WELCOME TO OPERATION PAPERCLIP
Operation Paperclip was the codename under which the US intelligence and military services extricated scientists from Germany, during and after the final stages of World War II. The project was originally called Operation Overcast, and is sometimes also known as Project Paperclip.
Of particular interest were scientists specialising in aerodynamics and rocketry (such as those involved in the V-1 and V-2 projects), chemical weapons, chemical reaction technology and medicine. These scientists and their families were secretly brought to the United States, without State Department review and approval; their service for Hitler's Third Reich, NSDAP and SS memberships as well as the classification of many as war criminals or security threats also disqualified them from officially obtaining visas. An aim of the operation was capturing equipment before the Soviets came in. The US Army destroyed some of the German equipment to prevent it from being captured by the advancing Soviet Army.
The majority of the scientists, numbering almost 500, were deployed at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, Fort Bliss, Texas and Huntsville, Alabama to work on guided missile and ballistic missile technology. This in turn led to the foundation of NASA and the US ICBM program.
Much of the information surrounding Operation Paperclip is still classified.
Separate from Paperclip was an even-more-secret effort to capture German nuclear secrets, equipment and personnel (Operation Alsos). Another American project (TICOM) gathered German experts in cryptography.
The United States Bureau of Mines employed seven German synthetic fuel scientists in a Fischer-Tropsch chemical plant in Louisiana, Missouri in 1946.
-
ABOUT OPERATION PAPERCLIP
This controversial top-secret U.S. intelligence program brought Nazi German scientists to America to harness their brain power for Cold War initiatives.
Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959. Conducted by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), it was largely carried out by special agents of the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps (CIC). Many of these personnel were former members, and some were former leaders, of the Nazi Party.
The primary purpose for Operation Paperclip was U.S. military advantage in the Soviet–American Cold War, and the Space Race. In a comparable operation, the Soviet Union relocated more than 2,200 German specialists—a total of more than 6,000 people including family members—with Operation Osoaviakhim during one night on October 22, 1946.
In February 1945, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) set up T-Force, or Special Sections Subdivision, which grew to over 2,000 personnel by June. T-Force examined 5,000 German targets with a high priority on synthetic rubber and oil catalysts, new designs in armored equipment, V-2 (rocket) weapons, jet and rocket propelled aircraft, naval equipment, field radios, secret writing chemicals, aero medicine research, gliders, and "scientific and industrial personalities”.
When large numbers of German scientists began to be discovered in late April, Special Sections Subdivision set up the Enemy Personnel Exploitation Section to manage and interrogate them. Enemy Personnel Exploitation Section established a detention center, DUSTBIN, first in Paris and later in Kransberg Castle outside Frankfurt. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) established the first secret recruitment program, called Operation Overcast, on July 20, 1945, initially "to assist in shortening the Japanese war and to aid our postwar military research". The term "Overcast" was the name first given by the German scientists' family members for the housing camp where they were held in Bavaria. In late summer 1945, the JCS established the JIOA, a subcommittee of the Joint Intelligence Community, to directly oversee Operation Overcast and later Operation Paperclip. The JIOA representatives included the army's director of intelligence, the chief of naval intelligence, the assistant chief of Air Staff-2 (air force intelligence), and a representative from the State Department. In November 1945, Operation Overcast was renamed Operation Paperclip by Ordnance Corps officers, who would attach a paperclip to the folders of those rocket experts whom they wished to employ in America.
In a secret directive circulated on September 3, 1946, President Truman officially approved Operation Paperclip and expanded it to include 1,000 German scientists under "temporary, limited military custody".
-
HISTORY OF OPERATION PAPERCLIP
As World War II was entering its final stages, American and British organizations teamed up to scour occupied Germany for as much military, scientific and technological development research as they could uncover.
Trailing behind Allied combat troops, groups such as the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS) began confiscating war-related documents and materials and interrogating scientists as German research facilities were seized by Allied forces. One enlightening discovery—recovered from a toilet at Bonn University—was the Osenberg List: a catalogue of scientists and engineers that had been put to work for the Third Reich.
In a covert affair originally dubbed Operation Overcast but later renamed Operation Paperclip, roughly 1,600 of these German scientists (along with their families) were brought to the United States to work on America’s behalf during the Cold War. The program was run by the newly-formed Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), whose goal was to harness German intellectual resources to help develop America’s arsenal of rockets and other biological and chemical weapons, and to ensure such coveted information did not fall into the hands of the Soviet Union.
Although he officially sanctioned the operation, President Harry Truman forbade the agency from recruiting any Nazi members or active Nazi supporters. Nevertheless, officials within the JIOA and Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the forerunner to the CIA—bypassed this directive by eliminating or whitewashing incriminating evidence of possible war crimes from the scientists’ records, believing their intelligence to be crucial to the country’s postwar efforts.
One of the most well-known recruits was Wernher von Braun, the technical director at the Peenemunde Army Research Center in Germany who was instrumental in developing the lethal V-2 rocket that devastated England during the war. Von Braun and other rocket scientists were brought to Fort Bliss, Texas, and White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico, as “War Department Special Employees” to assist the U.S. Army with rocket experimentation. Von Braun later became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, which eventually propelled two dozen American astronauts to the Moon.
Although defenders of the clandestine operation argue that the balance of power could have easily shifted to the Soviet Union during the Cold War if these Nazi scientists were not brought to the United States, opponents point to the ethical cost of ignoring their abhorrent war crimes without punishment or accountability.
-
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ABOUT OPERATION PAPERCLIP
Operation Paperclip (also Project Paperclip) was the code name for the O.S.S.–U.S. Military rescue of scientists from Nazi Germany, during the terminus and aftermath of World War II. In 1945, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency was established with direct responsibility for effecting Operation Paperclip.
Following the failure of the German invasion of the Soviet Union (codenamed Operation Barbarossa), and (to a lesser extent) the entry of the U.S. into the war, the strategic position of Germany was at a disadvantage since German military industries were unprepared for a long war. As a result, Germany began efforts in spring 1943 to recall scientists and technical personnel from combat units to places where their skills could be used in research and development:
“Overnight, Ph.D.s were liberated from KP duty, masters of science were recalled from orderly service, mathematicians were hauled out of bakeries, and precision mechanics ceased to be truck drivers.” — Dieter K. Huzel
The recalling first required identifying the men, then tracking them and ascertaining their political correctness and reliability, before being recorded to the Osenberg List, by Werner Osenberg, a University of Hannover engineer-scientist, head of the Wehrforschungsgemeinschaft (Military Research Association). In March 1945, a Polish laboratory technician found the pieces of the Osenberg List in an improperly flushed toilet. Major Robert B. Staver, U.S.A., Chief of the Jet Propulsion Section of the Research and Intelligence Branch of the U.S. Army Ordnance, London, used the Osenberg List to compile his Black List of scientists to be interrogated, headed by rocket scientist Wernher von Braun.
The original, unnamed plan — to interview only the rocket scientists — changed after Maj. Staver sent Col. Joel Holmes’s cable to the Pentagon, on 22 May 1945, about the urgency of evacuating the German technicians and their families as “important for [the] Pacific war”. Most of the scientists were rocketeers of the V-2 rocket service; initially housed with their families in Landshut, Bavaria.
On 19 July 1945, the U.S. JCS designated the handling of the Nazi scientists and their families as Operation Overcast, but when their housing’s nickname, “Camp Overcast”, became common, conversational usage, Operation Overcast was renamed Operation Paperclip. Despite the effort to secrecy, by 1958, much about Operation Paperclip was mainstream knowledge, mentioned in a panegyric Time magazine article about Wernher von Braun.
In early August 1945, Colonel Holger N. Toftoy, chief of the Rocket Branch in the Research and Development Division of Army Ordnance, offered initial one-year contracts to the rocket scientists. After Toftoy agreed to take care of their families, 127 scientists accepted the offer. In September 1945, the first group of seven rocket scientists arrived from Germany at Fort Strong in the US: Wernher von Braun, Erich W. Neubert, Theodor A. Poppel, August Schulze, Eberhard F. M. Rees, Wilhelm Jungert and Walter Schwidetzky. Eventually the rocket scientists arrived at Fort Bliss, Texas for rocket testing at White Sands Proving Grounds as “War Department Special Employees.”
In early 1950, U.S. legal residence for some “Paperclip Specialists” was effected through the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico; from which country the Nazi scientists legally entered the U.S. In later decades, the War time activities of some scientists were investigated — Arthur Rudolph linked to the Mittelbau-Dora slave labor camp, Hubertus Strughold implicated with Nazi human experimentation.
Eighty-six aeronautical engineers were transferred to Wright Field, which had acquired Nazi aircraft and equipment under Operation Lusty.
The United States Army Signal Corps employed 24 specialists — including physicists Drs. Georg Goubau, Gunter Guttwein, Georg Hass, Horst Kedesdy, and Kurt Levovec; physical chemists Professor Rudolf Brill and Drs. Ernst Baars and Eberhard Both; geophysicist Dr. Helmut Weickmann; technical optician Dr. Gerhard Schwesinger; and electronics engineers Drs. Eduard Gerber, Richard Guenther and Hans Ziegler.
The United States Bureau of Mines employed seven German synthetic fuel scientists in a Fischer-Tropsch chemical plant in Louisiana, Missouri in 1946.
In 1959, ninety-four Operation Paperclip men went to the U.S., including Friedwardt Winterberg and Friedrich Wigand. Through 1990, Operation Paperclip immigrated 1,600 Nazi personnel, with the “intellectual reparations” taken by the U.S. and the U.K. (patents and industrial processes) valued at some $10 billion dollars.
-
THE HORRIBLE SECRETS OF OPERATION PAPERCLIP:
An interview with Annie Jacobsen about her stunning account
The journalist Annie Jacobsen recently published Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Little Brown, 2014). Scouring the archives and unearthing previously undisclosed records as well as drawing on earlier work, Jacobsen recounts in chilling detail a very peculiar effort on the part of the U.S. military to utlize the very scientists who had been essential to Hitler’s war effort.
As I read your book I started thinking about the various Nazi genre films such as; The Boys from Brazil, The Odessa File, and Marathon Man — they all hold to a similar premise, key Nazi’s escape Germany after the war and plot in various ways to do bad things. Apparently truth is stranger than fiction. What was Operation Paperclip?
Operation Paperclip was a classified program to bring Nazi scientists to America right after World War II. It had, however, a benign public face. The war department had issued a press release saying that good German scientists would be coming to America to help out in our scientific endeavors.
But it was not benign at all, as seen in the character of Otto Ambros, a man, as you explain, was keen on helping U.S. soldiers in matters of hygiene by offering them soap, this soon after they had conquered Germany. Who was Ambros?
Otto Ambros I must say was one of the most dark-hearted characters that I wrote about in this book. He was Hitler’s favorite chemist, and I don’t say that lightly. I found a document in the National Archives, I don’t believe it had ever been revealed before, that showed that during the war Hitler gave Ambros a one million Reichsmark bonus for his scientific acumen. The reason was two-fold. Ambros worked on the Reich’s secret nerve agent program, but he also invented synthetic rubber, that was called buna. The reason rubber was so important — if you think about the Reich’s war-machine and how tanks need treads, aircraft need wheels — the Reich needed rubber. By inventing synthetic rubber, Ambros became Hitler’s favorite chemist.
Not only that when the Reich decided to develop a factory at Auschwitz, — the death camp had a third territory, there was Auschwitz, there was Birkenau — they did it in a third territory called Auschwitz III also known as Monowitvz-Buna. This was where synthetic rubber was going to be manufactured using prisoners who would be spared the gas chamber as they were put to work, and most often worked to death by the Reich war machine. The person, the general manager there at Auschwitz III, was Otto Ambros. Ambros was one of the last individuals to leave Auschwitz, this is in the last days of January 1945 as the Russians are about to liberate the death camp. Ambros is there according to these documents I have located in Germany, destroying evidence right up until the very end.
After the war, Ambros was sought by the Allies and later found, interrogated and put on trial at Nuremberg, where he was convicted of mass-murder and slavery. He was sentenced to prison, but in the early 1950s as the Cold War became elevated he was given clemency by the U.S. High Commissioner John McCloy and released from prison. When he was sentenced, the Nuremberg judges took away all his finances, including that one million Reichsmark bonus from Hitler. When McCloy gave him clemency he also restored Otto Ambros’ finances, so he got back what was left of that money. He was then given a contract with the U.S. Department of Energy.
He actually came to work in the United States?
Otto Ambros remains one of the most difficult cases to crack in terms of Paperclip. While I was able to unearth some new and horrifying information about his postwar life, most of it remains, “lost or missing,” which I take to mean classified. We do know for a fact that Ambros came to the United States two, possibly three times. As a convicted war criminal traveling to the United States he would have needed special papers from the U.S. State Department. The State Department, however, informed me through the Freedom of Information Act that those documents are lost or missing.
You describe quite well the pushing and pulling on how this program came about — and the compulsion to accelerate things once the Cold War hit full steam. The rationale being if the U.S. didn’t employ these men — and they were all men — then the Soviets would have. How do you see that type of argument having these characters so vividly in front of you?
It was really one of the most traumatic elements of researching and going through the documents, seeing how there were different factions in the Pentagon — because the program was run out of the Pentagon by Joint Chiefs of Staff. They created a specific unit called the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), which was in charge of Paperclip. In these documents you can see the tug-of-war between generals who were absolutely opposed to the idea of bringing anyone who participated in the Reich’s rise to power, they were loathe to bring these scientists here, they did not want to. I quote transcripts where certain generals saying exactly that. On the other hand, there were other individuals, generals and colonels, who were gun-ho about the prospect about making America’s arsenal, the aggregate of our military strength, the strongest in the world, and certainly stronger than the Soviets. To that end they did not see any problem in bringing these scientists to the U.S. and were seemingly willing to not only overlook the past of these Nazi scientists, but to white wash them.
The former Nazi Surgeon General, Walter Scheiber, had an advocate in the U.S in the person of Colonel Charles Loucks. You describe a photo taken of Loucks in Japan where he is standing by an “enormous pile of dead bodies” that in turn lay “next to a stack of incendiary bombs,” with a look of detachment.” This reminded me of the famous quote by U.S. General Curtis LeMay:
Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.... Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.”
LeMay and Louck’s justifications do not sound much different than the Nazi rationale of, “I was only following orders.” How do you see this and has your thinking changed in the course of writing this?
Certainly with some of the individuals involved a kind of necessary detachment in their perception of what they needed to do to serve their country. Mindful of the fact that I was not there during the Cold War and looking at history, one must take into account how high the stakes were — thermo nuclear war. Some of the individuals involved in Paperclip, i.e. the American officials, as a journalist I was able to consider that and see the paradox and conflict and empathize with having to make those very tough decisions.
General Loucks, however, stuck out as an exception to me because he didn’t only see work with Hitler’s closest confidants as a matter of national security for the United States moving forward, he grew to actually respect and appreciate the Nazi scientists. I found these quotes from him in his diaries, which he left posthumously to the Military History Institute in Pennsylvania. You see him discussing his fondness for example, a former Brigadier Fuhrer, Walter Schrieber, who was on Himmler’s personal staff and was so close to Hitler he was given a gold Party badge, which meant he was in favor by the Fuhrer. Sheiber was involved in concentration camp experiments, he was the liaison between Otto Ambros and Reich’s chemical committee, he had direct knowledge of the most horrific elements of the concentration camp, including genocide. Here he was being invited into the home of General Louck. At one point in the diary, I learned, he would even spend the night at the General’s home as a houseguest.
Now you point out an interesting passage in the book that I think gives a little perspective on General Loucks and made me wonder about how much the war had possibly transformed him? He was in charge overseeing the chemical weapons intelligence in Japan after the war. As I describe in the book going out into the Japanese countryside and taking a look at these incendiary bombs that he was in charge of manufacturing for the Americans during the war. He talks with this peculiar detachment about coming across a pile of what was left of these incendiary bombs and a pile of dead bodies, Japanese civilians who had been killed. He talks about them with such a strange perspective where he is only interested in seeing if his incendiary bombs had worked that it... gave me pause.
Former Vice President Henry Wallace, under Franklin Roosevelt, is perhaps best known for running for President, and refusing to renounce the support of U.S. Communists. What did he have to do with Operation Paperclip?
That’s such an interesting detail for you to pick up on and it was such an interesting element to write about. Although he had been Vice President and Truman later became Roosevelt’s Vice President, then of course fate and circumstance elevates Truman to the President. Henry Wallace is then Secretary of Commerce. What was interesting is that the Secretary of Commerce had a place on the JIOA, and was privy to some, but not all of the information regarding Operation Paperclip that was being run by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Wallace as Secretary of Commerce was incredibly gung-ho about getting Americans back to work. He had this book called, Sixty Million Jobs, and he intended to help America reach that milestone, the post-war prosperity that everyone in the nation was hoping for. Wallace saw science as a means to do that. Without knowledge of who these Nazi scientists were and what their pasts were Wallace endorsed this program, to such a degree that he wrote a letter to President Truman himself, saying you need to get on board with this program. That had a huge impact on Operation Paperclip which at that very moment in time, this is just a few months after the end of the war, the Joint Chiefs were struggling with the idea of Paperclip because the perception was that it was a deal with the devil. When Wallace stepped in, and said this is brilliant for commerce, it was exactly what the Joint Chiefs had been looking for.
How did you happen on this topic? How hard was it research and writing this?
I came across Operation Paperclip when I was writing Area 51, which involved the two Nazi aircraft designers who were brothers, Walter and Reimar Horten. The Horten brothers did not come to America as part of Paperclip, but their boss certainly did. His name was Siegfried Knemeyer, he was Herman Goering’s most important scientists for the Luftwaffe. Gorring liked him so much that he referred to him as ‘my boy‘ and made him chief of all technical engineering. When I learned that shortly after the war Knemeyer came to the United states with his seven children and his wife, had a long and prosperous career with the U.S. Air force, and that when he retired in the mid 1970s the Defense Department awarded him with the Distinguished Civilian Service Award — the highest award a scientist can get from the Pentagon — I thought to myself, how does that happen? How do you go from having Herman Goring as your boss then to having the U.S. Defense Department as your boss, and to be so important to both? That is where I became instantly curious about Operation Paperclip.
I was able to track down Knemeyer’s grandson who lives in the United States. He is about my age and is a very courageous fellow who believes in transparency. He agreed to let me interview him. There began a dialog between Dirk Knemeyer and myself about what this really meant. In those interviews I realized there was a way into Operation Paperclip in a manner that had not been reported before. Of course I was writing my book on the shoulders of so many amazing journalists; including Clarence Lasby, Linda Hunt and Tom Bower — people who have written about Paperclip before, but with limited access — we all sort of go along, and build on things as more informationgets revealed. I believe, though, that what gave me a lot of insight into the characters in Operation Paperclip was access to their family members.
As for the second part of your question, the subject matter is so complex, certainly when you are reading about the war, it is dark and evil. Then when you read about what happened after the war it is complicated and thought provoking. For a journalist that is challenging territory. I’m someone who always welcomes the challenge because I don’t believe stories are black and white. And I don’t believe stories are one-sided, or easily made simple. I believe this is a subject matter that deserves serious consideration and I also think there is so much more to be revealed. I hope my book inspires journalist sin the coming decade to look at this more. Because I absolutely know that there is so much out here that is still classified.
-
OPERATION PAPERCLIP: A MONSTROUS DISTORTION OF HISTORY
Annie Jacobsen’s 575-page Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Little, Brown and Company, 2014) combines documentary evidence with extensive interviews in a compelling work of history. Here is an example of a mainstream book publication that examines the burgeoning secret government America in the aftermath of World War II. It is also a work that deals with facts, as opposed to “theories.” As a model of inquiry into a controversial historical topic, Jacobsen’s study reveals how it is possible to untangle a complex event in order to shed light on how our nation was transformed from within in the second half of the twentieth century.
“Operation Paperclip” was the code name given to the top-secret program to recruit Nazi scientists and doctors in the chaotic period at the close of World War II. Among the many new branches of the expanding American military and intelligence network, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) was formed in 1945 with the express goal of recruiting Nazi scientists to engage in weapons projects, scientific intelligence programs, and chemical/biological warfare. Initially, President Truman was not apprised of the program, which was approved in principle by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on July 6, 1945. Over a year later, Truman gave his official approval after the urging of the undersecretary of the State Department, Dean Acheson. One of the most ardent critics of Operation Paperclip was Albert Einstein, who wrote a spirited letter to Truman on behalf of the Federation of American Scientists. But from the very beginning, the creation of what the author calls a “headless monster” was fully underway with the dual purpose of ending the war with Japan and confronting a new threat from a wartime ally, the USSR, in the areas of chemical, biological, and atomic warfare. A Faustian pact was made to ignore the ignominious past deeds of war criminals with the ultimate goal of winning the Cold War.
Ms. Jacobsen is successful in linking names and faces to Operation Paperclip. As most of the documents have long been destroyed, especially during the stewardship of CIA director Richard Helms, it is remarkable that the author has discovered enough evidence for a book of this scope through interviews and Freedom of Information Act requests, as well as the ground-breaking work of previous investigators like Linda Hunt. Ms. Jacobsen provides a rogues gallery of photographs of the elite Nazi scientists, researchers, and medical practitioners. A number of the men have scars on their faces, the result of the pastime of dueling for the Nazi top brass. One photo depicts a dueling scene occurring near the site of the Auschwitz death camp. Short biographical portraits are presented of both the scientists and the American military officers who recruited them. A number of heroic figures, such as State Department officer Samuel Klaus and a relentless investigator of war crimes, Dr. Leopold Alexander, strongly resisted the Nazi scientist program.
Due to the early efforts of journalist Drew Pearson, there was initial public outrage to the prospect of bringing the Nazi scientists to America. But with the passing of the National Security Act on July 26,1947, and the establishment of the CIA, the most intimate details of Operation Paperclip were kept secret from the American public for decades. As indicated by Ms. Jacobsen, “In Operation Paperclip, the CIA found a perfect partner in its quest for scientific intelligence. And it was in the CIA that Operation Paperclip found its strongest supporting partner yet.” (p. 288). Such secret CIA spin-off programs as Artichoke, MKUltra, Bluebird, and others would focus on “mind control,” “modifying behavior through covert means,” and “extreme interrogation” by using experimental drugs, such as LSD. In 1946, Reinhard Gehlen was recruited, not as a scientist, but for his expertise as former chief of Nazi intelligence against the USSR. The so-called Gehlen Organization was subsequently absorbed into the cavernous network of the CIA. Operation Paperclip was the tip of the iceberg for seemingly unlimited and unrestrained covert CIA operations.
A prominent civilian who made Operation Paperclip a full-blown operation was the future member of the Warren Commission, John J. McCloy. From 1945, when he was assistant secretary of war, to his role as chairman of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, and finally, to the time of his appointment as U.S. high commissioner of Germany in 1949, McCloy used his authority to champion the Nazi scientist program. From his headquarters in Frankfurt, McCloy’s office was located just a few floors up and a few doors down from the CIA office in the same building. According to Ms. Jacobsen, McCloy was advised by his legal staff that as high commissioner that “he had the authority to do whatever he thought appropriate.” (p. 337). McCloy proceeded to commute ten of fifteen death sentences from a batch of condemned criminals housed in the Landsberg Prison. In another notorious case, McCloy released from prison the industrialist Friedrich Flick, who had been tried and convicted at Nuremberg, then went on to become the wealthiest person in Germany during the Cold War. McCloy even attempted to commute the prison sentence of Albert Speer, one Hitler’s most loyal henchmen.
One of McCloy’s prize recruits was Otto Ambros, the Nazi chemist who had discovered sarin gas. Convicted of mass murder at the Nuremberg trials, Ambros was granted clemency by McCloy, prior to signing a Paperclip contract and helping America build an arsenal of sarin on an incredible scale. At the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, thousands of tons of sarin nerve agent were manufactured annually. The principal method of delivery was through M34 cluster bombs, which would be filled with sarin gas. It was not until November 25, 1969 that President Richard Nixon declared the end of the American biological warfare program and ordered the destruction of its enormous arsenal. According to Ms. Jacobson, it took more than three decades to “destroy” a stockpile of chemical weapons at a cost of $25.8 billion.
In the story of Operation Paperclip, an essential reference point for Ms. Jacobsen is the Nuremberg Code, which was the result of the war criminal trials conducted in Germany by the allies. Dr. Alexander was instrumental in providing a template for moral principles that were eventually expanded to six points of ethical conduct in medical research. At the core of those principles was the requirement in absolute terms of “informed consent” and “absence of coercion” for human beings used as subjects in medical experiments. But during the Nuremberg trials, Operation Paperclip was recruiting scientists who were guilty of the very war crimes that brought the Code into existence. As indicated by Ms. Jacobsen, “Less than 150 miles from the Nuremberg courtroom, several of the physicians who had participated in, and many others who were accessory to, these criminal medical experiments were now being employed by the U.S. Army at the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center, the classified research facility in Heidelberg.” (p. 203) In the ensuing decades, the principles of the Nuremberg Code continued to be violated in the use of human subjects as guinea pigs with no regard to the concept of informed consent.
Ms. Jacobsen highlights the tragic case of Dr. Frank Olson as a flagrant violation of Nuremberg Code. Dr. Olson was a specialist in biological warfare, who became an unwitting guinea pig for Dr. Sidney Gottlieb’s experiments with LSD as part of a top secret CIA program. On November 18, 1953, after drinking a glass of Cointreau spiked with the drug, Dr. Olson had a nervous breakdown. Two weeks later, he allegedly committed suicide, hurtling himself through the window of a room in the tenth floor of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. According to Ms. Jacobsen, the death of Dr. Olson “would nearly bring down the CIA.” (p. 366). But in the year following this incident, the CIA enjoyed two of its greatest “successes” in the overthrow of democratically elected regimes in Guatemala and Iran through carefully planned coups d’état. With its unprecedented and unaccountable authority, the CIA experiments in mind control in Project MKUltra would continue unchecked for another two decades.
In summing up the significance of Operation Paperclip, Ms. Jacobsen places the program in the context of the Cold War:
“The Cold War became a battlefield marked by doublespeak. Disguise, distortion, and deception were accepted as reality. Truth was promised in a serum. And Operation Paperclip, born of the ashes of World War II, was the inciting incident in this hall of mirrors.” (p. 175)
In this carefully researched study, it becomes apparent that Operation Paperclip opened the floodgates to a new, secret government that subverted our democratic practices while wielding power without the traditional checks and balances of our Constitution. The nuclear physicist Herbert York was the first scientific director of the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). York was troubled by the implications of President Eisenhower’s farewell address in which the outgoing chief executive warned not only of the dangers of the “military industrial complex,” but the potential abuses of scientific research: “In holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” When York later questioned Eisenhower about what individual scientist had aroused his concerns, the retired president identified Wernher von Braun—one of the earliest recruits into Operation Paperclip and the eventual superstar of the American space program. Von Braun was transformed into an American patriot and hero, resulting in part from a series of articles in Collier’s magazine and a popular television series produced by Walt Disney. As the author makes clear, propaganda played a crucial role in defusing the implications of Operation Paperclip.
One of the themes of this extremely detailed study is how the process of decision-making in America was taken away from elected officials and managed in secrecy in the labyrinth of the American intelligence network. Studying this topic reveals a world of concealment and obfuscation contrary to our cherished democratic practices. As Ms. Jacobsen observes, “Through the lens of history, it is remarkable to think that U.S. biological warfare and chemical warfare programs grew so quickly to the size they did.” (p. 391). The subversion of our political system was achieved in large part through the ability to “classify” documents and to rely on a compliant media to distort the historical truth, which was buried in unprecedented governmental bureaucratic secrecy and obfuscation. While serving as president, even Ronald Reagan could not get straight answers or documentation about the circumstances of Otto Ambros’s work in American industry.
While many of the secrets of Operation Paperclip were jealously guarded, the truth has a way of emerging, especially with the dedication of a gifted writer and tenacious researcher like Annie Jacobsen. One of realities conveyed by the author was the postwar obsession to acquire “science at any price.” The result was the creation of a national security Frankenstein with whom we are still wrestling today. The necessity of hiding the secrets of the “headless monster” has led to the concealment of the truth from the American public in a manner that has now become routine. The noted French Resistance writer Jean Michel observed that, “I make my stand solely against the monstrous distortion of history which, in silencing certain facts and glorifying others, has given birth to false, foul and suspect myths.” (p. 425) Annie Jacobsen’s book goes a long way to setting the record straight and challenging one of many “myths” about our recent history. In this regard, Operation Paperclip is a paradigm for understanding what happened to America during the Cold War.
-
THE SECRET OPERATION TO BRING NAZI SCIENTISTS TO AMERICA
In the fall of 1944, the United States and its allies launched a secret mission code-named Operation Paperclip. The aim was to find and preserve German weapons, including biological and chemical agents, but American scientific intelligence officers quickly realized the weapons themselves were not enough.
They decided the United States needed to bring the Nazi scientists themselves to the U.S. Thus began a mission to recruit top Nazi doctors, physicists and chemists — including Wernher von Braun, who went on to design the rockets that took man to the moon.
The U.S. government went to great lengths to hide the pasts of scientists they brought to America. Based on newly discovered documents, writer Annie Jacobsen tells the story of the mission and the scientists in her book, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists To America.
On the origins of Operation Paperclip
It's just a few months after the landings at Normandy and you have Allied forces making their way across the continent, headed toward Berlin and Munich, and with them, sort of scattered among the soldiers, are these small teams of scientific intelligence officers. And they are searching for the Reich's weapons. And they don't know what they might find.
One example was they had no idea that Hitler had created this whole arsenal of nerve agents. They had no idea that Hitler was working on a bubonic plague weapon. That is really where Paperclip began, which was suddenly the Pentagon realizing, "Wait a minute, we need these weapons for ourselves."
On the U.S. government's efforts to mask the scientists' past
There began a propaganda campaign by the U.S. government to whitewash the pasts of these scientists who we very much knew were ardent Nazis. And it happened on a number of levels, from the bureaucrats in Army intelligence who were asked to sort of re-write the dossiers, on up to the generals in the Pentagon who flatly said we need these scientists, and we're going to have to re-write some history. And that's where it becomes very tricky and very nefarious.
You have to be a Nazi ideologue to move up that chain of command so high. It's almost like someone who is a hedge fund manager in the United States trying to take the line that they don't believe in capitalism, you know? That they're just trying to earn a living for their family. I mean, if you're going to rise to the top of your field, you maintain the party line and that is what I found was the case with Paperclip.
On Wernher von Braun's Nazi past
He is a great example, because you wonder where the deal with the devil really happened in terms of his whitewashed past — because the U.S. government, NASA in particular, was so complicit in keeping his past hidden.
In doing the research, one discovers that not only was von Braun a Nazi, but a member of the SS. And not only was he running the underground slave labor facility where his rockets were being built — he wasn't running the facility but he was in charge of the science there — but when they were running low of good technicians, Wernher von Braun himself traveled nearby to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he hand-picked slaves to work for him as laborers.
When you see that kind of activity during the war, and you have to imagine what he saw and what he knew, it's impossible to excuse him from his Nazi past.
On the fates of the Nazi scientists
They all had different trajectories, but none of them seemed to have been held accountable for what happened and what they were involved in during the war. Dr. Benzinger, who was one of the Nazi doctors, came here, and when he died at the age of ninety-something he had a wonderful obituary in The New York Times lauding him for inventing the ear thermometer. Entirely left out of the story was the work that he performed on concentration camp prisoners.
-
OPERATION PAPERCLIP VIDEOS:
Video #1: https://url.americanpatriotsforum.com/OxPqNU
Video #2: https://url.americanpatriotsforum.com/qLvOvy
Video #3: https://url.americanpatriotsforum.com/rl1ZkT
Video #4: https://url.americanpatriotsforum.com/MCFnVY
Video #5: https://url.americanpatriotsforum.com/yfUYvB
Video #6: https://url.americanpatriotsforum.com/7nB3YG
Video #7: https://url.americanpatriotsforum.com/qj9sBI
Video #8: https://url.americanpatriotsforum.com/uCTyzB
Video #9: https://url.americanpatriotsforum.com/ZwvAZe