Operation Paperclip

by Annie Jacobsen

  Assisting CIOS teams were security forces called T-Forces, identifiable by helmets with a bright red T painted on the front. These small squadrons of elite soldiers operated at the army group level but worked independently of traditional combat units. Their job was to recognize potentially valuable scientific targets and then secure them until personnel from CIOS arrived.

  The goal of Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee was to investigate all things related to German science. Target types ran the gamut: radar, missiles, aircraft, medicine, bombs and fuses, chemical and biological weapons labs. And while CIOS remained an official joint venture, there were other groups in the mix, with competing interests at hand.

  Running parallel to CIOS operations were dozens of secret intelligence-gathering operations, mostly American. The Pentagon’s Special Mission V-2 was but one example. By late March 1945, Colonel Trichel, chief of U.S. Army Ordnance, Rocket Branch, had dispatched his team to Europe. Likewise, U.S. Naval Technical Intelligence had officers in Paris preparing for its own highly classified hunt for any intelligence regarding the Henschel Hs 293, a guided missile developed by the Nazis and designed to sink or damage enemy ships. The U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) were still heavily engaged in strategic bombing campaigns, but a small group from Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio, was laying plans to locate and capture Luftwaffe equipment and engineers. Spearheading Top Secret missions for British intelligence was a group of commandos called 30 Assault Unit, led by Ian Fleming, the personal assistant to the director of British naval intelligence and future author of the James Bond novels. Sometimes, the members of these parallel missions worked in consort with CIOS officers in the field. Certainly, they took full advantage of all the information CIOS made available, including its Black Lists. But each mission almost always put its individual objectives and goals first. The result, some officers joked, was CHAOS for CIOS.

  What began as a gentlemanly collaboration among Allies quickly transformed into one of the greatest competitions for information about weapons-related research in the history of war. Once the Rhine River was crossed, the hunt for Nazi science became a free-for-all.

  On its search for chemical weapons, Alsos scientists crossed the Rhine on the heels of the Third Army. They traveled in a small convoy of army jeeps. “The area was not in good shape,” Colonel Pash recalled after the war. “Buildings of the town shook from the shock waves generated by the gun explosions,” and “stalled or broken-down vehicles added to the confusion created by the wrecked armor and trucks of the retreating Nazis.” Entering Ludwigshafen, one of the Alsos jeeps became separated from its convoy and ran smack into the line of fire of a German antitank gun. Hardly expecting a single jeep to appear on the road without a tank accompanying it, the Germans were apparently caught off-guard. “A single salvo and the few machine-gun bursts went wide,” Pash recalled after the war.

  The Alsos scientists had heard that T-Forces units were close behind them and were making arrangements for a large team of technical experts to arrive under the CIOS banner. The Alsos scientists were determined to get to the IG Farben factory first. But what they ended up finding in Ludwigshafen was disappointing to them. Not only had the factory been heavily damaged by Allied bombing raids, but filing cabinets were empty. Paperwork had been destroyed or removed. There were no chemical weapons found.

  The following morning, March 24, 1945, while at breakfast, the Alsos team met up with the T-Forces and the CIOS team. Both had come to inspect the Farben factory. “It was interesting to watch the effect of bombshells casually dropped by our scientists,” Pash recalled, “sounding something like… ‘Oh sure, You’ll be able to go to the Farben plant tomorrow, after the T-Forces secures it. You’ll find it interesting. We know, because we were there yesterday.’ ” The rivalry between the teams was evident.

  The two men leading the CIOS chemical weapons team were an American officer named Lieutenant Colonel Philip R. Tarr and a British officer named Major Edmund Tilley. These men would soon become critical players in the Operation Paperclip story. Each was considered an expert in chemical warfare, but Major Tilley had a leg up on his American counterpart—at least in the field—in that he spoke fluent German. In addition to his role as a CIOS leader, Colonel Tarr was chief officer in the U.S. Army’s Intelligence Division of the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service, Europe. Unknown to Major Tilley at this time was that Colonel Tarr’s U.S. Army objective would soon supersede his loyalty to their work together as a CIOS team.

  With American forces now on German soil, the fear that Hitler might unleash a devastating chemical weapons attack in a last-ditch attempt to make good on his wonder weapons promise was real, but Tarr and Tilley had very few leads as to where the chemical weapons might be stashed. German counterintelligence agents had done a brilliant job concealing the Reich’s nerve agent programs from foreign intelligence agencies during the war. Tabun had been given various code names, including Trilon 83, Substance 83, and Gelan 1. Even its raw materials were coded. Ethanol was “A4,” and sodium was “A-17,” making identification all but impossible. In 1942, a U.S. intelligence report entitled “New German Poison Gas” concluded that the possibility that Germany had new chemical weapons was “no longer seriously regarded.” Only in May of 1943, after capturing a German chemist in North Africa, did British agents learn of a colorless nerve agent of “astounding properties” being developed by IG Farben chemists in Berlin. The British interrogation officers found the German chemist’s information to be credible and wrote up a ten-page secret report for the Chemical Defense Experimental Establishment, which operated out of Porton Down. But the captured scientist knew only the substance’s code name, Trilon 83. Without further information, no action was taken by the British. Now, in March 1945, Tarr and Tilley were on the hunt for this mysterious Trilon 83 and anything else like it.

  Leading the CIOS team into Germany, Tarr and Tilley inspected IG Farben factories at Ludwigshafen, Mannheim, and Elberfeld. At each location the officers noted with suspicion how remarkably little each town’s Farben scientists claimed to know. As far as intelligence collection was concerned, the scenario at each seized Farben factory was always strikingly similar: Where there should have been huge troves of company records, there were empty cabinets instead. Farben scientists who were taken into custody and questioned always said the same thing: IG Farben made chemical products for domestic use—detergent, paint, lacquer, and soap. And none of the scientists interviewed by CIOS officers claimed to have any idea where the bosses had gone.

  In a CIOS memorandum, Tilley and Tarr expressed mounting frustration. One scientist after the next “lied vigorously about his activities,” the men wrote in their intelligence report, entitled “Interrogation of German Scientific Personnel.” Good, actionable intelligence remained out of reach. Then, as circumstance would have it, Alsos agents caught a huge break farther north in the city of Bonn.

  Alsos had been trailing the Third Armored Division since it first rolled into Ludwigshafen on March 23. Several days later the soldiers liberated the city of Cologne and then set their sights on Bonn, some fifteen miles to the north. Scouting soldiers reported seeing men who might be professors burning caseloads of documents in Bonn University courtyards. What they couldn’t see was that inside university bathrooms, professors were also desperately flushing documents down the toilet, hoping to destroy evidence that might implicate them in war crimes. When the Allies finally secured the university, a Polish lab technician approached a British soldier to say that he had salvaged a large pile of documents that did not properly flush down a toilet bowl, as had apparently been intended.

  These papers looked important, the lab technician said. And indeed they were. The man had turned over to British intelligence a classified list of the Reich’s top scientists. The officer handed the list over to Samuel Goudsmit of Operation Alsos. This group of documents would lead to what would become known as the Osenberg List.

  Dr. Werner Osenberg, a mechanical engineer, was a dedi
cated Nazi and member of the SS; he was also a high-ranking member of the Gestapo, the secret police. In June 1943 Osenberg was assigned by Göring to run the so-called Planning Office of the Reich Research Council, which was dedicated to warfare. Per a Führer decree of June 9, 1942, the Research Council’s charter read: “Leading men of science above all, are to make research fruitful for warfare by working together in their special fields.”

  From the council’s Planning Office, Osenberg’s job was to coordinate a Who’s Who list of German scientists, engineers, doctors, and technicians. With bureaucratic precision Osenberg set to work, tracking down and cataloguing every scientist in Germany. Osenberg’s mission was to put these men into service for the Reich. In short order he had compiled a list of fifteen thousand men and fourteen hundred research facilities. All across Germany scientists, engineers, and technicians were recalled from the front lines, an act Hitler called the Osenberg Action. This led to the release of five thousand scientists from the German Armed Forces. After being screened for skill level, the men of science were set up in appropriated universities and institutions across Reich territory where they could work on weapons-related research programs in service of the war effort.

  The mystery of how the Osenberg List ended up in a Bonn University toilet was never solved, but for Alsos it was an intelligence gold mine. Not only was this list a record of who had been working on what scientific project for the Reich, but it contained addresses, including one for Werner Osenberg himself. Goudsmit dispatched a team to a little town near Hannover. There, Alsos agents captured Osenberg and his complete outfit.

  The papers found in the toilet were valuable, but it was an index of cards in Osenberg’s office that was priceless. “The primary index consists of a four-drawer cabinet containing approximately two-thousand large printed cards (10″ x 7″) adapted for multiple entry on both sides of the card,” reported Alsos. Secondary indexes included three additional sets of “approximately one thousand cards [each], 6″ x 4″… containing the same information but classified from a different standpoint and facilitating searches along different lines.” This was an overwhelming trove of information, too much for any one organization to handle. Alsos shared the Osenberg List with CIOS; there were thousands of leads that needed following up on. Osenberg’s card catalogue would allow the various teams to begin piecing together how science programs worked under the Reich and who had been in charge.

  The Alsos officers packed up Osenberg’s office and took him to Paris, where he was put to work organizing information. Goudsmit was appalled by the hubris Osenberg displayed after he was installed in an office in a guarded facility in Versailles. “Here, Osenberg had set up business as usual; he merely had his secretary change the address on his letterhead to… “at Present in Paris,” Goudsmit explained after the war. He also became exasperated when Osenberg tried repeatedly to convince Goudsmit of his sworn loyalty to the Allies. “I became impatient,” Goudsmit explained, and told Osenberg, “[O]ne cannot trust you.… You were in charge of the scientific section of the Gestapo, which you never revealed to us and you burned all the relating papers.” Osenberg was enraged by the accusation. “No, I did not burn those papers,” he told Goudsmit. “I buried them and, moreover, I was not the chief of the scientific section of the Gestapo, I was merely the second in command.” After that it was easy for Goudsmit to find out from Osenberg “where those papers were buried and where the missing Berlin papers were stored.”

  But no one from the Allied forces was going into Berlin just yet. In these last days of March 1945, Berlin continued to be the heart of the Reich, and it was being fiercely defended. It would remain German-held territory for another month, until the last day of April 1945.

  It was a city in ruins, and Berliners’ morale was sinking with each passing day. With nearly 85 percent of the city destroyed, Berlin had been reduced to rubble piles. The majority of buildings still standing had broken windows. Everyone was cold. The underground shelters were vastly overcrowded. Heating fuel was scarce. “During early April,” explains historian Anthony Beevor, “as Berlin awaited the final onslaught [of the Red Army,] the atmosphere in the city became a mixture of febrile exhaustion, terrible foreboding and despair.”

  Nazi radio broadcasts reminded Berliners that they were required to fight to the end. According to Goebbels, “A single motto remains for us: ‘Conquer or die.’ ” Hitler blamed everything on the Jews and the Slavs. “The deadly Jewish-Bolshevik enemy with his masses is beginning his final attack,” he told troops on the eastern front, in a last appeal on April 15. The Russians were determined to exterminate all German people, Hitler promised, “the old men and children will be murdered, women and girls will be degraded as barracks whores.” Everybody else would be marched off to Siberia.

  In the heart of Berlin, in the Wilhelmstrasse district, where the Reich’s ministries were located, Colonel Siegfried Knemeyer tried to maintain order over the vast group of personnel he was responsible for at the Air Ministry. It was a miracle that the building was still standing. Constructed of reinforced concrete, the Air Ministry was a prized symbol of Nazi Party intimidation architecture, seven stories tall, with twenty-eight hundred rooms, four thousand windows, and corridors that totaled four miles in length. At the height of the air war, the place bustled with four thousand Nazi bureaucrats and their secretaries. This was no longer the case. The Luftwaffe was in ruins.

  Since 1943, Siegfried Knemeyer had served as chief of all air force technical developments for the Luftwaffe. His title was technical adviser to Reichsmarschall Göring, who adored Knemeyer, calling him “my boy.” From aircraft engines to instruments, if a new component was being developed for the Luftwaffe, Göring wanted to know what Knemeyer had to say about it before he gave the project the go-ahead. But now, in the second week of April 1945, most orders that arrived at the Air Ministry were impossible for Knemeyer to fulfill. In the second half of 1944, the German Air Force had lost more than twenty thousand airplanes. The Speer ministry had since managed to produce approximately three thousand new aircraft, but they were of little use now. Across the Reich, German aircraft sat stranded on tarmacs. The Allies had bombed Luftwaffe runways, and there was barely any aviation fuel left. The plan for IG Farben to make synthetic fuel at its Buna factory had ended when the Red Army liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. Germany’s fuel sources in Hungary and Romania were tapped out. The German jet was superior to conventional Allied fighter planes in the air, but that didn’t mean much anymore, with most Luftwaffe aircraft stuck on the ground.

  Soon Knemeyer would flee Berlin, but not before he completed a final task assigned to him by Speer. According to Nuremberg trial testimony, Speer instructed Knemeyer to hide Luftwaffe technical information in the forest outside Berlin. Stashing official documents was a treasonable offense, but according to Knemeyer’s personal papers, Speer and Knemeyer had agreed that Germany’s seminal scientific progress in aeronautics could not, under any circumstances, fall into Russian hands. There was also a second unofficial job that Speer tapped Knemeyer for, one that was not discussed at Nuremberg but which Speer admitted to decades later. Speer asked Knemeyer to help plot his escape.

  Speer’s plan to flee Germany had been in the works for some time; it was the details he needed help ironing out. Ever since Speer had seen the film S.O.S. Iceberg, starring Leni Riefenstahl and Ernst Udet, he knew he wanted to escape to Greenland should Germany lose the war. In Greenland Speer could set up camp and write his memoirs, he later explained. Of course he’d need a pilot, which is where Knemeyer fit in.

  Knemeyer was an aeronautical engineer, but he was also one of the Luftwaffe’s most revered pilots, ranked among the top ten aviators in all of Germany. His specialty, back when he flew missions in the earlier stages of the war, had been espionage. From 1938 to 1942, Knemeyer flew a number of the most dangerous Abwehr (military intelligence) missions on record, including ones over England and Norway. And it was Knemeyer who made the first high-altitude s
ortie over North Africa, flying at forty-four thousand feet. But Knemeyer was also a pragmatist. He knew, apparently more so than Speer, that attempting to fly out of Germany and into Greenland transporting one of the most wanted war criminals of the Third Reich during the final days of the war would be a near-to-impossible feat. There was brutal weather in Greenland and fierce terrain. The mission would require a very specific aircraft that could handle the harsh conditions and difficult landing, namely, the Bv 222, designed by Blohm & Voss. Only thirteen had ever been built. There was only one man who had access to that kind of airplane, and that was Knemeyer’s friend Werner Baumbach, a twenty-eight-year-old dive-bomber pilot whom Hitler had made general of the bombers.

  Knemeyer knew that bringing Baumbach on board was imperative for a successful Greenland escape. During the war, Baumbach had flown missions between Norway and a German weather station located in Greenland. Speer agreed and Baumbach was brought into the plan. In secret, Baumbach and Knemeyer began gathering “food, medicine, rifles, skis, tents, fishing equipment and hand grenades” at Speer’s behest. At the Travemünde airfield, north of Berlin, Baumbach earmarked a Bv 222 for use. The only thing that remained was Speer’s command for the group to flee. Time was running out. Berlin was nearing its downfall.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Liberation

  All across Germany, the liberations were beginning. In one location after the next, prisoners in concentration camps and slave labor factories were being freed by Allied soldiers who stormed across Germany in tanks and jeeps and on foot. The action had begun in western Germany and continued steadily as the Allies marched east, headed toward Munich and Berlin. Alongside these liberations, soldiers also discovered Reich laboratories and research facilities, one after the next. After each discovery a team of CIOS scientists was called in to investigate. During the second week of April in 1945, four key facilities were seized—at Nordhausen, Geraberg, Völkenrode, and Raubkammer—each of which would lead to the capture of key scientists who would in turn become part of Operation Paperclip.