünde (a position that he had not held since August 1944, when he became Technical Director and Vice President of Elektromechanischewerk, GmbH). In followup questions, he admitted to having meetings with the director of EW GmbH in Bleicherode but implied that he was otherwise uninvolved. In a footnote, Jessel’s report noted that investigations already completed indicated that the EW GmbH group at Bleicherode was “well supplied with cars and women.”
Lt. Jessel then asked that if Wernher’s job was at Peenemünde, what was he doing 300 miles from there? Wernher had left Peenemünde in late January, but admitting that would lead Jessel to ask what he had been doing since then. So Wernher got creative, confident that any contradictory paperwork had been either burned or buried. He told Jessel that he had left Peenemünde on 10 March 1945 to avoid the Russians, and that he had been heading for Bleicherode with about 100 of his staff when his car crashed, breaking his arm. At the time, Jessel had no way of knowing that this was a total fabrication. When Jessel asked, “Why Bleicherode?” Wernher said it was because he had been there previously, the area was close to the American lines, and it was always his intention to surrender. When asked where he had stayed in Bleicherode, he led Jessel to believe it had been in the home of a friend, Ernst Franck. Admitting that he had commandeered a large home abandoned by its Jewish occupants would have raised questions about his long-term plans and his role in Bleicherode. Asked why he’d left Bleicherode for Oberjoch, Wernher said that he had left Bleicherode because SS-General Kammler had ordered him to relocate to Oberammergau, and that he had escaped from the SS as soon as he could.
Wernher’s creative, self-serving interpretations and omissions were repeated at every opportunity. In other interviews, Wernher (and members of his team) gave consistent accounts of historical events that had little basis in fact, but that helped create a benign public image. According to Wernher, the members of his rocket team were apolitical and uninvolved in Nazi activities. He said that slave labor at the Mittelwerk was mandated by the SS and completely out of his control, as were issues of discipline, work hours, and other factors. He was adamant that there were no slave laborers at Peenemünde, which was devoted to pure research.
As to the V-2, the answer varied. Sometimes he said it was created solely for defense, and at other times that it was created solely for research. In either case, he said he had never intended his work to be used for military purposes. It seems likely that Jessel had not seen the press briefing Wernher gave on arrival, where he had taken all of the credit for the V-2 and boasted that if he had had two more years, Germany would have won the war. Through it all, Wernher never mentioned the Mittelwerk, and despite mounting evidence to the contrary, decades passed before he admitted ever setting foot in the place.
A few days after Jessel completed his interrogation, Dornberger and von Braun met with a reporter from the London Daily Express. On 18 June 1945, the resulting story, “Dr. V2 laughs — at London,” was on newsstands in the UK. It was based on Guy Eden’s extended interview conducted in the sitting room of Dornberger’s lavish suite. The most interesting aspects of the article were the observations about von Braun and the attempts of the von Braun-Dornberger team to recast their wartime work as humanitarian:
It was immaterial to him whether they were fired at the moon or on little homes in London, so long as he could prove his invention worked efficiently. He feels no guilt at all. . . . “And now,” said Dornberger, “what we hope is that the world will use our experiences of the last 15 years for rocket development in travel and other ways.” “That’s right,” said von Braun eagerly, “our rockets are really a great boon for peace, if you only look at it the right way.”
Readers who had survived the V-2 bombardment of London and Antwerp were well aware that von Braun had indeed worked for peace, but for one imposed by a victorious Germany. After the Express article was printed, there were calls to bring both of the men to the UK for trial as war criminals.
After much discussion with higher-ups, Major Staver received permission to take Wernher to Nordhausen to help him round up engineers and technicians still in hiding. Over 19-21 June, Staver, with Wernher’s assistance, collected 1,000 specialists. These men were shipped to the American zone ahead of the Russian occupation. Staver’s main concern was keeping the Soviets from getting their hands on potentially important information and skills. What would happen to these men once they were under American control remained to be determined. While they waited for a decision, Wernher was moved around. He was briefly held and interviewed by British agents in Kransberg Castle, where Albert Speer and other high-ranking Nazis were held. The code name for the program was Operation Dustbin. Werner was then moved to a schoolhouse in Witzenhausen, with other technocrats and their families. It was crowded and difficult, but as usual, Wernher made the best of it, arranging for privacy and getting a new girlfriend.
Wernher was still unaware that his treasure trove of documents had been discovered, and Staver didn’t tell him. He did, however, continue to ask Wernher if he knew of any hidden documents, and the answer was always no. Staver was convinced that more documents existed, so he sent
teams with metal detectors into the area around Dornberger’s former headquarters in Bad Sachsa. Purely by luck, one of his teams stumbled across a trove of five crates that Dornberger had buried, containing 260 pounds of technical documents. Dornberger’s and von Braun’s main caches had now been found without their assistance, and despite their repeated assurances that no hidden documents existed. This would have raised serious questions about their reliability, had the promise of advanced Nazi weapons been less alluring.136
On 29 June, Dornberger was interrogated by British officers working on Project Backfire. This project was designed to teach the Allies how to launch V-2 rockets. The British were taking the lead, in part because they had found several completely assembled V-2s on railroad cars within the British Zone. The Americans had plenty of parts, enough for 100 V-2s, but those parts, along with a number of complete rockets, were already in the US. Dornberger thought that cooperating with this program would increase his leverage with the Americans. If he could get the British to make him an offer, the Americans would have to stop dawdling and make one themselves. So Dornberger assisted the British, giving them tips on proper procedures and the names of staff members who could provide specifics on various technical details. It soon became clear to the British that the infrastructure and launch facility requirements far exceeded what they had imagined.
WASHINGTON, DC
While the rocket team was held in limbo, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) were considering their options. Before the German surrender, an inter-governmental panel (the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, SWNCC), issued a directive that captured Nazi scientists should not be involved in military research. That position was suddenly problematic, given that the JIOA had collected over a thousand German scientists, most of them Nazis and many SS or SA members as well. Even if the Joint Chiefs were to decide that Nazis could work on military projects, the Department of State, a member of the SWNCC, would refuse to issue US Visas. So what could be done to get these men into the country?
The answer they formulated and approved was called Operation Overcast, to be run by the JIOA. Although Overcast needed approval by President Truman, it was set in motion almost immediately. The goal was to shorten the war with Japan by utilizing a select number of Nazi specialists who would be brought to the US temporarily. Because it would be only temporary, and the specialists would be under military control, they felt a visa wasn’t required, and therefore there was no need to involve or inform the Department of State. Once their work was completed the Nazi technicians would be returned to Germany, and any found or even suspected of being war criminals would be returned immediately. At least that was the stated plan, i.e. the one most likely to win approval. In retrospect, it seems likely that the real plan was rather different.
The JIOA anticipated bringing 350 Nazi scientists to the US, and distributing them among military research centers and companies engaged in military production. Roughly one-third of them would be assigned to LtC. Toftoy’s rocket program. The political problems Toftoy faced were that the V-2 rocket program was inextricably interwoven with the horrors and abuses at Dora and the Mittelwerk, and that the slave laborers for the program had come from Buchenwald and Nordhausen, names all too familiar to war crimes prosecutors and to the American public.
Military Intelligence (G-2) had already placed a security lid over the Mittelwerk, and the presence of Allied airmen at Buchenwald had already been concealed. The information blackout had started virtually as soon as the Dora and Buchenwald camps were liberated. The names of American airmen at Buchenwald and the death of Lt. Beck were included in military intelligence memos in May 1945. Yet when a congressional committee published the official US government report on German concentration camps after visiting both Nordhausen and Buchenwald, the introductory section stated:
Before proceeding with detailed statements concerning the several camps visited, we believe a preliminary word as to just what these camps are used for would be of value. In the first place, the concentration camps for political prisoners must not be confused with the prisoner of war camps. No prisoners of war were confined in any of these political prisoner camps, and there is no relationship whatever between a concentration camp for political prisoners and a camp for prisoners of war.137
This categorical statement would henceforth be the official position of the US government. The British, who had their own plans for German rocketeers, placed a nearly identical disclaimer in an April 1945 report to Parliament.138
When Buchenwald was liberated, the US Army seized the entry log and the office files, so they soon had a complete list of the names of the Buchenwald airmen. War crimes investigators circulated this list to stations throughout the ETO, to determine whether or not the men were still alive. It was a rather short list, however, as it included only the names of the commissioned officers.139 The Army Judge Advocate General’s office scheduled depositions from these officers for potential use in war crimes trials. All of the related paperwork, including the war crimes depositions, was collected along with the captured German documents and the MIS/OSS interviews and reports, and classified Top Secret. As far as the American public was concerned, the Mittelwerk never existed, and American POWs were never held in concentration camps.
OPERATION OVERCAST AND PROJECT BACKFIRE
Plans for Operation Overcast were finalized by 20 June, submitted for approval by the JIOA on 6 July, and formally approved on 19 July 1945. President Truman officially authorized Operation Overcast later in July, after receiving assurances that the Germans brought into the country would be on short-term contracts, and that dedicated Nazis and known or suspected war criminals would be excluded. In discussing this with Truman, Justice Robert Jackson, who would later be the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, wrote, “I have assurances from the War Department that those likely to be accused as war criminals will be kept in close confinement and stern control.”140
What transpired was something quite different. Through a complicated agreement among the Allies, the US agreed to loan a number of rocket specialists to the British for Project Backfire. The plan was to have the detained German specialists teach the Allies how to assemble, prep, and launch three intact V-2 rockets that the British had located in their sector. The British had a wish list: they wanted Dornberger and Axster for three weeks, von Braun, Riedel, and Steinhoff (among others) for two months, and a larger group for the duration of Project Backfire. No firm agreement was in place when on 22 July, General Dornberger, Dr. von Braun, and 77 other German engineers and technicians were taken by truck to the Krupps Proving Grounds at Cuxhaven, a coastal town on the North Sea that sat within the British Zone of partitioned Germany.
Two days later, Dornberger, Steinhoff, Shröder, and von Braun were moved to London for two weeks of interrogations that resembled corporate negotiations. Wernher was wined and dined and had cordial meetings with the Minister of Supply, who took great care to avoid offending him. A report filed at the time makes interesting reading:
I saw von Braun and half a dozen of his experts for a short time while they were in the country. . . . Their replies to questions certainly conformed to the directive quoted at the foot of page 1 of the Special Interrogation Report. Steinhoff was the most willing to talk, and I got the impression that we could have got more out of him if we had him alone. Von Braun several times intervened to explain why it was impossible to give answers to questions which I had put to Steinhoff and the latter might probably have answered. I also saw Dornberger. His technical information was superficial and salesmanlike. He was obviously fishing for a British bid for his services, and those of his subordinates, which he could use to make the Americans raise theirs, which he was also exaggerating. He was obviously confident of his prospects of keeping the old firm together and under his own direction. It is not irrelevant that the Peenemünde set up was changed from a German Army experimental station (HAP 11) to a semi-commercial organization (Elektromechanishe Werke [sic] GmbH). This fi
rm is still trying to do business.141
The British also held lengthy discussions with Paul Schröder about his involvement with the rocket program. Many of his comments could have raised red flags about von Braun’s reliability as a resource, as he cited specific examples of instances where von Braun made wildly exaggerated claims about performance capabilities, accuracy, and project timelines, and highlighted Wernher’s tendency to select a team of subservient dependents and to reject outside advice and opinions, even from qualified specialists. The British felt that this was in keeping with the profile they had already built of von Braun, and with Jessel’s evaluation in early June.
None of the Germans had been looking forward to the trip to the UK. They knew that the British considered them responsible for the V-2 bombardment of London and Antwerp, which left them open to charges as war criminals. But in practice, things worked out quite well, other than for General Dornberger. The British disliked and distrusted him. Their suspicions were confirmed when secret recordings revealed he planned to play the British off against the Americans and spark a bidding war for the services of the rocket team. There was concern that Dornberger might prevent the German technicians from freely exchanging information, and his security report stated: “Consider likely to exploit his considerable influence over EW personnel against Allied interests. Therefore desirable he has no further contact with EW Personnel.” As a result, Dornberger was housed separately, with his interactions restricted and closely monitored.
Meanwhile, the British in Cuxhaven continued to work with their German tutors, and new questions surfaced requiring additional expertise. Eventually the Cuxhaven program involved roughly 150 rocket technicians plus an additional 600 German POWs tasked with the manual labor involved. These laborers fared much better than the POW laborers at Peenemünde or the Mittelwerk, for all of the Germans were well paid, adequately housed, and well fed, and they received generous bonuses when the program ended.
Betrayed: Secrecy, Lies, and Consequences Page 29
