Operation Paperclip

by Annie Jacobsen

  Citizens who were offended by the Strughold library at the Brooks Air Force Base asked the air force when Strughold’s name was going to be removed from the U.S. government building. Library spokesman Larry Farlow told the Associated Press that there were no plans to remove the name from the Strughold Aeromedical Library. But growing pressure from the public forced the air force to reconsider its position. In 1995 General Ronald R. Fogleman, chief of staff of the Department of the Air Force, issued a terse statement stating that after reviewing Nazi-era documents, “the evidence of Dr. Strughold’s wartime activities is sufficient to cause concern about retaining his name in an honored place on the library.” The sign was removed from the building’s exterior brick walls, and the Strughold bronze portrait was taken down. The permanence of the honor had come to an end. Strughold died the following year, at the age of eighty-eight. The Justice Department had been preparing a Nazi war criminal case against Strughold in his final years.

  What does last? The desire to seek the truth? Or, in the words of Jean Michel, the ability to take a stand against “the monstrous distortion of history” when it gives birth to “false, foul and suspect myths”? In 1998, Congress passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, which required various U.S. government agencies to identify and release federal records relating to Nazi war criminals that had been kept classified for decades. In accordance with the act, President Clinton established an Interagency Working Group—made up of federal agency representatives and members of the public—to oversee the interpretation of over eight million pages of U.S. government records and report its findings to Congress. The documentation revealed a vast web of profitable relationships between hundreds of Nazi war criminals and U.S. military and intelligence agencies.

  In 2005, in a final report to Congress, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, the Interagency Working Group determined that “[t]he notion that they [the U.S. military and the CIA] employed only a few ‘bad apples’ will not stand up to the new documentation.” In hindsight, wrote the Interagency Working Group, the government’s use of Nazis was a very bad idea, and “there was no compelling reason to begin the postwar era with the assistance of some of those associated with the worst crimes of the war.” And yet history now shows us that that is exactly what the American government did—and continued to do throughout the Cold War.

  In the decades since Operation Paperclip ended, new facts continue to come to light. In 2008, previously unreported information about Otto Ambros emerged, serving as a reminder that the story of what lies hidden behind America’s Nazi scientist program is not complete.

  A group of medical doctors and researchers in England, working on behalf of an organization called the Thalidomide Trust, believe they have tied the wartime work of IG Farben and Otto Ambros to the thalidomide tragedy of the late 1950s and early 1960s. After Ambros was released from Landsberg Prison, he worked as an economic consultant to German chancellor Konrad Adenauer and to the industrial magnate Friedrich Flick, the richest person in Germany during the Cold War. Like Ambros, Flick had been tried and convicted at Nuremberg, then released early by John J. McCloy.

  In the late 1950s, Ambros was also elected chairman of the advisory committee for a German company called Chemie Grünenthal. Grünenthal was about to market a new tranquilizer that promised pregnant women relief from morning sickness. The drug, called thalidomide, was going to be sold under the brand name Contergan. Otto Ambros served on the board of directors of Grünenthal. In the late 1950s, very few people knew that Grünenthal was a safe haven for many Nazis, including Dr. Ernst-Günther Schenck, the inspector of nutrition for the SS, and Dr. Heinz Baumkötter, an SS captain (Hauptsturmführer) and the chief concentration camp doctor in Mauthausen, Natzweiler-Struthof, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps.

  Ten months before Grünenthal’s public release of thalidomide, the wife of a Grünenthal employee, who took the drug to combat morning sickness, gave birth to a baby without ears. No one linked the birth defect to the drug, and thalidomide was released by the company. After several months on the market, in 1959, Grünenthal received its first reports that thalidomide caused polyneuropathy, or nerve damage, in the hands and feet of elderly people who took the drug. The drug’s over-the-counter status was changed so that it now required a prescription. Still, thalidomide was marketed aggressively in forty-six countries with a label that stated it could be “given with complete safety to pregnant women and nursing mothers without any adverse effect on mother and child.” Instead, the drug resulted in more than ten thousand mothers giving birth to babies with terrible deformities, creating the most horrific pharmaceutical disaster in the history of modern medicine. Many of the children were born without ears, arms, or legs and with reptilian, flipperlike appendages in place of healthy limbs.

  The origins of thalidomide were never accounted for. Grünenthal had always maintained that it lost its documents that showed where and when the first human trials were conducted on the drug. Then, in 2008, the Thalidomide Trust, in England, headed by Dr. Martin Johnson, located a group of Nazi-era documents that produced a link between thalidomide and the drugs researched and developed by IG Farben chemists during the war. Dr. Johnson points out that Grünenthal’s 1954 patents for thalidomide cryptically state that human trials had already been completed, but the company says it cannot offer that data because it was lost, ostensibly during the war. “The patents suggest that thalidomide was probably one of a number of products developed at Dyhernfurth or Auschwitz-Monowitz under the leadership of Otto Ambros in the course of nerve gas research,” Dr. Johnson says.

  The Thalidomide Trust also links Paperclip scientist Richard Kuhn to the medical tragedy. “Kuhn worked with a wide range of chemicals in his nerve gas research, and in his antidote research we know he used Antergan, which we are fairly sure was a ‘sister drug’ to Contergan,” the brand name for thalidomide, Dr. Johnson explains.

  In 2005, Kuhn experienced a posthumous fall from grace when the Society of German Chemists (Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker, GDCh) announced it would no longer award its once-prestigious Richard Kuhn Medal in his name. Nazi-era documents on Kuhn had been brought to the society’s attention, revealing that in “the spring of 1943 Kuhn asked the secretary-general of the KWS [Kaiser Wilhelm Society], Ernst Telschow, to support his search for the brains of ‘young and healthy men,’ presumably for nerve gas research.” The Society of German Chemists maintains that “the sources indicate that these brains were most likely taken from execution victims,” and that “[d]espite his scientific achievements, [Richard] Kuhn is not suitable to serve as a role model, and eponym for an important award, mainly due to his research on poison gas, but also due to his conduct towards Jewish colleagues.”

  It seems that the legacy of Hitler’s chemists has yet to be fully unveiled. Because so many of these German scientists were seen as assets to the U.S. Army Chemical Corps’ nerve agent programs, and were thus wanted as participants in Operation Paperclip, secret deals were made, and the many documents pertaining to these arrangements were classified. President Clinton’s Interagency Working Group had access to eight million pages of declassified documents, but millions more documents remain classified. In U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, the Interagency Working Group’s authors write that “the truest reckoning with the official past can never be complete without the full release of government records.”

  Part of the problem lies in identifying where records are physically located. For example, a 2012 FOIA request to the State Department, asking for the release of all files related to Otto Ambros, was denied on the grounds that no such files exist. But it is a matter of record, owing to a May 1971 news article in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, that Otto Ambros traveled to the United States twice with the State Department’s assistance, despite his status as a convicted war criminal. In an interview with State Department official Fred Scott, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency learned, “Ambros came to the United States in 1967 after the State Department recommended to the J
ustice Department a waiver on his eligibility, which was granted,” and that in 1969, Ambros received a second visa waiver and traveled to the United States again. In the spring of 1971 Ambros was attempting to get a third visa waiver from the State Department when the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported the story. According to Fred Scott, Ambros’s host for his May 1971 visit was listed as the Dow Chemical Company. After the story was published, Jewish groups held protests, and Ambros allegedly canceled his trip. But none of this information is contained in Ambros’s declassified U.S. Army files, FBI files, or CIA files. Otto Ambros was a convicted Nazi war criminal. In accordance with the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, all files about him should have been released and declassified. But records that cannot be located cannot be declassified. Where are the Otto Ambros records hidden? And what secrets might be guarded therein?

  Names and dates continue to come to light, and researchers, journalists, and historians continue to uncover new facts. Fate and circumstance also inevitably play a part. In 2010 a cache of almost three hundred documents was found in the attic of a house being renovated in the Polish town of Oświȩcim, near Auschwitz. The documents include information about several Nazi doctors and Farben chemists who worked at the death camp. “The sensational value of this discovery is the fact that these original documents, bearing the names of the main murderers from Auschwitz, were found so many years after the war,” says Adam Cyra, a historian at the Auschwitz museum.

  Otto Ambros lived until 1990, to the age of ninety-two. After his death, the chemical conglomerate BASF, on whose board of directors he had served, lauded him as “an expressive entrepreneurial figure of great charisma.” Is the old German proverb really true? Jedem das Seine. Does everyone get what he deserves?

  Still, as of 2013, the Space Medicine Association in America continues to bestow its prestigious Hubertus Strughold Award to a scientist or specialist for outstanding contribution to aviation medicine. It has done so every year since 1963. On December 1, 2012, the Wall Street Journal ran a page-one story about Dr. Strughold, presenting revelatory new information about his criminal activities during the war. German historian Prof. Hans-Walter Schmuhl had been researching another subject when he came across evidence that showed that Dr. Strughold had allowed epileptic children to be experimented on inside the high-altitude chamber at Strughold’s Aviation Medical Research Institute of the Reich Air Ministry in Berlin. Rabbits had been put to the test first and had died. Next, Reich medical researchers wanted to see what would happen to young children with epilepsy subjected to those same conditions. Strughold authorized the potentially lethal tests on the children. “The head of the Institute is responsible,” says Schmuhl; “using this expensive equipment, the head of an institute had to have been informed about the use.” When the German Society for Air and Space Medicine learned about Schmuhl’s discovery, they eliminated their prestigious Strughold Award, which had been given annually in Germany since the mid-1970s.

  In America, the Wall Street Journal article renewed debate as to why the Space Medicine Association had not yet eliminated its Hubertus Strughold Award. Dr. Mark Campbell, a former president of the Space Medicine Association, insists the award will not go away. Campbell blames the Internet for maligning what he sees as Dr. Strughold’s good character. “I was a member of a committee investigating Dr. Strughold to see if his name should be removed from the Space Medicine Association Strughold Award,” says Campbell. “I was amazed to find that the facts that were uncovered were so different from the claims being made on the Internet.” But most of Dr. Campbell’s colleagues disagree. “Why defend him?” asks Dr. Stephen Véronneau, a research medical officer at the FAA’s Civil Aerospace Medical Institute in Oklahoma City, and a member of the Space Medicine Association. “I can’t find another example in the world of [an institution] honoring Dr. Strughold except my own association.”

  The National Space Club Florida Committee, one of three committees of the National Space Club in Washington, D.C., gives out a similarly prestigious space-related award called the Dr. Kurt H. Debus Award. This annual award is named in honor of Operation Paperclip’s Kurt Debus, who became the first director of the Kennedy Space Center. Kurt Debus is the scientist who, during the war, was an enthusiastic member of the SS, wore the SS uniform to work, and turned a colleague over to the Gestapo for making anti-Nazi remarks and failing to give Debus the Nazi salute. Under Operation Paperclip, Kurt Debus worked on missiles for the army and for NASA for a total of twenty-eight years—many of which he spent alongside Arthur Rudolph and Wernher von Braun. Kurt Debus retired in 1974. In 2013, after the Strughold award debate resurfaced, I interviewed Steve Griffin, the National Space Club chairman, to determine why the organization continues to give out an award that is named after someone who was once an avowed and active Nazi.

  “Simple as it is, Kurt Debus is an honored American,” Griffin says. I read to Griffin information from Kurt Debus’s OMGUS security report. “It is a simple matter,” Griffin told me. “Kurt Debus was the first director of the Kennedy Space Center.”

  Unlike the Strughold award, which was created in 1963 when Strughold’s foreign scientist case file was still classified, the Dr. Kurt H. Debus Award was first bestowed in 1990, after Debus’s OMGUS security report had been declassified and the revelation that he was an active member of Heinrich Himmler’s SS had been revealed. “It is not my purview to decide if we have an award or what it is called,” Griffin says. But Griffin conceded that he has been on the board of the National Space Club since the Debus award’s inception, so technically it is, and always has been, within his purview. Like so many of those involved in Operation Paperclip decades ago, Griffin looks past Debus’s former commitment to Nazi Party ideology. He only sees the scientist.

  “What do you say when people ask you about Kurt Debus’s Nazi past?” I asked. “Not a single person has asked me this question in [twenty-three] years,” Griffin said.

  To report this book, I filed dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, some of which were honored, many of which were denied, and most of which are still pending. I came across oblique references, circa 1945, regarding a supposed list of Nazi doctors whom the Office of U.S. Chief of Counsel, U.S. Army, sought for involvement in “mercy killings,” or medical murder crimes. FOIA requests for the list turned up nothing. Then, at the Harvard Medical Library, I found a collection of papers that once belonged to Colonel Robert J. Benford, the first commander of Operation Paperclip’s aviation medicine research program at the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg. Benford, with Dr. Strughold, oversaw the work of the fifty-eight Nazi doctors at the center; both Benford and Strughold worked under Colonel Harry Armstrong. In Benford’s papers I came across a file labeled “List of Personnel Involved in Medical Research and Mercy Killings,” but the access to the file was “Restricted Until 2015.” The Harvard Medical Library informed me that the Department of Defense had classified the list and that only the DoD had the authority to declassify it. Harvard filed a FOIA request on my behalf, and the “mercy killings” list was declassified and released to me.

  Included on this list, which had been in Colonel Benford’s possession, were seven Nazi doctors hired under Operation Paperclip: Theodor Benzinger, Kurt Blome, Konrad Schäfer, Walter Schreiber, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, Siegfried Ruff, and Oskar Schröder. The fact became instantly clear: U.S. Army intelligence knew all along that these doctors were implicated in murder yet chose to classify the list and hire the doctors for Operation Paperclip. Blome, Schäfer, Becker-Freyseng, Ruff, and Schröder were all tried at Nuremberg. Schreiber’s public outing in 1951 and his subsequent banishment from America are now on record. Dr. Theodor Benzinger seems to have slipped away from accountability.

  From his New York Times obituary in 1999, the world learned that Dr. Theodor Benzinger, 94, invented the ear thermometer, a nominal contribution to the medical world. As for the military world, Benzinger’s research work for the navy was destroyed or remain
s classified as of 2013. Wernher von Braun, Arthur Rudolph, Kurt Debus, and Hubertus Strughold led the American effort to get man to the moon. The question remains, despite a man’s contribution to a nation or a people, how do we interpret a fundamental wrong? Is the American government at fault equally for fostering myths about its Paperclip scientists—for encouraging them to whitewash their past so that their scientific acumen could be exploited for U.S. weapons-related work? When, for a nation, should the end justify the means? These are questions that can only be answered separately, by individuals. But as facts emerge and history is clarified, the answers become more suitably informed.

  In addition to the ear thermometer, Theodor Benzinger left the world with the Planck-Benzinger equation, fine-tuning the second law of thermodynamics, which states that nothing lasts. Benzinger’s lifelong scientific pursuit was studying entropy—the idea that chaos rules the world and, like ice melting in a warm room, order leads to disorder.

  I prefer Gerhard Maschkowski’s take on what matters and what lasts. Maschkowski was the Jewish teenager fortuitously spared the gas chamber at Auschwitz because he was of use to IG Farben as a slave laborer at their Buna factory. I was interviewing Maschkowski one spring afternoon in 2012 when I asked him the question, “What matters, what lasts?” He chuckled and smiled. He pushed back the sleeve on his shirt and showed me his blue-ink Auschwitz tattoo. “This lasts,” he said. “But it is also a record of [the] truth.”