The Nazis Next Door (6 page)

The secret program began almost immediately after the war, and it would ultimately bring more than sixteen hundred German scientists to America. Within the Truman administration, the idea was controversial from the start. State Department officials were adamant in their opposition, particularly over the idea of importing specialists who had produced the deadly chemicals used in Hitler’s gas chambers. “We should do everything we consistently can to prevent German chemists
and others from entering this country,” warned one immigration official—to no avail. The military won out. In September 1946, President Truman gave the War Department the formal go-ahead to bring a limited group of Germany’s top scientists back to America and put what they knew to use. The operation would have to be kept secret. If word leaked out that the military was bringing home Nazi agents—Hitler’s “angels of death,” one State Department official called them in protest—the public fallout in America and in Europe could be disastrous. The look of shock was plain on the face of another State Department diplomat when he learned that the military was looking to bring up to a thousand scientists into the country. It was clear from his reaction that State Department officials did not have “any idea such a number was contemplated and that this proposed number was not considered in the President’s approval of a ‘few’ selected scientists,” a military officer recounted.

The recruiting program became known as Project Paperclip, so called because officers reviewing the files of possible Nazi recruits would use paperclips to attach their German war records to their American papers. Their Nazi records and their American ambitions were now neatly joined as one. Within months, military officials had drawn up a list of twenty-four thousand German candidates from which to choose. These were not just rocket scientists. These were doctors and biologists; engineers and metallurgists; even a nutritionist, a printing pressman, and a curator of insects from the Berlin Museum. Nor were they all great scientists. “Their technical skills are only mediocre,” a military officer wrote in assessing two rocket engineers assigned to an Ohio air base. One German scientist specializing in medical aviation, Dr. Konrad Schäfer, was brought to a military base in Texas even after Nuremberg prosecutors had linked him to Nazi medical atrocities. He was soon sent back to Germany—not because of his Nazi ties, but because he “displayed very little scientific acumen.”
The military could tolerate evidence of Dr. Schäfer’s possible war crimes, but not his technical incompetence.

Some of the Paperclip recruits, in fact, weren’t scientists at all. One, Herbert Axster, had been chief of staff to General Dornberger, the V-2 boss who earned Patton’s admiration. Axster was brought to America not because of any technological expertise—he was a lawyer by trade—but because of his management experience helping to run the Nazis’ missile plant at Peenemünde. He was as surprised as anyone to find himself bound for the United States. Imprisoned in Europe after the war and facing war crimes charges, he was startled to hear that he was heading to an air base in Texas with his colleagues von Braun, Dornberger, and other German scientists who had worked on the V-2 project. “I said, ‘Why? I’m not a technician.’” An American colonel explained: “The US Army needs to know how Pennemünde was organized so we can organize our own rocket program.”

Officially at least, any scientists who were active members of the Nazi Party under Hitler were banned. No war criminals need apply. “Generally speaking, these are outstanding men,” a military officer bragged in a memo. In practice, however, the supposed ban on ardent Nazis was a façade, and American military officials mocked the rules as meaningless. Bit by bit, the ban on Hitler’s hard-core loyalists was washed away in a sea of bureaucracy. The background checks on the scientists’ German affiliations were supposed to be completed before they were allowed into the United States, but for von Braun and hundreds of others, the reviews were not even started until long after the scientists were moved to housing at military bases around the country. Nazi Party affiliations would be allowed, the military finally decided, so long as the scientist submitted “a statement (of approximately one page in length) explaining such membership and extenuating circumstances, if any.” If a scientist’s first review came back negative, the military might simply do it again and change the result. “Ardent” Nazis suddenly became harmless ones.

Von Braun, the boy wonder of Germany’s V-2 rocket program, was typical of the changing fortunes experienced by the Nazi scientists. At the close of the war, he was classified as a “potential security risk” because of his deep ties to Hitler and to the Nazi Party as a decorated officer. Within months, however, his hiring as a rocket scientist was suddenly reclassified as vital to America’s national security. He was brought to Texas—along with his parents, his new bride, his brother, who was also a scientist at Peenemünde, and nearly a hundred members of his German V-2 team, now recongregated under von Braun at Fort Bliss.

Even with the standards for barring Nazi Party members virtually abandoned, military officials complained that their counterparts at the State Department and the Justice Department were still too slow to sign off on the scientists because of concerns about their Nazi records. Military officers fumed over the delays. The bureaucrats slowing the scientists’ arrivals needed to bring “an iota of realism” to their task and to recognize that German scientists with Nazi links would ultimately have to be let in, the military’s gatekeeper for the project, a Navy captain named Bosquet Wev, seethed in a memo in 1947. Echoing the views of other officers, the captain wrote: “In so far as German scientists are concerned, Nazism should no longer be considered a serious consideration from a viewpoint of national security when the far greater threat of Communism is now jeopardizing the entire world . . . To continue to treat Nazi affiliations as significant considerations has been aptly phrased as ‘beating a dead Nazi horse.’
Considerations such as these, which delay or prevent action being taken in the cases of scientists who can further the scientific research and development of the United States, are detriments which should be removed.”

Soon enough, there was not even the pretense of keeping out Nazis, ardent or otherwise. The Air Force brought Emil Salmon, an SA Nazi troop leader, to an Ohio air base as a jet engineer, even after he was convicted in a denazification court of torching a synagogue. The military said it was “cognizant of Mr. Salmon’s Nazi activities and certain allegations made by some of his associates in Europe, but desires his immigration in spite of this.”

And so they came: German chemists from IG Farben, the notorious chemical company that supplied the deadly gases for the Nazi gas chambers; the rocket scientists under Dornberger and von Braun at the missile-building slave camps at Peenemünde and Dora-Mittelwerk; doctors at concentration camps who practiced their own brand of medicine on prisoners; and hundreds more. The professionals were generally paid six dollars a day in America and given comfortable housing, a laboratory with research assistants, and the promise of citizenship if their work proved valuable. Family members were welcome to join them later, too. The scientists were elated.

Despite the military’s best efforts to keep the operation secret, word began leaking out within months of the arrival of the first batch of recruits in 1946. It was hard to hide a thousand scientists with German accents, even on a military base. As the State Department had warned, many Americans were outraged to learn that the military was bringing Hitler’s scientists to live as their neighbors at military bases from Florida to California. Some objected on national security grounds: the Germans couldn’t be trusted to stay loyal to America, they charged. Others voiced moral concerns; given their Nazi backgrounds, the scientists were “potentially dangerous carriers of racial and religious hatred,” read one letter of protest signed in 1946 by Albert Einstein, Norman Vincent Peale, and some three dozen other noted Americans. One critic put out a mocking notice in a magazine: “Memo to would-be war criminal:
If you enjoy mass murder, but also treasure your skin, be a scientist, son. It’s the only way, nowadays, of getting away with murder.”

With a backlash brewing, the military’s PR people promoted feel-good stories in the media about the new German immigrants. Reporters in Texas were invited to watch as the recruits waited at the El Paso train station, flowers in hand, to be reunited with their wives, children, in-laws, and, in at least one case, a German mistress. The postal service even put out a stamp commemorating the Paperclip scientists’ arrival at Fort Bliss in Texas. Such positive public images were essential, military officials believed, to counter the negative publicity generated by what one officer called “the natural Jewish bias against anything Nazi,” and to ensure that Paperclip stayed on track.

Only on rare occasions did a recruit’s wartime past surface. In 1952, influential newspaper columnist Drew Pearson wrote an article charging that one of the German medical scientists brought to Randolph Air Force Base outside San Antonio had approved “some of the ghastly medical experiments which the Nazis performed on hopeless victims.”
The scientist, Dr. Walter Schreiber, was implicated in exposing Polish girls to a gas form of gangrene. He had faced war crimes charges at Nuremberg, Pearson wrote. Yet the doctor was mysteriously “cleared” of the charges before the U.S. military brought him to America. Pearson’s revelations caused no major outcry, no calls for broader investigation or congressional hearings into German scientists brought to America; just a few short stories deep inside the newspaper, and a letter of protest from a group of Boston physicians who said that the Air Force’s employment of Dr. Schreiber was “a reflection not only of the moral standards of the medical profession but of the entire country.”

At first, the military offered a tepid defense of Dr. Schreiber. The colonel who shepherded Schreiber’s appointment insisted that the Air Force knew nothing about the horrific accusations unearthed by America’s own investigators at Nuremberg. Regardless, the German doctor was the only person qualified to do the kind of medical research he was conducting in Texas, the colonel said. The defense was short-lived. Truman’s people were unwilling to take the risk that a small, little-noticed news story involving a single Nazi scientist might mushroom into something much bigger that could sweep up hundreds of the newly arrived Germans. Within a few weeks of the column, the Truman administration announced that Dr. Schreiber was leaving America. The Air Force swooped him out of Texas—not to West Germany, where he might have faced trial for war crimes, but to safer confines in Argentina. Dr. Schreiber “indicated satisfaction with . . . his resettlement in Argentina,” according to a secret Air Force account of the long-distance relocation. But the Nazi doctor did have one complaint over his treatment by his American handlers. He “voiced displeasure” that the military failed to give him any advance notice of the Argentine plan and was annoyed to have to read about it in the newspapers first.

The occasional embarrassment did nothing to slow the swelling numbers of German scientists entering the country. Military officials did everything they could to ease their transition and welcome them. German scientists in Alabama called one neighborhood outside Huntsville “Kraut Hill” because so many of them had found a comfortable home in the émigré community there. Sure, there were the occasional jokes. American officers at the base would laugh about the incongruity of hearing the Alabama rocket scientists singing German beer songs with a hint of a southern drawl, or of seeing the German doctors gallivanting through the air base in San Antonio in cowboy hats and western boots. But the connection to Nazi Germany was more a curiosity than any sort of scarlet letter. Colonel Paul Campbell, an Air Force doctor who helped bring some three dozen German doctors and medical researchers to Texas, promised the scientists there that “the day they took out their first American papers, we would no longer refer to them as Germans
and would integrate them into our whole system, one way or the other.” They would be “bonafide members of our American community,” with their pasts safely behind them. And so they were.

Project Paperclip, as big as it was, was still just one pathway in America’s Nazi rat line. Working side by side with the scientists were hundreds of Nazi operatives used as spies in Europe and America by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. There was no secret order, no formal presidential directive authorizing America’s intelligence agencies to put these Nazis to work, at least not in the way that Truman and Eisenhower had done with the scientists. Opaque as always, America’s spy agencies never mimeographed application forms or established guidelines to supposedly ban ardent Nazis, the way the War Department had with Hitler’s engineers and doctors. But by the early 1950s, Allen Dulles at the CIA, J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, and a handful of other senior American intelligence officials had in place around the globe a formidable network of their own of loosely linked and far-flung ex-SS men and Nazi operatives. They were the spy agencies’ foot soldiers in the Cold War. In Europe, in the Middle East, in South America, and in the United States, hundreds of junior Karl Wolffs—ex-Nazis with ties to Hitler’s brutality who were seen, nonetheless, as a bulwark against the Soviets—were now working for the Americans.

The network grew of its own momentum. One ex-Nazi agent recruited to work for the United States would lead to the next, and the next; one anti-Communist spy ring made up of scores of ex-SS men would produce another, and another. The field was dense by the time Eisenhower, the former World War II hero, became president in 1953. From Munich to New York and points in between, hundreds of Nazi officers who were the nation’s sworn enemies just years earlier were now ostensibly on America’s side as spies, informants, and intelligence “assets”: fed and housed; paid and protected; dispatched and debriefed; code-named, cleansed, and coddled by their American handlers. That they had once worked for Hitler’s Third Reich was of little concern.