Descriptions of life out west in America varied from scientist to scientist. “The conditions of employment were considered to be fair and generous by all,” said Dieter Huzel, the engineer who’d stashed the V-2 documents in the D?rnten Mine. Arthur Rudolph liked the fact that the swimming pool and the bowling alley were made available to the Germans exclusively one afternoon a week. He told his biographer, who did not want to be publicly identified and wrote using the pseudonym Thomas Franklin, that he missed his family and his Bible. Von Braun’s brother, Magnus, was being investigated by the FBI for selling a platinum bar he had illegally smuggled into the United States. Interrogators with the Department of Justice found Magnus von Braun to be “snobby” and “conceited” and said that he seemed to pose “a worse threat to security than a half a dozen discredited SS Generals.”
For Army Ordnance there were many problems to overcome. Funding was scarce. Shrinking military budgets offered very little room for missile development immediately after the end of a world war. Also at Fort Bliss the army discovered that not all the so-called rocket scientists had the talents they allegedly possessed. Karl Otto Fleischer, Major Staver’s original lead for the D?rnten mine and the man who led him on the wild goose chase around the Harz and to the Inn of the Three Lime Trees, claimed to have been the Wehrmacht’s business manager, when in reality he had been in charge of food services. In Texas, Fleischer was assigned the job of club manager until he was finally “repatriated” to Germany. Von Braun had also sold the army on hiring Walter Weisemann, a Nazi public relations officer who had done some work in the Peenemünde valve shop. Von Braun called him an “eminent scientist.” In reality, Weisemann learned engineering in America working for the army.
Fifteen hundred miles across the country, in the winter of 1946, there were now thirty German scientists at Wright Field. Colonel Putt considered this sum to be offensively low. At least once a month, he wrote to Army Air Forces headquarters in Washington requesting more German scientists and inquiring why the importation of these “rare minds” was happening at a snail’s pace. In fact, there was very little for the Germans to do at Wright Field, and many of them were restless. The Air Documents Research Center, formerly in London, had also moved to the Air Material Command headquarters, at Wright Field. There, five hundred employees sorted, catalogued, indexed, and put on microfiche some 1,500 tons of German documents captured by Alsos, CIOS, and T-Forces after the war. So abundant was the material that more than one hundred thousand technical words had been added to the Air Material Command’s English-language dictionary. The plethora of information provided some work opportunities for a predominantly idle group of German specialists who in turn resented this kind of work. The Germans perceived themselves as inventors and visionaries, not librarians or bureaucrats.
One of the Germans, a Nazi businessman named Albert Patin, had been keeping track of the groups’ complaints, which now made their way to Colonel Putt’s desk. It was not just the lack of challenging work, said the Germans; it was the whole package deal. The Hilltop was a dump. Payments were slow. The mail to Germany was even slower. Dayton had no civilized culture. The laboratory facilities at Wright Field were nothing compared to the grand laboratories of the Third Reich. In general, the Germans told Putt, they were beginning to “distrust” their American hosts “based on promises broken by USA officers.”
Colonel Putt’s next move was a controversial one. He appealed to Albert Patin for help. At fifty-eight, Patin was one of the more senior Germans at the Hilltop. He was a wartime armaments contractor whose numerous factories produced equipment for the Luftwaffe under the Speer ministry. When Patin’s facilities were first captured by the U.S. Army, one of the American technical investigators, Captain H. Freiberger, was so amazed by Patin’s industrial vision that he called “the soundness of his principles a revelation.” For Colonel Putt, Albert Patin’s wartime innovations represented the best and the brightest of Reich science. Putt coveted the scientific inventions that Patin’s factories mass-produced, which included navigation aids, in-flight steering mechanisms, and automatic control devices. This kind of technology would give the Army Air Forces a ten-year jump on anything the Russians had, Putt believed.