Henry Wallace was one of the nation’s greatest champions of the idea that Americans could find prosperity thanks to science. Wallace had served under Roosevelt in 1944, when Roosevelt promised Americans sixty million jobs. The promise became the subject of a book by Wallace: Sixty Million Jobs. As secretary of commerce, he intended to make good on it. Business, industry, and government could work together to make the world prosperous in peace, Wallace said. German science was a jumping-off point.
The public was not made aware of a second list regarding captured German scientific and technical information, one marked classified. This list catalogued eighteen hundred reports on German technology with military potential. Subject headings included: “rockets,” “chemical warfare,” “medical practice,” “aeronautics,” “ordnance,” “insecticides,” and “physics, nuclear.” The man in charge of both lists—the classified and the unclassified one—was Henry Wallace’s executive secretary and his representative on the JIOA, John C. Green.
Regarding the classified list, Green got an idea. Peace and prosperity were, in principle, sound ideas. But there was big business in war. Green wanted to make the classified list available to certain groups in industry. “Specialized knowledge [should not be] locked up in the minds of German scientists and technicians,” Green said. It needed to be shared. To help foster this sharing, in the fall of 1945 John C. Green traveled to Wright Field, in Dayton, Ohio, to meet with Colonel Donald Putt.
The first group of six Germans brought to Wright Field in the fall of 1945 lived in an isolated and secure housing area called the Hilltop, a cluster of five single-story wooden buildings and three small cottages that had once housed the National Youth Administration. Almost no one but the program’s administrators knew that the German scientists were there. There was a single-lane dirt road that passed by the Hilltop, used only by locals who needed to visit the town dump. Trucks and station wagons filled with trash sped by the Hilltop’s secret inhabitants, and when it rained the road turned into a sea of mud. This annoyed the Germans, and they began compiling a list of grievances to share with Colonel Putt at a later date. They knew better than to complain just yet. Considering the fate and circumstances of many of their colleagues back in Germany, theirs was a particularly good deal. But when the timing was right they would share this list of indignities, which would in turn affect the Nazi scientist program in the most unusual way.
The original scientists at Wright Field were listed as Dr. Gerhard Braun, motor research; Dr. Theodor Zobel, aerodynamics; and Dr. Rudolph Edse, rocket fuels; the specialists were Mr. Otto Bock, supersonics; Mr. Hans Rister, aerodynamics; and Mr. Albert Patin, a businessman. Their salaries averaged $12,480 a year, plus a $6.00 per diem—the equivalent of about $175,000 in 2013. Because of an “oversight,” later caught and corrected, the Germans did not pay U.S. taxes for the first two years and twenty months of the program.
At the Hilltop, a husband-and-wife team of housekeepers looked after the Germans’ domestic needs, washed their laundry, and made their beds. German prisoners of war who had already been brought to the United States and were not yet repatriated acted as cooks. The six scientists and specialists and the others who would soon follow carried military-issue identification cards that had a large green “S” stamped on the front, indicating that they were not allowed to leave the base on their own. A gate running around the perimeter of the Hilltop was to be locked from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. each night. On weekends, U.S. Army intelligence officers escorted the Germans into Dayton, where they could exercise at the local YMCA. A priest was brought in from Cincinnati to deliver Sunday mass in German. “We would like you to know and to appreciate that you are here in the interest of science and we hope that you will work with us in close harmony to further develop and expand your various subjects of interest,” read the introductory pamphlet issued to each specialist at Wright Field. “We have tried to make you comfortable in the quarters assigned to you.”