Operation Paperclip

by Annie Jacobsen

  On the morning of April 11, 1945, a unit of American soldiers with the 104th Infantry Division, also known as the Timberwolves, entered the slave tunnels at Nordhausen. Among the liberating soldiers was an infantry sharpshooter, a private first class named John Risen Jones Jr. In his bag he carried a camera, a gift given to him by his family before he shipped off to war. Expensive and sleek-looking, Jones’s Leica III was one of the first portable 35 mm cameras ever made.

  It had been seven months since John Risen Jones landed in France, back in September 1944. He had spent 195 days on the continent thus far, many of them engaged in fierce combat, all the while pushing though snow, sleet, and mud—much of it on foot. Jones had walked across France, Belgium, and Holland, and now here he was, in the deep mountains of central Germany, the Harz. He had lost friends in battle and taken many photographs of the war. When his unit arrived in this little mountain town, he imagined the day would pass like the one before. Just one step closer to the end of this brutal war.

  No amount of fighting prepared John Risen Jones for what he saw through the lens of his Leica when his unit entered Nordhausen. The photographs he took documented the tragedy that had befallen thousands of V-2 rocket laborers condemned to die as slaves in the tunnels here. Hundreds of corpses were stretched out across the tunnel floors. Equally disturbing was the condition of hundreds more still alive: emaciated humans covered with bruises and sores, too weak to even stand. “It was a fabric of moans and whimpers of delirium and outright madness,” recalled fellow soldier Staff Sergeant Donald Schulz. John Risen Jones would not speak of it for fifty-one years.

  Following along behind the soldiers was a team of seven war crimes investigators. Among them was a young Dutch officer working for the U.S. Army, William J. Aalmans. Like John Risen Jones, Aalmans was deeply affected by what he saw and smelled. “Stench, the tuberculosis and the starved inmates,” he told journalist Tom Bower after the war. “Four people were dying every hour. It was unbelievable.” Aalmans and his team began taking witness statements from prisoners, who sipped watered-down milk for strength. The job facing the war crimes investigators was overwhelming, and their schedule was intense. After five days in Nordhausen they were ordered to move on. Most of the official paperwork regarding rocket production had been hidden or destroyed, but Aalmans and his team found a single sheet of paper inadvertently left behind, tacked to the wall. It was the Mittelwerk telephone list; a directory of who was in charge. At the very top were two names: Georg Rickhey, director of production, and Arthur Rudolph, deputy production manager. Aalmans found the document interesting enough to staple it to the report. Although it would take years to come to light, this single sheet of paper would eventually lead to the downfall of Rudolph and Rickhey and threaten to expose the dark secrets of Operation Paperclip.

  Seventy-five miles south of Nordhausen, in the Thuringian Forest at the edge of the Harz, Allied soldiers liberated the town of Geraberg. Here, they came upon a curious-looking research facility concealed in a thick grove of trees. Clearly the place had recently been abandoned. It comprised a laboratory, an isolation block, animal houses, and living quarters for fourteen men. Part of the facility was still under construction. Word was sent to SHAEF headquarters in Versailles that a team of bacteriologists was needed in Geraberg. Alsos scientists were dispatched to investigate. One of the first biological warfare experts to arrive was Bill Cromartie, who had been hunting for evidence of Hitler’s biological weapons program since the mission began back in Strasbourg, France. Back in November, Cromartie had been one of the men scouring files with Samuel Goudsmit, inside the apartment of Dr. Eugen Haagen, when Alsos agents first learned that the Reich was testing deadly vaccines on prisoners in concentration camps. Arriving at Geraberg, Cromartie determined that the laboratory here was a significant lead.

  “The building and sites were on either side of a small valley and constructed under tall trees,” read Cromartie’s classified report. “On one side there was a building [that] was to have been the experimental laboratory,” he surmised, suggesting that this facility was designed to produce experimental vaccines to protect German soldiers against a biological weapons offensive.

  A local villager provided Cromartie and a colleague, J. M. Barnes, with two key pieces of information in the biological weapons puzzle. The villager explained that an SS man named Dr. Karl Gross had been overseeing work at this facility. Gross kept dozens of trunks and boxes locked in the upper floors of a local schoolhouse, and, while he had recently disappeared, he had left the trunks behind. The villager took the American scientists to the schoolhouse to investigate.

  An inventory was taken of Dr. Gross’s possessions, mostly laboratory equipment. “There were crates of test tubes and small flasks and large numbers of test tube racks. There were two incubators and an autoclave. There were two boxes of gas mask filters and some rubber hoods and gowns,” read the report. Everything was military-grade protective gear, marked as having “been obtained from the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen SS.” There was also a large collection of books, “several boxes of periodicals all dealing with infectious diseases.” The ones that really caught the scientists’ attention were “Russian contributions on plague.”

  Next, the villager took the Alsos agents to the nearby boardinghouse where Dr. Gross had been renting a room. The place was cleared out and void of personal possessions. “His landlady said she believed he had burnt a lot of papers the night before he left,” the Alsos scientists noted in their report. But Dr. Gross was only the intermediary, the landlady said. There was another man who came to the facility and appeared to be in charge. He was an older man, about fifty, five foot nine, with a mustache and black hair. On his upper lip he had a pronounced dueling scar. He had to have been of high rank, because everyone on the staff deferred to him. When cross-referenced by Alsos against the Osenberg List, the situation became even clearer: Dr. Karl Gross worked under Dr. Kurt Blome, the individual in charge of biological weapons research and the deputy surgeon general of the Third Reich.

  All indicators pointed to the idea that Geraberg was a Reich facility for biological weapons research. Alsos agents photographed the site: the animal house, the vaccine station, the experimental laboratory, and the isolation hospital. They typed up a report and filed it away for future use. Now, near the top of the biological weapons Black List was the name Dr. Kurt Blome.

  Sixty miles north of Nordhausen, a battalion of American soldiers with the First U.S. Infantry moved cautiously through the forest on the western edge of a small city called Braunschweig. It was April 13, 1945, when they came upon a compound of about seventy buildings. Great care had gone into camouflaging this place, the soldiers noted. Thousands of trees had been planted closely so that the area would appear from the air to be dense forest. The buildings in the compound had been designed to look like simple farmhouses. Traditional gardens had been planted and tended to. Stork nests covered the rooftops.

  Inside the buildings, soldiers discovered state-of-the-art aircraft laboratories, including entire warehouses filled with airplane parts and rocket fuel. There were wind and weapons tunnels that were radically more advanced than anything the Army Air Forces had at Wright Field. The oldest division in the United States Army had unexpectedly happened upon the most scientifically advanced aeronautics laboratory in the world. It was called the Hermann Göring Aeronautical Research Center at Völkenrode. The Allies had never heard of it before. It didn’t appear on any CIOS Black List. It was an incredible find.

  At first, it seemed as if the place had been abandoned. But after an hour of looking around, the soldiers came upon the institute’s scientific director, a man named Adolf Busemann. Busemann told the soldiers that this facility was called Völkenrode for short, and that it had been up and running for ten years. A team of Army Air Forces technical intelligence experts, working as part of a mission called Operation Lusty and stationed in Saint-Germain, France, was dispatched to investigate. By now the U.S. Strategic Air Force
s in Europe had destroyed the Luftwaffe, and the bombing campaign had essentially stopped. Its commander, General Carl A. “Tooey” Spaatz, had just received a fourth star for his success commanding the largest fleet of combat aircraft ever assembled for war. Now Spaatz had a new mission for his field commanders. “Operation Lusty,” Spaatz wrote in a memo, was “in effect,” and everyone “not engaged in critical operational duties” was to seek out “technical and scientific intelligence [that would be] of material assistance in the prosecution of the war against Japan.” The man Spaatz chose to lead the hunt for Luftwaffe scientists and engineers was Colonel Donald L. Putt.

  When Putt arrived at Völkenrode on April 22, 1945, he was thrilled by what he saw. All he could think about was how quickly he could get all this equipment back to the United States. Putt was a legendary test pilot who had been at Wright Field since 1933, assigned to various branches, including the Flying Branch. He had walked away from a deadly air crash that killed his colleagues and left him with second-degree burn scars on his face and neck. Putt was a hard-charging, Type A personality—a tiger among men. “He displayed the ability to withstand great emotional shock, to absorb it, and take in stride,” explained a colleague from Wright Field. Putt was also intellectually gifted, with a degree in electrical engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and a master’s in aeronautical engineering from the California Institute of Technology. As an older man, Donald Putt recalled the prewar mind-set regarding pilots who were also engineers. “Then, the philosophy was, ‘Don’t put an engineering pilot in the cockpit, because he tries to figure out why things happen.’ ” But when the air wars in Europe and Japan escalated, the Army Air Forces found itself in need of fast, out-of-the-box thinking from American pilot-engineers like Putt. The Army Air Forces put the old philosophy to the side and Putt’s expertise to use. In 1944, Putt’s career milestone arrived when he was put in charge of modifying a B-29 bomber so that it could deliver an extraordinarily heavy, Top Secret payload on Japan. This payload was eventually revealed to be the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After Putt finished his B-29 bomber retrofitting jobs, in January 1945, he was sent overseas as director of technical services for the Air Service Command. Now here he was in the last week of April 1945 at Völkenrode.

  With his engineer’s expertise, Putt was able to clearly judge the revolutionary nature of the technology he was looking at. Most astonishing to Putt were Völkenrode’s seven wind tunnels that had allowed the Luftwaffe to study how a swept-back wing would behave at the speed at which an aircraft broke the sound barrier. This transition place, between Mach 0.8 and Mach 1.2, was still unknown to American fliers in 1945. When Putt learned from Völkenrode’s director, Adolf Busemann, that the sound barrier had already been breached by German scientists in these wind tunnels, he was amazed. Putt knew immediately that the facility had “the most superb instruments and test equipment” in the world.

  Putt was taking orders from the U.S. Army, European Theater of Operations, Directorate of Intelligence, Exploitation Division, which meant that he had access to stripped-down B-17s and B-24s if he needed them, a means to transport much of this equipment to the United States, which Putt very much wanted to do. He wrote to his boss, Major General Hugh Knerr, deputy commander of U.S. Strategic Air Force in Europe, outlining his proposition and suggesting a second idea: Why not also fly scientists like Adolf Busemann out of Germany, along with the captured Luftwaffe equipment? “If we are not too proud to make use of this German-born information, much benefit can be derived from it and we can advance where Germany left off,” Putt wrote. The German scientists “would be of immense value in our jet engine and airplane development program.” Putt and Knerr both knew that the War Department General Staff was filled with individuals who were wary of Germans in general and totally opposed to making deals of any kind with the very Nazi scientists who had helped to prolong the war. But if anyone could get the War Department to bend, Knerr and Putt believed they could.

  Major General Knerr sent a memo to the War Department in Washington, D.C., explaining that using Luftwaffe technology to fight the war in Japan was imperative. He added that the scientists’ Nazi Party membership needed to be overlooked. “Pride and face saving have no place in national insurance,” wrote Knerr.

  The War Department General Staff was not so easily convinced—at least not now. Colonel Putt was informed that the equipment could come out of Völkenrode immediately but that getting German scientists to Wright Field would take some more time. Putt oversaw the massive airlift of German aircraft and rocket parts from Völkenrode to the United States; five thousand scientific documents were also shipped. Meanwhile, he and his staff rounded up as many Luftwaffe personnel as they could, tracking down leads and making deals with scientists and engineers in their homes. Putt informed the Germans that he could not offer them U.S. Army contracts just yet but that he would most likely be able to do so soon. In the meantime, he arranged for dozens of Luftwaffe scientists and engineers to be quartered in the Hotel Wittelsbacher Hof, in the spa town of Bad Kissingen, and made sure that the men had plenty to eat, drink, and smoke. Wait here, the scientists were told. The U.S. Army contracts are on the way.

  Colonel Putt and Major General Knerr would then put their heads together and figure out a way to convince the War Department that their point of view was best for the United States.

  Around this time, the single largest cache of chemical weapons discovered to date was found seventy-five miles west of Hannover. On April 16, 1945, British soldiers from Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group pulled up to the entrance of an abandoned German army proving ground called the Robbers’ Lair, or Raubkammer. The place appeared to be abandoned, but Waffen-SS snipers still were known to be hiding in the woods. The soldiers exercised caution as they drove their armored personnel cars through a pair of entrance pillars adorned with Reich eagles and swastikas.

  At first glance the facility looked like a standard military proving ground—a place where bombs were exploded and blast measurements recorded. Raubkammer was located in a rural forested area called Münster-Nord, and it extended more than seventy-six square miles. Large craters in open fields suggested that Luftwaffe airplanes had practiced dropping bombs here. There was fancy housing for hundreds of officers. There were large administrative buildings and an officers’ mess hall. Then the soldiers came upon the zoo.

  It was a large zoo, capable of housing a vast array of animals of all sizes. There were cages for mice, cats, and dogs, as well as large pens and stables for farm animals like horses, cows, and pigs. There were also monkey cages. But it was the discovery of a massive, round wooden cylinder—most likely an aerosol chamber—that triggered alarm. The structure was sixty-five feet tall and a hundred feet wide, and it was ringed with a network of scaffolding, pipes, and ventilator fans. Between the zoo and the large chamber, the soldiers were now relatively certain that Raubkammer was no ordinary military proving ground. The Robbers’ Lair bore the hallmarks of a field-testing facility that likely involved poison gas. An urgent memo was sent to SHAEF asking for a team of chemical warfare experts to be dispatched to Raubkammer. Two teams descended, one from the British Chemical Defense Experimental Establishment at Porton Down and another from CIOS, including Major Tilley and Colonel Tarr.

  At the same time, a second unit of British troops working just a few miles to the southwest of the Robbers’ Lair came upon two bunker clusters totaling almost two hundred structures. The area had been artfully concealed from overhead view by dense forest cover. The first cluster consisted of several dozen small wooden buildings intermittently spaced between similarly sized concrete blockhouses. The soldiers inventoried the contents with caution. Inside one set of bunkers they found thousands of bombs, stacked in neat piles. Each bomb was marked with a single yellow ring painted around the sides of the munition. This was the standard marking to denote mustard gas, the chemical weapon used by both sides in World War I. The British soldiers took inventory
and counted one hundred thousand mustard gas shells.

  The second munitions depot was marked as belonging to the Luftwaffe. Here, 175 bunkers were filled with bombs that were unidentifiable to the Allies. Each bomb had been marked with three green rings painted around its sides. Montgomery’s soldiers sent an urgent memo to SHAEF asking for a team of chemical weapons experts to come investigate the munitions in the forest.

  The scientists from CIOS and Porton Down were nervous about what might be inside the mysteriously marked bombs. They decided that it was best to try to locate German scientists in the area who might be familiar with the contents of the bombs before they opened the casings themselves—so they began knocking on the doors of the nicer houses in the vicinity of Robbers’ Lair. As they had suspected they would, CIOS officers located a number of individuals who confessed to being German army scientists and having worked at Raubkammer. While each scientist claimed to have no idea what kind of weapons testing had been going on at the military facility, CIOS officers were able to persuade several of the German scientists to assist them in extracting the liquid substance from the center of the bombs.

  By this time, chemists with the U.S. Army’s Forty-fifth Chemical Laboratory Company had arrived, bringing with them a mobile laboratory unit and cages filled with rabbits. The original thought was that the substance marked by three green rings was some kind of new Nazi blister agent—similar to, but perhaps more powerful than, mustard gas. The chemists were wrong. Extractions were made, and when tested on the rabbits in the mobile laboratory, whatever this liquid substance was killed a warm-blooded rabbit five times faster than anything that British or American scientists had ever seen, or even heard about, before. Even more alarming, the liquid substance did not have to be inhaled to kill. A single drop on the rabbit’s skin killed the animal in just a few minutes. The millions of gas masks England had distributed to city dwellers during the war would have offered no defense against a chemical weapon as potent as whatever this killing agent was.