Operation Paperclip

by Annie Jacobsen

  Dr. Strughold handpicked fifty-eight Luftwaffe doctors for the research program, including Dr. Siegfried Ruff, Dr. Theodor Benzinger, and Dr. Konrad Schäfer—the first Nazi doctors to be hired by the U.S. Army Air Forces. In Munich, Dr. Georg Weltz was arrested and sent to an internment facility for processing. From there, he would be sent to the prison complex in Nuremberg to await trial.

  In less than two years, many of the Nazi doctors chosen by Dr. Strughold would quietly begin their secret journeys to the United States.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Black, White, and Gray

  In Washington, with policy now informally set, the debate over the Nazi scientist program became intense inside the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC). Like its successor organization, the National Security Council, SWNCC acted as the president’s principal forum for dealing with issues related to foreign policy and national security. The State Department was vocal in its opposition to the program. Exacerbating the situation for the State Department was a parallel issue it had recently become embroiled in. South American countries, Argentina and Uruguay in particular, were known to be giving safe haven to Nazi war criminals who had escaped from Germany at the end of the war. The State Department had been putting pressure on these countries to repatriate Nazis back to Europe to face war crimes charges. If it came out that the State Department was providing not only safe haven but employment opportunities for Nazi scientists in the United States, that would be cause for an international scandal. And while some generals and colonels in the War Department were decidedly for the Nazi science programs, others were fundamentally opposed to the idea. A secretly recorded conversation between two generals at the Pentagon summed up the conflict that the very idea of German scientists working for the U.S. military created.

  “One of the ground rules for bringing them over is that it will be temporary and at the return of their exploitation they will be sent back to Germany,” said one general, whose name was redacted.

  The second general agreed. “I’m opposed and Pop Powers [a nickname for a Pentagon official] is opposed, the whole War Department is opposed,” he said. To “open our arms and bring in German technicians and treat them as honored guests” was a very bad idea.

  The Department of Justice was not happy about the voluminous workload that background checks on former enemy aliens would require. The Department of Labor was concerned about laws governing alien labor, and the Department of Commerce was concerned about patent rights. In an attempt to ease the contention, Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson sent a memorandum to the War Department General Staff stating that the person to mediate these issues was John J. McCloy, the assistant secretary of war and chairman of SWNCC.

  John J. McCloy would become an especially significant player in Operation Paperclip starting in 1949. But now, in the summer of 1945, he wore two hats related to the issue of Nazi scientists. On the one hand, Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson had put McCloy in charge of coordinating policy regarding Nazi scientists coming to the United States to work. On the other hand, Patterson’s boss, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, had given McCloy the job of helping to develop the war crimes program. McCloy’s position regarding the exploitation of Nazi science and scientists was clear. He believed that the program would help foster American military superiority while engendering economic prosperity. To McCloy, those ends justified any means. It was not that McCloy believed that the Nazis should go unpunished, at least not in the summer of 1945. For that, McCloy was a strong supporter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) and the idea of a war crimes trial. But he was someone who saw these two categories as black and white. There were scientists and there were war criminals.

  In McCloy’s eyes, a war criminal was a Himmler, a Hess, a Göring, or a Bormann. Scientists, like industrialists, were the backbone of a healthy economy in this new, postwar world. In the summer of 1945, McCloy was regularly briefed on the capture and arrest of these war criminals as they were rounded up and taken to a Top Secret interrogation facility in Luxembourg, code-named Ashcan, where they would be squeezed for information before facing judgment at Nuremberg.

  John Dolibois, an officer with Army Intelligence, G-2, the Collecting and Dissemination Division, spent a significant portion of the last eight months of the war watching and rewatching Triumph of the Will, the three-hour-long Nazi propaganda film by Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl. Every Thursday night, inside a screening room at Camp Ritchie, America’s Military Intelligence Training Center, located eighty miles north of Washington in the Catoctin Mountains, the twenty-six-year-old Dolibois used the film to teach German order of battle and Nazi Party hierarchy to colonels, generals, and intelligence officers preparing to go off to war.

  The Triumph of the Will documentary was an ideal teaching tool and enabled Dolibois to point out to his students how individuals within the Nazi Party hierarchy spoke and gestured, what insignia they wore, who was subordinate to whom. Between the hateful speeches and the endless parades, the fawning inner circle and the Nuremberg rallies, John Dolibois had become so familiar with Hitler’s inner circle that he could almost recite their speeches himself.

  He enjoyed teaching, but, like so many dedicated Americans of his generation, Dolibois wished to see action overseas. There was a tinge of envy as well. He stayed in touch with his former colleagues from Officer Candidates School, most of whom had been sent to Europe months ago. Many had already been promoted to captains and majors. As the war in Europe drew to a close, John Dolibois had accepted that he was, in all likelihood, not going to be sent overseas as part of an interrogation team, called an IPW team, to interview newly captured prisoners of war. Then, on Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, he received orders to ship out with the next detachment. Steaming out of the New York harbor only days later, he was standing on the deck of the Île de France when someone handed him a telegram. He’d been promoted to first lieutenant.

  Things moved fast after he’d crossed the Atlantic. On April 13, Dolibois’s ship landed in West Scotland. Every vessel in the harbor was at half-mast; President Roosevelt had died the day before. A quick train trip to London bore witness to “appalling devastation.” Piles of rubble filled both sides of every street. Dolibois’s channel crossing took place under a full moon, and he was grateful to arrive in the war-torn port at Le Havre, France, without incident. “Up until then our move from Camp Ritchie to Le Havre had been well orchestrated,” explains Dolibois. “Now chaos set in.” Driving into Munich, destroyed vehicles and weaponry littered the road. In the clearings in the woods sat small fleets of wrecked Luftwaffe airplanes, their wings torn off and their fuselages pockmarked with holes. Corpses rotted in ditches. “Suddenly the war was very real,” Dolibois recalls.

  His first assignment was at the Dachau concentration camp, just two days after its liberation. Dolibois had been sent to Dachau to look over groups of captured German soldiers to see if important generals, party officials, or scientists were hiding out among the crowd. “Primarily I was to watch for high ranking Nazis in disguise,” remembers Dolibois. “We had reports that many of them were passing themselves off as ordinary German soldiers, thus hoping to be overlooked in the confusion and to disappear.” His job was to intuit the meaning of certain manners of walk, greeting, and speech. Dolibois was on the lookout for anyone who might be useful to the Allies for a more detailed interrogation at a facility elsewhere.

  At Dachau, John Dolibois scoured faces in the crowd for telltale marks, things that could not be hidden. The most obvious among them were the dueling scars of the Nazi elite. But at Camp Ritchie Dolibois had also become an expert in signs of concealment. Recently shaved facial hair or patches pulled off uniforms were indicators that a man had something to hide. True expertise, Dolibois knew, lay in recognizing nuance.

  After a few days at Dachau, Dolibois received another assignment. He proceeded to Central Continental Prisoner of War Enclosure Number 32, or CCPWE No. 32. The mission he was now on was cl
assified Top Secret. Everyone he asked about CCPWE No. 32 said that they had never heard of it before. When Dolibois’s driver left the borders of Germany and began heading into Luxembourg, Dolibois became overwhelmed with memories. Luxembourg, of all places—how capricious to be on assignment here. John Dolibois was born in Luxembourg. He had moved to America when he was a twelve-year-old boy, with his father; his mother had died in the great influenza pandemic. Driving into Luxembourg in 1945, Dolibois was seeing his native country for the first time in fourteen years. As his army jeep made its way into a little spa town called Mondorf-les-Bains, images of his youth flooded his mind. He recalled Mondorf’s “beautiful park, a quiet stream on which one could row a boat, lots of old trees, and acres of flowers.” Mondorf was built a few miles from the Moselle River in antiquity, developed by the Romans as a health resort. It was known for its restorative qualities, its mineral baths and fresh air. How different it all looked now, another small city devastated by war. Most homes and shops had been plundered or destroyed. Driving along the main boulevard, Dolibois observed how the façades of many houses had been blown off. He could see people carrying on with their lives inside of what was left of their homes.

  Only when his jeep pulled up to its destination did Dolibois realize that he’d arrived at the Palace Hotel. It was unrecognizable to him. A fifteen-foot-high fence ran around the main building, on top of which was a double-stringed curl of barbed wire. There was a second fence that appeared to be electrified. Camouflage netting hung from panels of fencing. Wide canvas sheets had been strung from tree to tree. Huge klieg lights illuminated the place. There were four guard towers, each manned by American soldiers holding powerful machine guns. Not even in photographs had John Dolibois seen an Allied prison facility in the European war theater as heavily fortified as this place was. At the front gate there was a jeep, parked and with its engine turned off. A stern-faced sergeant sat inside. His name tag read “Sergeant of the Guard, Robert Block.” Block addressed Dolibois with a nod.

  “Good afternoon, sergeant,” Dolibois said. “I’m reporting for duty here.”

  Block just stared at him. Dolibois recalled asking what kind of place this was. What was going on inside?

  Block said he had not been inside.

  There was a long, uncomfortable pause. Finally Block spoke. “To get in here you need a pass signed by God.” He nodded at the prisoner-of-war facility behind him. “And have somebody verify the signature.”

  Dolibois handed over his papers. After Block looked at them, the gate swung open and Dolibois was waved inside. In spite of its fortifications, the Palace Hotel remained surprisingly unscathed by war. The boomerang-shaped building was five stories tall. The fountain at the front entrance lacked water, its stone-carved nymph rising up from an empty pool. Inside the hotel foyer Dolibois was greeted by two guards. A third soldier handed him a key and pointed up a flight of stairs. He told Dolibois to leave his things in room 30, on the second floor.

  “I climbed up the stairs, located room 30 and let myself in with the key he had given me. It was an ordinary hotel room,” remembers Dolibois, “with rather noisy wallpaper.” Inside, the fancy light fixtures and plush furniture of a grand hotel had been replaced by a folding table, two chairs, and an army cot. Dolibois unpacked his duffel bag. There was a knock on the door.

  Ashcan may have been heavily fortified on the exterior, but inside the facility, the prisoners were free to roam around. Dolibois opened the door and stood face-to-face with a large man dressed in a ratty pearl-gray uniform with gold braids on the collars and gold insignia on the shoulder pads. He held a pair of trousers draped over one arm. Clicking his heels, he nodded and introduced himself as if he were at a party, not in a prison. The man opened his mouth and barked, “Göring, Reichsmarschall!”

  So this was Hermann Göring. Dolibois recognized him immediately from so many screenings of Triumph of the Will. Here was the man in flesh and blood. Göring was arguably the most notorious of Hitler’s inner circle still alive. Former commander in chief of the Luftwaffe. Director of the Four Year Plan. Hitler’s long-acknowledged successor until the perceived betrayal at the very end. It was Hermann Göring who ordered security police chief Reinhard Heydrich to organize and coordinate plans for a “solution to the Jewish question.”

  “At once I understood my assignment,” recalled Dolibois. He was here in Luxembourg to interrogate the highest-ranking war criminals in the Nazi Party. This was not a Nazi propaganda film. The individuals who had so populated his mind and his teaching at Camp Ritchie for the past eight months were right here. And they were all prisoners now.

  Göring stood before Dolibois, panting.

  Göring said he had been unfairly tricked by his captors. “He had been told he was going to a palatial spa,” Dolibois explained. When Göring arrived at Ashcan with his valet, Robert Kropp, he was expecting a vacation. He brought along eleven suitcases and twenty thousand Paracodin pills, and had made sure his toenails and fingernails had been varnished to a bright red shine for his stay. That the spa at Mondorf had lost its chandeliers and been turned into a maximum-security prison complex was not what Göring had in mind. His mattress was made of straw, Göring barked at Dolibois. He didn’t have a pillow. A man of his rank deserved more.

  Dolibois looked at Göring. Made a mental note.

  “Are you by chance a welfare officer who will see to it that we are treated correctly, according to Articles of War?” Göring asked Dolibois.

  In this question, Dolibois saw opportunity as an interrogator. “Yes,” he said. He would be working “along those lines.” Göring was pleased. “He made a great show again of heel-clicking, bowing and taking his 280 pounds out of my room.”

  Göring returned to his fellow prisoners. He told the other Nazis about the new officer’s arrival and his responsibilities to see better treatment for all of them. Suddenly everyone wanted to speak with First Lieutenant John Dolibois.

  CCPWE No. 32 was filled with Nazi “Bonzen,” the big wheels, as Dolibois and the other interrogators called them. Hans Frank, the “Jew-Butcher of Cracow,” arrived at Ashcan on a stretcher, in silk pajamas drenched in blood. He had tried to kill himself by slashing his own throat. Frank was captured with his thirty-eight-volume diary, written during the war, a damning confession of many crimes he was guilty of. “Dark-eyed and balding,” noted Ashcan’s commandant, Colonel Burton Andrus, Frank had “pale hairy hands.” Other prisoners included members of the former German General Staff: Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), or Armed Forces High Command; General Alfred Jodl, Keitel’s chief of operations; Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of submarines and commander in chief of the German navy; Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, former chief of Armed Forces Italy and later Supreme Commander West; Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister; and Albert Speer, minister of armaments and war production. These were the men who personally helped Hitler plan and execute World War II and the Holocaust—those who hadn’t escaped, perished, or committed suicide.

  “In a second circle, or clique, there were the real Nazi gangsters,” Dolibois explained, “the old fighters—who had been with Hitler at the beginning of his rise to power.” Among this group were Robert Ley, Labor Front leader; Julius Streicher, editor of the anti-Semitic newspaper and propaganda tool Der Stürmer; Alfred Rosenberg, Nazi philosopher; Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the man who betrayed Austria and became Reichskommissar of Holland; and Wilhelm Frick, former minister of the interior and Reichsprotektor of Bohemia-Moravia.

  Stripped of their power, small details spoke volumes to Dolibois. Göring was terrified of thunderstorms. Keitel was obsessed with sunbathing and staring at his reflection in Ashcan’s only mirror, in its entrance hall. Robert Ley was repeatedly reprimanded for masturbating in the bathtub. Joachim von Ribbentrop, named by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda as the best-dressed man in Germany for nine consecutive years, was a lazy slob. Day in and day out, John Dolibois interviewed them.
>
  “Almost all the men at Ashcan were eager to talk,” Dolibois recalls. “They felt neglected if they hadn’t been interrogated by someone for several days.… Their favorite pastime was casting blame.” The greatest challenge for Dolibois and his fellow interrogators was determining, or trying to determine, who was lying and who was telling the truth. “Cross-examination. Playing one prisoner off the other,” according to Dolibois, was a tactic that worked best.

  “Often, I was taken into their confidence when they needed a shoulder to cry on,” Dolibois explains. “At Mondorf, they still couldn’t believe they would be tried for their crimes.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Hitler’s Chemists

  At war’s end, the staff of the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service had their sights set on bringing Hitler’s chemists to the United States. The service saw unbridled potential in making the Nazis’ nerve agent program its own and was willing to go to great lengths to obtain its secrets. Less than one month after British tanks rolled into the Robbers’ Lair and found the enormous cache of tabun-filled bombs in the forests of Münster-Nord, the Chemical Warfare Service had obtained a sample of the nerve agent and was analyzing its properties in its Development Laboratory in the United States. Work began on May 15, 1945, and took two weeks to complete. The analysis revealed that tabun was a revolutionary killer that could decimate enemy armies. General William N. Porter, chief of the Chemical Warfare Service, requested that five 260-kg tabun-filled bombs be shipped from the Robbers’ Lair to the United States “by air under highest priority” for field tests. Separately, General Porter asked the U.S. Army Air Forces and U.S. Army Ordnance to conduct their own feasibility studies to determine if tabun bombs could be used in combat by U.S. troops.