A deal with the devil

Annie Jacobsen’s book is crammed full of distressing revelations about how America cynically co-opted Nazi war criminals to further development of weapons.

By MATT NESVISKY
Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America By Annie Jacobsen Little, Brown 575 pages; $30 (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America By Annie Jacobsen Little, Brown 575 pages; $30
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Thanks to George Clooney we all know about the “monument men,” the intrepid Allied team that scoured Europe at the end of World War II to rescue art stolen by the Nazis. It’s a safe bet that Clooney will not be starring in any Hollywood film about the amoral Allied men who scoured Europe at the end of the war for Nazi rocket engineers, medical researchers and biological and chemical weapons experts and hired them to continue their work, mainly in the US.
It’s not just that the story of Operation Paperclip lacks a handsome and rugged hero.
How many of us really want to know about the Yanks who carted off the infamous V-2 rockets – and their designers – and shot off hundreds of the missiles into the American desert? Or about the Americans, along with their German hirelings, who proceeded to manufacture thousands of tons of sarin, anthrax and other deadly poisons? Or about the hundreds of American servicemen who were exposed to chemical, biological and nuclear hazards – everything from deadly bacteria to Agent Orange to LSD to atomic blast fallout? Or about how every step of the way, the Americans, and to a lesser extent the British, were partnered with cynically opportunistic Germans who in many cases were clearly war criminals, including high-ranking officers of the SS, SA, and Wehrmacht, and even intimate associates of Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goering and Adolf Hitler? The film rights to “Operation Paperclip,” in fact, have been sold, but we’ll have to wait and see if it ever makes it to the silver screen; even in our cynical times this remains anything but a crowd-pleasing story. The saga is ignoble, shameful and often downright sickening. Much of this information has been revealed before, notably by such investigative journalists and researchers as Linda Hunt, Seymour Hersh, Robert Jay Lifton and Michael Bar-Zohar.
But who really wants to know that American military and intelligence agencies repeatedly turned a blind eye to the backgrounds of the war criminals they so eagerly coveted – men who had conducted fiendish medical experiments on prisoners, worked to death thousands of slave laborers in hellish underground munition and rocket factories, and developed weapons of mass destruction for the Nazi regime they so enthusiastically served? The American journalist Annie Jacobsen has done much original research to update this sorry story, although it must be said that she fails to get a handle on all of it. Her list of “principal characters” at the end of her book numbers nearly 100, and easily another hundred or more names figure in her pages; because the author had access to very few of the principals – most are no longer alive – none is especially well delineated.
It doesn’t help that her characters have names like Shafer, Scharff, Schaub, Schenck, Schieber, Schlicke, Schlidt, Schneikert, and Schrader, as well as no fewer than five Schreibers. The same goes for the scores of overlapping, competing, and frequently reconstituted and renamed government agencies, usually identified by a bewildering series of acronyms like JIC, JIOA, JCS, DEFSIP, CROWCASS, CIOS, CIC, FAS, FIAT, OMGUS, OSI, OSS, and OSRD. Nor is “Operation Paperclip” particularly well organized, as it loops back on itself several times in an attempt to portray parallel developments in the recruitment of different categories of scientists.
Still, what Jacobsen has assembled is one appalling account. How could the Allied military, intelligence, scientific and diplomatic communities defend such a program? Justify it they did, at least to themselves. First, they maintained that because Nazi aircraft design, rocketry, flight medicine and bioweaponry were decades ahead of their Western counterparts, they needed that knowledge of German “wonder weapons” to defeat Japan. At the same time they claimed that if the US and the UK did not co-opt Nazi scientists the Russians would do so, and the Russians, many believed, were gearing up to launch World War III.
Then it was the cold war, the arms race, the missile gap, the space race, the strategy of deterrence – plenty of reasons. Commerce secretary Henry Wallace even argued that using the German scientists would mean the eventual creation of 60 million American jobs. But the fact that the authorities made enormous efforts to keep the backgrounds of hundreds of Nazi scientists contracted by Operation Paperclip secret from the public (and even from president Harry Truman and Congress) surely signifies knowledge that this was a deal with the devil.
The msot famous of these Nazi scientists was Wernher von Braun, the urbane, champagne-sipping SS-Sturmbannführer (major) who would later direct America’s Saturn moon project and who was glamorized in Disney television films about the space program. By that time von Braun had also become a US citizen and a born-again Christian. (To my eternal shame, as a teenage journalist I once shook hands with von Braun, who all his life denied any knowledge that thousands of slave laborers were worked to death assembling his V-1 and V-2 rockets.) Then there was von Braun’s fellow SS officer Kurt Debus, who went from V-rocket engineer at Peenemünde to director of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. And Dr.
Hubertus Strughold, who among other things studied epileptic children strapped into highaltitude pressure chambers. And Dr. Konrad Schafer, who forced concentration camp inmates to drink seawater. And Dr. Kurt Blome, who worked on mass distribution of bubonic plague, and Erich Traub, who worked on weaponizing rinderpest and hoof and mouth disease for wiping out enemy cattle.
And Otto Ambros, co-inventor of sarin and even deadlier poison gases. Others engaged in such lethal experiments as giving camp inmates only cellulose to eat, or freezing them to death and attempting to revive them.
These and hundreds of others always vigorously denied ever engaging in war crimes and were given whitewashed backgrounds and lucrative contracts under Operation Paperclip. Special mention too should be made of the IG Farben industrial complex, which had employed many of the more than 1,600 German scientists to receive Operation Paperclip contracts. During the Third Reich, Farben was one of the largest corporations in the world. It had a hand in everything from the production of nerve gas and Zyklon B to the use of slave labor in factories at Auschwitz.
To be sure, some US State Department officials balked at issuing visas and citizenship applications to ex-Nazis. In most cases, however, military and intelligence personnel managed, in the name of national security, to overcome such bureaucratic squeamishness and get their scientists.
Official policy was that “no known or alleged war criminals should be brought to the United States,” but this policy was flagrantly ignored or otherwise circumvented.
Still, the truth has a way of bubbling to the surface, and if “Operation Paperclip” has anything like a George Clooneyesque hero, it might be Dr. Leopold Alexander, an American Jewish neurologist, born in Vienna and educated there and in Berlin before immigrating to the US in 1933. Following his service in World War II, he became a US Army investigator of Nazi medical war crimes and for many years afterwards remained a relentless investigator and critic of Operation Paperclip.
Others, including Albert Einstein, Rabbi Stephen Wise, the Federation of American Scientists and the great muckraking columnist Drew Pearson were among the early opponents of the clandestine program, and the volume of criticism would slowly grow over the decades. The protests resulted in a few ex-Nazis being sent back to Germany.
In one instance in 1952, because Walter Schreiber, the former Third Reich surgeon general, feared prosecution in Germany, the Joint Chiefs of Staff helped him resettle in Argentina.
Maybe another hero in this story – and I never thought I’d write these words – was Richard Nixon, who, in 1969, unilaterally ended the 26-year program of biological weapons research and had the American stockpiles destroyed. Some years later some 412,000 chemical bombs, mines and rockets, some of them already leaking sarin nerve agent, were destroyed – at a cost of $30 billion.
Annie Jacobsen’s “Operation Paperclip” is crammed full of distressing revelations, much of them recently acquired under her Freedom of Information petitions. Much about the program, however, remains classified. One dreads what might be revealed in the future.