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, T?gliche 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.”
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.