In Washington, with policy now informally set, the debate over the Nazi scientist program became intense inside the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC). Like its successor organization, the National Security Council, SWNCC acted as the president’s principal forum for dealing with issues related to foreign policy and national security. The State Department was vocal in its opposition to the program. Exacerbating the situation for the State Department was a parallel issue it had recently become embroiled in. South American countries, Argentina and Uruguay in particular, were known to be giving safe haven to Nazi war criminals who had escaped from Germany at the end of the war. The State Department had been putting pressure on these countries to repatriate Nazis back to Europe to face war crimes charges. If it came out that the State Department was providing not only safe haven but employment opportunities for Nazi scientists in the United States, that would be cause for an international scandal. And while some generals and colonels in the War Department were decidedly for the Nazi science programs, others were fundamentally opposed to the idea. A secretly recorded conversation between two generals at the Pentagon summed up the conflict that the very idea of German scientists working for the U.S. military created.
“One of the ground rules for bringing them over is that it will be temporary and at the return of their exploitation they will be sent back to Germany,” said one general, whose name was redacted.
The second general agreed. “I’m opposed and Pop Powers [a nickname for a Pentagon official] is opposed, the whole War Department is opposed,” he said. To “open our arms and bring in German technicians and treat them as honored guests” was a very bad idea.
The Department of Justice was not happy about the voluminous workload that background checks on former enemy aliens would require. The Department of Labor was concerned about laws governing alien labor, and the Department of Commerce was concerned about patent rights. In an attempt to ease the contention, Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson sent a memorandum to the War Department General Staff stating that the person to mediate these issues was John J. McCloy, the assistant secretary of war and chairman of SWNCC.
John J. McCloy would become an especially significant player in Operation Paperclip starting in 1949. But now, in the summer of 1945, he wore two hats related to the issue of Nazi scientists. On the one hand, Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson had put McCloy in charge of coordinating policy regarding Nazi scientists coming to the United States to work. On the other hand, Patterson’s boss, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, had given McCloy the job of helping to develop the war crimes program. McCloy’s position regarding the exploitation of Nazi science and scientists was clear. He believed that the program would help foster American military superiority while engendering economic prosperity. To McCloy, those ends justified any means. It was not that McCloy believed that the Nazis should go unpunished, at least not in the summer of 1945. For that, McCloy was a strong supporter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) and the idea of a war crimes trial. But he was someone who saw these two categories as black and white. There were scientists and there were war criminals.
In McCloy’s eyes, a war criminal was a Himmler, a Hess, a G?ring, or a Bormann. Scientists, like industrialists, were the backbone of a healthy economy in this new, postwar world. In the summer of 1945, McCloy was regularly briefed on the capture and arrest of these war criminals as they were rounded up and taken to a Top Secret interrogation facility in Luxembourg, code-named Ashcan, where they would be squeezed for information before facing judgment at Nuremberg.
John Dolibois, an officer with Army Intelligence, G-2, the Collecting and Dissemination Division, spent a significant portion of the last eight months of the war watching and rewatching Triumph of the Will, the three-hour-long Nazi propaganda film by Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl. Every Thursday night, inside a screening room at Camp Ritchie, America’s Military Intelligence Training Center, located eighty miles north of Washington in the Catoctin Mountains, the twenty-six-year-old Dolibois used the film to teach German order of battle and Nazi Party hierarchy to colonels, generals, and intelligence officers preparing to go off to war.