What the Germans craved most was respect, and this eluded them. During the war Hitler’s scientists and industrialists had been treated with great admiration by the Reich. Most scientists enjoyed financial reward. But here at Wright Field, many of the Germans’ American counterparts looked down on them with disdain. “The mere mention of a German scientist is enough to precipitate emotions in Air Corp personnel ranging from vehemence to frustration,” one manager stated in an official classified report.
As commanding general for intelligence at Wright Field, Colonel Donald Putt was in charge of the German specialist program. Putt had great admiration for each of the scientists, having handpicked almost every one of them in Germany, at the Hermann G?ring Aeronautical Research Center at V?lkenrode, and elsewhere. He could not fathom why the specialists were looked upon with contempt. “[A]ll they wanted was an opportunity to work,” Putt said. Colonel Putt’s vision for the Germans’ workload in America was threefold. Initially, he planned for the men to write reports on their past and future work. Next, those reports would be translated and circulated among American engineers at Wright Field. Then Air Technical Service Command would hold research and development seminars at Wright Field, with invitations sent out to defense contractors, university laboratories, and any other interested parties with Top Secret clearance and a contract with the Army Air Forces. But Putt’s idea came to a grinding halt after the War Department weighed in on his proposal, responding to what it called “calculated risk.” The German scientist program was a highly classified military program and needed to remain secret. A War Department memo required that the Germans remain “properly segregated from persons not directly concerned with their exploitation.” There was to be no fraternizing with American scientists. Collaboration with defense contractors and others was impossible at this point in the program.
The German specialists were offended by the way they were treated. Word from Dr. Herbert Wagner, inventor of the Hs 293 missile, was that Gould Castle on Long Island, where Wagner resided and worked, had marble bathtubs. Naval Intelligence allowed their German scientists to take field trips into Manhattan. The Germans at Wright Field told Putt they felt like “caged animals,” and they demanded that something be done about it. Putt saw opportunity here. He wrote to Army Intelligence, G-2, to say that the Germans’ overall malaise was “critically affecting” their ability to work. When the Pentagon ignored Putt’s concerns, he appealed to Major Hugh Knerr, his commanding general at Air Technical Service Command. Knerr wrote to the Pentagon. “Intangibles of a scientist’s daily life directly affect the quality of his product,” he said, but this too had little effect. In Washington the general feeling was that Operation Overcast was temporary and that the Germans should be happy to have jobs. Besides, the Nuremberg trials were about to begin.
On October 18, 1945, an indictment was lodged by the International Military Tribunal against the defendants named as major war criminals. The trial would take place inside the east wing of the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, with opening statements beginning November 20. Because this was a military tribunal, sentences would be passed by judges, not jurors. Nuremberg as a city had played a unique role in the rise of the Nazi Party. It had been the site of Hitler’s Nazi Party rallies—colossal military parades supported by as many as 400,000 Nazi loyalists—and home to the Nuremberg race laws. Now the leaders in the regime would be tried in this location for conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
As the trial began, twenty-one defendants sat crammed onto two benches, inside Courtroom 600, headphones over their ears. (There were twenty-two defendants; Martin Bormann was tried in absentia.) Behind them on the wall, symbolically positioned over their heads, was a large marble statue of the hideous monster Medusa. The twenty-one present faced the death penalty if convicted. “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating,” Chief U.S. Prosecutor Justice Robert H. Jackson famously declared, “that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.” The trial would last almost a year. With stories about Nuremberg and the Nazi war crimes dominating world news, complaints about comfort from the Germans at Wright Field meant very little to the War Department General Staff.