On August 6, 1947, the verdicts were read. Seven defendants were given death sentences, and nine were given prison sentences of between ten years and life, including Beiglb?ck (fifteen years), Becker-Freyseng (twenty years), and Schr?der (life). Seven Nazi doctors were acquitted, including Blome, Sch?fer, Ruff, and Weltz. Of Blome’s acquittal, the Nuremberg judges noted, “It may well be that defendant Blome was preparing to experiment on human beings in connection with bacteriological warfare, but the record fails to disclose that fact, or that he ever actually conducted the experiments.”
Konrad Sch?fer returned to work at the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg where he assumed Dr. Strughold’s former position as chief of staff. Strughold had already set sail for America as part of Operation Paperclip and was now in Texas, serving as “professional advisor” to Colonel Armstrong, the commandant of the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Field. Armstrong had set up a new aeromedical research laboratory there and was in the process of bringing dozens of Hitler’s former doctors to Texas to conduct medical research. Hubertus Strughold’s job description also included “overall supervision of the professional activities of the German and Austrian scientists [to be] employed by the School.” Meanwhile, the FBI was having difficulty getting approval for Strughold’s visa application for immigration into the United States. The Bureau had conducted a special inquiry into Dr. Strughold back in Germany. “One informant, who had known the subject,” investigators learned, said that Strughold “had expressed the opinion that the Nazi party had done a great deal for Germany. He [Strughold] said that prior to Nazism, the Jews had crowded the medical schools and it had been nearly impossible for others to enroll.” To counterbalance this derogatory depiction of Strughold, Dr. Konrad Sch?fer was asked to write a letter of recommendation for his former boss. In a sworn statement written just a few weeks after Sch?fer was acquitted at Nuremberg, Sch?fer praised Dr. Strughold for his “ethical principles” while conducting research work. “I also know that he strictly refused to take part [in] or permit scientific research work which was damaging to human health,” Sch?fer wrote. The following year, Dr. Konrad Sch?fer would be on a boat headed for America, an Operation Paperclip contract in hand.
As for Dr. Blome, he was seen as a highly desirable recruit for Operation Paperclip. Blome allegedly knew more about bubonic plague research than anyone else in the world. But, given his former position in Hitler’s inner circle, coupled with the fact that Blome had worn the Golden Party Badge, bringing him to America as part of Operation Paperclip remained too difficult for the U.S. Army to justify. But as the Cold War gained momentum and intense suspicion of the Soviets increased, even someone like Kurt Blome would eventually be deemed eligible for Operation Paperclip.
PART IV
“Only the commander understands the importance of certain things, and he alone conquers and surmounts all difficulties. An army is nothing without the head.”
—Napoleon
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Chemical Menace
It had been nearly a year since State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee Paper No. 275/5 authorized JIOA to import one thousand Nazi scientists from Germany so as to deny them to the Russians. For the JIOA, things were not happening nearly fast enough. The number of Operation Paperclip scientists who had come to America in this time frame had nearly doubled, from 175 in March 1946 to 344 in February 1947, but none of these scientists had been granted visas yet. JIOA officials perceived State Department official Samuel Klaus to be the man most responsible for the holdup. On February 27, 1947, Klaus was called into a meeting in the Pentagon with his military counterparts. There, JIOA director Colonel Thomas Ford told Klaus that he had a list of German scientists already in the United States whose visas needed to be expedited. He asked Samuel Klaus to sign a waiver that would allow JIOA to begin this process.
Klaus refused to rubber-stamp anything. “I told him that of course I could do no such thing and that certification presupposed that the Department should have an opportunity to pass judgment of some kind before affixing the signature,” he wrote in a State Department memo. Colonel Ford reminded Klaus of the language in a recent JIOA directive dated September 3, 1946. According to the directive, the Department of State was to “accept as final the investigation and security reports prepared by JIOA, for insuring final clearance of individuals concerned.” Klaus told Ford that he would not sign a document that was essentially a blanket waiver of anything—that he would have to see the list of scientists first.