Kurt Debus, director of NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center, in an undated photo. According to his U.S. government security report, during the war Debus turned a colleague over to the Gestapo for making anti-Nazi remarks. The National Space Club in Washington, D.C., oversees the annual Dr. Kurt H. Debus Award. (NASA)
Albert Einstein accepting his certificate of American citizenship in 1940. One of Germany’s most famous pre-war scientists, Einstein left Nazi Germany just months after Hitler took power, declaring that science and justice were now in the hands of “a raw and rabid mob of Nazi militia.” He appealed to President Truman to cancel Paperclip, calling anyone who served Hitler unfit for U.S. citizenship. (Library of Congress, World-Telegram)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The idea for Operation Paperclip first took hold while I was reading documents about two Nazi aircraft designers, Walter Horten and Reimar Horten, both of whom play a role in my previous book, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base. In this research, I occasionally came across the name Siegfried Knemeyer, a senior adviser to the Horten brothers but, more notably, a man with quite a title from World War II: technical adviser to Reichsmarschall Hermann G?ring. Not knowing much about Operation Paperclip back then, I was very surprised when I learned that just a few years after the war’s end, Siegfried Knemeyer was living in America working for the U.S. Air Force, and that he would eventually be awarded the U.S. Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Service Award—the highest civilian award given by the DoD. In 2010, I located Siegfried Knemeyer’s grandson, Dirk Knemeyer, and asked if he would meet with me for an interview. He agreed.
Dirk Knemeyer is an American father, husband, entrepreneur, and businessman. By his own admission, he spends a good deal of his time thinking philosophically about concepts of “identity,” “science,” “time,” and “life.” When I first met him, Dirk Knemeyer shared with me that he had never before spoken publicly about his grandfather’s wartime activities, and that most members of his family go out of their way to maintain silence about Siegfried Knemeyer’s high ranking in the Nazi Party. “For the most part the family’s position is: Do not discuss Siegfried’s [past] with anyone, particularly not a journalist,” Dirk Knemeyer says. “But what do you do when you have documents in your attic, as I do, praising your grandfather and his excellent work, and signed by people like Hermann G?ring and Albert Speer?”
I find no easy answer to this question. The conundrum therein is one of the notions that made me want to learn much more about Operation Paperclip.
“Siegfried’s life is complicated,” Dirk Knemeyer says of his grandfather. “I am someone [who is] more interested in learning the truth about the past than denying it. Besides, some things are unwise to ignore.”
I asked Knemeyer if he would share with me some of his grandfather’s documents that were stored in boxes in his own attic. He said he would think about it. Eventually he agreed. Thank you, Dirk Knemeyer.
I wish to thank Dr. G?tz Blome, Gabriella Hoffmann, Paul-Hermann Schieber, and Rolf Benzinger for their time and their transparency. The indomitable John Dolibois, whom I admire: Thank you for taking the time with me on so many different points. Dr. Jens Westemeier assisted me with all things German in this book and located some very difficult to find documents in numerous German archives; thank you, Jens. I thank the author and historian Clarence Lasby for sharing his insights with me. Lasby first began his book Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War (1971) in the 1960s, as an extension of his college thesis—decades before the truth about the German scientists’ Nazi past was revealed under the Freedom of Information Act. Lasby’s access to documents was seminal. As we have seen, many of these documents have since disappeared from various collections—been destroyed or lost.