In January of 1951, John J. McCloy’s office announced that he had come to a decision regarding the war criminals incarcerated at Landsberg Prison. The Peck Panel had finished its review process and recommended “substantial reductions of sentences” in the majority of cases involving lengthy prison terms. As for those who had been handed death sentences, the panel advised McCloy to consider each case individually. Also at issue was a financial matter. At Nuremberg, the judges had ordered the confiscation of property of convicted war criminals whose money was so often earned on the backs of slave laborers, tens of thousands of whom had been worked to death. Now, the Peck Panel suggested that this confiscation order be rescinded. For Otto Ambros, this would mean that he could keep what remained of the gift, from Adolf Hitler, of 1 million reichsmarks, a figure that has never been revealed before. McCloy spent several months considering the panel’s recommendations. During this time he was deluged with letters from religious groups and activists in Germany urging for the war criminals’ release. McCloy sent a cable from Frankfurt to Washington asking for counsel from the White House. The White House advised McCloy that the decision was his to make.
John J. McCloy commuted ten of the fifteen death sentences. This meant that ten men condemned by International Military Tribunal judges—including the commander of the Malmédy Massacre, considered one of the war’s worst atrocities against prisoners of war, and several SS officers who had overseen the mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen—would be released back into society within one and seven years. Among the death sentences McCloy chose to uphold were those of Otto Ohlendorf, commander of Einsatzgruppe D, responsible for ninety thousand deaths in Ukraine; Paul Blobel, commander of Einsatzgruppe C, responsible for thirty-three thousand deaths at Babi Yar, in Kiev; and Oswald Pohl, chief administrator of the concentration camps. McCloy also drastically reduced the sentences of sixty-four out of seventy-four remaining war criminals, which meant that one-third of the inmates tried at Nuremberg were freed. On February 3, 1951, Otto Ambros traded in his red-striped denim prison uniform for the tailored suit he had arrived in. He walked out of the gates of Landsberg Prison a free man, his finances fully restored.
General Telford Taylor was indignant. In a press release he stated, “Wittingly or not, McCloy has dealt a blow to the principles of international law and concepts of humanity for which we fought the war.” Eleanor Roosevelt asked in her newspaper column, “Why are we freeing so many Nazis?”
The will and wherewithal to punish Nazi war criminals had faded with the passage of time. “Doctors who had participated in the murder of patients continued to practice medicine, Nazi judges continued to preside over courtrooms, and former members of the SS, SD and Gestapo found positions in the intelligence services,” explains Andreas Nachama, curator of the Nazi Documentation Center in Berlin. “Even some leaders of the special mobile commandos (“Einsatzkommandos”) [paramilitary extermination squads] tried to pursue careers in the public service.”
The following month, on March 27, 1951, Dr. Carl Nordstrom dispatched Charles McPherson, an officer with the Special Projects Team, to go locate and hire Dr. Kurt Blome. The Special Projects Team was now composed of a group of twenty agents, each with his own “K” list of scientists to find. McPherson learned that Blome lived at 34 Kielstrasse, in Dortmund, and he traveled there to interview the doctor.