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

by Annie Jacobsen

  Schreiber insisted he had “never taken part in any such research work.… The knowledge [I] gained about it, [I] either gained through documents [I] ran across in [my] position or in medical conventions, where intellectuals could see that something like that was being conducted in the background.”

  Every aspect of Schreiber’s escape story seemed unreasonable, which made it difficult for the reporters to take seriously almost anything else he said. Yet the press conference went on for more than thirty minutes, with Schreiber standing his ground.

  As it turned out, Schreiber’s press conference was not impromptu but rehearsed. He had been discussing his testimony with officers from the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps for two weeks—since October 18, 1948, the day he had walked into the CIC’s Berlin office. CIC special agent Severin F. Wallach was Schreiber’s handler. Wallach had heard a much longer version of what had allegedly been going on with Schreiber since his capture by the Red Army during the fall of Berlin.

  According to the thirteen-page report by Wallach in Schreiber’s intelligence dossier, “On the 5th of May Dr. Schreiber was sent, together with other captured German Generals, back to Berlin. The Generals were put in a cellar of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin and received orders to emerge from this cellar under strong Soviet guard. This whole scene was photographed by the Soviets, who were engaged in putting together an ‘authentic’ documentary film of the capture of Berlin.” On May 9, with the Reich’s surrender complete, Dr. Schreiber was sent with other officers to a much larger prisoner of war camp, in Posen, where he stayed until August 12, 1945. A transport of generals to Moscow had been organized; Schreiber said he arrived there on August 29. “The transport was very badly organized,” Schreiber said, according to the dossier report. “There was a food shortage because the cooks on the transport sold the food on the black market or kept it for themselves.” Schreiber’s testimony was resplendent with details. “All generals were sent to the PW camp No. 7027 in Krasnogorsk, near Moscow,” he recalled. Here, the food tasted wonderful because it came from the United States, in cans. Schreiber repeatedly told Wallach how much he loved everything about the United States.

  On March 12, 1946, Schreiber said he was transferred to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. “Treatment not bad.” On March 20 he claimed to have been interrogated by the Russians for the first time: “Subject was The German Preparation for Biological Warfare.” Wallach had to have known that this was highly improbable. Schreiber was one of the Third Reich’s highest-ranking medical doctors, and he was a major general in the army. On March 20, 1946, he would have been in Soviet custody for ten months. That this was his first interrogation was absurd. Schreiber told Wallach he was questioned by a lieutenant general named Kabulow for three days. Kabulow didn’t believe his testimony, Schreiber said, and so he was told, “Soviet interrogators are going to use now physical violence to break [you] and get the whole truth out of [you].” The next interrogation, recalled Schreiber, took place at three o’clock that same morning. “[I was] beaten by a Soviet officer who me knows as Lt. Smirnow [Smirnov]. Together with a Col. Walter Stern, who speaks German without the slightest accent and who [was] an excellent interrogator.”

  Schreiber said he withstood three weeks of rough interrogation, at which point he finally broke down and “wrote the statement which later on was submitted by the Soviet Government to the International War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg.” He was flown from Moscow to Berlin, then down to Nuremberg to testify at the war crimes trial. During one of the flights Schreiber said his German-speaking Soviet interrogator, Colonel Stern, leaned over and whispered a warning to him. If Schreiber were to go off-book and say “anything detrimental to the interests of the Soviet Union, he would be hanged on his return to Russia.”

  After testifying at Nuremberg, Schreiber said he was taken back to the Soviet Union, where he and three generals were set up in a two-story country house in Tomilino, sixteen miles southeast of Moscow. One of the three generals was Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus—the highest-ranking Nazi general to ever have surrendered to the Soviets, which Paulus did during the Battle of Stalingrad. Paulus’s own story, of the events leading up to his capture and his final communication with Hitler, was remarkable. The Soviets had also brought Paulus to testify at Nuremberg.

  As William Shirer explained in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the last days of Paulus’s command during the battle for Stalingrad were cataclysmic. “Paulus, torn between his duty to obey the mad Fuehrer and his obligation to save his own surviving troops from annihilation, appealed to Hitler.” Paulus sent an urgent message to the Führer that read, “Troops without ammunition or food… Effective command no longer possible… 18,000 wounded without any supplies or dressings or drugs… Further defense senseless. Collapse inevitable. Army requests immediate permission to surrender in order to save lives of remaining troops.” But Hitler refused to allow Paulus to surrender. “Surrender is forbidden,” Hitler wrote in return, “Sixth Army will hold their positions to the last man and the last round and by their heroic endurance will make an unforgettable contribution toward the establishment of a defensive front and the salvation of the Western world.”

  “Heroic endurance” was a euphemism for suicide. Paulus was now supposed to kill himself. Hitler nudged him further in this direction by making Paulus a field marshal in what he hoped would be the last hour of the general’s life. “There is no record in military history of a German Field Marshal being taken prisoner,” Hitler told Alfred Jodl, who was standing next to him at the time. Instead, at 7:45 the following morning, Field Marshal Paulus surrendered. His last message to Hitler: “The Russians are at the door of our bunker. We are destroying our equipment.” He was taken prisoner shortly thereafter. What Paulus left behind was, as described by Shirer, a terrifying scene: “91,000 German soldiers, including twenty-four generals, half-starved, frostbitten, many of them wounded, all of them dazed and broken, were hobbling over the ice and snow, clutching their blood-caked blankets over their heads against the 24-degrees-below-zero cold toward the dreary, frozen prisoner-of-war camps of Siberia.” Of the ninety-one thousand Germans taken prisoner by the Soviets, only five thousand would come out of the prison camps alive. Paulus was one of them.

  By 1947, he was living comfortably in this two-story country house with Major General Dr. Schreiber, outside Berlin. Actually, explained Schreiber, there were a total of four former Nazi generals living together under one roof. In addition to Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, there was Lieutenant General Vincenz Müller, captured outside Minsk in 1944, and General Erich Buschenhagen, captured in eastern Romania in August 1944. For what purpose? Wallach asked. “Subject [Schreiber] is convinced Lt. Gen Vincenz Mueller was ordered by the Soviets to indoctrinate Professor Dr. Schreiber with communistic ideas.” Whatever the real reason, Schreiber said he and his fellow generals lived a relatively enjoyable life full of Soviet perks. At one point General Schreiber and General Buschenhagen were taken to live “in Moscow in a nicely furnished private house.” Their Soviet handler, with them constantly, “acted as a guide and took them to the museum, opera and to play-houses stressing the fact that Soviet Russia has a highly developed culture.” For Schreiber, the motive was clear. “This, too, was of course part of the planned indoctrination program,” he told Special Agent Wallach. All the while, Schreiber feigned that he was a happy Communist.

  In July 1947, Field Marshal Paulus became sick and the group was “taken to a summer resort, Livadia, on the Crimea.” There was no shortage of irony here. This was the same palatial resort at which the Yalta Conference took place, in February 1945. The dangerous Lieutenant General Vincenz Müller was with Paulus and Schreiber at the resort. The group stayed through the summer and returned to Moscow, by private jet, when the summer weather passed. For the next year, the former Nazi generals resided again at the country house in Tomilino, Schreiber said. Only now they were heavily engaged in antifascist courses that the Soviets required them to take. Studying kept
the generals occupied until September 7, 1948. That’s when Schreiber said he learned that he and twenty-five other former Nazi generals would be leaving for East Germany at once. After Schreiber said no to the police job, he was brought to Dresden and put up in the Hotel Weisser Hirsch, at Bergbahnstrasse 12. His handler, the man called Fisher, agreed to release him from police work, Schreiber said. Fisher stepped away to work on arrangements regarding Schreiber’s teaching position. According to Schreiber, that was when he got away.

  Special Agent Wallach summarized the details. “Subject remained alone without anybody looking after him… Subject simply took a train in Dresden on the 17th and arrived in Berlin on the same day. After contacting his family in Berlin… subject established contact with this agent… and was since then under the protection of U.S. authorities in Berlin. At the end of October subject was evacuated with his family to the U.S. Zone for detailed exploitation by ECIC [European Command Intelligence Center],” Camp King.

  Was Schreiber a double agent? Was he a true-to-life James Bond? How was he able to resist the Soviets’ notoriously brutal interrogation techniques when so many others—from hardened generals to civilians to spies—were beaten into human ruin? Was he a charlatan? Or a weasel of a man, uniquely skilled at saving his own hide? What was he really doing in Soviet Russia for three and a half years? Special Agent Wallach drew his own conclusion. “Subject made an excellent impression on the undersigned agent. It is not believed that subject is a Soviet plant,” wrote Wallach. He signed his name in black ink.

  Wallach’s interrogation report was sent to the director of the Intelligence Division of the U.S. Army, EUCOM, with a memo written by Wallach’s CIC superior marked “Secret-Confidential.” It read: “Subject [Schreiber] claims to know everybody in his transport, their background, political attitude and new job assignments… Will be ready for transfer to your headquarters for detailed interrogation in about six days.” Schreiber had told Wallach he had information on all the high-ranking Nazis now working for the East German police.

  On November 3, 1948, the director of the Intelligence Division of the U.S. Army sent a telegram marked “Secret” to JIOA headquarters at the Pentagon, with a copy also sent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “If the Surgeon General replies that Schreiber is of importance to national security, his case should be processed under JCS procedure for immigration to the U.S.” Major General Dr. Prof. Walter Schreiber, the former surgeon general of the Third Reich, was about to become part of Operation Paperclip. In the meantime, he and his family were taken to Camp King and put up in a safe house there. When General Charles E. Loucks learned that Schreiber was in U.S. custody, he traveled to Camp King to interview him. Loucks was the man who had welcomed Hitler’s chemists into his home in Heidelberg to work on the secret formula for sarin production. He was particularly interested in learning from Dr. Schreiber about vaccines or serums produced by the Reich to defend against nerve agents.

  Loucks found Schreiber to be “cooperative in all respects” and hired him to work for the U.S. Chemical Corps “in compiling data concerning the Nazi Chemical Corps.” To oversee the project, General Loucks traveled back and forth from Heidelberg to Camp King. Next, Schreiber was hired to write a monograph for the U.S. Army about his experiences in Russia. When Loucks was finished working with Schreiber, he was asked by Camp King’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Gordon D. Ingraham, if he would testify as to Schreiber’s character for the doctor’s OMGUS security report. Given Schreiber’s position as a general in the Nazi high command, it was going to take serious effort on the part of JIOA to bring Schreiber into the United States. Loucks agreed but was uncharacteristically skeptical of the Nazi general’s motivations. “Loucks stated subject was energetic and a good organizer of work projects.… Schreiber had apparently given accurate information [to Loucks] on all occasions [which has] been checked and confirmed by Technical Research experts in the United States.… However, Loucks stated that Schreiber may also have given this same information ‘to the Russians.’ ” Loucks told Lieutenant Colonel Ingraham that he “believed that Schreiber could be persuaded by any attractive offer.” In other words, Schreiber’s loyalty could be bought.

  At Camp King, Dr. Schreiber and his family were moved into a nice home provided by the U.S. Army. Despite General Loucks’s concern about Schreiber’s trustworthiness, in November 1949 Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber was hired by army intelligence to serve as post physician at the clandestine interrogation facility that was Camp King. According to Schreiber’s declassified OMGUS security report, his new job involved “handling all the medical problems at Camp King [and] caring for internees.” This meant Schreiber was in charge of the health and well-being of the Soviet prisoners held here, some of whom were being subjected to “special interrogation methods” by the CIA. Given the army’s obsession with Soviet spies and the possibility of double agents, hiring a Nazi general turned Soviet starshina was an unusual choice when one considered the real possibility that Schreiber had not escaped from the Russians but was working for them. If Schreiber was a Soviet spy, it would have been very easy for him to learn everything that the CIA and military intelligence were doing at Camp King.

  On the other hand, if Schreiber really had escaped from the Russians, then there was a lot to be exploited from his Soviet experience. Having been a prisoner of the Russians for the past three and a half years, he was familiar with at least some of the Soviets’ interrogation techniques. He spoke Russian fluently as well. Lieutenant Colonel Ingraham was confident that Dr. Schreiber was a truth-teller. Ingraham kept him on as post doctor until August 1951. Colonel Ingraham also hired Schreiber’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, Dorothea Schreiber, to serve as his personal secretary.

  While employed at Camp King, Schreiber told his Army handler that the Russians were trying to capture and kill him and he asked to use the cover name of “Doc Fischer,” to hide his identity. It was a cryptic choice for an alias. “Fisher” had been the name of the Soviet handler from whom Schreiber had allegedly escaped, in Dresden, and it was also the name of an SS doctor who served as one of Schreiber’s wartime subordinates at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Dr. Fritz Fischer had performed medical experiments on Polish women and girls at Ravensbrück, crimes for which he had been tried and convicted of murder at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial. Fritz Fischer was one of the few doctors who had accepted his guilt over the course of the trial. After hearing some particularly shocking witness testimony against him, Dr. Fischer confided in war crimes investigator Dr. Alexander about how he felt. “I would have liked to stand up and say hang me immediately,” Fischer told Alexander.

  Looking at the whole scenario—Dr. Schreiber, Doc Fischer, the Soviet Mr. Fisher, and the SS doctor Fritz Fischer—was like seeing a man standing in a hall of mirrors. But then again Operation Paperclip was a world marked by duplicity and deception. It was impossible to know who was telling the truth.

  In September 1949, John J. McCloy became U.S. high commissioner of Allied Germany, marking the end of more than four years of military rule of Germany by the Allies. The day also marked the beginning of the end of the time Dr. Otto Ambros would spend in prison for war crimes. Soon he would be placed on the Operation Paperclip target list.

  Ambros, Hitler’s favorite chemist, had been incarcerated for roughly one year of an eight-year prison sentence. On July 30, 1948, Ambros had been convicted of mass murder and slavery in Case No. VI of the subsequent Nuremberg proceedings, the IG Farben trial, and sent to Landsberg Prison, also called War Criminal Prison No. 1. Located thirty-eight miles west of Munich, Landsberg was home to 1,526 convicted Nazi war criminals. The men were housed in a central prison barracks inside individual cells, but the facility itself was situated on a boarding school–like campus, with nineteenth-century buildings, leafy parks, and a grand, wood-paneled Catholic church. Adolf Hitler had been a prisoner here for eight months in 1924. Landsberg Prison was where Hitler wrote Mein Kampf.

  In prison Am
bros taught “chemical technology” to other inmates as part of a prisoner education program. He penned letters to his mother expressing how unfair it all was. “Politic[s] is a bitter disease and it is grotesque that I, as a non-political person, should suffer for something I have not done,” he wrote. “But one day, all this suffering will cease and then it will not be long before I have forgotten all this bitterness.” Ambros’s nineteen-year-old son, Dieter Ambros, wrote clemency appeals on his father’s behalf. “My father is innocent as you know,” began one letter to Bishop Theophil Wurm, a Protestant leader who regularly advocated for the war criminals’ release. “Thank you for supporting our efforts… my father is [being] illegally held.” Ambros was a model prisoner. Only once was he written up for disciplinary action: “Inmate Ambros, Otto, WCPL No. 1442 was standing and looking out the window at the women’s exercise yard [and] this is against the prison regulations,” reads a note in his prison file.

  Otto Ambros had many lawyers working for him to secure an early release. He also wrote petitions himself, requesting small items. In 1948, he asked the prison board for an extra pillow, softer than the one provided. In 1949, he requested permission to keep his accordion in his cell. Each year, Ambros saw the Landsberg Prison doctor for a checkup. Convicted Nazi war criminal Dr. Oskar Schröder, former chief of the Medical Corps Services of the Luftwaffe, checked Ambros’s vitals and wrote up his annual health report. Schröder had been employed by the U.S. Army Air Forces at the Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg before the doctors’ trial and was now serving a life term at Landsberg. Also in the prison were Hermann Becker-Freyseng and Wilhelm Beiglböck, serving twenty and fifteen year sentences, respectively.

  The twelve subsequent war crimes trials at Nuremberg had ended just a few months prior to John J. McCloy’s becoming high commissioner of Germany. Most Americans had long since lost interest in following any of the trials. The majority of Germans disagreed with the whole war crimes trial premise, and many saw those convicted as having been singled out by American and British victors and given “victors’ justice” as punishment. At war’s end, U.S. occupation authorities had determined that 3.6 million Nazis in the American zone alone were “indictable” for political or war crimes. This enormous number was eventually whittled down to a more manageable 930,000 individuals, who were then processed through 169,282 denazification trials. More than 50,000 Germans had been convicted of various Nazi-era crimes, most in the Spruchkammern courts but also in Allied military tribunals. The majority of those convicted served some time in postwar detention camps or paid nominal fines. When McCloy took office, 806 Nazis had been sentenced to death and sent to Landsberg Prison, with 486 executions carried out to date. By the fall of 1949, the German press had begun referring to the convicted criminals held at Landsberg as the “so-called prisoners of war.” This was just one of the sensitive issues that Commissioner McCloy was faced with when he arrived. Another was Operation Paperclip.