Operation Paperclip

by Annie Jacobsen

Very well, said Blome. He considered himself a loyal Nazi, and it was his intention to help Germany win the war. “History gives us examples of human disease affecting the outcome of wars,” Blome told his Alsos interrogators, taking a moment to lecture them on history. “We know [that] from antiquity up till the time of [the] Napoleonic wars, victories and defeats were often determined by epidemics and starvation,” Blome said. Spreading an infectious disease could bring about the demise of a marauding army, and Blome said that the failure of Napoleon’s Russian campaign was “due in great part to the infection of his horses with Glanders,” a highly contagious bacterial disease. History aside, Blome said he counseled Himmler on the fact that a concentration camp was a terrible place to experiment with bubonic plague because the population was too dense.

  Blome then told Himmler that if he were to experiment with plague bacterium, he would need his own institute, an isolated facility far removed from population centers. Himmler and Blome agreed that Poland would be a good place, and they settled on Nesselstedt, a small town outside the former Poznań University (by then operated by the Reich). Blome’s research institute was to be called the Bacteriological Institute at Nesselstedt.

  In the interim, in Berlin, Blome oversaw a field test using rats, history’s traditional carrier of bubonic plague. A debate had been taking place inside the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS as to whether or not rats were the best plague carriers. Himmler’s idea was “to take infected rats on to U-boats and release them near the enemy shores so they could swim to land.” Blome doubted that rats could swim great distances. He believed they could swim only for as long as the air in their fur kept them afloat. To prove his point, Blome arranged for a test on a Berlin lake. “About thirty rats were taken out in a police boat and released at different distances from the shore to swim both with and against the wind.” Blome said that the rats were dumber than he thought—that when placed in the water, “they had no idea where the shore was and swam around in different directions.” A few of them drowned in ten minutes. The longest any of the rats swam for was thirty minutes. Of those released a little over a half-mile from shore, only a third reached land. As far as Blome was concerned, Himmler’s U-boat dispersal idea was not practical.

  Meeting Number Two took place a month or two later, in September or October 1943, and was largely a repetition of the first, at least according to Blome. There was one significant development, however. Himmler asked Blome if he needed an assistant. Blome agreed that a bacteriologist would be helpful. Himmler assigned Dr. Karl Gross, formerly a staff member at the Waffen-SS Hygiene Institute.

  The two doctors did not get along. Blome became convinced that Dr. Gross had been sent by Himmler to spy on him. He told his interrogators that he was under great pressure to work faster. Himmler repeatedly “reiterated that the methods of waging BW [biological warfare] must be studied in order to understand the defense against it.” What this meant was that Himmler wanted Blome to infect human test subjects with plague to see what would happen to them.

  The third meeting took place four or five months later, in February 1944. By this time, Blome said, the facility at Nesselstedt had been built. There was ample staff housing, a well-equipped laboratory, and an animal farm. The block for experimental work included a climate room, a cold room, disinfectant facilities, and rooms for “clean” and “dirty” experiments. There was an isolation hospital for sixteen people in the event that workers on Blome’s staff contracted the disease. Work progressed slowly, Blome said, and Himmler became enraged. Rumors of an Allied invasion of the European continent had become a constant thorn in the side of the Reichsführer-SS. Why wasn’t the Reich’s bioweapons program more advanced, Himmler demanded to know. He asked Blome if it was possible to “do something now—for example disseminate influenza—that would delay the heralded Anglo-American invasion in the West.” According to Blome, he told Himmler “it was impossible to do anything on these lines.” Himmler proposed another idea: How about disseminating a virulent strain of hoof-and-mouth disease? Or tularemia, also called rabbit fever, which affected man in a manner similar to plague? Blome told Himmler that these were dangerous ideas, as any outbreak would surely affect Germany’s troops. The Reich needed a massive stockpile of vaccinations before it could feasibly launch a biological attack.

  Himmler stretched his thinking to target the Allies on their own soil. How about spreading cattle plague, also called rinderpest, in America or England? Himmler told Blome that infecting the enemy’s food supply would have a sinister effect on enemy troops. Blome agreed and said he would investigate what it would take to start a plague epidemic among the enemies’ cows. There was, however, a problem, Blome explained. An international agreement prohibited stocks of the rinderpest virus to be stored anywhere in Europe. Strains of cattle plague were available only in the third world.

  Himmler said that he would get the cattle plague himself. He sent Dr. Erich Traub, a veterinarian from the Reich’s State Research Institute, located on the island of Riems, to Turkey. There, Dr. Traub acquired a strain of the lethal rinderpest virus. Under Blome’s direction, trials to infect healthy cows with rinderpest began. Riems, in northern Germany in the Bay of Greifswald, was totally isolated and self-contained. It was the perfect place for these dangerous tests. The veterinary section used airplanes to spray the cattle plague virus on the island’s grassy fields, where cows grazed. Blome said he didn’t know much more about the program or its results—only that Dr. Traub, second in command at the research facility, was taken by the Russians when the Red Army captured Riems, in April 1945.

  Blome’s fourth meeting with Himmler took place in April or May of 1944. Himmler had become paranoid by now, Blome said. He believed that the Allies were plotting a biological weapons attack against the Reich. “Blome was summoned by telephone to see Himmler urgently. The latter had received a number of curious reports. Grass had come floating out of the sky over some part of Austria and a cow that had eaten some of it had died.” Blome told Himmler he’d look into it. There were additional strange events, Himmler confided to Blome. “Some small balloons had been found near Salzberg [sic] and Berchtesgaden” not far from Hitler’s mountain residence, the Berghof. And potato beetles had been dropped in Normandy. Blome promised to study each incident.

  Blome told Himmler he had a pressing issue of his own. Given the progress of the Red Army, he thought it was wise to move his plague research institute at Posen (Poznań) somewhere inside Germany. The place Blome suggested was Geraberg, in the Thuringian forest, at the edge of the Harz Mountains. Himmler said that the Russians would never reach Posen. By early fall, he had changed his mind. In October a new biological weapons research facility was being built, concealed inside a pine forest in the village of Geraberg.

  In the meantime, Blome told his interrogators, work on vaccines was moving forward—not at either of his research institutes but inside the army instead. Göring had moved epidemic control into the jurisdiction of a major general named Dr. Walter Schreiber, surgeon general of the Reich. Blome held the position of deputy surgeon general of the Reich, but the two men had equal positions under Göring, Blome explained. He, Blome, was in charge of creating the biological weapons; Dr. Schreiber was in charge of protecting Germans against biological weapons, should they be used—Major General Dr. Schreiber specialized in epidemic control. The sword and the shield.

  Alsos was very interested in learning about these vaccines. Blome said that Major General Dr. Schreiber was the person to talk to about that. Where could he be found? Blome said Schreiber had last been seen in Berlin. Word was he had surrendered to the Red Army and was their prisoner now.

  Blome said something else that alarmed interrogators. During the war, Dr. Kliewe told Blome that it was the Russians who had the single most extensive biological weapons program in the world—a program more advanced even than that of the Japanese. Further, the Russians had managed to capture everything from Dr. Traub’s laboratory on Riems, including Dr. Trau
b’s Turkish strain of cattle plague. Then, in the winter of 1945, the Russians had captured Blome’s bacteriological institute at Nesselstedt, outside Posen. This meant the Russians now had the Reich’s most advanced biological weapons research and development facility, its steam chambers, incubators, refrigerators, and deep-freeze apparatus. They also had all of the pathogens—viral and bacterial—that Blome had been working with when he had fled west.

  Alsos had two key pieces of information now: The Russians had the laboratory from Posen and they had the doctor in charge of vaccines, Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber. They had both the science and the scientist.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Hired or Hanged

  The future of the scientists at Dustbin was obscure. Would they be hired by the U.S. government for future work, or would they be prosecuted by the Allies for war crimes? At Ashcan the future facing the Nazi high command was almost certainly grim, although there was much work to do. War crimes prosecutors faced a monumental task. They had to build criminal cases from scratch, a conundrum described by Nuremberg trials prosecutor General Telford Taylor after the war. “Our task was to prepare to prosecute the leading Nazis on [specific] criminal charges.… The first question a prosecuting attorney asks in such a situation is, ‘Where’s the evidence?’ The blunt fact was that, despite what ‘everybody knew’ about the Nazi leaders, virtually no judicially admissible evidence was at hand.” For evidence, prosecutors like Telford Taylor were relying on interrogators like John Dolibois to glean facts from the Nazis interned at Ashcan.

  Frustration was mounting at Ashcan. Prisoners were conspiring to withhold information. “They were whispering rather important secrets to each other,” Ashcan’s commander, Colonel Burton Andrus, recalled, “determined not to help on the question of hidden loot, the whereabouts of people like Martin Bormann, and the guilt for war atrocities.” Colonel Andrus racked his brain for ideas. How to make guilty men talk? “To jog the prisoners’ memories back to the reality of their grave situation we decided to show them atrocity films taken at Buchenwald.”

  Colonel Andrus assembled his fifty-two Nazi prisoners in one room. Before the film began, he addressed them with the following words: “You know about these things and I have no doubt many of you participated actively in them. We are showing them to you not to inform you of what you already know, but to impress on you the fact that we know of it, too.”

  The lights went down and the first frames of the documentary footage flickered across the screen. Colonel Andrus watched his prisoners. Hans Frank, governor general of occupied Poland, the lawyer and PhD largely responsible for the murder of the Jewish population there, put a handkerchief to his mouth and gagged. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the former champagne salesman who became Hitler’s foreign minister and pressured foreign states to allow the deportation of Jews in their territories to extermination camps in the east, got up from his chair and walked out of the room. Albert Kesselring, commander of the Luftwaffe invasions into Poland, France, and the Soviet Union, who also led the Battle of Britain, turned white. Hermann Göring sighed as if bored. Julius Streicher, the schoolteacher who became Hitler’s mouthpiece and encouraged readers to exterminate the Jews, sat on his chair “clasping and unclasping his hands.” When the film was over, no one said a word. A little while later, Walter Funk, the fifty-five-year-old former minister of the war economy and president of the Reichsbank, asked to see Colonel Andrus alone.

  Small, overweight, and suffering from venereal disease, this once supremely powerful Nazi Party official twisted his fingers anxiously, while telling Colonel Andrus he had a confession to make. Walter Funk “looked incapable of running a filling-station, let alone a bank,” Andrus recalled. Funk fidgeted nervously. “I have something to tell you, sir,” Andrus recalled Funk saying. “I have been a bad man, Colonel, and I want to tell about it.” Funk started to cry. Then he told Colonel Andrus that it was he who gave the order that all gold in every prisoner’s mouth—in every concentration camp across the Reich—be removed and collected for the Reichsbank’s reserves. Funk confessed that at first he’d “had [the gold] knocked out of their mouths while they were alive, but [realized] if they were dead there was far less bother.” Andrus was appalled. “I had never believed before that such a horrific order as the one Funk was confessing to had ever been given,” Andrus said.

  Colonel Andrus told Funk to leave. In his memoir, Andrus wondered what Walter Funk had hoped to gain from his confession; he never got his answer. Whatever motivated Funk that day at Ashcan eventually disappeared. Months later, at Nuremberg, Funk denied that the conversation with Colonel Andrus had ever taken place. Instead, he swore under oath that he had never been connected with orders involving acquiring gold from Jews. “If it was done,” declared Funk, “it has been kept from me up till now.”

  Save Funk’s tearful confession, the screening of the Buchenwald atrocity film had no apparent effect on the other prisoners. The men who gagged and left the room had nothing more to say, and the rest of the Nazi high command remained tight-lipped about their crimes. Colonel Andrus grew increasingly frustrated. The prisoners were allowed to sit outside in the Palace Hotel garden, in small groups out of earshot of prison guards. There, Andrus watched Hitler’s closest confidants prattle on among themselves.

  “They could sit out in the garden in the spring sunshine and chatter to their hearts’ content,” recalled Andrus. “Undoubtedly they compared notes on the interrogation[s] which went on in sixteen booths every day.” If only G-2 had wired the Ashcan garden for sound. Colonel Andrus got an idea. He made a list of the four men who he believed were the biggest “backstabbers and gossips” in the group. “Those with outspoken views about their fellow Nazis—men ready to blame each other for their own crimes.” Göring, “verbose,” von Papen, “malicious,” Kesselring, “vain,” and Admiral Horthy, “the Prince of Austria who believed he was better than everyone else,” were chosen. With permission from headquarters, Andrus devised an elaborate ruse intended to extract information from the Nazi prisoners.

  The four men were told that they were being handed over to the British for interrogation; that soon they would be traveling to a villa in Germany to be questioned there. In reality, Army Intelligence, G-2, had rented a house located three and a half miles from Ashcan. It was a traditional German-style half-timber house with a high wall running around its perimeter. U.S. Army signal intelligence engineers spent several days running hundreds of yards of wires through the house, under floorboards, behind walls, inside furniture cushions and lighting fixtures. In a final touch, they wired the garden for sound. The engineers burrowed through the backyard garden and attached tiny microphones to a single tree above the sitting area. All wires connected back to a recording machine capable of laying audio tracks down onto gramophone records. This was high technology in the summer of 1945.

  At the Ashcan detention center, Göring, von Papen, Kesselring, and Admiral Horthy were loaded into an ambulance, a common means of transport after the war, and driven away. Black curtains had been drawn across the vehicle windows so the prisoners couldn’t see where they were being taken. For hours, the ambulance drove around in what Andrus called a “circuitous route,” covering fifty miles of terrain but never leaving Luxembourg. When the ambulance pulled up to the Germanic-looking house and unloaded the Nazis, Göring was thrilled.

  “We are at a house I know!” boasted Göring, assuring his colleagues they had arrived in beautiful Heidelberg. “I recognize the decor on the walls,” Göring said once inside.

  The bedrooms in the new quarters had fresh sheets, plush mattresses, and soft pillows. Strolling through the house, Göring pointed to a chandelier and warned his fellow Nazis to be wary of listening devices. When one of the prisoners asked if they could sit outside in the garden, a guard checked with a superior and said yes. Göring made note of a single patch of shade under a weeping willow tree and suggested it as a good spot. The men dragged four garden chairs into the shade, sat down, and began
to gossip.

  “Heavy, guttural voices could be heard loud and clear,” Andrus recalled. “They were being recorded onto the black gramophone disks.”

  It was a brilliant start. But only a start. Soon, it began to rain. The men moved inside. There, they sat around barely saying a word. The following day, it rained again. That evening, Colonel Andrus received an order from SHAEF. The eavesdropping project was being shut down. Andrus had twenty-four hours to pack up his prisoners and leave.

  This time the ambulance took the direct route back to Mondorf, just three and a half miles away. “Göring was furious,” Andrus recalled. “How could they have gotten back to the prison so quickly! They realized they’d been had.”

  Back at Ashcan, things moved in a whirlwind. John Dolibois received a “Letter of Authority” on August 10, 1945, stating that CCPWE No. 32 was going to be closed down. Dolibois was to be part of the transport team now taking prisoners to new locations. For reasons Dolibois was not privy to, thirty-three of the fifty-two Ashcan internees were going to a new prisoner of war interrogation facility, this one located in the small town of Oberursel in the Taunus Mountains. Only later would Dolibois learn that many of these Nazis would be hired by the U.S. Army to write intelligence reports on work they had done during the war. Oberursel was just a few miles from the Dustbin facility at Castle Kransberg. The transport would be a convoy of six ambulances, a command car, a jeep, a trailer, and a truck carrying the prisoners’ suitcases. Dolibois was assigned to ride in the first ambulance. His prisoner list included Admiral Karl Dönitz, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, General Walter Warlimont, cabinet minister Schwerin von Krosigk, OKW Foreign Office head Admiral Leopold Bürkner, and Admiral Gerhard Wagner.

  The trip from Mondorf to Oberursel was a journey through ruined countryside. Crossing from Luxembourg into Germany, Dolibois watched the chatter among the Nazis in his backseat come to a “halting end” as they saw the destruction and despair everywhere. “This was their first look at the condition of their country” since the war, Dolibois explained. From churches to administrative buildings to shops, entire villages had been reduced to rubble. In three months of peace there were no resources to clean anything up. People were starving and trying to survive. “The destruction that was the aftermath of Hitler’s determination to ‘fight to the last man,’ ” said Dolibois.