All across Germany, the liberations were beginning. In one location after the next, prisoners in concentration camps and slave labor factories were being freed by Allied soldiers who stormed across Germany in tanks and jeeps and on foot. The action had begun in western Germany and continued steadily as the Allies marched east, headed toward Munich and Berlin. Alongside these liberations, soldiers also discovered Reich laboratories and research facilities, one after the next. After each discovery a team of CIOS scientists was called in to investigate. During the second week of April in 1945, four key facilities were seized—at Nordhausen, Geraberg, V?lkenrode, and Raubkammer—each of which would lead to the capture of key scientists who would in turn become part of Operation Paperclip.
On the morning of April 11, 1945, a unit of American soldiers with the 104th Infantry Division, also known as the Timberwolves, entered the slave tunnels at Nordhausen. Among the liberating soldiers was an infantry sharpshooter, a private first class named John Risen Jones Jr. In his bag he carried a camera, a gift given to him by his family before he shipped off to war. Expensive and sleek-looking, Jones’s Leica III was one of the first portable 35 mm cameras ever made.
It had been seven months since John Risen Jones landed in France, back in September 1944. He had spent 195 days on the continent thus far, many of them engaged in fierce combat, all the while pushing though snow, sleet, and mud—much of it on foot. Jones had walked across France, Belgium, and Holland, and now here he was, in the deep mountains of central Germany, the Harz. He had lost friends in battle and taken many photographs of the war. When his unit arrived in this little mountain town, he imagined the day would pass like the one before. Just one step closer to the end of this brutal war.
No amount of fighting prepared John Risen Jones for what he saw through the lens of his Leica when his unit entered Nordhausen. The photographs he took documented the tragedy that had befallen thousands of V-2 rocket laborers condemned to die as slaves in the tunnels here. Hundreds of corpses were stretched out across the tunnel floors. Equally disturbing was the condition of hundreds more still alive: emaciated humans covered with bruises and sores, too weak to even stand. “It was a fabric of moans and whimpers of delirium and outright madness,” recalled fellow soldier Staff Sergeant Donald Schulz. John Risen Jones would not speak of it for fifty-one years.
Following along behind the soldiers was a team of seven war crimes investigators. Among them was a young Dutch officer working for the U.S. Army, William J. Aalmans. Like John Risen Jones, Aalmans was deeply affected by what he saw and smelled. “Stench, the tuberculosis and the starved inmates,” he told journalist Tom Bower after the war. “Four people were dying every hour. It was unbelievable.” Aalmans and his team began taking witness statements from prisoners, who sipped watered-down milk for strength. The job facing the war crimes investigators was overwhelming, and their schedule was intense. After five days in Nordhausen they were ordered to move on. Most of the official paperwork regarding rocket production had been hidden or destroyed, but Aalmans and his team found a single sheet of paper inadvertently left behind, tacked to the wall. It was the Mittelwerk telephone list; a directory of who was in charge. At the very top were two names: Georg Rickhey, director of production, and Arthur Rudolph, deputy production manager. Aalmans found the document interesting enough to staple it to the report. Although it would take years to come to light, this single sheet of paper would eventually lead to the downfall of Rudolph and Rickhey and threaten to expose the dark secrets of Operation Paperclip.