The SS surely deserves to bear part, perhaps even the largest part, of responsibility for the crimes at Nordhausen. But it is a mistake to think it acted alone. In truth, Dornberger and his aides fought a long bureaucratic battle with the SS over control of Germany’s rocket program, and the degree of Dornberger’s personal authority over what took place on the production line shifted with Hitler’s moods. In late 1944 the general reached an agreement with Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, under which the SS’s representative, Hans Kammler, took over day-to-day management at Nordhausen on the condition that selected Dornberger subordinates (like latter-day U.S. rocket program administrator Arthur Rudolph) retained their positions of authority at the facility. Dornberger himself retained explicit jurisdiction over production schedules, including the number of missiles to be built and the mix of the various models.4
Dornberger, in short, did not directly control the slaves at Nordhausen. His production orders, however, set the schedule by which they were worked to death. And he was, it seems, an enthusiastic taskmaster. He demanded more and more rockets—more than there was even fuel to launch—until the very last moments of the war. Food for the slaves at Nordhausen—never much in the first place—ran out altogether sometime in February 1945. But Dornberger’s orders for more missiles never stopped, and the labor battalions worked around the clock without nourishment. The SS simply crammed more prisoners into the Dora camp, used the strong ones for labor until they dropped, and let the weak ones die.
Thousands of inmates starved to death. Cholera raged through the camp, killing hundreds each day. At first the SS cremated the dead so as to keep down disease among the surviving slaves. As the end neared, however, the ovens couldn’t keep up with the demand and the corpses were simply left to rot. Inmates piled the bodies up in corners, under stairways, anywhere that was a little out of the way. And the rocket work continued.
Dornberger visited the Nordhausen factory on many occasions. He knew—or should have known, for the atrocity was evident to any eye—that the prisoners who worked on his rockets were being systematically starved to death. And he knew, for he has said this much himself, that Germany’s defeat was inevitable.5 Dornberger could have shut down the assembly line on some technical pretext. He could have demanded adequate rations for the prisoners. He could have cut back his missile orders to the number that Germany was capable of launching. He chose instead to accelerate production.
The general’s postwar autobiography, which was received with some critical acclaim in the West, is filled with anecdotes about his rocket tests, bureaucratic struggles, and technical achievements. His machines are described in endless detail with precise information on takeoff weight, fuel consumption, thrust, and other minutiae of physics. Yet there is not a phrase of acknowledgment for the prisoners who actually constructed these machines at the cost of their lives. He presents events in his book as though his missiles had simply leaped off their drawing boards and into the skies with no intermediate steps, as though rockets could somehow build themselves.
When many Americans think of the Holocaust—those, that is, who were not eyewitnesses—they often think of the images on a certain piece of grainy motion-picture film, on which cadaverous inmates resembling living skeletons are shown leaning out from filthy wooden bunks to weakly greet U.S. Army liberators. The movie then cuts to a scene in which hundreds of corpses are laid out in a row. They appear hardly human even in death. The leg-bones are etched clearly against the ground, but the limbs seem too big somehow, as though they don’t fit with the bodies. This is because there is no flesh left on the remains, only skin; the Nazis and their rocket factory have made off with the rest. The film flickers as an American officer walks past the atrocity, his face a mask.
That documentary film was taken by the U.S. Army Signal Corps at Nordhausen in April 1945.6 The Dora camp and its underground missile works were the first major slave labor facility liberated by American forces.
The U.S. liberation of the Nordhausen complex set off a scramble between U.S. and Soviet scientific raiding teams that proved to be one of the opening shots of the cold war. The Soviets attempted to claim the captured scientists and the buried technical booty at Nordhausen as their own, in part because they considered the camp inside their zone of military operations. The United States, however, ended up with the larger share of the scientific legacy of the Nordhausen complex. This included tons of partially assembled V-2 rockets, technical documentation, and about 1,200 captured German rocketry experts—Dornberger and Wernher von Braun among them. The value of the scientific documents alone has been conservatively estimated at $400 to $500 million.
And there was more, much more: scientific and technical booty from all over Germany. The U.S. share of these spoils included the engineers, technicians, and fifty ME-162 jet turbines—the most advanced in the world—from the Messerschmitt factory at Schönebeck; virtually the entire scientific staff from the Siemens and Zeiss companies; leading chemical and electrical engineers and their equipment from I. G. Farben and Telefunken; scientists, radium, and all traces of atomic research from the Physical and Technical Institute in Weida; and the technical staff and all designs for new motors from the underground BMW works at Unsenberg, to name only a few.7
The Soviets, for their part, regarded virtually all the wealth of Germany as potential compensation for the massive destruction that the Nazis had wreaked inside the USSR. Soviet troops seized almost any industrial or scientific equipment that could be located in the Russian occupation zone. Printing presses; chemistry labs; office furniture; dentistry tools; hospitals; steel mills; railroad track; machine tools—anything and everything of productive value that could be located were systematically dismantled, crated, and shipped east.
Before the summer of 1945 was out, the United States and the USSR were publicly accusing each other of looting German scientific and industrial wealth in violation of their wartime agreements. These East-West conflicts over seizures soon spilled over into the August 1945 Potsdam Conference, where contentious arguments over who had prior claim to Germany’s scientists and technicians seriously soured the already tense negotiations. Each side at the conference appears to have regarded its rival’s clandestine raiding operations as an acid test of its opponent’s postwar intentions, regardless of what the diplomats may have said at the conference table.
American spokesmen, interestingly enough, replied to Soviet charges concerning captured German scientists with the assertion that all such experts then in U.S. hands were either suspected war criminals or former top executives of Germany’s war machine. They were therefore appropriately subject to arrest, the United States said.8 But despite these early public claims concerning the character of the captured German specialists, many of the same experts were soon considered too valuable to bring to trial. Instead, the United States began to integrate scores of top German scientists into American military research projects only weeks after Hitler’s final collapse. Before two years were out, hundreds of German scientists, including some suspected of crimes against humanity, were on the American payroll.
Most of the German specialists who actively engaged in military research during the war were longtime Nazi party members. There are many complex reasons for this phenomenon. Some of them, of course, simply believed in the Nazi cause. U.S. Army investigators were informed shortly after the war that Dornberger’s chief of staff, Dr. Herbert Axster, for example, beat and starved inmate workers on his two estates, while his wife had been a national spokeswoman noted for her pro-Nazi speeches on behalf of the NS Frauenschaft, a Nazi party women’s auxiliary.9 Many senior German academic figures promoted elaborate “scholarly” theories of Aryan genetic superiority, which had been popular in some intellectual circles for decades by the time the Nazis came to power, and the Axsters are said to have been among them.
Hitler’s government had given party members and sympathizers among the intelligentsia control of most major centers of German scholarship well befor
e the war, and they maintained an effective carrot-and-stick system to keep Germany’s academic community in line. Research grants and professional advancement were open only to those experts who were willing to associate themselves publicly with the party or with a variety of Nazi-controlled professional associations and licensing bodies. Researchers engaged in rocketry, electronics, and other highly sensitive fields of interest to the military were carefully screened for reliability before they received security clearances. Leading technical thinkers were often given honorary party membership or SS ranks; Wernher von Braun, for example, had been an honorary SS officer for almost a decade by the end of the war. A brief review of the German scientific literature of the period makes it clear that many experts who were accorded such “honors” clearly felt it was prudent to display them and use them for professional advancement.
At the same time Jews and scientists thought to be hostile to Nazi precepts were systematically purged from academe, and not a few brilliant minds who refused to aid the Nazis died in concentration camps or as cannon fodder on the eastern front. Of those who continued work during the Nazi period, many have since said that they supported the Nazi state out of fear, German national pride, or the feeling that they could not abandon their country in wartime.
By the end of the war many U.S. military intelligence officials believed that a distinction should be made between scientists like von Braun who had joined the Nazi party and SS for what the Americans termed “opportunistic” reasons, on the one hand, and the various German experts who had supported Nazism for ideological reasons or who had directly participated in atrocities, on the other. The former were viewed as prized captives and given special dispensation from the general Allied policy on handling former Nazi officers and SS men.
The U.S. Army and Navy brought some German scientists to this country as early as the summer of 1945. On July 6 the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) specifically authorized an effort to “exploit … chosen, rare minds whose continuing intellectual productivity we wish to use” under the top secret project code-named Overcast. The chiefs directed that up to 350 specialists, mainly from Germany and Austria, should be immediately brought to the United States.10 These “rare minds” included, for example, specialists in submarine design, chemical warfare, and, of course, missile research.
Under Overcast, it soon became the custom for U.S. intelligence officers to ignore German scientists’ past memberships in the Nazi party and the SS in order to recruit these presumably valuable experts. There were several reasons for this. For one thing, the first scientists were enlisted under a program that was clearly limited to “temporary military exploitation,” as the JCS order put it, and thus was in effect an expanded type of interrogation of German POWs. All the Axis scientists (and their families, who were permitted to accompany them to the United States) were to remain under War Department control during their stay in this country, and all of them were supposed to be returned to Europe following completion of their particular research projects.
At first this was justified on the grounds that German scientists might be useful in the continuing war against Japan. But the Americans’ own terror weapon, the atomic bomb, decided the Pacific conflict within a few months after the surrender of Hitler’s Germany. The “Japanese threat” rationale evaporated.
Subsequent events have made clear that the emerging conflict with the USSR was often not far from policymakers’ minds when Overcast was created. As early as June 1945 RCA chief David Sarnoff argues in a confidential letter to President Truman’s chief science adviser that “the security for any nation henceforth depends … to a very large extent on its place in the scientific sun. That sun may shine brightly for those who know, and it may be a total blackout for those who don’t.” Sarnoff continues: “It is not only important that we get [Germany’s] scientific information but that we lay hands on their scientists as well. If we do not find them and remove them to a place perhaps on this side of the water where they can continue their scientific experiments under our guidance and control, our Russian friends may do so first.”11
At the same time the U.S.-USSR rivalry was heating up, the mystique of white coats and high technology was also at work, separating the captured specialists from responsibility for their wartime deeds in all but the most horrific cases. A special committee of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, for example, put forward in 1945 the rather surprising theory that its brethren’s wartime research for the Nazis had actually been a form of resistance against Hitler’s regime. The majority of German scientists, the academy asserted, composed what was termed “an island of nonconformity in the Nazified body politic” which had withdrawn into “the traditional ivory tower [that] offered the only possibility of security” during the Nazi rule.12
By 1946 the Pentagon’s Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) began pushing for a revised and bigger program of recruiting German scientists. (The JIOA, which was handling the Overcast program for the War Department, had superseded the earlier Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee, the group that had organized the capture of many of the scientists in the first place.) The JIOA now wanted 1,000 former enemy specialists. More important, it wanted authority to grant them American citizenship as an inducement to participate in the program.
The Pentagon’s agency generally refused to ship back the German experts who were already in the United States. These men and women were now viewed as too valuable to return to Europe, particularly because many of the Overcast scientists already knew almost as much about several of America’s most secret military research programs as they did about Hitler’s. Letting such specialists fall into Soviet hands back in Germany was seen as a serious security threat.
The JIOA needed President Truman’s direct authorization precisely because so many of the German scientists and technicians had once been Nazi party members and SS officers. U.S. immigration laws at the time strictly prohibited entry into this country by any former Nazis. The fact that a person might have joined the Nazi party “involuntarily” or simply in order to advance his career could not be taken into account as the law then stood. What the JIOA and the War Department were asking for, in effect, was an exemption from this statute for up to 1,000 former enemy specialists.
President Truman accepted the idea of putting selected Germans back to work on America’s behalf during the cold war, as long as the effort could remain secret from the public. American government attitudes toward Nazism in general were changing as early as the spring of 1946. “In the beginning everyone was a hard-liner,” commented a former U.S. military government official engaged in Overcast who requested anonymity. “In the end, though, very few people were [hard-liners].” The recruitment of former Nazis through Overcast was not a dark conspiracy, he insisted, but rather what he termed “a natural process of learning what the role of the Nazi Party had been in Germany.” Among his own conclusions, this retired official said, is that a useful distinction could be made between ordinary Nazis, on the one hand, and actual war criminals, on the other. Former Nazi party members could be put to profitable use by the United States, many of Truman’s top advisers believed. War criminals, on the other hand, should be prosecuted.
Truman authorized the JIOA’s plan in September 1946. He insisted that only “nominal” Nazis—that is, people who had joined the Nazi party out of what the Americans considered opportunistic motives—be permitted to participate in the program. Known or suspected war criminals were supposed to be strictly barred. The relevant presidential directive states in part: “No person found … to have been a member of the Nazi Party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazism or militarism shall be brought to the U.S. hereunder.” Even so, “position [or] honors awarded a specialist under the Nazi Regime solely on account of his scientific or technical abilities” would not disqualify a potential candidate. This program took the code name Paperclip.13
Truman’s authorization did not define exactly wh
at an “active supporter” was. Instead, it left the sorting out of former Nazis up to a secret panel made up of experts from the departments of State and Justice, who were required to rule directly on each scientist the JIOA wanted to bring to this country. The question of who was—and who was not—an “active supporter of Nazism or militarism” soon became a highly politicized issue within the American national security establishment. The decision often depended at least as much on the attitudes of the person who was judging as it did on the actual behavior of any given suspect.
JIOA Director Bosquet Wev presented the first group of scientists’ dossiers to the U.S. departments of State and Justice for approval about six months after Truman’s authorization of Paperclip. Wev’s files did not contain raw investigative reports on the German specialists’ activities, which might have permitted the outside agencies to decide for themselves about the characters of the recruits. Instead, the key document in each folder was a security report on each scientist filed by OMGUS (Office of Military Government—US), the U.S. occupation administration inside defeated Germany. The OMGUS report presented the gist of any earlier CIC investigations into the specialist’s wartime activities. If OMGUS said the scientist had been an “ardent Nazi,” there was little prospect that he would ever be permitted into the United States. If it didn’t, he was probably home free.
Wev’s job was to shepherd the experts’ dossiers past the review board responsible for ruling on scientists nominated for the Paperclip program. Unfortunately for Wev, however, the State Department’s representative on the committee was Samuel Klaus, a stickler for detail who made no secret of his belief that Nazis—“ex-” or otherwise—were a threat to the United States.
The OMGUS reports in Wev’s first batch of folders had been prepared by OMGUS agents who served in Germany prior to the rapid revision of American intelligence attitudes toward former Nazis that was then under way. The reports bluntly pointed out that some of Wev’s recruits, who had actually already entered the United States under Project Overcast, had been “ardent Nazis.” The records on other specialists on the Paperclip recruiting list were not much better. Some of the experts were accused of participating in murderous medical experiments on human subjects at concentration camps, for example, and of brutalizing slave laborers. One was a fugitive from formal murder charges. Another was known to have established an institute for biological warfare experimentation on humans in Poland. At least half of Wev’s recruits, and probably more, were Nazi party members or SS veterans.
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