Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America
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McCloy had been a champion of the Nazi scientist program from its very first days, back in the late spring of 1945, when he served as assistant secretary of war. He was also the chairman of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee at the time, which put him in charge of making some of the first decisions regarding the fate of the program. McCloy was a statesman and a lawyer but he was also an economist. In between his tenure as assistant secretary of war and high commissioner of Germany, he was president of the World Bank. His service there came at a critical time in the bank’s early history. McCloy is credited in World Bank literature as “defining the relationship between the Bank and the United Nations and the Bank and the United States.” Now he was back in government service as a diplomat, having come to Germany to fill the shoes of General Lucius D. Clay, exiting OMGUS chief. John J. McCloy was a short, plump man, balding, with a banker’s bravado. When in public he almost always wore a crisp suit. As high commissioner he traveled around Germany in the private diesel train that had belonged to Adolf Hitler. While power had been officially transferred to a new West German civilian government, run by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, McCloy remained in charge of many aspects of Germany’s law and order as West Germany transitioned into becoming its own sovereign nation once again. One area that Chancellor Adenauer had absolutely no jurisdiction over was the Landsberg prisoners. Several hundred of these convicted war criminals had already been hanged in the Landsberg courtyard. Eighty-six others faced death. When McCloy took office as high commissioner, the rhetoric around the Landsberg prisoners was at an all-time high. Many Germans wanted the prisoners released.
In November of 1949, a group of German lawyers linked to the Farben industrialists, including Otto Ambros, requested a meeting with John J. McCloy at his office in the former IG Farben building, in Frankfurt. The IG Farben building had been taken over by the U.S. Army when troops entered Frankfurt in March of 1945 and had served as a home for the U.S. Army and various U.S. government organizations ever since. The massive complex—the largest office building in Europe until the 1950s—had panoramic views of Frankfurt, as well as parklands, a sports field, and a pond. In August 1949, OMGUS moved its headquarters from Berlin to Frankfurt, and shortly thereafter the U.S. high commissioner’s office headquarters were set up in the IG Farben complex. In September 1949, McCloy settled in. The CIA maintained an office in the IG Farben building throughout the Cold War. It was located just a few floors and a few doors down from McCloy’s office.
It was a precarious time for an American civilian to be governing occupied Germany. The Soviets had just detonated their first atomic bomb, years ahead of what had been predicted by the CIA. The U.S. military was on high alert, perhaps nowhere more so than in West Germany. During the November meeting in McCloy’s office at the IG Farben complex, German lawyers told McCloy that if West Germany and the United States were going to move forward together in a united front against the Communist threat, something had to be done about the men incarcerated at Landsberg. These prisoners were viewed unanimously by Germans as “political prisoners,” the lawyers said, and they told McCloy that he should grant all of them clemency.
After the meeting, McCloy sent a memo to the legal department of the Allied High Commission, inquiring if “after sentences were imposed by military tribunal,” he, as U.S. high commissioner, had any authority to review the sentences. The legal department told him that as far as the Landsberg war criminals were concerned, he had the authority to do whatever he thought appropriate. In America, Telford Taylor, the former Nuremberg prosecutor general, caught wind of what was going on in the high commissioner’s office in Frankfurt and was outraged. He wrote to McCloy to remind him that the Nazi war criminals at Landsberg “are without any question among the most deliberate, shameless murderers of the entire Nuremberg List, and any idea of further clemency in their cases seems to me out of the question.” McCloy never responded, according to McCloy’s biographer, Kai Bird.
McCloy established an official review board to examine the war criminals’ sentences—the Advisory Board on Clemency for War Criminals, known as the Peck Panel, after its chairman, David W. Peck. A powerful former Nazi lieutenant general, Hans Speidel, appealed personally to McCloy. Speidel was one of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s chief advisers on rearmament, a highly controversial subject but one being discussed nonetheless. Hans Speidel’s younger brother, Wilhelm Speidel, was a convicted war criminal at Landsberg. Speidel told McCloy’s adjunct in Bonn, “[If] the prisoners at Landsberg were hanged, Germany as an armed ally against the East was an illusion.” In a similarly bullish manner, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer told McCloy the same thing, advising him that he should grant “the widest possible clemency for persons sentenced to confinement.”
In June 1950, North Korean forces, supported by Communist benefactors, moved across the 38th parallel, marking the start of the Korean War. The idea that the Communists were also about to invade Western Europe took hold in the Pentagon. On July 14, 1950, the commander at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base sent an urgent memo to Operation Paperclip’s in-house champion, Colonel Donald Putt: “Due to the threat of impending hostilities in Europe and the possibility that forces of the USSR may rapidly overrun the continent, this command is concerned with the problem of the immediate implementation of an evacuation program for German and Austrian scientists.” Were these scientists to “fall into enemy hands… they would constitute a threat to our national security.” Air force intelligence recommended to JIOA that it initiate a “mass procurement effort” in Germany. JIOA agreed and began making formal plans with the high commissioner’s office to effect this.
The Korean War sparked a new fire under Operation Paperclip. Inside the high commissioner’s office, McCloy maintained a group called the Scientific Research Division that was specifically dedicated to the issue of German scientists. The head of the division was Dr. Carl Nordstrom, and ever since McCloy had taken office Nordstrom had been trying to expedite the procession of German scientists to America. Dr. Nordstrom maintained a thick file labeled “Allocation of German Scientists and Technicians” and had sent many eyes-only memos to McCloy in “support of certain research projects” he foresaw as valuable to national interest. Now, in light of the Korean War, Nordstrom got a new job from JIOA. He was assigned to be the German liaison to a new JIOA program being fast-tracked out of the Pentagon, named Accelerated Paperclip but called Project 63 in the field: A number of Germans had soured on the name Paperclip. The premise of the Accelerated Paperclip program was to move “especially dangerous top level scientists” out of Germany in a “modified Denial Program” that needed to be kept away from the Soviets at all costs. The high commissioner’s office began working with army intelligence to “evacuate” 150 of these scientists, code-named the “K” list, from Germany to the United States. A group of American officers called the Special Projects Team would be dispatched to recruit the “K” list scientists. The Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a prodigious $1 million procurement budget to help entice these “especially dangerous top level scientists” to come to America, the equivalent of approximately $10 million in 2013.
Accelerated Paperclip, or Project 63, meetings were held at the high commissioner’s offices in Wiesbaden and Frankfurt, with Dr. Carl Nordstrom keeping notes. Representatives from JIOA, the army, the air force, EUCOM, and the CIA attended. Because many on the “K” list did not have a job offer already in place, the JIOA decided to set up a clandestine office in New York City, at the Alamac Hotel, where the scientists could live while they waited for assignments. The Accelerated Paperclip project director in America, Colonel William H. Speidel (no known relation to the Wilhelm Speidel war criminal at Landsberg Prison or his lawyer brother), maintained an office there. An entire block of rooms was set aside in the nineteen-story hotel, on Seventy-first Street and Broadway, for a yet-unnamed group of German scientists scheduled to arrive at a future date. A welcome brochure was printed up and kept on file at the high commissioner’s offi
ce. “To insure your comfort, convenience and interest in general,” it read, “a competent officer, assisted by a carefully selected staff… will serve your interests from the time of your arrival until the time of your departure to enter employment.” The officer “will maintain an office at the hotel in which you reside and be prepared to complete, or make provisions for, all arrangements incident to housing, restaurant facilities, securing medical services, and the administrative details of the project.” The U.S. Army’s “primary interest,” the scientists were told, “is in providing for your comfort, contentment, happiness and security [and] efforts will be directed to help you in attaining these goals with a minimum [of] friction, distraction, and delay.”
But the program did not take off like fire in dry grass, as Dr. Nordstrom had hoped it would. Much to everyone’s surprise, the offers made under Accelerated Paperclip were rejected by many of the German scientists who were approached. When JIOA requested an explanation from the high commissioner’s office as to why, Nordstrom reported that some on the “K” list were simply “too old, too rich, too busy and too thoroughly disgruntled with past experiences with Americans,” to see a free room at the Alamac Hotel in New York City as a career move. Besides, Germany had its own chancellor now, and for the first time in five years, many German scientists saw that a prosperous scientific future was possible in their own country.
Others could not wait to come to America. With Accelerated Paperclip’s newest policy in place, Class I offenders could now be put on a JIOA list. This included Dr. Schreiber, still serving as post physician at Camp King. Another Class I offender was Dr. Kurt Blome, former deputy surgeon general of the Third Reich and Hitler’s biological weapons expert. The sword and the shield.
Finally, there was Dr. Otto Ambros, the war criminal convicted at Nuremberg of slavery and mass murder. In the winter of 1951, Otto Ambros was placed on the JIOA list for Accelerated Paperclip even though he was still incarcerated at Landsberg Prison.
In January of 1951, John J. McCloy’s office announced that he had come to a decision regarding the war criminals incarcerated at Landsberg Prison. The Peck Panel had finished its review process and recommended “substantial reductions of sentences” in the majority of cases involving lengthy prison terms. As for those who had been handed death sentences, the panel advised McCloy to consider each case individually. Also at issue was a financial matter. At Nuremberg, the judges had ordered the confiscation of property of convicted war criminals whose money was so often earned on the backs of slave laborers, tens of thousands of whom had been worked to death. Now, the Peck Panel suggested that this confiscation order be rescinded. For Otto Ambros, this would mean that he could keep what remained of the gift, from Adolf Hitler, of 1 million reichsmarks, a figure that has never been revealed before. McCloy spent several months considering the panel’s recommendations. During this time he was deluged with letters from religious groups and activists in Germany urging for the war criminals’ release. McCloy sent a cable from Frankfurt to Washington asking for counsel from the White House. The White House advised McCloy that the decision was his to make.
John J. McCloy commuted ten of the fifteen death sentences. This meant that ten men condemned by International Military Tribunal judges—including the commander of the Malmédy Massacre, considered one of the war’s worst atrocities against prisoners of war, and several SS officers who had overseen the mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen—would be released back into society within one and seven years. Among the death sentences McCloy chose to uphold were those of Otto Ohlendorf, commander of Einsatzgruppe D, responsible for ninety thousand deaths in Ukraine; Paul Blobel, commander of Einsatzgruppe C, responsible for thirty-three thousand deaths at Babi Yar, in Kiev; and Oswald Pohl, chief administrator of the concentration camps. McCloy also drastically reduced the sentences of sixty-four out of seventy-four remaining war criminals, which meant that one-third of the inmates tried at Nuremberg were freed. On February 3, 1951, Otto Ambros traded in his red-striped denim prison uniform for the tailored suit he had arrived in. He walked out of the gates of Landsberg Prison a free man, his finances fully restored.
General Telford Taylor was indignant. In a press release he stated, “Wittingly or not, McCloy has dealt a blow to the principles of international law and concepts of humanity for which we fought the war.” Eleanor Roosevelt asked in her newspaper column, “Why are we freeing so many Nazis?”
The will and wherewithal to punish Nazi war criminals had faded with the passage of time. “Doctors who had participated in the murder of patients continued to practice medicine, Nazi judges continued to preside over courtrooms, and former members of the SS, SD and Gestapo found positions in the intelligence services,” explains Andreas Nachama, curator of the Nazi Documentation Center in Berlin. “Even some leaders of the special mobile commandos (“Einsatzkommandos”) [paramilitary extermination squads] tried to pursue careers in the public service.”
The following month, on March 27, 1951, Dr. Carl Nordstrom dispatched Charles McPherson, an officer with the Special Projects Team, to go locate and hire Dr. Kurt Blome. The Special Projects Team was now composed of a group of twenty agents, each with his own “K” list of scientists to find. McPherson learned that Blome lived at 34 Kielstrasse, in Dortmund, and he traveled there to interview the doctor.
During his first visit, Charles McPherson learned that Dr. Blome lived in the apartment adjacent to Blome’s private physician’s practice in Dortmund during the week. On weekends he returned to his home in Hagen, twelve miles away, to be with his family. “His English is excellent and no interpreter is necessary to carry on a conversation,” McPherson wrote in his report. The reason for the visit, McPherson told Dr. Blome, was to offer Blome a contract with Operation Paperclip. “He stated he would definitely be interested.” Dr. Blome requested more details. “He feels he is too old to begin a new type of work and would prefer to return to biological research or cancer research.” Blome alluded to the fact that he had already worked on Top Secret germ warfare research for the British, under Operation Matchbox, the British equivalent of Operation Paperclip. Blome said that the British had helped secure his house in Hagen for him. McPherson left Dortmund with the impression that the fifty-seven-year-old was “very interested but would need a definite offer before he could make up his mind.”
Approximately three months later, on Thursday, June 21, 1951, McPherson again interviewed Dr. Blome. “I presented him with a copy of our contract form and informed him that we were willing to pay him about $6400 per year for the duration of the contract.” Blome had additional questions. He asked McPherson about the buying power of this salary and the amount of taxes he would have to pay. “He then had another request which I informed him that I could do nothing about,” McPherson wrote. Blome said he had “some money which was tied up in a professional account because it had been determined that these are funds of the Nazi Party.” Blome asked McPherson for his help in trying to release the money back to him, and to look into “the possibilities of transferring [the money] from Marks into Dollars,” in order to bring it to the United States. McPherson explained, “I informed him that there was no legal means at present of doing this but that this could be transacted through Switzerland.”
Blome said he needed some time to read over the contract and to discuss the matter with his wife. He said he’d get in touch with McPherson in about two weeks. In August it was official: “Professor Kurt Blome was contracted under Project 63 on 21 August. Will be ready for shipment 15 November,” McPherson wrote. The Blomes took their boys out of school and began teaching them English. Dr. Blome turned his practice over to another doctor in Dortmund. The couple traveled to the Berlin Document Center and provided sworn testimony regarding their Nazi past. The documents were reviewed by McCloy’s office. Per Accelerated Paperclip, a key document that would be used for a visa application, the Revised Security Report on German (or Austrian) Scientist or Important Technician, was drawn up.