Ford told Klaus that the list was classified and that he did not have the clearance to see it. Klaus still refused to sign off on it. “Ford stated in various ways that if I did not accept the paper on behalf of the State Department he would give the information to several senators who would take care of the Department,” Klaus wrote of Ford’s threat. Colonel Ford accused him of standing in the way of “national interest.”
Colonel Ford’s request was likely influenced by information the JIOA had recently received from the Office of the Military Government in Germany. After months of negative press attention directed at Operation Paperclip, spearheaded by the Federation of American Scientists and given further momentum by the American Jewish Congress’s having identified the Axsters, of Fort Bliss, as “real Nazis,” the War Department had asked OMGUS to conduct an internal review of the Operation Paperclip scientists working in the United States. It was OMGUS in Germany that oversaw the reports on all the German scientists issued by Army Intelligence, G-2. The War Department told OMGUS that it did not want to have to deal with any other exposés.
In response, OMGUS sent the War Department 146 security reports that could potentially create scandals were the information contained in them to be revealed. One report pertained to rocket engineer Kurt Debus. Debus was an ardent Nazi. He had been an active SS member who, according to the testimony of colleagues, wore his Nazi uniform to work. Most troublesome was the revelation in his OMGUS security report that during the war he had turned a colleague, an engineering supervisor named Richard Craemer, over to the Gestapo for making anti-Nazi remarks and for refusing to give Debus the Nazi salute. From Nazi-era paperwork, it was clear that Debus had initiated the investigation into Craemer. No one else had heard the conversation between the two scientists; Debus had gone home after work and taken it upon himself to write up a report of what was allegedly said, which he had then submitted, in transcript form, to the SS. The specifics of the incident made it impossible for the European Intelligence Division of the U.S. Army to cast Kurt Debus as an apolitical scientist trying to survive in a fascist world. Debus had gone out of his way to have a colleague arrested by the Gestapo. Craemer was subsequently prosecuted for treason. According to the report, and as a result of Debus’s actions, on November 30, 1942, “Craemer was called to Gestapo H.Q. and confronted with this damning evidence.” The army intelligence officer assigned to the case, Captain F. C. Groves, explained what happened next. On April 5, 1942, “he [Craemer] was dragged before a ‘Sondergericht’ [a special Nazi court] and sentenced to 2 years imprisonment.” Groves’s lengthy summary and analysis of the incident was sent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Debus’s “deliberate and vicious denunciation [of] Craemer” was not something army intelligence could disavow, wrote Groves. It was a matter of public record in Germany.
An OMGUS report put von Braun on equally shaky footing, and army intelligence cautioned that, given his international profile, pushing the State Department for a visa for von Braun could cause problems. The report revealed that not only had von Braun been an SS officer with the high rank of SS-Sturmbannführer, or SS-Major, but his membership had been sponsored by Heinrich Himmler. In response, JIOA director Colonel Ford proposed contrary action to what was being advised. Ford believed that the best solution was to get these undesirables on an even faster track toward citizenship. If Klaus signed the waiver, JIOA could expedite the process.
With Klaus refusing to sign the documents, the situation escalated into a standoff. Klaus left the meeting and did some investigative work on his own. In the months that followed, he learned what had transpired with Georg Rickhey at Wright Field—that Rickhey had been returned to Germany to stand trial for alleged war crimes. The information had purposely been withheld from the State Department. In a memo to the undersecretary of state, Klaus defended his opposition to the JIOA’s bullish requests to have him sign a blind waiver. “That the department’s security fears were not baseless was recently demonstrated when a war criminal, wanted for war crimes of a bestial kind, was found here among these scientists, to be returned to Germany.” Klaus was determined to hold his ground, but so was the JIOA. The difficulty for Klaus was that he was outnumbered.