Operation Paperclip

by Annie Jacobsen

  Castle Kransberg was grand and splendid, built piecemeal over the centuries to include watchtowers, half-timbered meeting halls, and stone walls. It had 150-odd rooms, including a wing that had been redesigned and renovated by Albert Speer in 1939, when Speer was still Hitler’s architect. At Hitler’s behest Speer added several state-of-the art defense features to Kransberg Castle, including a twelve-hundred-square-foot underground bunker complex, complete with poison gas air locks designed to protect inhabitants from a chemical warfare attack. Now here was Speer, having fled from the front lines to hide out in this citadel. The next time he would live here it would be as a prisoner of the Americans.

  Hitler had his own headquarters just a few miles away. Adlerhorst, or the Eagle’s Nest, had also been designed by Speer. It was a series of small cement bunkers at the edge of a long stretch of valley near the spa town of Bad Nauheim. Few knew it was there. From Adlerhorst, Hitler had been directing the Ardennes campaign—the Battle of the Bulge.

  Arriving at Kransberg Castle late at night after fleeing Houffalize, Speer and his aide were shown to their quarters, where they freshened up before driving over to Adlerhorst to celebrate the coming year—1945—with Hitler. When Speer arrived at the Eagle’s Nest at 2:30 a.m. on January 1, Hitler, who never drank, appeared drunk. “He was in the grip of a permanent euphoria,” remembered Speer. Hitler made a toast and promised that the present low point in the war would soon be overcome. “His [Hitler’s] magnetic gifts were still operative,” Speer later recalled. In the end Germany would be victorious, Hitler said. This was enough for Speer to change his mind about losing the war.

  Two weeks later, on January 15, with the war allegedly still winnable, Adolf Hitler boarded his armored train and began the nineteen-hour trip to Berlin, where he would spend the rest of his life living underground in the Führerbunker (Führerhauptquartier, or FHQ) in Berlin. The bunker was a fortress of engineering prowess, built beneath the New Reich Chancellery. Its roof, buried under several tons of earth, was sixteen feet thick. Its walls were six feet wide. Living inside the Führerbunker, with its low ceilings and cryptlike corridors, was “like being stranded in a cement submarine,” said one of Hitler’s SS honor guards, Captain Beermann. Beermann described a “bat-like routine of part-time prisoners kept in a cave. Miserable rats in a musty cement tomb in Berlin.” Not everyone shared the sentiment. Months later, when Mittelwerk general manager Georg Rickhey was angling to get a job from the Americans, he would boast to army officers that he’d overseen construction of the grand Führerbunker in Berlin.

  Now, in mid-January 1945, with Hitler moving back to Berlin, it was decided that Speer should head east, to Silesia, in Poland. There, he was to survey what was going on. Important chemical weapons factories had been built in Poland, armaments ventures jointly pursued with IG Farben, a chemical industry conglomerate. The location of these facilities was significant; Poland was, for the most part, out of reach of Allied bombing campaigns. But a new threat was bearing down. The Soviets had just launched their great offensive in Poland, a final military campaign that would take the Red Army all the way to Berlin. Germany was being invaded from both sides—east and west—squeezed as in a vise.

  The same day that Hitler left the Eagle’s Nest, Speer was driven to Poland. There, he witnessed firsthand what little was left of the Reich’s war machine. On January 21, he went to the village of Oppeln to check in with Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner, newly appointed commander of the army group, and learned that very little of the Wehrmacht’s fighting forces remained intact. Nearly every soldier and every war machine had been captured or destroyed. Burnt-out tank hulls littered the snow-covered roads. Thousands of dead German soldiers lay in ditches along the roadsides, but many more dead soldiers swung eerily from trees. Those who dared desert the German army had been killed by Field Marshal Schörner, a ferocious and fanatical Nazi Party loyalist who had earned his moniker, Schörner the Bloody. The dead German soldiers had placards hanging around their necks. “I am a deserter,” they read. “I have declined to defend German women and children and therefore I have been hanged.”

  During Speer’s meeting with Schörner, he was told that no one had any idea exactly how far the Red Army was from overtaking the very spot where they were standing, only that the onslaught was inevitable. Speer checked into an otherwise empty hotel and tried to sleep.

  For decades, this night remained vivid in Albert Speer’s mind. “In my room hung an etching by Käthe Kollwitz: La Carmagnole,” remembered Speer as an old man. “It showed a yowling mob dancing with hate-contorted faces around a guillotine. Off to one side a weeping woman cowered on the ground.… The weird figures of the etching haunted my fitful sleep,” wrote Speer. There, in his Oppeln hotel room, Albert Speer was overcome by a thought that had to have been preoccupying many Nazis’ minds. After Germany, what will become of me? The guillotine? Will I be torn apart by a yowling mob?

  Jedem das Seine. Could it be true? Does everyone get what he deserves?

  The following week, on January 30, 1945, Speer wrote a memorandum to Hitler outlining the huge losses in Silesia. “The war is lost,” is how Speer’s report began.

  Widespread destruction of evidence would now begin.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Destruction

  Ninety miles southeast of Speer’s Oppeln hotel room, chaos was unfolding at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Speer’s chairman of the ultra-secret Committee-C for chemical weapons, a chemist named Dr. Otto Ambros, had documents to destroy. It was January 17, 1945, and every German in a position of power at Auschwitz, from the army officers to the IG Farben officials, was trying to flee. Not Ambros. He would not leave the labor-extermination camp for another six days.

  Otto Ambros was a fastidious man. His calculations were exact, his words carefully chosen, his fingernails always manicured. He wore his hair neatly oiled and parted. In addition to being Hitler’s favorite chemist, Ambros was the manager of IG Farben’s synthetic rubber and fuel factory at Auschwitz. With the Red Army bearing down, the Farben board members had ordered the destruction and removal of all classified paperwork; Ambros and colleague Walther Dürrfeld were at Auschwitz to do the job. In addition to being the plant manager of this hellish place, Ambros was the youngest member on Farben’s board of directors.

  All over the camp, SS guards were destroying evidence. Crematoria II and III were being dismantled, and a plan to dynamite Crematoria V was in effect. Some of the SS officers were already fleeing on horseback, while others were preparing to evacuate prisoners for the death march. Whips cracked. Dogs barked. Tanks painted white for camouflage outside the camp rolled through the muddy streets. Rumors swirled: The Red Army was only a few miles away. A female chemist in Farben’s Buna-Werke Polymerization Department asked the prisoner and future world-renowned writer Primo Levi, a chemist by training, to fix her bicycle tire. After the war, Levi recalled how strange it was to hear a Farben employee use the word “please” with a Jewish inmate like himself.

  Auschwitz was the Reich’s largest extermination center. As a concentration camp it consisted of three separate but symbiotic camps: Auschwitz I, the main camp; Auschwitz II, the Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria; and Auschwitz III, a labor-concentration camp run by the chemical giant IG Farben. Since April 7, 1942, IG Farben had been building the Reich’s largest chemical plant at Auschwitz, using a workforce of slave laborers selected from the Auschwitz train car platforms. Farben called their facility “IG Auschwitz.”

  IG Auschwitz was the first corporate concentration camp in the Third Reich. The barracks in which the slave laborers lived and died was officially called Monowitz. “Those of us who lived there called it Buna,” recalls Gerhard Maschkowski, a survivor of the camp. Maschkowski was a nineteen-year-old Jewish boy spared the gas chamber because he was of use to IG Auschwitz as an electrician. That he was still alive in the second week of January 1945 was something of a miracle. He had arrived at Auschwitz on April 20, 1943, which meant that he h
ad been there for a year and nine months. At Buna, the average lifespan of a slave laborer was three months. Many of Gerhard Maschkowski’s friends had long since been worked to death or had been murdered for minor infractions, like hiding a piece of food.

  Gerhard Maschkowski remembers January 18, 1945, with clarity, because it was his last day at Auschwitz. It was still dark outside when the SS burst into the barracks. “They shouted, ‘Get up! March!’ They had large guns, thick jackets, and dogs,” Maschkowski recalls. He put on his shoes and hurried outside. There, nine thousand emaciated, starving inmates from Buna were lining up in neat rows. Maschkowski heard cannon fire in the distance and the crack of firearms close by. There was chaos all around. SS guards were burning evidence. Bonfires of papers sent ashes up into the dark sky. Snow fell fast, then faster. There was a blizzard on the way. The guards, dressed in warm coats and boots, waved submachine guns. “Dogs on leather leashes barked and snarled,” Gerhard Maschkowski recalls. Wearing thin pajamas, the prisoners at Buna-Monowitz began a death march toward the German interior. Within forty-eight hours, 60 percent of them would be dead.

  Primo Levi was not part of the death march. A week before, he had contracted scarlet fever and had been sent to the infectious diseases ward. “He had a high temperature and a strawberry tongue,” remembered Aldo Moscati, the Italian doctor-prisoner who tended to him. “With a [104-degree] fever I was extremely feeble and could not even walk,” Primo Levi explained after the war. Lying supine in the infectious diseases ward, he listened to the sounds of the emptying camp.

  On January 21, a memorandum from Berlin ordered all Farben employees to leave. The last train for Germans leaving Auschwitz, transporting mostly IG Farben’s female staff from the camp, left that same afternoon. Yet Otto Ambros stayed behind. Ambros’s official title was plant manager of Buna-Werk IV and managing director of the fuel production facility at IG Auschwitz. He had been involved in the facility since January 1941, back when Farben’s original plans were being drawn. Ambros had chosen the site location and sketched out the original blueprints for the plant. He was also the man who invented synthetic rubber for the Reich. Tanks, trucks, and airplanes all require rubber for tires and treads, and during wartime this feat was considered so important to the Reich’s ability to wage war that Ambros had been awarded 1 million reichsmarks by the Führer.

  Finally, on January 23, 1945, Ambros left the concentration camp. Only random prisoners remained. Inmates like Primo Levi who were too weak to march and had not been killed by the SS lay in the infectious diseases ward. When Levi’s fever finally broke and he ventured outside, he found groups of prisoners roaming around the camp looking for food. Levi found a silo filled with frozen potatoes. He made a fire and cooked his first food in days. On January 27, he was dragging a dead friend’s corpse to a large grave dug in a distant field when he spotted four men on horseback approaching the camp from far away. They were wearing white camouflage clothing, but as they got closer he could see that at the center of the soldiers’ caps there was a bright red star. The Red Army had arrived. Auschwitz was liberated.

  Otto Ambros was already on the way to Falkenhagen, Germany, to destroy evidence in another Farben factory there. Speer headed back to Berlin. Neither man dared travel north inside Poland, where a second armaments factory the two men were jointly involved in was also in jeopardy of being captured by the Soviets. At this facility, called Dyhernfurth after the small riverside village in which it was located, IG Farben produced chemical weapons—deadly nerve agents—on an industrial scale. On January 24, 1945, the day after Ambros fled Auschwitz, Farben had given the word to evacuate Dyhernfurth and destroy whatever evidence remained there. All munitions were loaded onto railcars and trucks and sent to depots in the west.

  The destruction of evidence was now becoming standard operating procedure at laboratories, research facilities, and armaments factories across the Reich. And while Nazi Germany faced imminent collapse, its scientists, engineers, and businessmen had their futures to think about.

  All across Nazi-occupied Poland, German forces were retreating en masse as the Red Army continued to shred the eastern front. On February 5, 1945, one hundred and seventy miles northwest of Auschwitz, the Soviets captured the village of Dyhernfurth. Soviet soldiers took over the town’s castle, built during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and drank up its wine cellar. The castle, with its fairy-tale-like conical spires, quickly transformed into a scene of wild debauchery, with inebriated Russian soldiers singing rowdy victory songs. The situation got so out of control that Russian commanders suspended fighting until order could be restored. This made for a perfect opportunity for a team of Nazi commandos hiding in the forest to launch a daring and unprecedented raid.

  Less than half a mile away, one of the Reich’s most prized wonder weapons facilities lay hidden underground. Camouflaged in a forest of pine trees, inside a large complex of underground bombproof bunkers, a workforce of 560 white-collar Germans and 3,000 slave laborers had been mass-producing, since 1942, liquid tabun—a deadly nerve agent the very existence of which was unknown to the outside world.

  Tabun was one of Hitler’s most jealously guarded secrets, a true wonder weapon of the most diabolical kind. Similar to a pesticide, the organophosphate tabun was one of the most deadly substances in the world. A tiny drop to the skin could kill an individual in minutes or sometimes seconds. Exposure meant the glands and muscles would hyperstimulate and the respiratory system would fail. Paralysis would set in and breathing would cease. At Dyhernfurth, where accidents had happened, a human’s death by tabun gas resembled the frenetic last moments of an ant sprayed with insecticide.

  Like the synthetic rubber and fuel factory at Auschwitz, the nerve agent production facility at Dyhernfurth was owned and operated by IG Farben, and here the Speer ministry worked with Farben to fill aerial bombs with tabun that could eventually be deployed from Luftwaffe planes. No one in the inner circle knew for sure when, or if, Hitler would finally concede to many of his ministers’ wishes and allow for a chemical weapons attack against the Allies. But as evidenced at Dyhernfurth, the opportunity was real. Enough poison gas had been produced here to decimate the population of London or Paris on any given day.

  Despite the overwhelming onslaught of Red Army troops to this region in February of 1945, Hitler remained determined to keep the secrets of tabun out of enemy hands. On the morning of February 5, 1945, Major General Max Sachsenheimer of the Reich’s Seventeenth Field Replacement Battalion and his troops were hiding in the forest along the banks of the Oder River. Sachsenheimer’s commando force was made up of several hundred soldiers, but he also had a unique secondary contingent of men, namely, eighty-two scientists and technicians. Some were army scientists but most were IG Farben employees and chemical weapons experts. Sachsenheimer’s mission was to protect the scientists while they scrubbed Farben’s facility of any and all traces of tabun.

  The Dyhernfurth complex was a sprawling, state-of-the-art production plant. Speer’s Armaments and War Production Ministry had paid Farben nearly 200 million reichsmarks to build and operate it. The facility had been secretly and skillfully designed and managed by Otto Ambros. As he had done with IG Auschwitz, Ambros had overseen every element of this chemical weapons factory dating from the winter of 1941, when the thick forest here was first cleared of pine trees by 120 concentration camp slaves.

  As Nazi Germany blended industry, war making, and genocide, few corporations were as central a player as IG Farben. The chemical concern was the largest corporation in Europe and the fourth largest corporation in the world. IG Farben owned the patent on Zyklon B. And perhaps no single person at Farben was as central a figure in this equation as Otto Ambros had been. For his work as chairman of Committee-C, the chemical weapons committee inside the Speer Ministry, Ambros was given the prestigious title of military economy leader (Wehrwirtschaftsführer). He was awarded the War Merit Cross, 1st and 2nd Class, and the Knight’s Cross of the War Merit Cross, wh
ich was similar to the award bestowed on Dornberger and von Braun.

  There was a second scientist who played an important role in chemical weapons—a man who, like Otto Ambros, would be targeted for Operation Paperclip. This was SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Walter Schieber, a chemist by training, Speer’s deputy and director of the Armaments Supply Office. Schieber was a hard-core Nazi ideologue and a member of Reichsführer-SS Himmler’s personal staff. Unusually corpulent for an SS officer, his official car and airplane required retrofitting to accommodate his 275-pound frame. With Hitler’s physician, Karl Brandt, Schieber was in charge of gas mask production, a requisite for troop defense if chemical warfare was to be waged. As with biological weapons, the sword needs a shield, and by January of 1945 Schieber had overseen the production of 46.1 million gas masks. Their reliability had been tested at Dyhernfurth on concentration camp prisoners. The stories that would emerge during the Nuremberg trials about such tests were ghoulish, including locking prisoners in glass rooms and spraying them with nerve agent. War crimes investigators would later debate whether or not these actions were pilot programs for the gas chambers. The full story of how, and to what extent, Dr. Walter Schieber worked for the U.S. military after the war—and also for the CIA—has never been fully explained until this book.