What does last? The desire to seek the truth? Or, in the words of Jean Michel, the ability to take a stand against “the monstrous distortion of history” when it gives birth to “false, foul and suspect myths”? In 1998, Congress passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, which required various U.S. government agencies to identify and release federal records relating to Nazi war criminals that had been kept classified for decades. In accordance with the act, President Clinton established an Interagency Working Group—made up of federal agency representatives and members of the public—to oversee the interpretation of over eight million pages of U.S. government records and report its findings to Congress. The documentation revealed a vast web of profitable relationships between hundreds of Nazi war criminals and U.S. military and intelligence agencies.
In 2005, in a final report to Congress, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, the Interagency Working Group determined that “[t]he notion that they [the U.S. military and the CIA] employed only a few ‘bad apples’ will not stand up to the new documentation.” In hindsight, wrote the Interagency Working Group, the government’s use of Nazis was a very bad idea, and “there was no compelling reason to begin the postwar era with the assistance of some of those associated with the worst crimes of the war.” And yet history now shows us that that is exactly what the American government did—and continued to do throughout the Cold War.
In the decades since Operation Paperclip ended, new facts continue to come to light. In 2008, previously unreported information about Otto Ambros emerged, serving as a reminder that the story of what lies hidden behind America’s Nazi scientist program is not complete.
A group of medical doctors and researchers in England, working on behalf of an organization called the Thalidomide Trust, believe they have tied the wartime work of IG Farben and Otto Ambros to the thalidomide tragedy of the late 1950s and early 1960s. After Ambros was released from Landsberg Prison, he worked as an economic consultant to German chancellor Konrad Adenauer and to the industrial magnate Friedrich Flick, the richest person in Germany during the Cold War. Like Ambros, Flick had been tried and convicted at Nuremberg, then released early by John J. McCloy.
In the late 1950s, Ambros was also elected chairman of the advisory committee for a German company called Chemie Grünenthal. Grünenthal was about to market a new tranquilizer that promised pregnant women relief from morning sickness. The drug, called thalidomide, was going to be sold under the brand name Contergan. Otto Ambros served on the board of directors of Grünenthal. In the late 1950s, very few people knew that Grünenthal was a safe haven for many Nazis, including Dr. Ernst-Günther Schenck, the inspector of nutrition for the SS, and Dr. Heinz Baumk?tter, an SS captain (Hauptsturmführer) and the chief concentration camp doctor in Mauthausen, Natzweiler-Struthof, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps.
Ten months before Grünenthal’s public release of thalidomide, the wife of a Grünenthal employee, who took the drug to combat morning sickness, gave birth to a baby without ears. No one linked the birth defect to the drug, and thalidomide was released by the company. After several months on the market, in 1959, Grünenthal received its first reports that thalidomide caused polyneuropathy, or nerve damage, in the hands and feet of elderly people who took the drug. The drug’s over-the-counter status was changed so that it now required a prescription. Still, thalidomide was marketed aggressively in forty-six countries with a label that stated it could be “given with complete safety to pregnant women and nursing mothers without any adverse effect on mother and child.” Instead, the drug resulted in more than ten thousand mothers giving birth to babies with terrible deformities, creating the most horrific pharmaceutical disaster in the history of modern medicine. Many of the children were born without ears, arms, or legs and with reptilian, flipperlike appendages in place of healthy limbs.