Dr. Leopold Alexander, war crimes investigator and expert consultant at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial, explains to the judges the nature of the medical experiment performed on Jadwiga Dzido at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Paperclip doctor Walter Schreiber was in charge of the experiments. (NARA)
After being acquitted at Nuremberg, Dr. Konrad Sch?fer took over Strughold’s U.S. Army job in Germany while his Paperclip contract was sorted out. In Texas, Sch?fer tried and failed to make the Mississippi River drinkable. His superiors found him “singularly unsuccessful in producing any finished work and has displayed very little real scientific acumen.” Sch?fer was asked to leave the country but refused because he had already received his immigrant’s visa per Operation Paperclip. (NARA)
The IG Farben building in Frankfurt was taken over by the U.S. Army and became home to various American military and political organizations during the Cold War. Today it is Johann Wolfgang Goethe University. (Author’s collection)
Castle Kransberg, outside Frankfurt, was G?ring’s Luftwaffe headquarters. The Allies captured it, code named it “Dustbin,” and interrogated Nazi scientific and industrial elite here. (Author’s collection)
Hitler’s nerve gas–proof bunker underneath Castle Kransberg was designed by Albert Speer. In the event the Reich used chemical weapons, Hitler’s high command assumed the Allies would retaliate in kind. (Author’s collection)
Hitler wrote Mein Kampf at Landsberg Prison in 1924. After the war, it became home to 1,526 convicted Nazi war criminals until John J. McCloy granted clemency to the majority of those convicted at Nuremberg. (Author’s collection)
The unmarked graves of hanged Nazi war criminals mark the church lawn at Landsberg Prison. (Author’s collection)
The Cathedral inside Landsberg Prison, where convicted Nazi war criminals were allowed to pray. The benches were built at an angle so guards could observe individuals. (Author’s collection)
Camp King was used as a Cold War black site. The CIA, Army, Air Force, and Naval Intelligence shared access to Soviet spies kept prisoner here using “extreme interrogation” techniques and “behavior modification programs,” as part of CIA Operations Bluebird and Artichoke. Doctors Schreiber and Blome were Camp King Post physicians under Paperclip contracts from 1949 to 1952. (Author’s collection)
John J. McCloy (center) with President Truman. McCloy championed the Nazi scientist program from its first days in May 1945. Between his tenure as assistant secretary of war and high commissioner of Germany, McCloy served as president of the World Bank. (NARA)
Charles E. Loucks with German scientists and others at a party at Edgewood Arsenal. Loucks befriended Nazi scientist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Kuhn, who introduced Loucks to LSD, which was later tested on hundreds of soldiers at Edgewood and used in the Army’s Psychochemical Warfare program and the CIA’s MKUltra mind-control program. (Papers of Charles E. Loucks, U.S. Army Military History Institute)
SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schieber served on Reichsführer-SS Himmler’s personal staff and was chief of the Armaments Supply Office in the Speer Ministry where he oversaw tabun and sarin production. Shown here in 1951, Schieber worked for the U.S. Army and for the CIA as part of Operation Paperclip. (Collection of Paul-Hermann Schieber)
The “Eight Ball,” at Camp Detrick. Airtight, bombproof, and weighing 131 tons, this one-million-liter chamber allowed Detrick’s scientists to understand how aerosolized biological agents would work at different altitudes in the open air. Monkeys and human test subjects sat inside. (U.S. Army)
Fritz Hoffmann, the CIA’s poison master, relaxes on his front lawn in suburban Maryland, circa 1948. (Collection of Gabriella Hoffmann)
Paperclip rocket scientists and specialists at Fort Bliss, Texas, circa 1946. Some were sent home when the Army learned they did not all have “rare minds.” Karl Otto Fleischer, for example, claimed to have been the Wehrmacht’s business manager when in reality he was in charge of food services. (NASA)
A V-2 rocket carrying the first monkey astronaut, Albert, blasts off at White Sands, New Mexico. (NASA)
Wernher von Braun and Kurt Debus confer during the countdown for a Saturn launch in 1965. (NASA)
Arthur Rudolph holds a model of the Saturn V rocket, which launched man to the moon in 1969. In 1983 the Department of Justice began its investigation of Rudolph on war crimes charges. He was told to prepare to stand trial or to renounce his U.S. citizenship and leave the country. Rudolph left. (NASA)
Von Braun and his team at the Redstone Arsenal in 1958. Pictured from left are Ernst Stuhlinger, Helmut Hoelzer, Karl Heimburg, E. D. Geissler, E. W. Neubert, Walter Haeussermann, von Braun, W. A. Mrazek, Hans Hueter, Eberhard Rees, Kurt Debus, and Hans Maus. (NASA)