In June 1948, Colonel Charles E. Loucks, the man who oversaw the Paperclip scientists at Edgewood, was made brigadier general and transferred to Heidelberg. Loucks now served as chief of intelligence collection for Chemical Warfare Plans, European Command. In Heidelberg, he had access to a whole new group of Hitler’s former chemists, from those who had been at the top of the chain of command on down. Within weeks of his arrival, Loucks formed a working relationship with Richard Kuhn, the former director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg. Because Kuhn had an international profile before and during the war, he was a problematic candidate for Operation Paperclip. Though Kuhn had once been revered among scientists, Samuel Goudsmit of Operation Alsos was never afraid to remind colleagues that Kuhn had become an active Nazi during the war, and that he began his lectures with “Sieg Heil” and the Nazi salute. Kuhn had lied to Goudsmit in a postwar interview, swearing that he had never worked on Reich projects during the war. In fact Kuhn was a chemical weapons expert for the Reich and developed soman nerve agent. Soman was even deadlier than sarin and tabun but considered too delicate and therefore too costly to industrialize.
Richard Kuhn began working with General Loucks in Heidelberg on chemical weapons projects for the Chemical Corps. General Loucks’s friendly relationship with Richard Kuhn drew ire from the British. When formally queried about his professional partnership with Kuhn, Loucks replied, “I was under the impression that Professor Kuhn had been cleared of his Nazi complicity or had suffered the penalty and is now in the good graces of both the British and the Americans.” Further, wrote Loucks, “I am sure our people are certainly familiar with his background.” To General Loucks, moving forward on military programs considered vital to U.S. national security was more important than dredging up an individual’s Nazi past. Through the lens of history, this remains one of the most complicated issues regarding Operation Paperclip. When working with ardent Nazis, some American handlers appear to have developed an ability to look the other way. Others, like General Loucks, looked straight at the man and saw only the scientist, not the Nazi.
Richard Kuhn had a connection with a scientist in Switzerland with whom General Loucks was particularly interested in working. The scientist had been investigating a little-known incapacitating agent that was far more potent than anything the Chemical Corps was working on at the time. This Swiss chemist had recently given a lecture, “New Hallucinatory Agent,” to a gathering of the Swiss Society of Psychiatry and the Association of Physicians in Zurich. On December 16, 1948, General Loucks took a trip to Switzerland. So as not to draw attention to himself or the U.S. military, he took the unusual step of taking off his military uniform. This story does not appear in any known declassified army record but is told in Loucks’s own words, in his personal diaries that were left to the U.S. Army Heritage Center in Pennsylvania. “Went back to the house and put on civilian clothes,” Loucks wrote in his diary. His wife, Pearl, took the plainclothed general to the train station. En route to his destination in Switzerland, Loucks shared a compartment with a “foreigner, dark, nationality unknown,” and a “Dutchman who acted Jewish in quizzing me all about myself.” The train compartment, Loucks noted, provided a clean, comfortable, well-lit ride, and General Loucks arrived in Bern at 8:55 that night. Before heading to bed, Loucks enjoyed a fire in the fireplace in his hotel room. General Loucks did not note in his journal any of the details of the meeting with the mysterious Swiss scientist. The mission was classified.