McCloy had been a champion of the Nazi scientist program from its very first days, back in the late spring of 1945, when he served as assistant secretary of war. He was also the chairman of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee at the time, which put him in charge of making some of the first decisions regarding the fate of the program. McCloy was a statesman and a lawyer but he was also an economist. In between his tenure as assistant secretary of war and high commissioner of Germany, he was president of the World Bank. His service there came at a critical time in the bank’s early history. McCloy is credited in World Bank literature as “defining the relationship between the Bank and the United Nations and the Bank and the United States.” Now he was back in government service as a diplomat, having come to Germany to fill the shoes of General Lucius D. Clay, exiting OMGUS chief. John J. McCloy was a short, plump man, balding, with a banker’s bravado. When in public he almost always wore a crisp suit. As high commissioner he traveled around Germany in the private diesel train that had belonged to Adolf Hitler. While power had been officially transferred to a new West German civilian government, run by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, McCloy remained in charge of many aspects of Germany’s law and order as West Germany transitioned into becoming its own sovereign nation once again. One area that Chancellor Adenauer had absolutely no jurisdiction over was the Landsberg prisoners. Several hundred of these convicted war criminals had already been hanged in the Landsberg courtyard. Eighty-six others faced death. When McCloy took office as high commissioner, the rhetoric around the Landsberg prisoners was at an all-time high. Many Germans wanted the prisoners released.
In November of 1949, a group of German lawyers linked to the Farben industrialists, including Otto Ambros, requested a meeting with John J. McCloy at his office in the former IG Farben building, in Frankfurt. The IG Farben building had been taken over by the U.S. Army when troops entered Frankfurt in March of 1945 and had served as a home for the U.S. Army and various U.S. government organizations ever since. The massive complex—the largest office building in Europe until the 1950s—had panoramic views of Frankfurt, as well as parklands, a sports field, and a pond. In August 1949, OMGUS moved its headquarters from Berlin to Frankfurt, and shortly thereafter the U.S. high commissioner’s office headquarters were set up in the IG Farben complex. In September 1949, McCloy settled in. The CIA maintained an office in the IG Farben building throughout the Cold War. It was located just a few floors and a few doors down from McCloy’s office.
It was a precarious time for an American civilian to be governing occupied Germany. The Soviets had just detonated their first atomic bomb, years ahead of what had been predicted by the CIA. The U.S. military was on high alert, perhaps nowhere more so than in West Germany. During the November meeting in McCloy’s office at the IG Farben complex, German lawyers told McCloy that if West Germany and the United States were going to move forward together in a united front against the Communist threat, something had to be done about the men incarcerated at Landsberg. These prisoners were viewed unanimously by Germans as “political prisoners,” the lawyers said, and they told McCloy that he should grant all of them clemency.
After the meeting, McCloy sent a memo to the legal department of the Allied High Commission, inquiring if “after sentences were imposed by military tribunal,” he, as U.S. high commissioner, had any authority to review the sentences. The legal department told him that as far as the Landsberg war criminals were concerned, he had the authority to do whatever he thought appropriate. In America, Telford Taylor, the former Nuremberg prosecutor general, caught wind of what was going on in the high commissioner’s office in Frankfurt and was outraged. He wrote to McCloy to remind him that the Nazi war criminals at Landsberg “are without any question among the most deliberate, shameless murderers of the entire Nuremberg List, and any idea of further clemency in their cases seems to me out of the question.” McCloy never responded, according to McCloy’s biographer, Kai Bird.
McCloy established an official review board to examine the war criminals’ sentences—the Advisory Board on Clemency for War Criminals, known as the Peck Panel, after its chairman, David W. Peck. A powerful former Nazi lieutenant general, Hans Speidel, appealed personally to McCloy. Speidel was one of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s chief advisers on rearmament, a highly controversial subject but one being discussed nonetheless. Hans Speidel’s younger brother, Wilhelm Speidel, was a convicted war criminal at Landsberg. Speidel told McCloy’s adjunct in Bonn, “[If] the prisoners at Landsberg were hanged, Germany as an armed ally against the East was an illusion.” In a similarly bullish manner, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer told McCloy the same thing, advising him that he should grant “the widest possible clemency for persons sentenced to confinement.”