Hiring Patin for a U.S. Army Air Forces contract meant ignoring his past. His armaments factories used slave labor, which was a war crime. In an autobiographical report for Putt, Albert Patin admitted that many of the people in his six-thousand-person workforce were slave laborers supplied by Heinrich Himmler’s SS. Patin stated that he was not ashamed of this; he explained to Colonel Putt that he had been one of the better bosses in the Third Reich. He didn’t encircle his factories in electric fencing like other industrialists did. Patin acknowledged that his wartime access to Hitler’s inner circle benefited his businesses, but he did not see how this made him a war profiteer. He was just following orders. Patin took summer holidays with the G?ring family and winter trips with Albert Speer’s munitions procurement chief, Dieter Stahl, but so did a lot of people. He was no better and no worse.
During this slow period at Wright Field, Colonel Putt had Albert Patin survey the other Germans. He told Patin to be alert to grudges so that Patin could formalize his list of complaints. Putt would in turn forward this summary to his superiors at Air Materiel Command. Patin’s job, Putt counseled, was to emphasize how the Germans had become depressed, even suicidal, without their families and without the promise of long-term work. Colonel Putt sent Patin’s summary of complaints to Air Force Headquarters in Washington, to the attention of Brigadier General John A. Samford. In his own cover letter, Putt requested that immediate action be taken to “improve the morale [of the Germans] and save the existing situation.”
The name Albert Patin had already caught General Samford’s eye. All mail sent to the scientists at Wright Field was screened by army intelligence first. Albert Patin regularly received letters from his staff back in Germany, many of whom also sought work in the United States. A letter had recently been sent to Patin in which lucrative offers from French and Russian intelligence agents were discussed. Brigadier General Samford’s office was made aware of this unwelcome development. Coupled with the summary of German scientists’ dissatisfaction, General Samford took action. He sent the complaint list as well as Patin’s intercepted mail to the War Department. “Immediate action in this situation is imperative if we are to divert the services of valuable scientists from France and Russia to the United States,” General Samford warned his colleagues.
The timing created a perfect storm. The Joint Intelligence Committee was in the process of implementing a major policy change. It had just warned the Joint Chiefs that the existing idea of using restraint when dealing with the Soviets needed to be reconsidered. “Unless the migration of important German scientists and technicians into the Soviet zone is stopped,” read a JIC memo to the Joint Chiefs, “we believe that the Soviet Union within a relatively short time may equal United States developments in the fields of atomic research and guided missiles and may be ahead of U.S. developments in other fields of great military importance, including infra-red, television and jet propulsion.” The JIC also stated, incorrectly, that German nuclear physicists were helping the Russians develop a nuclear bomb and that “their assistance had already cut substantially, probably by several years, the time needed for the USSR to achieve practical results.” In reality the Soviets had gotten to where they were in atomic bomb development not because of any German rare minds but by stealing information from American scientists at Los Alamos. Not until 1949 would the CIA learn that the Russian mole was a British scientist named Karl Fuchs, who worked on the Manhattan Project.
In response to the perception that the Soviets were getting all the “important German scientists,” the Joint Intelligence Committee proposed to the JIOA that three changes be implemented in the Nazi scientist program, effective immediately. The first was to do everything possible in Germany to prevent more scientists from working for the Russians. The second was that the U.S. Army was to make sure that German scientists and their families were given whatever it was they were asking for, including American visas. Third, a list was drawn up proposing that as many as one thousand additional Germans be brought to America for weapons-related research.