Operation Paperclip

by Annie Jacobsen

  When American officials of higher rank finally arrived in Gendorf a few days later, they had more specific questions for Ambros. Why was part of the Farben detergent factory built underground? It would take months for CIOS investigators to learn that the factory here in Gendorf produced chemical weapons during the war—and that, after Ambros had fled Auschwitz in late January 1945, he and his deputy, Jürgen von Klenck, had come to Gendorf to destroy evidence, hide documents, and disguise the factory so that it appeared to produce only detergents and soap.

  In Munich, on May 17, 1945, U.S. soldiers at a checkpoint were conducting a routine identification request when a well-dressed man—134 pounds, five foot nine, with dark black hair, hazel eyes, and a pronounced dueling scar on the left side of his face between his nose and his upper lip—presented a German passport bearing the name Professor Doctor Friedrich Ludwig Kurt Blome.

  Dr. Blome’s name triggered an alert: “Immediate arrest. 1st Priority.” Samuel Goudsmit and the entire team of biological warfare experts with Operation Alsos had been on the hunt for Dr. Blome. Agent Arnold Vyth, with the army’s Counter Intelligence Corps, made the arrest. Agent Vyth completed the necessary paperwork while the prisoner was processed. Dr. Blome was sent to the Twelfth Army Group Interrogation Center for questioning. Several days later, a document arrived via teletype from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America’s wartime espionage agency and the precursor to the CIA. They, too, had been searching for Dr. Blome.

  The War Crimes Office had considerable information about Dr. Kurt Blome. He was deputy surgeon general of the Third Reich and vice president of the Reich’s Physicians’ League, Reichsärztekammer. He was believed to have reported directly to Göring and maybe even to Himmler, or to both. Blome had been named head of Reich cancer research in 1942. Alsos and OSS presumed that this was a cover name for biological weapons work. Blome was a dedicated and proud Nazi. His book Arzt im Kampf (Doctor in Battle) compared a doctor’s struggle with the struggle of the Third Reich. Soldiers, officers, and doctors weren’t all that different, each constantly in battle against invading forces and disease.

  Investigators were trying to piece together the labyrinthine medical hierarchy of the Third Reich so as to understand who was in charge of what organization. Particularly interesting to the interrogators was the fact that Dr. Kurt Blome had been part of a top-tier group of Nazi doctors who focused on “hygiene.” This word connoted disease control but was also believed to have been used by the Reich as a euphemism for ethnic cleansing and extermination of Jews. Alsos was in possession of correspondence between Blome and Himmler that discussed giving certain groups of sick individuals—in this case tubercular Poles—“special treatment” (Sonderbehandlung). What exactly did special treatment mean? At the time of Blome’s capture and interrogation, Allied intelligence agencies believed that there was only one physician higher than Blome in the hierarchy of the Reich Hygiene Committee, and that was the notorious Reich Health Leader (Reichsgesundheitsführer), Leonardo Conti.

  Dr. Blome spoke fluent English with his first army interrogator. He described himself as a “good Nazi”—obedient—and promised that he was willing to cooperate with the Allies. At first his interrogators were thrilled by the prospect of learning more about Reich medicine from such a big fish as Dr. Blome.

  Why was he cooperating? Blome was asked.

  “[I] can not approve of the way new advances in medical science have been used for atrocities,” declared Dr. Blome.

  What kind of atrocities? Blome’s investigator wanted to know.

  Blome stated that in his capacity as deputy surgeon general of the Reich he had “observe[d] new scientific studies and experiments which led to later atrocities e.g. mass sterilization, gassing of Jews.” It was an astonishing admission. Until Dr. Blome gave up this information so freely, no physician in the inner circle had admitted to having known about such wide-scale atrocities as mass murder and sterilization programs. That Blome was willing to talk was extremely promising news. Blome was “cooperative and intelligent,” noted his interrogator. Most important, he was “willing to supply information.”

  But the U.S. investigators’ excitement did not last long. By his next interrogation, Dr. Kurt Blome had shut down entirely. He told his interrogating officer, Major E. W. B. Gill, that he had only ever been an administrator for the Reich; that he did nothing “hands-on.” Major Gill pressed Blome for information about his direct superior, Dr. Leonardo Conti. Blome said he knew nothing about Conti’s job.

  “When I pointed out that the deputy must presumably know something about his chief’s job,” Major Gill wrote in his report, “he said the organization was extremely complicated and really he would like to draw me a diagram on it.” Gill lost his temper. “I told Blome I didn’t want his dammed diagrams, but an answer to a simple question. How did he take Conti’s place if he [Conti] were absent or ill if he knew nothing of the job?”

  Blome repeated his position. That it was all too complicated to explain to a man like Major Gill. Outraged by the sidestepping, Gill kept at it. But by the end of Blome’s Alsos interrogation, Major Gill had been unable to get even a scrap of new information from Blome. He claimed never to have heard of the majority of the names of fellow doctors that Major Gill asked him about. Instead, Blome insisted that he knew nothing about the medical chain of command inside the Third Reich or the SS, despite the fact that he had personally met with Himmler five times since 1943. Gill asked how Blome, a “cancer expert,” had been put in charge of the Reich’s bioweapons program, a subject he claimed to know very little about. Blome said he had no answer for that.

  “On my suggestion that a most important branch of war research would not be assigned to a complete ignoramus he, after endless explanations of the complexity of the German world, finally said it must have been because, as an undergraduate, he wrote on BW [biological weapons] as his thesis for a doctorate.” Major Gill felt for certain that Dr. Blome was lying. But there was nothing he could do except present Blome with information and evidence that Alsos had compiled about him since they had seized Dr. Eugen Haagen’s apartment six months before.

  Gill told Blome that in a series of interrogations with sixteen Reich doctors also involved in bioweapons-related research, Alsos officers had learned about many horrific medical crimes. Gill explained that Alsos had documents that tied Blome to the crimes. For example, Alsos had found letters inside the apartment of Dr. Eugen Haagen that linked Dr. Blome to Dr. Haagen and also to an SS colleague named Dr. August Hirt. These letters made clear that someone was providing Reich doctors with human guinea pigs. Who exactly was in charge of this program, Gill asked Blome? Gill needed a name.

  Blome denied having any idea what Gill was referring to. Major Gill told Blome he had a letter that implicated Blome. In another letter, Gill said, Dr. Blome had instructed Dr. Hirt to conduct research on “the effect of mustard gas on living organisms.” The phrase “living organisms” was a code name for people, wasn’t it? Gill asked Blome. Dr. Blome kept stonewalling. “On the whole subject of SS research, his attitude was always that it was so secret that not even [the] Reich chief medical advisor knew anything about it,” Major Gill wrote in his report.

  Gill was convinced that Dr. Kurt Blome was lying. He felt certain that Doctors Haagen, Hirt, Blome, and the SS were connected to medical research on prisoners at concentration camps.

  “This interrogation was extremely unproductive,” a frustrated Major Gill summarized in his report. “Although I do not wish to be definitive my first impression is that Blome is a liar and a medical charlatan.”

  Down south in the Bavarian Alps, while the V-2 rocket scientists angled for a deal with the U.S. Army, Georg Rickhey, former general manager of the Mittelwerk, tried to blend in. Rickhey had taken a job ninety miles from Nordhausen, running operations in a salt mine. For several weeks, no one was looking for him. Then Colonel Peter Beasley, of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), arrived in the area on a mission from
the War Department. Beasley’s job was to locate the engineers who had built the fortified underground weapons facilities in the Harz. These bombproof bunkers were extraordinary engineering feats, and the USSBS was impressed with how so many of them had withstood relentless Allied air bombing campaigns. The rocket facility at Nordhausen was of particular importance to USSBS officers, and Colonel Beasley set up shop in an abandoned barracks just north of the former Mittelwerk factory, in a town called Ilfeld, to investigate. As circumstance would have it, the barracks he chose to occupy was the building in which the former office of Georg Rickhey was located. From documents and equipment left behind, Colonel Beasley learned that Rickhey possessed extremely valuable information about how the tunnel factory had been built. Beasley asked around, but none of the locals claimed to know where Rickhey had gone.

  “I made daily visits to the jails in the small towns to see if I could locate anyone who might interest me,” Beasley wrote in a report. Eventually he found a man who gave him a tip. Georg Rickhey was running operations at a salt mine in the Black Forest, the man said. Colonel Beasley sent two officers into the field to track Rickhey down.

  Meanwhile, Beasley and his team followed another lead. “In Blankenburg,” Beasley wrote, “we found a school building with some miscellaneous papers bearing the Speer Ministry insignia.” From these documents Beasley learned that Georg Rickhey was the liaison between the Mittelwerk and the Ministry of Armaments. When Beasley’s two officers returned with Georg Rickhey in custody, Beasley placed Rickhey under arrest and began to interrogate him. He was “a nervous little man who smoked incessantly and always brought the conversation back to scientific or technical matters,” Beasley recalled after the war, but in the end he “was a most profitable catch.”

  “I’ve got a job for you,” Beasley told Rickhey. “I want you to begin right now writing out a full description of yourself and all the activities of the V-2 factory, and what your people were working on.” Rickhey complied. When the task was complete, Beasley told the former general manager of the Mittelwerk, “[W]e accept you as an official of the German Government; we have patience and time and lots of people—you have lost the war and so as far as I am concerned you are a man who knows a lot about rockets. As an American officer, I want my country to have full possession of all your knowledge. To my superiors, I shall recommend that you be taken to the United States.”

  Rickhey embraced this news with open arms. He told Beasley that he was a scientist and only wanted to work in pleasant surroundings, like the United States. He agreed to tell Beasley where some important records had been hidden. Rickhey took Colonel Beasley to a cave several miles away. There, forty-two boxes of worksheets, engineering tables, and blueprints relating to Nordhausen and the V-2 had been stashed. This was certainly not Wernher von Braun’s documents stash, but for the USSBS, it was more than they possessed up to this point. Now that he was in possession of a huge trove of documents, Colonel Beasley realized that he needed to have them translated by someone with technical expertise. He had promised Rickhey a recommendation for a job in the United States, but first he needed Rickhey to come with him to London to translate and analyze these documents for him.

  Albert Speer, one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals in the world, was finally captured on the morning of May 23, 1945. He was standing in one of the bathrooms of a friend’s castle, Schloss Glücksburg, near Flensburg, in north Germany. Hitler’s successor, Grand Admiral Dönitz, had by now moved his new government from Eutin to Flensburg, which was located just a few miles from the Danish border. Speer, a Dönitz cabinet member, had been making the daily six-mile drive from Schloss Glücksburg to the new government’s headquarters. The way Speer told the story of his capture, he had been shaving when he heard the sounds of heavy footsteps and loud orders being delivered in English. Sensing that the end of his freedom had arrived, Speer opened the bathroom door a little, his face half-covered in shaving cream, and saw the British soldiers standing there.

  “Are you Albert Speer, sir?” a British sergeant asked.

  “Yes, I am Speer,” he answered in English.

  “Sir, you are my prisoner,” the sergeant said.

  Speer got dressed and packed a bag. Outside on the castle lawn, a unit of British soldiers with antitank guns had surrounded Schloss Glücksburg. Speer was arrested and taken away.

  By the time the British arrested Speer, American officials had known for nearly two weeks where he had been hiding out. Speer’s previous eleven days in the castle had been spent in discussions with American officials with the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS). The head of that organization, Paul Nitze, had managed to be the first person in an international manhunt to track down Albert Speer. Nitze considered Speer his most desired intelligence target, and on May 12, 1945, he boarded his DC-3 from where he was stationed in London and headed to Castle Glücksburg “before you could say ‘knife,’ ” Nitze recalled after the war. Because Flensburg was in the British zone of control, it was the British who needed to arrest Albert Speer. Until then, Nitze, an American, felt at liberty to get as much information from Speer as he could. “We were looking for absolutely vital information and knowledge and he was literally the only person in Germany who was in a position to provide it,” Nitze recalled years later.

  Specifically, Nitze’s organization wanted to know which Allied bombing campaigns had proved the most devastating against Germany during the war. America was still at war with the Japanese, and the USSBS believed Speer could provide them with information that might help America defeat them. Nitze was joined at the castle by two of his colleagues, George Ball and John Kenneth Galbraith. For the next eleven days the three men questioned Speer. From inside an elegant sitting room wallpapered in red and gold brocade, the men discussed which Allied bombing campaigns had done the most damage to Nazi Germany and which had had the least effect. Of particular interest to Nitze, Ball, and Galbraith was how the Reich’s armaments industry had been able to hold out for so long. Speer explained that at his initiative the majority of the Reich’s weapons facilities had been moved underground. These weapons complexes had proved to be impervious to even the heaviest bombing campaigns. They were engineering triumphs, their construction spearheaded largely by Franz Dorsch and Speer’s deputy Walter Schieber, Speer said. Speer’s secretary, Annemarie Kempf, took notes. The only interruption was when the cook for the castle summoned everyone for lunch.

  Speer did not mention that his deputy, SS-Brigadeführer Schieber, a chemist, also worked with Speer in chemical weapons production; that would be opening up a can of war crimes–related worms. The Americans were not interested in pressing Speer about his involvement in war crimes, and Speer was certainly not offering up any incriminating evidence against himself. Mostly he boasted about his ministry’s feats. George Ball recalled that only once, maybe twice, during the USSBS questioning was Speer asked about the concentration camps. “I asked him what he knew about the extermination of the Jews. He said he couldn’t comment because he hadn’t known about it, but he added that it was a mistake not to have found out,” Ball told Speer’s biographer, Gitta Sereny, after the war.

  John Kenneth Galbraith was the only one of the three men from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey who had toured a liberated concentration camp before interviewing Speer. Galbraith had seen the atrocities at Dachau and Buchenwald. He explained, “One was just beginning to hear rumors about Auschwitz.” Did Galbraith believe that Speer did not know about the extermination of the Jews? “No, I don’t believe he didn’t know,” Galbraith told Sereny. “Certainly he knew about all the slave laborers. I remember him saying to us, ‘You should hang Saukel’ ”—Speer’s deputy in charge of slave labor—“and then a few weeks later, Saukel said to us, ‘You should hang Speer.’ Nice people, weren’t they?”

  After eleven days of discussions with the Americans, the British located and arrested Speer. They drove him the six miles to Flensburg, where the remaining members of Hitler’s government were a
lso arrested. Under an escort of more than thirty armored vehicles, the prisoners were driven to waiting aircraft. There, in a field of grass, the men of Hitler’s inner circle were loaded onto two airplanes and flown to a Top Secret interrogation center code-named Ashcan.

  That same afternoon, one hundred miles south of Flensburg, at the Thirty-first Civilian Interrogation Camp near Lüneburg, a former Wehrmacht sergeant was making a lot of noise. The officer in charge of Camp 31, Captain Thomas Selvester, found the man’s behavior odd. Wehrmacht soldiers who were prisoners rarely did anything to draw attention to themselves. Captain Selvester sent for the agitated man, whom he described as a short, “ill-looking” person in civilian clothing with a black eye patch over his left eye. Face-to-face with Captain Selvester, the small, ugly man ceremoniously pulled off the eye patch, revealing a pale, unshaven face. The man then produced a pair of horn-rimmed glasses from his pocket and put them on his face.

  “Heinrich Himmler,” the prisoner announced in a quiet voice.

  With the glasses on, Captain Selvester recognized Heinrich Himmler at once. Before him stood a man many considered the most powerful man in the Third Reich after Hitler. Himmler was Reichsführer-SS and chief of the German police, commander of the Reserve Army of the Wehrmacht, and Reich minister of the interior. That face. The cleft chin and the sinister, smiling eyes. Ever since a drawing of Himmler had appeared on the cover of Time magazine, on October 11, 1943—portraying the “Police Chief of Nazi Europe” in front of a mountain of corpses—he had become synonymous with evil. Now that the little round glasses were on, Selvester was certain this person was indeed Heinrich Himmler. Still, Captain Selvester followed protocol and asked for signature verification. When Himmler had been captured days before he’d presented forged military papers that identified him as a Wehrmacht sergeant named Heinrich Hitzinger.