John Kenneth Galbraith was the only one of the three men from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey who had toured a liberated concentration camp before interviewing Speer. Galbraith had seen the atrocities at Dachau and Buchenwald. He explained, “One was just beginning to hear rumors about Auschwitz.” Did Galbraith believe that Speer did not know about the extermination of the Jews? “No, I don’t believe he didn’t know,” Galbraith told Sereny. “Certainly he knew about all the slave laborers. I remember him saying to us, ‘You should hang Saukel’ ”—Speer’s deputy in charge of slave labor—“and then a few weeks later, Saukel said to us, ‘You should hang Speer.’ Nice people, weren’t they?”
After eleven days of discussions with the Americans, the British located and arrested Speer. They drove him the six miles to Flensburg, where the remaining members of Hitler’s government were also arrested. Under an escort of more than thirty armored vehicles, the prisoners were driven to waiting aircraft. There, in a field of grass, the men of Hitler’s inner circle were loaded onto two airplanes and flown to a Top Secret interrogation center code-named Ashcan.
That same afternoon, one hundred miles south of Flensburg, at the Thirty-first Civilian Interrogation Camp near Lüneburg, a former Wehrmacht sergeant was making a lot of noise. The officer in charge of Camp 31, Captain Thomas Selvester, found the man’s behavior odd. Wehrmacht soldiers who were prisoners rarely did anything to draw attention to themselves. Captain Selvester sent for the agitated man, whom he described as a short, “ill-looking” person in civilian clothing with a black eye patch over his left eye. Face-to-face with Captain Selvester, the small, ugly man ceremoniously pulled off the eye patch, revealing a pale, unshaven face. The man then produced a pair of horn-rimmed glasses from his pocket and put them on his face.
“Heinrich Himmler,” the prisoner announced in a quiet voice.
With the glasses on, Captain Selvester recognized Heinrich Himmler at once. Before him stood a man many considered the most powerful man in the Third Reich after Hitler. Himmler was Reichsführer-SS and chief of the German police, commander of the Reserve Army of the Wehrmacht, and Reich minister of the interior. That face. The cleft chin and the sinister, smiling eyes. Ever since a drawing of Himmler had appeared on the cover of Time magazine, on October 11, 1943—portraying the “Police Chief of Nazi Europe” in front of a mountain of corpses—he had become synonymous with evil. Now that the little round glasses were on, Selvester was certain this person was indeed Heinrich Himmler. Still, Captain Selvester followed protocol and asked for signature verification. When Himmler had been captured days before he’d presented forged military papers that identified him as a Wehrmacht sergeant named Heinrich Hitzinger.
The signature matched, and Captain Selvester sent for the most senior interrogator in Camp 31, a Captain named Smith. Once Smith arrived, Selvester ordered Himmler searched again. This time British soldiers found two vials of poison hidden in Himmler’s clothes. It was medicine to treat stomach cramps, Himmler said. Captain Smith ordered a second physical exam of the prisoner, and the camp’s doctor, Captain Clement Wells, spotted a blue-tipped object—hidden in the back of Himmler’s mouth. When Dr. Wells tried to remove it, Himmler jerked his head back and bit down. The vial contained poison. Within seconds, the prisoner collapsed. Now Heinrich Himmler was dead. An assistant to Dr. Wells noted in his diary, “[T]his evil thing breathed its last breath at 23:14.”
The war in Europe was over. Germans called it die Stunde Null, zero hour. Cities lay in ruins. Allied bombing had destroyed more than 1.8 million German homes. Of the 18.2 million men who had served in the German army, navy, Luftwaffe, and the Waffen-SS, a total of 5.3 million had been killed. Sixty-one countries had been drawn into a war Germany started. Some 50 million people were dead. The Third Reich was no more.
Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler were dead. Albert Speer was in custody. So were Siegfried Knemeyer and Dr. Kurt Blome. Otto Ambros was under house arrest in Gendorf, with no one in CIOS or Alsos yet having figured out who he really was. Wernher von Braun, Walter Dornberger, and Arthur Rudolph were in custody, working toward contracts with the U.S. Army. Georg Rickhey had a job in London, translating documents for the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey.
The future of war and weapons hung in the balance. What would happen to the Nazi scientists? Who would be hired and who would be hanged? In May 1945 there was no official policy regarding what to do with any of them. “The question who is a Nazi is often a dark riddle,” an officer with the Third Army, G-5, wrote in a report sent to SHAEF headquarters in May. “The question what is a Nazi is also not easy to answer.”
Over the next few months, critical decisions about what to do with Hitler’s former scientists and engineers would be made, almost always based on an individual military organization’s needs and justified by perceived threats. Official policy would follow, one version for the public and another for the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). A headless monster called Operation Paperclip would emerge.
PART II
“The scale on which science and engineering have been harnessed to the chariot of destruction in Germany is indeed amazing. There is a tremendous amount to be learnt in Germany at the present time.”
—W. S. Farren, British aviation expert with the
Royal Aircraft Establishment
CHAPTER SIX
Harnessing the Chariot of Destruction