Operation Paperclip

by Annie Jacobsen

  As for Dr. Blome, the scientists from Detrick knew it was far too risky to offer him a Paperclip contract just weeks after he’d been acquitted of capital war crimes at Nuremberg. Drew Pearson’s reporting on the Paperclip contract offered to Karl Krauch in prison had upset General Eisenhower and nearly brought the program to its knees. While Blome made clear his willingness to work for the Army, the Detrick scientists knew he would have to remain an under-the-radar consultant, relegated to the JIOA target list for potential hire at a future date.

  The army bacteriologist and biological weapons expert Dr. Harold Batchelor returned to Camp Detrick with many new ideas to explore, including assassination-by-poison techniques that had been shared with him by Dr. Blome. The Reich had been researching biological weapons that would initiate epidemics but could also “kill certain people,” according to Blome. In 1947, however, with scientific frontiers opening up wide, there would be hundreds of new ways to assassinate individuals using a single device carrying a biological or chemical agent. This was an area in which the CIA was interested. The Chemical Corps had the perfect scientist for the job of exploring poisons that could be used for individual assassinations, Fritz Hoffmann. But Hoffmann had a backlog of work. He still had to figure out how to synthesize tabun gas so the Chemical Corps could hurry up and begin producing it on an industrial scale.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Headless Monster

  In June 1948, Colonel Charles E. Loucks, the man who oversaw the Paperclip scientists at Edgewood, was made brigadier general and transferred to Heidelberg. Loucks now served as chief of intelligence collection for Chemical Warfare Plans, European Command. In Heidelberg, he had access to a whole new group of Hitler’s former chemists, from those who had been at the top of the chain of command on down. Within weeks of his arrival, Loucks formed a working relationship with Richard Kuhn, the former director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg. Because Kuhn had an international profile before and during the war, he was a problematic candidate for Operation Paperclip. Though Kuhn had once been revered among scientists, Samuel Goudsmit of Operation Alsos was never afraid to remind colleagues that Kuhn had become an active Nazi during the war, and that he began his lectures with “Sieg Heil” and the Nazi salute. Kuhn had lied to Goudsmit in a postwar interview, swearing that he had never worked on Reich projects during the war. In fact Kuhn was a chemical weapons expert for the Reich and developed soman nerve agent. Soman was even deadlier than sarin and tabun but considered too delicate and therefore too costly to industrialize.

  Richard Kuhn began working with General Loucks in Heidelberg on chemical weapons projects for the Chemical Corps. General Loucks’s friendly relationship with Richard Kuhn drew ire from the British. When formally queried about his professional partnership with Kuhn, Loucks replied, “I was under the impression that Professor Kuhn had been cleared of his Nazi complicity or had suffered the penalty and is now in the good graces of both the British and the Americans.” Further, wrote Loucks, “I am sure our people are certainly familiar with his background.” To General Loucks, moving forward on military programs considered vital to U.S. national security was more important than dredging up an individual’s Nazi past. Through the lens of history, this remains one of the most complicated issues regarding Operation Paperclip. When working with ardent Nazis, some American handlers appear to have developed an ability to look the other way. Others, like General Loucks, looked straight at the man and saw only the scientist, not the Nazi.

  Richard Kuhn had a connection with a scientist in Switzerland with whom General Loucks was particularly interested in working. The scientist had been investigating a little-known incapacitating agent that was far more potent than anything the Chemical Corps was working on at the time. This Swiss chemist had recently given a lecture, “New Hallucinatory Agent,” to a gathering of the Swiss Society of Psychiatry and the Association of Physicians in Zurich. On December 16, 1948, General Loucks took a trip to Switzerland. So as not to draw attention to himself or the U.S. military, he took the unusual step of taking off his military uniform. This story does not appear in any known declassified army record but is told in Loucks’s own words, in his personal diaries that were left to the U.S. Army Heritage Center in Pennsylvania. “Went back to the house and put on civilian clothes,” Loucks wrote in his diary. His wife, Pearl, took the plainclothed general to the train station. En route to his destination in Switzerland, Loucks shared a compartment with a “foreigner, dark, nationality unknown,” and a “Dutchman who acted Jewish in quizzing me all about myself.” The train compartment, Loucks noted, provided a clean, comfortable, well-lit ride, and General Loucks arrived in Bern at 8:55 that night. Before heading to bed, Loucks enjoyed a fire in the fireplace in his hotel room. General Loucks did not note in his journal any of the details of the meeting with the mysterious Swiss scientist. The mission was classified.

  Loucks returned to Germany the following day, and he did note in his journal that Richard Kuhn came over to his house for lunch with a special guest, Dr. Gerhard Schrader, the inventor of Preparation 9/91, or tabun gas. With snow coming down outside the Louckses’ home in flurries, Richard Kuhn, Dr. Gerhard Schrader, and General Loucks had a pleasant chat and “lunch of pork chops.”

  Decades later, in a speech prepared for the Amherst chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Sons of the American Revolution, General Loucks revealed that this Swiss chemist referred to him by Richard Kuhn had been Professor Werner Stoll, a psychiatric researcher at the University of Zurich. The hallucinatory agent that Loucks was after in Switzerland would be the ultimate “incapacitation chemical” also sought by L. Wilson Greene at Edgewood “to knock out not kill.” The chemical, said Loucks, was called “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide,” or LSD. Stoll did not discover LSD. That distinction went to Albert Hofmann, a chemist for Sandoz pharmaceutical company in Basel. Werner Stoll, a colleague of Hoffmann’s (and the son of Sandoz chief chemist, Arthur Stoll), repeated Albert Hofmann’s original LSD experiment and concluded, “modified LSD-25 was a psychotropic compound that was nontoxic and could have enormous use as a psychiatric aid.” In 1947, Werner Stoll had published the first article on LSD, in the Swiss Archives of Neurology. Stoll’s second paper, entitled “A New Hallucinatory Agent, Active in Very Small Amounts,” was published two years later, in 1949. But General Loucks did not see LSD as a psychiatric aid but rather as a weapon, an incapacitating agent with enormous potential on the battlefield. Soon the army and the navy would all be experimenting with LSD as a weapon, and the CIA would be experimenting with LSD as a means of controlling human behavior, an endeavor that soon came to be known as mind control.

  Eventually, physicians and chemists from Operation Paperclip would work on jointly operated classified programs code-named Chatter, Bluebird, Artichoke, MKUltra, and others. LSD, the drug that induces paranoia and unpredictability and makes people see things that are not really there, would become a strange allegory for the Cold War.

  One day in the late summer of 1948 a call came in to Brigadier General Charles Loucks’s new office in Heidelberg. A lieutenant answered the phone. The caller, a German, left a cryptic message to be relayed to General Loucks. It was short and to the point.

  “I can help,” the caller said.

  He left a return telephone number and his name, Schieber. General Loucks had been in Germany since June. As chief of intelligence collection for chemical warfare plans in Europe, it was Loucks’s job to determine which Western European countries were developing chemical weapons and to monitor their progress. Loucks was also working on unfinished business back at Edgewood, namely, the continuing failure by the Chemical Corps to develop industrial-scale production of nerve gas, an effort that by now had officially switched from the pursuit of tabun to the pursuit of sarin. The American university professors Loucks had hired back in the U.S. were making very little progress. “We put samples [of sarin] in front of them and everything, but yet they… could n
ot come up with any process to make some Sarin,” General Loucks explained decades later in an oral history for the U.S. Army. A fire in the sarin plant at Edgewood had set the program back even further.

  Along came the Schieber call.

  In 1947, a thick OMGUS security report had been compiled on SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Walter Schieber. He had been involved with the U.S. Army since the fall of the Reich.

  Schieber was a Nazi Bonzen, a big wheel. He was unattractive, fat, and wore a Hitler mustache and false teeth. Since the 1920s he had been regarded as one of Hitler’s Alte Kämpfer, the Old Fighters, trusted members of Hitler’s inner circle who wore the Golden Party Badge. Dr. Schieber was also a loyal SS man and served on the personal staff of Heinrich Himmler.

  SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Walter Schieber had been a dedicated and loyal member of the Nazi Party since 1931. He had also been frequently photographed alongside Hitler, Himmler, Bormann, and Speer as part of the inner circle. A number of these photographs survived the war, which made public dealings with Schieber impossible. U.S. Army transactions with him were classified Top Secret. As head of the Reich Ministry of Armaments Supply Office (Rüstungslieferungsamt), first under Fritz Todt when the ministry was called the Munitions Ministry, or Organisation Todt, and then under Albert Speer, Schieber was an engineer and a chemist and handled business in both areas for the Third Reich. As an engineer, he oversaw many of the Reich’s underground engineering projects. “Designs for concentration camp armaments factories remained almost the exclusive work of Schieber,” writes Michael Thad Allen, an expert on the SS and slave labor.

  Schieber also wore his chemist’s hat for at least one concentration camp experiment. In an attempt to save the SS money and address the growing problem of food shortages among slave laborers, Schieber designed a “nourishment” program called Eastern Nutrition (Östliche Kostform). It was tested at the Mauthausen concentration camp. For a period of six months, starting in December 1943, a group of one hundred and fifty slave laborers were denied the watery broth they usually received and instead were fed an artificial paste designed by Schieber and made up of cellulose remnants, or pieces of used clothing. One hundred and sixteen of the one hundred and fifty test subjects died. After the war, there was a judicial inquiry into Schieber’s Eastern Nutrition program. The West German courts determined that the resulting deaths could not necessarily be “attributed to nutrition” because there were so many other causes of death in the concentration camp.

  Walter Schieber was further linked to the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of slave laborers through the various chemical weapons programs that were carried out at Farben’s multiple production plants. Schieber was not tried at Nuremberg but was used as a witness for the prosecution instead. During the war, with his expertise as a chemist, SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Walter Schieber was the Speer ministry’s liaison to IG Farben and he oversaw the industrial production of tabun and sarin gas. According to his intelligence file, one of his titles was “confidential clerk of IG Farben AG.” Dr. Walter Schieber and Dr. Otto Ambros worked together at the Dyhernfurth nerve agent production facility.

  By the late summer of 1948, Otto Ambros had been tried and convicted at Nuremberg and was serving an eight-year sentence at Landsberg Prison for mass murder and slavery. Schieber had been released from his obligations as a witness for the tribunal and was a free man. Now, here he was on the telephone, requesting to speak with Brigadier General Loucks. Schieber was looking for work with the U.S. Army Chemical Corps.

  “I’m free now,” Schieber told Loucks’s lieutenant during the call. “They have nothing against me.”

  It was, of course, more complicated than that.

  Four months prior, in February 1948, former SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schieber had signed a Top Secret Operation Paperclip contract with the JIOA. He had been recruited by Colonel Putt at Wright Field, now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Putt wanted to make use of Schieber’s underground engineering skills—just as Georg Rickhey’s skills had been used before Rickhey was returned to Germany to stand trial for war crimes. Hiring a top Nazi like Walter Schieber was risky, and the potential problems facing the U.S. Air Force for doing so were candidly discussed in an exchange of memorandums. A JIOA case officer wrote to military headquarters in Frankfurt summarizing how things were progressing. “Subject is Dr. Walter Schieber… requested priority shipment to Wright Field. Schieber’s ability is outstanding and his potentialities believed invaluable to the United States.” For the past three months, the case officer explained, Schieber had been working on “the underground factory project,” a massive undertaking, at U.S. military headquarters in Germany. The project was spearheaded by Franz Dorsch, and Schieber had been working as Dorsch’s first assistant. In Germany, Schieber and Dorsch had supervised “150 scientists and technicians” who had built underground factories for the Reich. The result was a thousand-page monograph for U.S. Air Force. Schieber, the report explained, “has been especially cooperative and is agreeable to going to [the] United States. He is well known to the Soviets and is desired by them. His exploitation in the United States is therefore believed highly desirable.”

  There was, however, a problem that needed to be addressed, wrote the case officer. “His party record is as follows: Entered party in June 31, Brigade Fuhrer in the SS, holder of the Golden Party Badge, member of SS, DAF [Deutsche Arbeitsfront, or German Labor Front], NSV [Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, or National Socialist People’s Welfare], and VDCH [VDCh, or Association of German Chemists].” There was no way to disguise that Schieber had been in Hitler’s inner circle, but the JIOA also proposed a solution. “In order to minimize the possibility of unfavorable publicity in the United States your views requested on advisability of shipping subject via air under escort and or under an alias.” Schieber could be part of Operation Paperclip as long as no one knew who Schieber really was. Unlike standard operating procedure with Operation Paperclip applicants, there was to be no photograph of SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Walter Schieber attached to his intelligence file.

  The air force agreed with JIOA’s suggestions. “Ship Dr. Walter Schieber to Wright Field Dayton Ohio. Air Force requests case be expedited and given top priority.” There was one caveat that JIOA and the air force agreed upon. Dr. Schieber had to undergo a denazification trial first. “Trusting he would be placed in Class 3”—the category for individuals who were “less incriminated”—after his denazification trial, Dr. Walter Schieber packed his bags and awaited transport to the United States. Instead, on March 11, 1948, a different verdict came in: “the civilian Internee Dr. Walter Schieber, born 13-09-1897 at Beimerstetten, former Chief of Armaments Deliveries on the Reich Ministry for Armaments and War Production, Head of the Central Office for Generators, Deputy Head of the Reich Organization Industry, SS-Brigadefueher [sic], PSt [presently] held at this enclosure,” read the decree, “was tried by the Sonder-Spruchkammer for Hesse, Neustadt-Lager, and sentenced to Group II, 2 years Labor Camp and restriction to 5 years ordinary labor.” The Group 2 designation meant that Schieber was in a category with “party activists, militarists, and profiteers.” His Paperclip contract would have to wait.

  Five days after his trial, Schieber contacted the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps to relay to his Paperclip handler his version of events. “Herr Berbeth [the judge] had subject brought into the chamber and asked him about his trip to the United States, to which Schieber replied that he did not think it would be wise for him to go to the U.S. as an offender. Herr Berbeth suggested that he should immediately apply for a re-trial or ask the Minister for Political Liberation for a pardon. Herr Berbeth also told Schieber that he would recommend such a pardon.” Schieber told his Paperclip handler that, after leaving the courtroom, he had returned to the internee camp where he was being held. Then, according to Schieber, something rather shocking happened: “Berbeth of the court joined Schieber and told him, contrary to his previous statement, not to apply for another trial or a pardon, but to go to Fran
kfurt immediately, contact the Russian Liaison Officer and ask for an Interzonal Pass. With this pass, subject [Schieber] was to enter the Russian Zone and proceed to one of his factories in the Schwarza/Saale [where] he could be assured of every possible help, should he have the desire to work in his former position.” In other words, according to Schieber, the judge at this trial worked for the Russians and was offering him a job. Schieber claimed to have told the judge that his offer sounded impossible. Was he really being advised to ignore the court’s judgment, to flee the camp, get an interzonal pass, and begin working for the Russians “at a high pay grade” comparable to what he was paid during the Hitler regime? “The President of the Spruchkammer assured [me] that arrangements would be made,” Schieber said. Did this really happen? Was the judge a Russian mole? Or was Schieber playing the Americans with the proverbial Russian card?

  Schieber’s Counter Intelligence Corps handler asked him what he thought of the judge’s black market offer. “Schieber believes that the [Spruchkammern] sentence was imposed to prevent his contract with the United States and to make his residence in Germany so difficult as to force him to accept the Russian Offers.” The handler had his own thoughts. “Cancellation of Schiebers [sic] contract after he has possibly jeopardized his safety and after he has cooperated so whole-heartedly with intelligence agencies here is certain to have an adverse effect on the future contracting or exploitation of specialists and will only serve as another example of broken faith on the part of the United States.” The CIC officer felt that when “considering the magnitude of Schiebers [sic] potential value to the United States either for military or civil exploitation,” it was obvious that his contract needed to be honored one way or other. The officer recommended that Schieber be paid as a consultant to the U.S. Army in Heidelberg. In the meantime, he could appeal the judgment of the Spruchkammern trial and become part of Operation Paperclip after the attention died down.