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. G?ring 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, G?ring 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 G?ring’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 prepared 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.