Six of the twenty-one stood trial at Nuremberg, a seventh was released without trial under mysterious circumstances, and an eighth stood trial in Dachau for regional war crimes. One was convicted of mass murder and slavery, served some time in prison, was granted clemency, and then was hired by the U.S. Department of Energy. They came to America at the behest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Some officials believed that by endorsing the Paperclip program they were accepting the lesser of two evils—that if America didn’t recruit these scientists, the Soviet Communists surely would. Other generals and colonels respected and admired these men and said so.
To comprehend the impact of Operation Paperclip on American national security during the early days of the Cold War, and the legacy of war-fighting technology it has left behind, it is important first to understand that the program was governed out of an office in the elite “E” ring of the Pentagon. The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) was created solely and specifically to recruit and hire Nazi scientists and put them on weapons projects and in scientific intelligence programs within the army, the navy, the air force, the CIA (starting in 1947), and other organizations. In some cases, when individual scientists had been too close to Hitler, the JIOA hired them to work at U.S. military facilities in occupied Germany. The JIOA was a subcommittee of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which provided national security information for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The JIC remains the least known and least studied U.S. intelligence agency of the twentieth century. To understand the mind-set of the Joint Intelligence Committee, consider this: Within one year of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the JIC warned the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the United States needed to prepare for “total war” with the Soviets—to include atomic, chemical, and biological warfare—and they even set an estimated start date of 1952. This book focuses on that uneasy period, from 1945 to 1952, in which the JIOA’s recruitment of Nazi scientists was forever on the rise, culminating in Accelerated Paperclip, which allowed individuals previously deemed undesirable to be brought to the United States—including Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber, the surgeon general of the Third Reich.
Operation Paperclip left behind a legacy of ballistic missiles, sarin gas cluster bombs, underground bunkers, space capsules, and weaponized bubonic plague. It also left behind a trail of once-secret documents that I accessed to report this book, including postwar interrogation reports, army intelligence security dossiers, Nazi Party paperwork, Allied intelligence armaments reports, declassified JIOA memos, Nuremberg trial testimony, oral histories, a general’s desk diaries, and a Nuremberg war crimes investigator’s journal. Coupled with exclusive interviews and correspondence with children and grandchildren of these Nazi scientists, five of whom shared with me the personal papers and unpublished writings of their family members, what follows is the unsettling story of Operation Paperclip.
All of the men profiled in this book are now dead. Enterprising achievers as they were, just as the majority of them won top military and science awards when they served the Third Reich, so it went that many of them won top U.S. military and civilian awards serving the United States. One had a U.S. government building named after him, and, as of 2013, two continue to have prestigious national science prizes given annually in their names. One invented the ear thermometer. Others helped man get to the moon.
How did this happen, and what does this mean now? Does accomplishment cancel out past crimes? These are among the central questions in this dark and complicated tale. It is a story populated with Machiavellian connivers and men who dedicate their lives to designing weapons for the coming war. It is also a story about victory, and what victory can often entail. It is rife with Nazis, many of whom were guilty of accessory to murder but were never charged, and lived out their lives in prosperity in the United States. In the instances where a kind of justice is delivered, it rings of half-measure.
Or perhaps there is a hero in the record of fact, which continues to be filled in.
PART I
“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
—Unknown
CHAPTER ONE
The War and the Weapons