Rickhey was gone, but there was no shortage of Nazis coming to Wright Field to work. On August 22, 1947, one of the Reich’s top ten pilots, Siegfried Knemeyer, arrived. This was the daring pilot and engineer whom Albert Speer had hoped would help him to escape to Greenland and whom Hermann G?ring had called “my boy.”
“Knemeyer is very popular with his fellow nationals since he is a good mixer and free of vanity,” read a memo in his intelligence dossier. “He is a diligent worker with an inventive mind. He is absorbed by his work and especially enthusiastic about participating in aerial tests.” Soon Knemeyer’s wife, Doris, and their seven children arrived in America to join him and to become U.S. citizens. The family moved into a large, drafty farmhouse on Yellow Springs Road. Doris Knemeyer hated provincial life in Dayton, Ohio. In Berlin, the Knemeyers had a grand home in the Charlottenburg district, with many servants to help take care of the Knemeyer brood. Raising seven children by herself in America was not what Doris Knemeyer had in mind. The difficulties at home did not go unnoticed by Knemeyer’s supervisors at Wright Field.
“Since the arrival of his family he seems harassed and neglectful of his personal appearance,” read an internal security report. But Knemeyer was determined to succeed. Assigned to the Communication and Navigation Laboratory at Wright Field, Knemeyer found his stride. He began to make significant contributions to navigational instruments for his new employer, the U.S. Air Force—no longer part of the army anymore. Knemeyer is “a genius in the creation of new concepts in flight control,” wrote Colonel John Martin, Knemeyer’s superior at the lab.
Knemeyer’s friend Werner Baumbach, Hitler’s general of the bombers, had been scheduled to come to Wright Field to work alongside Knemeyer, but an entry in Baumbach’s intelligence dossier noted that there had been a last-minute change: “Lt. Colonel Baumbach has since been substituted,” it read. Baumbach went to Argentina instead, to train fighter pilots for Juan Perón. Whether he had been dropped from Operation Paperclip or Juan Perón had offered him a better deal remains a mystery. Werner Baumbach died a few years later after an airplane he was testing crashed into the Río de la Plata, near Uruguay.
Also arriving at Wright Field in the summer of 1947 was General Walter Dornberger, newly released from England’s Special Camp XI, outside Bridgend, South Wales (formerly Island Farm). Before turning General Dornberger over to the Americans, the British labeled him a “menace of the first order” and warned their Allied partners of his deceitful nature. While holding Dornberger for war crimes, British intelligence had eavesdropped on him and recorded what he said. When the Americans listened to these secret audio recordings, they, too, concluded that Hitler’s former “chief of all rocket and research development” had “an untrustworthy attitude in seeking to turn ally against ally.” Still, Dornberger signed a Paperclip contract, on July 12, 1947, just weeks after his release from prison. Dornberger’s skill at manipulation was put to use by Army Ordnance, which had him write classified intelligence briefs. America needed to develop missiles regardless of what any naysayers might think, Dornberger believed.
“Russia strives now only for time to prepare for war before the United States,” Dornberger wrote in a classified budget pitch, financed by the Ordnance Department, in 1948. “The United States must decide upon a research and development program that will guarantee satisfactory results within the shortest possible time and at the least expense. Such a program must be set up even if its organization appears to violate American economic ideals and American traditions in arms development,” Dornberger wrote. At least it could be said that Dornberger remained true to his totalitarian-leaning principles—his belief that democratic ideals and traditions could be ignored in the quest for military supremacy. That the U.S. Army condoned Dornberger’s idea appears never to have been made public before; his pitch was presented to Ordnance Department officials at the Pentagon. A copy of the classified document was found in 2012 in Dornberger’s personal papers kept in a German state archive.