Operation Paperclip

by Annie Jacobsen

  “I have read the two pages you have presented to me,” Blome told his interviewer on the appointed day. “During the war I got the task to prepare a serum, a vaccine, against a bacterial plague. This all started because [Major General] Dr. Schreiber told a lie. Schreiber is a pawn of the Russians. It’s a sworn lie.” Blome spent the rest of his radio time blaming Schreiber for his own misfortunes. He ended by pointing out his innocence; Blome reminded the radio announcer that he had endured a ten-month trial at Nuremberg. “I was acquitted on every point that there was,” Blome said. “The U.S. judges were not easy. They handed out seven death penalties and five lifelong imprisonments. If I had been guilty, they would have convicted me.”

  The allegations opened a subsequent investigation into Blome. Two weeks later, on April 4, 1962, the state’s attorney in Dortmund wrote to the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes to see if there was anything on Dr. Kurt Blome. The state’s attorney put together a dossier on Blome, with most of the focus on a letter Blome had written on November 18, 1942, to Reich Governor (Reichsstatthalter) Arthur Karl Greiser, mayor of a Polish area near Posen and subsequently executed for war crimes. The subject matter was Sonderbehandlung, or “special treatment,” of Poles with tuberculosis. By now, in 1962, it had been established that Sonderbehandlung was a Nazi euphemism for extermination. In this 1942 correspondence, Blome and Greiser agreed that the best way to deal with this group of tubercular Poles being discussed was to give them “special treatment.” But Blome also raises “a problem” that had to be dealt with—namely, that if these tubercular Poles were to be exterminated, “[t]he general perception by relatives would be that something unorthodox is going on.” Blome reminds Reich Governor Greiser that the group they are proposing special treatment for totals approximately thirty-five thousand people.

  Blome was called in to an interview with the state’s attorney. “I am aware that there is an investigation,” Blome said. “My position is that this has already been investigated by the Americans.” Dr. Blome then made the same argument he had used at Nuremberg as a defendant in the doctors’ trial: that he may have recommended the extermination of thirty-five thousand Poles as a course of action, but that there was no proof that that action ever took place. Intent, Blome maintained, is not a crime. “Furthermore,” Blome told investigators, “I want to add that I put the blame on [Major General Dr. Walter] Schreiber based on what I learned at the trial.” Blome said that Dr. Schreiber was the true murderer and that he had framed Dr. Blome to deflect the guilt away from himself. After several days of consideration, on May 21, 1962, the state’s attorney placed the investigation of Dr. Blome on hold. Blome continued to practice medicine in Dortmund and the case against him was never reopened. Three years later, Blome was dead. “He died of emphysema,” says his son, who also reports that, by the time of his father’s death, Dr. Kurt Blome was alone and estranged from the world.

  Albert Speer served all twenty years of his sentence at Spandau Prison outside Berlin, despite the efforts by John J. McCloy, as U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, to get Speer released earlier. In 1956 McCloy wrote to Speer’s wife, Margarete, “I have a very strong conviction that your husband should be released and would be very happy if I could do anything to expedite such a release.”

  In prison Speer secretly worked on the memoirs he would publish upon his release. On pieces of toilet paper, cigarette wrappers, and paper scraps he jotted down recollections of his days working alongside Hitler and the inner circle. It was illegal to write and send unscreened notes out of Spandau, so Speer had his writing smuggled out by two sympathetic Dutch Red Cross nurses. The notes were delivered to Speer’s old friend and colleague Rudolf Wolters, a diehard Hitler loyalist living in Berlin. Over the course of twenty years Wolters painstakingly typed up tens of thousands of these individual paper scraps that Speer continued to send to him. After twenty years they amounted to a thousand-page manuscript, which Wolters turned over to Speer upon Speer’s release. With the advance payments Speer received on his memoirs—he would write two, Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries—Speer became a wealthy man once again. He earned a reported 680,000 deutschmarks from Die Welt for serialization rights, and a reported $350,000 (roughly $2.4 million in 2013) advance for English-language book rights. Albert Speer bought a sports car and embarked on a new life as a successful author.

  He never thanked or acknowledged Rudolf Wolters for his twenty years of work, at least not in his book and not publicly. A decade later, Speer defended this decision to his biographer, Gitta Sereny, saying “[I]t was for [Wolters’s] own protection.” Wolters’s son reported that when Wolters died, the last word he uttered was “Speer.”

  After Speer sent Wernher von Braun a copy of Spandau, von Braun wrote a letter to his old friend and former boss at the Reich’s Ministry of Armaments and War Production, pointing out how divergent their lives had been over the past twenty years. While Speer had been at Spandau Prison, von Braun’s star had risen steadily. He thanked Speer for the book. “How often I thought of you during those last twenty long years when so much was happening in my life,” wrote von Braun.

  When Siegfried Knemeyer learned that Albert Speer was out of prison, Knemeyer took a trip to visit his old friend in Germany. The last time the two men had seen each other was in Berlin in April 1945, when Knemeyer was helping Speer plot his escape to Greenland. In the years that Speer had been in prison, Knemeyer had been working for the United States—formerly the sworn enemy of both men. As an employee of the U.S. Air Force in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Knemeyer worked on classified and unclassified projects, won awards, and rose up through the ranks. For the air force, he established the Pilot Factors Program, which coordinated technologies as aircraft went from subsonic to supersonic flight. Upon his retirement in 1977, Pentagon officials awarded Knemeyer their highest civilian award, the Distinguished Civilian Service Award. Knemeyer died of emphysema two years later, on April 11, 1979. His last wish was that his body be “immediately taken to a crematory” and that no funeral be held. “He served his native country, Germany, and his adopted country, America, with equal enthusiasm and dedication,” said his son Sigurd Knemeyer.

  To the end, Albert Speer denied that he had direct knowledge of the Holocaust. Sixty-seven years after interviewing Speer at the Ashcan interrogation facility in Luxembourg, John Dolibois still takes umbrage at this. “I asked [Speer] if he was at the Wannsee Conference at which Himmler announced the ‘Final Solution’ for eradicating Jews,” Dolibois explains. “In my opinion, anyone who was at that meeting could not say he knew nothing about extermination camps—like Auschwitz, Sobibor, Birkenau. Speer first denied being at Wannsee, then admitted [to me] he was there, but left before lunch and missed the important announcements. Others also asserted [Speer] was not telling the truth. I think he should have been hanged.”

  Albert Speer died in a London hotel room in 1981. He was in town doing an interview for the BBC. “One seldom recognizes when the Devil puts his hand on your shoulder,” Albert Speer told James P. O’Donnell in a New York Times Magazine interview shortly after his release from Spandau. He was referring to Hitler but might have been talking about himself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  What Lasts?

  In the 1970s, several events led to a major shift in the American public’s perception of the Holocaust, Nazis, and the United States. A series of congressional oversight hearings were convened as a result of many high-profile cases of Nazi war criminals found living in America. The hearings drew attention to the fact that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had been negligent in its investigations of these individuals and in turn led to the creation of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations. Then came the 1978 broadcast of NBC’s four-part miniseries Holocaust, which broke records for family viewing and made Americans who had never contemplated the Holocaust think seriously about what had happened in
Nazi Germany and what the state-sponsored murder of six million people really meant. These events set the stage for a simple, fortuitous occurrence for a young Harvard law student named Eli Rosenbaum, the consequences of which would profoundly impact the Paperclip scientists who had something to hide.

  In 1980, Eli Rosenbaum was perusing book titles inside a Cambridge bookstore when he came across Dora: The Nazi Concentration Camp Where Modern Space Technology Was Born and 30,000 Prisoners Died, written by a former Dora prisoner, the French Resistance fighter Jean Michel. The narrative is detailed and revelatory in its brutal honesty. Jean Michel called his book an homage to the thirty thousand slave laborers who died building the V-2s. He comments on the memoirs written by Wernher von Braun and General Dornberger, and the countless interviews given by many of the other V-2 scientists who worked under Operation Paperclip. None of these Germans, notes Michel, utters a word about Nordhausen.

  “I do not reproach these men with not having made public confessions after the war,” Michel writes. “I do not hold it against the scientists that they did not choose to be martyrs when they discovered the truth about the [death] camps. No, mine is a more modest objective. I make my stand solely against the monstrous distortion of history which, in silencing certain facts and glorifying others, has given birth to false, foul and suspect myths.”

  In that same Cambridge bookstore, on that same day, Eli Rosenbaum came across a second book about the V-2 rocket. This one was called The Rocket Team and was written by Frederick I. Ordway III and Mitchell R. Sharpe, with an introduction by Wernher von Braun. The book discusses and quotes the German scientists involved in the U.S. rocket program. In one part of the book, engineer Arthur Rudolph—praised as the developer of NASA’s Saturn V rocket program—shares his thoughts with the authors. Rudolph is not identified as having once been operations director at the Mittelwerk slave labor facility.

  Rudolph relates an anecdote from the war, concerning his dismay at being called away from a New Year’s Eve party in 1943–44 because of a problem with some of the V-2 rockets. An accompanying photograph shows a POW in striped prisoner pajamas moving rocket parts. Eli Rosenbaum had spent the previous summer working for the Department of Justice in its Office of Special Investigations. He knew that the Geneva Convention forbade nations from forcing prisoners of war to work on munitions. He had also just read about what went on in the Nordhausen tunnels in Jean Michel’s book Dora. Rosenbaum later recalled that he “was particularly offended by Rudolph’s taking umbrage at missing a gala party while slave laborers toiled.” The following year, after graduating from Harvard Law School, Rosenbaum started full-time work at the Department of Justice as a trial lawyer. He persuaded his boss, Neal M. Sher, to open an investigation into Arthur Rudolph.

  In September of 1982, Marianne Rudolph, the daughter of Arthur Rudolph, received an unexpected telephone call at her home in San Jose, California. It was the Department of Justice calling. They explained that they had been trying to reach her father, Arthur Rudolph, who apparently lived nearby, but that they had been unable to do so. Marianne Rudolph, who worked as an artist for NASA, told the caller that her parents were vacationing in Germany and would be back at the end of the month.

  The day after the Rudolphs returned, Arthur Rudolph received a registered letter in the mail from the Department of Justice, Office of Special Investigations. The letter stated that questions had been raised regarding Arthur Rudolph’s activities during the Second World War. Rudolph was asked to meet with DOJ officials at the San Jose Hyatt on October 13 and to bring any documents with him that he owned covering the period between 1933 and 1945. During this first meeting, which included Arthur Rudolph, OSI director Allan A. Ryan Jr., Deputy Director Neal M. Sher, and trial attorney Eli Rosenbaum, the interview lasted five hours. There were two central questions the lawyers wanted answered: Owing to what set of principles had Rudolph decided to join the Nazi Party, which he did in 1933, and what exactly did he know about the Nordhausen executions, specifically about the prisoners who had been hanged from a crane? DOJ lawyers Allen, Sher, and Rosenbaum had documents with them including the previously sealed testimony from the 1947 Dora-Nordhausen trial. These documents included pretrial investigative material regarding former Paperclip specialist Georg Rickhey. Among the documents was the interview that Rudolph gave, on June 2, 1947, to Major Eugene Smith of the U.S. Army Air Force. In that testimony, Rudolph had first said that he never saw any prisoners beaten or hanged. Later in the interview with Major Smith, Rudolph changed his story to say that he had been forced to watch the hangings but had nothing to do with them.

  During the San Jose Hyatt interview in 1982, the three Justice Department lawyers presented Rudolph with the drawing made by his former Nordhausen colleagues from Fort Bliss, the rocket engineers Günther Haukohl, Rudolph Schlidt, Hans Palaoro, and Erich Ball. This drawing illustrated the layout inside the tunnels and had been used as evidence in the Dora-Nordhausen trial. The Justice Department lawyers pointed out to Rudolph that there was a clear dotted line, labeled “Path of Overhead Crane Trolly [sic] On Which Men Were Hung.” The dotted line ran right by Rudolph’s office, which suggested that it would have been impossible for Rudolph not to have seen the hangings. The lawyers asked why he had lied. They also asked Rudolph about testimony from the 1947 Dora-Nordhausen trial that revealed that, at the Mittelwerk tunnel complex, he received daily “prisoner strength reports which showed the number of prisoners available for work, the number of ‘new arrivals,’ and the number of people lost through sickness or death.’ ” They said that, clearly, Rudolph knew people were being worked to death and were being replaced by fresh bodies from the Dora-Nordhausen concentration camp.

  Back in Washington, D.C., the Justice Department put together its case. Four months later, on February 4, 1983, a second meeting took place at the San Jose Hyatt, and, shortly thereafter, Rudolph received a letter from the Justice Department in the mail. “Certain preliminary decisions have now been made,” wrote Neal Sher. “I would be prepared to discuss these decisions, as well as the evidence amassed to date, with an attorney authorized to represent your interest.”

  The government stated intentions to pursue its case against Arthur Rudolph “showing that Mr. Rudolph enforced the slave labor system at Mittelbau [Mittelwerk] and aided in the transmission of sabotage reports to the SS.” Arthur Rudolph had two choices, the Justice Department said. He could hire a lawyer and prepare to stand trial, or, alternatively, he could renounce his U.S. citizenship and leave the country at once.

  Thirty-eight years after coming to America as part of Operation Paperclip, Arthur Rudolph left the United States, on March 27, 1984. Neal Sher met Arthur Rudolph at the San Francisco International Airport and made sure he got on the airplane.

  It was another seven months before the Justice Department made public that Arthur Rudolph had renounced his citizenship so as to avoid facing a war crimes trial. When asked to comment, Eli Rosenbaum said that Arthur Rudolph had contributed to “the death of thousands of slave laborers.” But Rosenbaum also said that it was Rudolph’s “almost unbelievable callousness and disregard [for] human life” that surprised him most. The story became front-page news around the world.

  Some individuals affiliated with NASA and other rocket-related government programs remained staunch supporters of Arthur Rudolph, calling the Justice Department’s actions against him a “witchhunt.” One of Rudolph’s leading proponents, Hugh McInnish, an engineer with the U.S. Army Strategic Defense Command, helped promote the idea that Rudolph, Dornberger, and von Braun had all confronted members of the SS during the war and had tried to get better working conditions for the slave laborers. “Their defenders’ assertions must be regarded with the greatest skepticism, especially as there is not a single document to back them up,” says Michael J. Neufeld. “There is little doubt in my mind that Rudolph was deeply implicated.” The Rudolph exposé triggered keen interest in how it was that Arthur Rudolph came to America in the first place.
This was a turning point in Operation Paperclip’s secret history.

  There is a broad misconception in America that there exists some kind of automatic declassification system that requires the government to reveal its secret programs after thirty or fifty years. In reality, the most damaging programs often remain classified for as long as they can be kept secret. The Freedom of Information Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, allows for the full or partial disclosure of some documents, but a request must be initiated by an individual or a group and is by no means a guarantee that information will be obtained. After the Arthur Rudolph story broke, journalist Linda Hunt began reporting on Operation Paperclip for CNN and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She filed FOIA requests with the different military organizations and intelligence agencies involved and received varied responses. “I obtained six thousand Edgewood Arsenal documents in 1987 but it took more than a year, two attorneys and a threatened lawsuit to get the records [released],” says Hunt. When she arrived at the Washington National Records Center in the late 1980s to inspect the documents, she was told that Edgewood’s own historian had checked out seven of the boxes and that another twelve were missing. The army later agreed to look for the missing records and sent her a bill for $239,680 in so-called search fees (the equivalent of $500,000 in 2013). Eventually Linda Hunt was granted access to the documents, and in the early 1990s she published a book that unveiled many of Operation Paperclip’s seemingly impenetrable secrets. It was now no longer possible for the government to uphold the myth that Paperclip was a program peopled solely by benign German scientists, nominal Nazis, and moral men.

  As if pushing back against the Office of Special Investigations, just a few months after Arthur Rudolph was expelled from the United States, the Texas Senate passed a resolution declaring that June 15 was Dr. Hubertus Strughold Day. Then Ohio State University’s medical college unveiled a portrait of Strughold on its mural of medical heroes. But the attempts by one organization to perpetrate a false myth can serve as a great motivator for another organization, and to this end the World Jewish Congress discovered and released information on Dr. Strughold that army intelligence had managed to keep classified for nearly fifty years. The New York Times verified that Dr. Strughold had been listed as among those being sought on the 1945 Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects, or CROWCASS, list. Strughold’s portrait was removed from the Ohio State mural, where he appeared, ironically, alongside Hippocrates.