Operation Paperclip

by Annie Jacobsen

  Descriptions of life out west in America varied from scientist to scientist. “The conditions of employment were considered to be fair and generous by all,” said Dieter Huzel, the engineer who’d stashed the V-2 documents in the Dörnten Mine. Arthur Rudolph liked the fact that the swimming pool and the bowling alley were made available to the Germans exclusively one afternoon a week. He told his biographer, who did not want to be publicly identified and wrote using the pseudonym Thomas Franklin, that he missed his family and his Bible. Von Braun’s brother, Magnus, was being investigated by the FBI for selling a platinum bar he had illegally smuggled into the United States. Interrogators with the Department of Justice found Magnus von Braun to be “snobby” and “conceited” and said that he seemed to pose “a worse threat to security than a half a dozen discredited SS Generals.”

  For Army Ordnance there were many problems to overcome. Funding was scarce. Shrinking military budgets offered very little room for missile development immediately after the end of a world war. Also at Fort Bliss the army discovered that not all the so-called rocket scientists had the talents they allegedly possessed. Karl Otto Fleischer, Major Staver’s original lead for the Dörnten mine and the man who led him on the wild goose chase around the Harz and to the Inn of the Three Lime Trees, claimed to have been the Wehrmacht’s business manager, when in reality he had been in charge of food services. In Texas, Fleischer was assigned the job of club manager until he was finally “repatriated” to Germany. Von Braun had also sold the army on hiring Walter Weisemann, a Nazi public relations officer who had done some work in the Peenemünde valve shop. Von Braun called him an “eminent scientist.” In reality, Weisemann learned engineering in America working for the army.

  Fifteen hundred miles across the country, in the winter of 1946, there were now thirty German scientists at Wright Field. Colonel Putt considered this sum to be offensively low. At least once a month, he wrote to Army Air Forces headquarters in Washington requesting more German scientists and inquiring why the importation of these “rare minds” was happening at a snail’s pace. In fact, there was very little for the Germans to do at Wright Field, and many of them were restless. The Air Documents Research Center, formerly in London, had also moved to the Air Material Command headquarters, at Wright Field. There, five hundred employees sorted, catalogued, indexed, and put on microfiche some 1,500 tons of German documents captured by Alsos, CIOS, and T-Forces after the war. So abundant was the material that more than one hundred thousand technical words had been added to the Air Material Command’s English-language dictionary. The plethora of information provided some work opportunities for a predominantly idle group of German specialists who in turn resented this kind of work. The Germans perceived themselves as inventors and visionaries, not librarians or bureaucrats.

  One of the Germans, a Nazi businessman named Albert Patin, had been keeping track of the groups’ complaints, which now made their way to Colonel Putt’s desk. It was not just the lack of challenging work, said the Germans; it was the whole package deal. The Hilltop was a dump. Payments were slow. The mail to Germany was even slower. Dayton had no civilized culture. The laboratory facilities at Wright Field were nothing compared to the grand laboratories of the Third Reich. In general, the Germans told Putt, they were beginning to “distrust” their American hosts “based on promises broken by USA officers.”

  Colonel Putt’s next move was a controversial one. He appealed to Albert Patin for help. At fifty-eight, Patin was one of the more senior Germans at the Hilltop. He was a wartime armaments contractor whose numerous factories produced equipment for the Luftwaffe under the Speer ministry. When Patin’s facilities were first captured by the U.S. Army, one of the American technical investigators, Captain H. Freiberger, was so amazed by Patin’s industrial vision that he called “the soundness of his principles a revelation.” For Colonel Putt, Albert Patin’s wartime innovations represented the best and the brightest of Reich science. Putt coveted the scientific inventions that Patin’s factories mass-produced, which included navigation aids, in-flight steering mechanisms, and automatic control devices. This kind of technology would give the Army Air Forces a ten-year jump on anything the Russians had, Putt believed.

  Hiring Patin for a U.S. Army Air Forces contract meant ignoring his past. His armaments factories used slave labor, which was a war crime. In an autobiographical report for Putt, Albert Patin admitted that many of the people in his six-thousand-person workforce were slave laborers supplied by Heinrich Himmler’s SS. Patin stated that he was not ashamed of this; he explained to Colonel Putt that he had been one of the better bosses in the Third Reich. He didn’t encircle his factories in electric fencing like other industrialists did. Patin acknowledged that his wartime access to Hitler’s inner circle benefited his businesses, but he did not see how this made him a war profiteer. He was just following orders. Patin took summer holidays with the Göring family and winter trips with Albert Speer’s munitions procurement chief, Dieter Stahl, but so did a lot of people. He was no better and no worse.

  During this slow period at Wright Field, Colonel Putt had Albert Patin survey the other Germans. He told Patin to be alert to grudges so that Patin could formalize his list of complaints. Putt would in turn forward this summary to his superiors at Air Materiel Command. Patin’s job, Putt counseled, was to emphasize how the Germans had become depressed, even suicidal, without their families and without the promise of long-term work. Colonel Putt sent Patin’s summary of complaints to Air Force Headquarters in Washington, to the attention of Brigadier General John A. Samford. In his own cover letter, Putt requested that immediate action be taken to “improve the morale [of the Germans] and save the existing situation.”

  The name Albert Patin had already caught General Samford’s eye. All mail sent to the scientists at Wright Field was screened by army intelligence first. Albert Patin regularly received letters from his staff back in Germany, many of whom also sought work in the United States. A letter had recently been sent to Patin in which lucrative offers from French and Russian intelligence agents were discussed. Brigadier General Samford’s office was made aware of this unwelcome development. Coupled with the summary of German scientists’ dissatisfaction, General Samford took action. He sent the complaint list as well as Patin’s intercepted mail to the War Department. “Immediate action in this situation is imperative if we are to divert the services of valuable scientists from France and Russia to the United States,” General Samford warned his colleagues.

  The timing created a perfect storm. The Joint Intelligence Committee was in the process of implementing a major policy change. It had just warned the Joint Chiefs that the existing idea of using restraint when dealing with the Soviets needed to be reconsidered. “Unless the migration of important German scientists and technicians into the Soviet zone is stopped,” read a JIC memo to the Joint Chiefs, “we believe that the Soviet Union within a relatively short time may equal United States developments in the fields of atomic research and guided missiles and may be ahead of U.S. developments in other fields of great military importance, including infra-red, television and jet propulsion.” The JIC also stated, incorrectly, that German nuclear physicists were helping the Russians develop a nuclear bomb and that “their assistance had already cut substantially, probably by several years, the time needed for the USSR to achieve practical results.” In reality the Soviets had gotten to where they were in atomic bomb development not because of any German rare minds but by stealing information from American scientists at Los Alamos. Not until 1949 would the CIA learn that the Russian mole was a British scientist named Karl Fuchs, who worked on the Manhattan Project.

  In response to the perception that the Soviets were getting all the “important German scientists,” the Joint Intelligence Committee proposed to the JIOA that three changes be implemented in the Nazi scientist program, effective immediately. The first was to do everything possible in Germany to prevent more scientists from working for the Russians. The second w
as that the U.S. Army was to make sure that German scientists and their families were given whatever it was they were asking for, including American visas. Third, a list was drawn up proposing that as many as one thousand additional Germans be brought to America for weapons-related research.

  For Samuel Klaus, the second proposed policy change was untenable. The Nazi scientist program was originally defined as “temporary,” with scientists working under military custody. That was how the War Department was able to circumvent immigration law for all the scientists already here. Now the JIOA was demanding that immigration visas be issued to scientists and their families. Even if the policy change were approved, Klaus argued, the visa process was a slow-going one. The State Department was legally required to approve each scientist’s visa application individually. This was not an overnight task but a lengthy investigative process. The person requesting a visa was required to list on his or her application contacts who would in turn be interviewed by a representative from State. The Office of the Military Government in Germany needed to compile a security report on each individual scientist. Nazi Party records would have to be pulled from the Berlin Document Center. If the scientist had won an honorary award from the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP)—the Nazi Party—or was a member of the SS or the SA, that needed to be explained. This was the law, Klaus said.

  With the new information about the Soviets, Robert Patterson, now secretary of war, shifted from being weary of the Nazi scientist program to becoming its champion. Only a year earlier, Patterson had called the German scientists “enemies… capable of sabotaging our war effort,” and had warned the Joint Chiefs of Staff that “[b]ringing them to this country raises delicate questions.” Now he stated in a memorandum that “the War Department should do everything possible to clear away obstacles that may be raised in the State Department.” This in turn caused Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, Samuel Klaus’s boss, to soften his opposition to Operation Overcast. Due to the emerging Soviet threat, Secretary of State Byrnes and Secretary of War Patterson agreed informally that leaving German scientists unsupervised inside Germany, where they could be bought by the Russians, was too dangerous. If the State Department required individual investigations, so be it, Byrnes said. German scientists and their families should be allowed to enter the country under temporary military custody with an interim State Department blessing, Patterson wrote. The logic was simple. If we don’t get them, the Russians will.

  The State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, now acting as an advisory body to JIOA, confirmed agreement with the positions of the Secretaries of War and State but added another consideration to the argument. German scientists left to their own devices presented “serious military implications to the future of United States Security,” according to SWNCC. In other words, Samuel Klaus’s argument could now be used against him in the military’s attempt to speed up the visa application process. Yes, the German scientists were inherently untrustworthy—so much so that they could not be trusted if they were left unsupervised, let alone left available to competing powers.

  On March 4, 1946, SWNCC Paper No. 275/5 went into effect. German scientists could now be admitted to the United States in a classified program that was in the “national interest.” This shifted the focus from whether or not someone was a Nazi to whether they were someone the Russians would be interested in. The commander in chief of U.S. Forces of Occupation in Germany and commander of U.S. Forces, European Theater (USFET), General Joseph T. McNarney, was told to draft a list of one thousand top scientists in Germany who were to be brought to the United States at once so the Russians couldn’t get them. A military intelligence officer named Colonel R. D. Wentworth was assigned to provide General McNarney with material support on behalf of Army Intelligence, G-2. The scientists’ families were to be given food and clothing and were to be housed in a secret military facility northeast of Munich called Landshut until their visa applications were approved. It was a radical revision of the initial terms of the German scientist program, and it was exactly what the JIOA had envisioned all along.

  The following month, the members of JIOA were called together to spend an entire day hammering out new program protocols. Expert consultants like Alsos scientific director Samuel Goudsmit were invited to attend. Expedite the German scientist program, said the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There were now 175 German scientists in America under military custody, none of whom had visas. The consensus, save Klaus, was that the application process needed to be sped up. The thorniest issue had to do with getting the State Department to approve certain individuals who had clearly been Nazi ideologues, including members of the SS and SA. Also at issue were those men who received high awards for their important contributions to the Nazi Party. These were people that by regulation were entirely ineligible for citizenship.

  The meeting resulted in a clever workaround. Army Intelligence officers reviewing the OMGUS security reports of certain scientists could discreetly attach a paperclip to the files of the more troublesome cases. Those files would not be presented to the State Department right away. Instead, those men would remain under military custody in America, most likely for a longer period of time than some of their fellows. As a result, the Nazi scientist program got a new code name. Operation Overcast had apparently been compromised after the families of the German scientists starting calling their U.S. military housing Camp Overcast. So from now on, the Nazi scientist program would be called Operation Paperclip.

  Not everyone understood the discreet paperclip-attached-to-the-file protocol. The first major setback came just a few months later, on July 17, 1946. General Joseph McNarney wrote to JIOA stating that he had worked with Colonel Wentworth to identify 869 German scientists who were ready to sign Paperclip contracts. But there was an obstacle. “There is a large number of former Nazis and mandatory unemployables among those shown on the list,” General McNarney wrote. “These [men] cannot now or later be employed in the United States zone of Germany except in the labor category.” McNarney was following USFET rules that said all members of the SS and the SA had to go through mandatory denazification trials.

  Citing America’s “national interest,” the JIOA would now change the language of the core principle guiding Paperclip’s original charter. “No known or alleged war criminals” and “no active Nazis” would become no persons who might try and “plan for the resurgence of German military potential.” Assistant Secretary of War Howard Petersen felt this new language would allow the JIOA to “bypass the visa people,” as stated in a memo dated July 24, 1946. But this was meant to be temporary. Eventually, State Department officials like Samuel Klaus would take umbrage at this language. What JIOA really needed was an endorsement from President Truman.

  By the summer of 1946 the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union was shattering. The legendary Long Telegram, written by George F. Keenan, America’s diplomat in Moscow, had been received at the State Department, reviewed by the president and his advisers, and sent to every U.S. embassy around the world. After analyzing the Soviet’s “neurotic view of world affairs,” Keenan warned his bosses at the State Department that “in the long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence” with the Soviet Union. The two nations were destined to become steadfast enemies, Keenan said.

  Influenced by Keenan’s insights, President Truman asked White House counsel Clark Clifford to prepare a study of the current state of affairs and the future prospects regarding Soviet-American relations from a military standpoint. To do so Clifford culled reports and briefings from the Secretaries of War, State, and Navy as well as the attorney general, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, various directors of military and civilian intelligence, and George Keenan. The result was an alarming Top Secret analysis. The report’s conclusion was made clear in the introduction: “Soviet leaders believe that a conflict is inevitable between the U.S.S.R. and the capitalist states, and their duty is to prepare the Soviet Union for this conflict.” Clifford warne
d that Soviet leaders were on a path “designed to lead to eventual world domination.” The Russians were developing atomic weapons, guided missiles, a strategic air force, and biological and chemical weapons programs. The idea of “peaceful coexistence of communist and capitalist nations is impossible,” Clifford wrote. The only way to counter this threat was to use the “language of military power.” Not military force, but military threat.

  On August 30, 1946, the undersecretary of the State Department, Dean Acheson, asked President Truman to make a decision on Paperclip. If the president did not act quickly, Acheson wrote, many of the German scientists “may be lost to us.” After four days of deliberation Truman gave his official approval of the program and agreed that Operation Paperclip should be expanded to include one thousand German scientists and technicians and allow for their eventual immigration to the United States. With presidential approval official, the attorney general was able to expedite the proposed changes to the program. A new JIOA contract was drawn up, allowing scientists who had been in the United States for six months to sign on for another year, and with the government maintaining the right to renew the contract for another five years. Operation Paperclip was transitioning from a temporary program to a long-term one. Former enemies of the state would now be eligible for coveted U.S. citizenship.

  In response to the Clifford Report, the Joint Intelligence Committee conducted its own classified assessment of the Soviet threat, JCS 1696. The Soviet Union, wrote the JIC, sought world domination and would begin by bringing other nations into Soviet control to isolate the capitalist world. JIC saw a future war with the Soviet Union as being of apocalyptic proportion. In a war “with the Soviet Union we must envisage complete and total hostilities unrestricted in any way on the Soviet part by adherence to any international convention or humanitarian principals,” noted JCS 1696. “Preparations envisaged on our part and our plans must be on this basis.” In other words, for the United States to prepare for “total war” with the Soviets, America had to maintain military supremacy in all areas of war fighting, including chemical warfare, biological warfare, atomic warfare, and any other kind of warfare the other side dreamed up.