Operation Paperclip

by Annie Jacobsen

  Smith approached the question in a different manner. He asked Rudolph if he could recall anything about the twelve men who had been hanged from the crane. This public execution, Smith said, had been confirmed by many of Rudolph’s colleagues, and Smith was trying to put together an accurate portrait of what had happened, and when. Rudolph replied, “[O]ne [dying prisoner] lifted his knees, after I got there.” In other words, Rudolph had witnessed the executions. Major Smith was now convinced that the truth about what happened at Nordhausen was being covered up, collectively, by the group, and that Arthur Rudolph knew a lot more than he let on. But as Smith noted in his report, the subject of the investigation was Georg Rickhey, not Arthur Rudolph. “Mr. Rudolph impressed the undersigned as a very clever, shrewd individual,” Smith wrote. “He did not wish to become involved in any investigations that might involve him in any way with illegal actions in the underground factory and as a result, was cautious of his answers.”

  Smith returned to Washington and advised U.S. Army Air Forces Headquarters of his findings. In Germany, a serendipitous incident occurred at this same time. William Aalmans, the Dutch citizen who had been working on the U.S. War Crimes Investigation Team, had been hunting down SS officers from Dora-Nordhausen for an upcoming regional war crimes trial. Aalmans had managed to locate only eleven out of three thousand SS officers who had run the concentration camp. Aalmans was the man who had interviewed many of the newly liberated prisoners back in April 1945, and he was also the individual who had found the Mittelwerk employee telephone list tacked to the tunnel wall. The two names at the top of that list were Georg Rickhey and Arthur Rudolph. Aalmans had no idea that both men had been recruited into Operation Paperclip. In Germany, no one Aalmans interviewed claimed to know the whereabouts of either man. Then, one afternoon in May 1947, Aalmans was taking a break from his Nazi hunting work, reading the Stars and Stripes newspaper in the sunshine, when, as he told journalist Tom Bower decades later, “I just saw a tiny headline, ‘German Scientist Applies for American Citizenship.’ ” The name mentioned was Georg Rickhey, Aalmans explained. “I screamed for joy and rushed into the head office shouting, ‘We’ve found him!’ ” Within three days the Georg Rickhey matter had been escalated to the attention of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  On May 19, 1947, an arrest warrant was issued for Georg Rickhey on orders from the War Crimes Branch, Civil Affairs Division, in Washington. “Georg Rickhey is wanted as a principal perpetrator in the Nordhausen Concentration Camp Case,” the document read. Rickhey’s immediate reaction was to claim he was being falsely accused. This was a case of mistaken identity, Rickhey declared. In response, the Office of the Deputy Director of Intelligence, Headquarters, European Command, had this to say: “The Dr. Georg Rickhey now employed at Wright Field and the Georg Rickhey engineer at Nordhausen are one and the same person. Dr. Karl Rahr, chief physician at Nordhausen, has been interrogated and states that he knew Rickhey, that he is now in his late 40’s [or] early 50’s and that there was only one Georg Rickhey at Nordhausen. This Group is making arrangements to have Rickhey returned to Germany for trial in the Nordhausen Concentration camp case.” The War Department’s Intelligence Division assigned the chief of security at Wright Field, Major George P. Miller, the role of escorting Rickhey back to Germany. Rickhey’s five-year contract was terminated. He was instead going to be a defendant in the Dora-Nordhausen war crimes trial.

  On June 2, 1947, JIOA deputy director Bosquet N. Wev wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, the powerful director of the FBI, alerting him of the situation and sending along Rickhey’s classified dossier. If the public learned that an Operation Paperclip scientist had been returned to Germany to stand trial for war crimes, the JIOA, the Army, the War Department, and the FBI would all have a lot of explaining to do. It was in everyone’s interest to keep the Georg Rickhey fiasco under wraps.

  On August 7, 1947, Georg Rickhey appeared as one of nineteen defendants in the Dora-Nordhausen trial. The Nazis were charged with the deaths of at least twenty thousand laborers who were beaten, tortured, starved, hanged, or worked to death while being forced to build V-2 rockets. The trial, which took place inside a former SS barracks adjacent to the Dachau concentration camp, lasted four months and three weeks. The prosecution requested that Wernher von Braun be allowed to testify at the trial, but the army said it was too much of a security risk to allow von Braun to travel to Germany. The Russians could kidnap him, the U.S. Army said. They did not say that von Braun had recently traveled to Germany to marry his cousin and bring her back to Texas with him. At the end of the trial, fifteen of the nineteen defendants were found guilty. Four, including Georg Rickhey, were acquitted. “Then, in an unprecedented move, the Army classified the entire trial record,” explains journalist Linda Hunt. The record would remain secret from the public for another forty years. There was far too much at stake for the U.S. Army to allow the information about what had really gone on in the Nordhausen tunnel complex to get out to the public. The trial record would call attention to the backgrounds of the 115 rocket scientists at Fort Bliss. The future of the United States missile program was too important. The Russians had their rocket scientists and America needed hers, too.

  Shortly after Rickhey was acquitted, back in Washington, D.C., the office of the secretary of the air force received a call from the State Department. The official identified himself as Henry Cox. The air force captain who took Cox’s call wrote up a memo of what was said.

  “After exchanged pleasantries, [Cox] inquired if we had ever returned a specialist to Europe for trial. I thought a moment and, realizing that the Rickhey case was in the public domain and in all probability facts known to the State Department since his sister made inquiries, I did not dare deny the story. I, therefore, told Mr. Cox that one Air Force case had been returned to Europe under suspicion, that my recollection was he was cleared; that in any event we did not desire to take further chances on the case and that he had not been returned to the United States.” The State Department appeared to have bought the story.

  Rickhey was gone, but there was no shortage of Nazis coming to Wright Field to work. On August 22, 1947, one of the Reich’s top ten pilots, Siegfried Knemeyer, arrived. This was the daring pilot and engineer whom Albert Speer had hoped would help him to escape to Greenland and whom Hermann Göring had called “my boy.”

  “Knemeyer is very popular with his fellow nationals since he is a good mixer and free of vanity,” read a memo in his intelligence dossier. “He is a diligent worker with an inventive mind. He is absorbed by his work and especially enthusiastic about participating in aerial tests.” Soon Knemeyer’s wife, Doris, and their seven children arrived in America to join him and to become U.S. citizens. The family moved into a large, drafty farmhouse on Yellow Springs Road. Doris Knemeyer hated provincial life in Dayton, Ohio. In Berlin, the Knemeyers had a grand home in the Charlottenburg district, with many servants to help take care of the Knemeyer brood. Raising seven children by herself in America was not what Doris Knemeyer had in mind. The difficulties at home did not go unnoticed by Knemeyer’s supervisors at Wright Field.

  “Since the arrival of his family he seems harassed and neglectful of his personal appearance,” read an internal security report. But Knemeyer was determined to succeed. Assigned to the Communication and Navigation Laboratory at Wright Field, Knemeyer found his stride. He began to make significant contributions to navigational instruments for his new employer, the U.S. Air Force—no longer part of the army anymore. Knemeyer is “a genius in the creation of new concepts in flight control,” wrote Colonel John Martin, Knemeyer’s superior at the lab.

  Knemeyer’s friend Werner Baumbach, Hitler’s general of the bombers, had been scheduled to come to Wright Field to work alongside Knemeyer, but an entry in Baumbach’s intelligence dossier noted that there had been a last-minute change: “Lt. Colonel Baumbach has since been substituted,” it read. Baumbach went to Argentina instead, to train fighter pilots for Juan Perón. Whether he had been dropped
from Operation Paperclip or Juan Perón had offered him a better deal remains a mystery. Werner Baumbach died a few years later after an airplane he was testing crashed into the Río de la Plata, near Uruguay.

  Also arriving at Wright Field in the summer of 1947 was General Walter Dornberger, newly released from England’s Special Camp XI, outside Bridgend, South Wales (formerly Island Farm). Before turning General Dornberger over to the Americans, the British labeled him a “menace of the first order” and warned their Allied partners of his deceitful nature. While holding Dornberger for war crimes, British intelligence had eavesdropped on him and recorded what he said. When the Americans listened to these secret audio recordings, they, too, concluded that Hitler’s former “chief of all rocket and research development” had “an untrustworthy attitude in seeking to turn ally against ally.” Still, Dornberger signed a Paperclip contract, on July 12, 1947, just weeks after his release from prison. Dornberger’s skill at manipulation was put to use by Army Ordnance, which had him write classified intelligence briefs. America needed to develop missiles regardless of what any naysayers might think, Dornberger believed.

  “Russia strives now only for time to prepare for war before the United States,” Dornberger wrote in a classified budget pitch, financed by the Ordnance Department, in 1948. “The United States must decide upon a research and development program that will guarantee satisfactory results within the shortest possible time and at the least expense. Such a program must be set up even if its organization appears to violate American economic ideals and American traditions in arms development,” Dornberger wrote. At least it could be said that Dornberger remained true to his totalitarian-leaning principles—his belief that democratic ideals and traditions could be ignored in the quest for military supremacy. That the U.S. Army condoned Dornberger’s idea appears never to have been made public before; his pitch was presented to Ordnance Department officials at the Pentagon. A copy of the classified document was found in 2012 in Dornberger’s personal papers kept in a German state archive.

  Opposition to Operation Paperclip gained momentum with America’s scientific elite. On February 1, 1947, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) met in New York City to ask President Truman to put an end to it. The American scientists saw the Nazi scientist program as a “drastic step in the search for military power.” When it was learned that some of the one thousand additional German scientists on the Paperclip recruiting list were being hired for short-term military work followed by longer-term positions at American universities, many were outraged. “Certainly not wishing to jeopardize the legitimate needs of the national defense, and not advocating the policy of hatred and vengeance toward our former enemies, we nevertheless believe that a large-scale importation of German scientists… is not in keeping with the best objectives of American domestic and foreign policy,” the members of FAS wrote. One American scientist was more forthright. “Certainly any person who can transfer loyalties from one idealology [sic] to another upon the shifting of a meal ticket is not better than Judas!” he said.

  Albert Einstein was the most esteemed figure to publicly denounce Operation Paperclip. In an impassioned letter, written on behalf of his FAS colleagues, Einstein appealed directly to President Truman. “We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous.… Their former eminence as Nazi Party members and supporters raises the issue of their fitness to become American citizens and hold key positions in American industrial, scientific and educational institutions.”

  Another important figure among the opposition was the nuclear physicist Hans Bethe. Bethe had fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and had worked on the Manhattan Project during the war. In the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Bethe and Dr. Henri Sack, a colleague from Cornell University, posed a series of simple questions about Operation Paperclip. “Was it wise, or even compatible with our moral standards to make this bargain, in light of the fact that many of the Germans, probably the majority, were die-hard Nazis?” Bethe and Sack asked. “Did the fact that the Germans might save the nation millions of dollars imply that permanent residence and citizenship could be bought? Could the United States count on [the German scientists] to work for peace when their indoctrinated hatred against the Russians might contribute to increase the divergency between the great powers? Had the war been fought to allow Nazi ideology to creep into our educational and scientific institutions by the back door?” Their final question struck at the dark heart of the Nazi scientist program. “Do we want science at any price?”

  The condemnation of Operation Paperclip by these leading American scientists and others had a ripple effect on the general public. Reporters began searching for leads about individual German scientists’ wartime activities, but this proved an almost impossible effort given the program’s classified nature. Frustrated by the lack of information, some Americans sent threatening letters addressed to the German scientists at Wright Field and Fort Bliss. The army tightened security and surveillance. In Washington, D.C., the War Department was rightly concerned that intense opposition and bad publicity had put the entire program in jeopardy of collapse, and in the winter of 1947 the War Department forbade the further release of information about the program.

  Despite the precautions, two individuals from the program at Fort Bliss were exposed by an angry public as “real Nazis”: Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Axster. Herbert Axster, a former lieutenant colonel in the Wehrmacht, had been a Nazi Party member since 1940. He was not a scientist but rather a patent lawyer and an accountant. At Peenemünde he worked as General Dornberger’s chief of staff. His wife, Ilse Axster, was a leader of NS-Frauenschaft, a Nazi Party organization for women. During a routine investigation of the Axsters conducted for their visa applications, neighbors in Germany told army intelligence officers that Mrs. Axster was a particularly sadistic Nazi. On the Axsters’ estate, the neighbors said, the couple kept forty “political prisoners,” Russians and Poles, whom they used as slave laborers. The neighbors said Mrs. Axster was known to use a horsewhip on her servants. This information was first passed on to Rabbi Stephen Wise of the American Jewish Congress and then to the press. “These scientists and their families are supposed to have been ‘screened,’ Wise wrote to the War Department. “The Axsters prove that this ‘screening’ is a farce and the War Department ‘screeners’ are entirely incapable of performing this task.” The Department of Justice withdrew Herbert Axster’s application for legal immigration, but the Axsters were not sent home. Eventually they left Fort Bliss and Herbert Axster opened a law firm in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

  The War Department cabled USFET demanding an explanation as to how the Axsters got through the screening process. A classified cable was sent back, stating that a few “ardent Nazis” may have slipped into the program based on “unavailability of records” immediately after the war.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Strange Judgment

  The doctors’ trial was the first of twelve subsequent war crimes trials at Nuremberg wherein the U.S. government prosecuted individuals in specific professions—including industrialists, lawyers, and generals—who had served the Third Reich. The first trial, called the trial of the major war criminals, was prosecuted by the four Allied powers. When it ended, in October 1946, tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States had escalated to the degree that cooperation between the two nations was no longer possible. The subsequent twelve trials took place at the Palace of Justice, as the others had, but with only American judges and prosecutors. The twenty-three defendants in the doctors’ trial were charged with murder, torture, conspiracy, and atrocity in the name of medical science. “Mere punishment of the defendants,” said Brigadier General Telford Taylor in his opening statement, “can never redress the terrible injuries which the Nazis visited on these unfortunate peoples.” But General Taylor reminded the tribunal and the world that one of the central purposes of the trial was to establish a record of proof of the crimes, “so that no one can ever doubt that they were fact and not fable; and
that this court, as agent of the United States and as the voice of humanity, stamps these acts, and the ideas which engendered them, as barbarous and criminal.”

  Dr. Leopold Alexander, the Viennese-born American psychiatrist who had first learned of the Luftwaffe freezing experiments, helped General Taylor write his opening speech. Dr. Alexander’s official title was expert consultant to the secretary of war, but in layman’s terms he was the most influential person involved in the doctors’ trial after Telford Taylor. Dr. Alexander worked tirelessly to supply information and answers for the prosecution team as they prepared to go to trial. He conducted hundreds of hours of pretrial interrogations with the defendants and interviewed scores of witnesses and victims. He was able to converse in both German and English and he took extensive notes in both languages. Throughout the trial Dr. Alexander delivered presentations of evidence and cross-examined witnesses. When the trial was over he would be given credit for writing the Nuremberg Code.

  Of the twenty-three defendants, no one outside a small group of American medical military elite had any idea that four of the accused had already worked for the U.S. Army under Paperclip. This fact would remain secret for forty years. Neither Siegfried Ruff, nor Konrad Schäfer, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, nor Oskar Schröder mentioned this damning fact during the trial.

  Siegfried Ruff was one of the few physicians who admitted he’d overseen the medical murders at Dachau but said he did not perform any of the experiments himself. In his defense, he said he didn’t believe that what he did was wrong. “It was understood that concentration camp inmates who had been condemned to death would be used in the experiments, and as compensation they were to have their sentences commuted to life in prison,” Ruff told the judges. “Personally, I would not consider these experiments as immoral especially in war time.” This line of defense, that extraordinary times called for extraordinary measures, was also used by Schröder and Becker-Freyseng.