Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America

by Annie Jacobsen

  The following month, JIC intelligence report 250/4 (the fourth report in the JIC 250 series) warned the Joint Chiefs that “eight out of ten leading German scientists in the field of guided missiles” had recently gone missing from Germany, had most likely been captured by the Soviets, and were now at work in the USSR. Similarly threatening, noted the report, two German physics institutes had been seized by the Red Army and reassembled in the USSR—not just the laboratories and the libraries but the scientists as well. JIC 250/4 warned of “intensive Soviet scientific research programs” under way across Russia, all of which threatened the West. It was from within this environment of intense suspicion that the JIOA was created. The Nazi scientist program was an aggressive U.S. military program from the moment the JIOA took control, just a few weeks after two atomic bombs ended the war with Japan. The employment of German scientists was specifically and strategically aimed at achieving military supremacy over the Soviet Union before the Soviet Union was able to dominate the United States.

  Attaining supreme military power meant marshaling all the cutting-edge science and technology that could be culled from the ruins of the Reich. In the eyes of military intelligence, the fact that the scientists happened to be Nazis was incidental—a troublesome detail. It had no bearing on the bigger plan. The clock was ticking and, according to the Joint Intelligence Committee, would likely run out sometime around 1952.

  There was language in the existing Nazi scientist policy that now had to be dealt with by the JIOA. The phrase “no known or alleged war criminal” could not remain as part of policy nomenclature for long, nor could the phrase “no ardent Nazis.” These words had been put there to appease a few generals in the Pentagon, certain individuals in the State Department and moralists like Dr. H. P. Robertson, General Eisenhower’s chief of scientific intelligence. For the program to move forward according to this new strategy, the language needed to change.

  With the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency now in control, a new, aggressive recruitment process would begin. On its governing body, the JIOA had one representative of each member agency of the Joint Intelligence Committee: 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. The diplomat in the group was outnumbered by the military officers three to one.

  The State Department officer assigned to the JIOA was Samuel Klaus, and he was perceived by his JIOA colleagues to be a troublemaker from day one. Samuel Klaus was a forty-two-year-old shining star in the State Department, a brilliant lawyer, avid horseman, and Hebrew scholar who also spoke Russian and German. Because Klaus was the man on the JIOA who was in charge of approving the visas for all incoming German scientists, it was important that he be on board with what the JIOA wanted to accomplish. But Samuel Klaus was fundamentally opposed to the Nazi scientist program, and this created intense conflict within the JIOA.

  Klaus had hands-on experience with Nazi Party ideology, owing to his wartime work for the U.S. Foreign Economic Administration during the war. During the war, Klaus ran Operation Safe Haven, a program with international reach designed to capture Nazi assets, including stolen art and gold being smuggled out of Germany for safekeeping in neutral countries. During his years running Safe Haven, Klaus had interviewed hundreds of German civilians, and he had developed the belief that many “ordinary Germans” had profited from the Nazi Party and had had a tacit understanding of what was happening to the Jews. In his role as the State Department representative on the JIOA, Klaus argued that the Germans at issue were not brilliant scientists who had been unwittingly caught in a maelstrom of evil but rather that they were amoral opportunists of mediocre talent. JIOA records indicate that Klaus’s sentiments were shared by at least two of his State Department colleagues, including Herbert Cummings and Howard Travers. But it was Samuel Klaus who was unabashedly vocal about how he felt and what he believed. At a JIOA meeting in the late fall of 1945, Klaus vowed that “less than a dozen [German scientists] would ever be permitted to enter the U.S.” on his watch. For this, he was seen as a thorn in the side of military intelligence and he was also outnumbered. Per the JIOA’s charter, it was required to share its plan with a cabinet-level advisory board, which included a representative from the Department of Commerce. As it so happened, the representative from the Commerce Department, John C. Green, was an advocate of the German scientist program, apparently without benefit of knowing who these German scientists really were. In the fall of 1945 Green came up with an idea that would undermine Samuel Klaus’s resistance to Operation Overcast.

  After the war in Europe ended, President Truman put the Department of Commerce in charge of a program designed to excite the nation about a unique form of reparations being culled from the defeated German state, namely, the acquisition of scientific and technical information. There would be no financial compensation coming from Nazi Germany, the Department of Commerce explained, but American industry could now benefit from a different kind of restitution: knowledge. Secretary of Commerce (and former vice president) Henry Wallace had been appointed by the president to supervise the release of thousands of what would become known as PB reports, named after the Commerce Department’s Office of the Publication Board. These reports contained non-armaments-related information collected by CIOS officers in Germany after the war. The idea behind the PB reports was to get average Americans to start their own small businesses inspired by German technological advances. These new businesses would be a boon to America’s postwar prosperity, the Commerce Department said.

  Thanks to Reich scientists, the public was told, beverage manufactures could now sterilize fruit juice without heat. Women could enjoy run-proof hosiery. Butter could be churned at the rate of 1,500 pounds per hour. These lists seemed not to end. Yeast could be produced in unlimited quantities, and wool could be pulled from sheepskins without injuring the animal’s hide—all because of brilliant German scientists. Hitler’s wizards had reduced suitcase-sized electrical components to the size of a pinkie finger and pioneered electromagnetic tape.

  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. Tr
ucks 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.”

  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 Göring Aeronautical Research Center at Völkenrode, 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.

  The same month the Nuremberg trial opened, in October 1945, the Army Air Forces hosted a grand two-day-long fair at Wright Field. On display were captured German and Japanese aircraft and rockets seen by the public for the first time since war’s end. Over half a million people from twenty-six countries came to marvel at the confiscated enemy equipment, said to be worth $150 million. Among the items on display were the V-2 rocket, the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 G3 fighter aircraft, and the Messerschmitt Me 262. Particularly fascinating to the public was that some of the airplanes still had swastikas painted on their tails. The fair was so popular that the Army Air Forces extended it for five days. There was no mention made of the fact that several of the men who had designed and engineered these weapons were living a stone’s throw away, at the Hilltop.

  Among the half-million visitors at the fair was John C. Green, the Commerce Department’s representative on the JIOA advisory board and its executive secretary overseeing the PB reports. The board had just changed its name to the Office of Technical Services, underscoring its transformation from a passive “board” to a more active “service” that would make use of cutting-edge science and technology. As planned, Green tracked down Colonel Putt at the Wright Field Fair. He had a myriad of questions for Putt, all of which centered around one idea: How could all this science and technology on display benefit American industry moving forward? Initially, Putt was uneasy about Green’s attention, but in the end he decided to take a gamble on him. After all, John C. Green had access to the classified list. Putt shared with him some information about the German scientists on the Hilltop. How they were like men kept in an ivory tower, how
their talents were squandered by policy and prejudice in some circles in Washington, D.C. They needed employment opportunities, Putt lamented. Perhaps Green could help?

  Green seemed amenable, and Putt took note. “During his visit to the Air Forces Fair, Wright Field, [John C. Green] evidenced keen interest and inquired as to the reaction of industry toward the possible employment of German scientists,” Putt wrote in a memo. He was not yet clear if Green’s “influence is favorable or unfavorable.” But Putt decided to take the risk. He forwarded to Green several “letters of interest” from defense contractors regarding potential employment of the German scientists. These documents had already been received by Air Material Command. They included letters from Dow Chemical Company, the AiResearch Manufacturing Company, and the Aircraft Industries Association. Defense contracts meant that there was business in the wings waiting to be transacted. It was Washington, D.C., that stood in the way. Putt explained to Green that these private businesses did not have a high enough security clearance to deal directly with the German scientists themselves.

  John C. Green wrote to JIOA explaining what he had in mind: German scientists of “international repute” should be allowed, with their families, to enter the United States for long-term work, argued Green. This was good for American businesses. The letters from the defense contractors indicated that there was a great demand for this kind of work. The Commerce Department would set up a board to weed out the Nazis and bring the good Germans in. The German scientists’ knowledge and know-how would be “fully and freely” available to all Americans, said Green. This boom to industry would help create tens of thousands of American jobs.