Smith returned to Washington and advised U.S. Army Air Forces Headquarters of his findings. In Germany, a serendipitous incident occurred at this same time. William Aalmans, the Dutch citizen who had been working on the U.S. War Crimes Investigation Team, had been hunting down SS officers from Dora-Nordhausen for an upcoming regional war crimes trial. Aalmans had managed to locate only eleven out of three thousand SS officers who had run the concentration camp. Aalmans was the man who had interviewed many of the newly liberated prisoners back in April 1945, and he was also the individual who had found the Mittelwerk employee telephone list tacked to the tunnel wall. The two names at the top of that list were Georg Rickhey and Arthur Rudolph. Aalmans had no idea that both men had been recruited into Operation Paperclip. In Germany, no one Aalmans interviewed claimed to know the whereabouts of either man. Then, one afternoon in May 1947, Aalmans was taking a break from his Nazi hunting work, reading the Stars and Stripes newspaper in the sunshine, when, as he told journalist Tom Bower decades later, “I just saw a tiny headline, ‘German Scientist Applies for American Citizenship.’ ” The name mentioned was Georg Rickhey, Aalmans explained. “I screamed for joy and rushed into the head office shouting, ‘We’ve found him!’ ” Within three days the Georg Rickhey matter had been escalated to the attention of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
On May 19, 1947, an arrest warrant was issued for Georg Rickhey on orders from the War Crimes Branch, Civil Affairs Division, in Washington. “Georg Rickhey is wanted as a principal perpetrator in the Nordhausen Concentration Camp Case,” the document read. Rickhey’s immediate reaction was to claim he was being falsely accused. This was a case of mistaken identity, Rickhey declared. In response, the Office of the Deputy Director of Intelligence, Headquarters, European Command, had this to say: “The Dr. Georg Rickhey now employed at Wright Field and the Georg Rickhey engineer at Nordhausen are one and the same person. Dr. Karl Rahr, chief physician at Nordhausen, has been interrogated and states that he knew Rickhey, that he is now in his late 40’s [or] early 50’s and that there was only one Georg Rickhey at Nordhausen. This Group is making arrangements to have Rickhey returned to Germany for trial in the Nordhausen Concentration camp case.” The War Department’s Intelligence Division assigned the chief of security at Wright Field, Major George P. Miller, the role of escorting Rickhey back to Germany. Rickhey’s five-year contract was terminated. He was instead going to be a defendant in the Dora-Nordhausen war crimes trial.
On June 2, 1947, JIOA deputy director Bosquet N. Wev wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, the powerful director of the FBI, alerting him of the situation and sending along Rickhey’s classified dossier. If the public learned that an Operation Paperclip scientist had been returned to Germany to stand trial for war crimes, the JIOA, the Army, the War Department, and the FBI would all have a lot of explaining to do. It was in everyone’s interest to keep the Georg Rickhey fiasco under wraps.
On August 7, 1947, Georg Rickhey appeared as one of nineteen defendants in the Dora-Nordhausen trial. The Nazis were charged with the deaths of at least twenty thousand laborers who were beaten, tortured, starved, hanged, or worked to death while being forced to build V-2 rockets. The trial, which took place inside a former SS barracks adjacent to the Dachau concentration camp, lasted four months and three weeks. The prosecution requested that Wernher von Braun be allowed to testify at the trial, but the army said it was too much of a security risk to allow von Braun to travel to Germany. The Russians could kidnap him, the U.S. Army said. They did not say that von Braun had recently traveled to Germany to marry his cousin and bring her back to Texas with him. At the end of the trial, fifteen of the nineteen defendants were found guilty. Four, including Georg Rickhey, were acquitted. “Then, in an unprecedented move, the Army classified the entire trial record,” explains journalist Linda Hunt. The record would remain secret from the public for another forty years. There was far too much at stake for the U.S. Army to allow the information about what had really gone on in the Nordhausen tunnel complex to get out to the public. The trial record would call attention to the backgrounds of the 115 rocket scientists at Fort Bliss. The future of the United States missile program was too important. The Russians had their rocket scientists and America needed hers, too.
Shortly after Rickhey was acquitted, back in Washington, D.C., the office of the secretary of the air force received a call from the State Department. The official identified himself as Henry Cox. The air force captain who took Cox’s call wrote up a memo of what was said.
“After exchanged pleasantries, [Cox] inquired if we had ever returned a specialist to Europe for trial. I thought a moment and, realizing that the Rickhey case was in the public domain and in all probability facts known to the State Department since his sister made inquiries, I did not dare deny the story. I, therefore, told Mr. Cox that one Air Force case had been returned to Europe under suspicion, that my recollection was he was cleared; that in any event we did not desire to take further chances on the case and that he had not been returned to the United States.” The State Department appeared to have bought the story.