“Of the 100 prisoners you sent me,” Haagen wrote to a colleague at the university, an anatomist named Dr. August Hirt, “18 died in transport. Only 12 are in a condition suitable for my experiments. I therefore request that you send me another 100 prisoners, between 20 and 40 years of age, who are healthy and in a physical condition comparable to soldiers. Heil Hitler, Prof. Dr. E. Haagen.” The document was dated November 15, 1943.
For Samuel Goudsmit the moment was a stunning reveal. Here, casually tucked away in a group of Haagen’s personal papers, he had discovered one of the most diabolical secrets of the Third Reich. Nazi doctors were conducting medical experiments on healthy humans. This was new information to the scientific community. But there was equally troubling information in the subtext of the letter as far as biological weapons were concerned. Haagen was a virus expert who specialized in creating vaccines. The fact that he was involved in human medical experiments made a kind of twisted sense to Goudsmit in a way that few others could interpret. In order to successfully unleash a biological weapon against an enemy force, the attacking army had to have already created its own vaccine against the deadly pathogen it intended to spread. This vaccine would act as the shield for its own soldiers and civilians; the biological weapon would act as the sword. The document Goudsmit was looking at was a little more than a year old. How much vaccine progress had the Nazis made since?
As Goudsmit stared at the documents in front of him, he was faced with a troubling reality. Once, Eugen Haagen had been a temperate man—a physician dedicated to helping people. In 1932 Dr. Haagen had been awarded a prestigious fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation, in New York City, where he had helped to develop the world’s first yellow fever vaccine. In 1937 he had been a contender for the Nobel Prize. Haagen had been one of Germany’s leading men of medicine. Now here he was testing deadly vaccines on once healthy prisoners from concentration camps supplied to him by Himmler’s SS. If a leading doctor like Haagen had been able to conduct these kinds of research experiments with impunity, what else might be going on?
Goudsmit and his colleagues scoured Dr. Haagen’s papers, paying particular attention to the names of the doctors with whom Haagen corresponded about his prisoner shipments, his vaccine tests, and his future laboratory plans. Goudsmit started putting together a list of Nazi scientists who were now top priorities for Alsos to locate, capture, and interview. Dr. Eugen Haagen would never become a Paperclip scientist. After the war he would flee to the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany and work for the Russians. But among the names discovered in his apartment were two physicians important to Operation Paperclip. They were Dr. Kurt Blome, deputy surgeon general of the Third Reich, and Surgeon General Walter Schreiber. Dr. Blome was in charge of the Reich’s biological weapons programs; Dr. Schreiber was in charge of its vaccines. The sword and the shield.
Before Hitler rose to power, Blome and Schreiber had been internationally renowned physicians. Had Nazi science also made monsters of these men?
Almost two weeks after the Alsos mission’s discovery at Strasbourg, three hundred miles to the north, in Germany, a party was under way. There, deep in the dark pine forests of Coesfeld, a magnificent moated eight-hundred-year-old stone castle called Varlar was being readied for a celebration. The castle was a medieval showpiece of the Münster region, resplendent with turrets, balustrades, and lookout towers. On this night, December 9, 1944, the banquet hall had been decorated in full Nazi Party regalia. Trellises of ivy graced the podium. Flags featuring Germany’s national eagle-and-swastika emblem hung from walls, a motif repeated in each china place setting where the guests of the Third Reich celebrated and dined.