Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America
This month I’ve been looking at some of the nefarious crap our government has gotten up to over the years, making this weeks book Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America by Annie Jacobsen.
In the closing days of WWII, as the allied forces of Russia in the east, France, England, and America in the West, started closing in on Third Reich forces, the various powers started scrambling to claim what they could of the Reich scientists for themselves. And the information that was unearthed as the various forces moved through Germany was truly alarming…not JUST because of the horrific treatment of the concentration camp inmates, but because that utterly inhuman and inhumane treatment had led to some truly impressive leaps in medicine, engineering, and science. I mean, it’s EASY to advance medicine when you don’t have any ethics and a clear dictate from your entire chain of command, up to and including the head honcho, aka Adolf Hitler, that the people being experimented on aren’t even people at all. They’re untermenschen…subhuman.
In the years immediately after the war…and I mean, from the time Hitler put a bullet in his own brain…the rush was on. And America would ultimately offer more than sixteen hundred of them contracts to continue the work they had been doing for the Nazis, but for America. Jacobsen whittles down that list to twenty-one specific men, who were so high up in the Nazi regime, that I believe every single one has been tried for their activities during the war. As Jacobsen spells out: “The men profiled in this book were not nominal Nazis. Eight of the twenty one…at some point worked side by side with Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, or Hermann Göring during the war. Fifteen of the twenty one were dedicated members of the Nazi Party; ten of them also joined the ultra-violent, ultra-nationalistic Nazi Party paramilitary squads…; two wore the Golden Party Badge, indicating favor bestowed by the Führer; one was given an award of one million reichsmarks for scientific achievement.”
So no…no matter how much each of them twenty one denied their party affiliations, they were not nominal…meaning in name only. They were hard core, central to the party, members, some of them were party members since the party started. So they had in turn, earned loyalty from Hitler, Himmler, or Göring.
Now, it’s easy to assume the US Government just opened the doors and welcomed them in with open arms. And there are certainly those who, as Jacobsen put it, saw only the scientist, and not the idealogue behind the scientist.
But there were many more who pushed back against this monstrous push, and fought back when they could to ensure those who made the move to America, were later removed from her shining shores when they were discovered to be living here.
Among the heroes…and that’s not ironic, I mean literal heroes who fought back against this bizarre chapter in American history, is Dr. Leopold Alexander, he was one of the post war investigators who consulted during the Nuremberg trials and co-authored the Nuremberg codes afterwards. In 1951, Dr. Alexander is working in Boston, and he gets called by the International Rescue Office that is working to provide medical assistance for camp survivors, one of whom, Janina Iwanska, is known to Alexander. Janina had been a witness during the doctors trials at Nuremberg. Now, as Alexander is preparing for her arrival, he spots a small note in a medical journal that Walter Schreiber has just joined the staff of the US Air Force School of Aviation Medicine in Texas. This is a name Alexander knows well, and so does Iwanska when she arrives in America. Experiments done on Iwanska by Dr. Gebhardt had been done so at the direction of Schreiber.
Alexander, being the good American he is, reached out to the Massachusetts Medical Society and advised them that the USAF has now hired a Nazi…and not a nominal one, but one of the major players, who should absolutely have been executed, but managed to escape death by being picked up by the Russians first. Russia had put Schreiber forward as a witness against Dr. Kramer and Dr. Holzlöhner. Schreiber eventually “escaped” the Russians. That’s put in quotes because there is plenty of evidence that he was actually slipping intelligence to the Russians. The CIA…yes, Operation Paperclip quickly slipped from being purely military and the newly formed CIA got in on the action early…they swore up and down that Schreiber was working for them and was under control.
Anyways, the military and MMS came back and said basically, there’s nothing to see here, Schreiber was one of the “good nazi’s” if there could be said to be such a thing, and Schreiber would be allowed to practice medicine in the United States. Alexander knew that to be absolute bullshit, so he quietly tipped off the Boston Globe. This is back in the day when journalists actually took pride in their work, followed a news story in to the ground. Schreiber eventually fled to Argentina.
So, who was Schreiber? How bad was he? Why would we not want him in America? SS-Schutzstaffel Brigadeführer Walter Schreiber was the chief of the armaments supply office in the Speer Ministry, he was the liaison to the industrial production of tabun and sarin gas. He was on Himmler’s personal staff. Tabun is a chemical reagent that causes central nervous system malfunction and is universally fatal at low doses. Sarin is similarly toxic. Schreiber was the man to make sure both were produced in industrial scales, ostensibly for use on the battlefield. America was so far behind on the matter of chemical and biological weaponry that they desperately wanted people who could help us catch up quick. Even if those people were Nazi’s.
They felt the same way about explosive ordinance, which is why they brought over Wernher von Braun, Herbert Axster, Kurt Debus, Walter Dornberger, Georg Rickhey, Walter Riedel, Arthur Rudolph. Now, you might think…ok? And. These are engineers, not chemists, not doctors, we also have engineers who were designing bombs and rockets, and missiles. I mean, yeah these guys were Nazi’s, but everyone needs to feed their families, and judging by our own engineering pools, they’re basically just math geeks, the tail end of the STEM acronym.
Well….not quite. The engineers used slave labor, provided courtesy of the concentration camp system, to manufacture the things they mathed up in their engineering labs. And Jacobsen recounts one horrific incident where the engineers decided the inmates were not working hard enough, and hung thirteen of them from a crane at the factory, leaving the bodies up until they started to decompose.
Now, even while paperclip was ongoing, this was not secret. It kept leaking out, to universally negative reviews. But for all that, the people walking the halls of power, the unelected officials who run our country, the deep state as outlined by Edward Snowden, they were making great strides forward in research in weaponry, space flight, medicine, biological and chemical warfare. So the deep state hid the worst excesses they were aware of, buried it, and admitted that yes, we hired Nazi’s…but only the nominal Nazi’s. Only the ones who were forced to join the party to feed their families.
And from these Nazi scientists….we got NASA. No joke. We also got Agent Orange. We got an enormous stockpile of ICBM’s, chemical and biological warfare elements, which Richard Nixon dismantled during his presidency. We learned tremendous amounts about what the human body can withstand.
We got thalidomide. You may or may not remember from history that in the 1950’s and 60’s there was a new miracle drug to treat morning sickness in pregnant women, that resulted in over 10,000 babies being born with severe birth defects. Missing limbs, flippers for arms, missing ears. When it was approved for use in England, initially, the medical community there had been told that human studies had already been completed, but the research backing that had been lost in the war.
Now…when I tell you that one of the doctors included in Operation Paperclip was Otto Ambros, an IG Farben chemist, co-discoverer of sarin gas, and Buna synthetic rubber, the recipient of that one million reichsmarks mentioned at the beginning of this review, was the advisor to Chemie Grünenthal, the marketer of thalidomide, and was on the board of directors for that same company, and was the manager of IG Farben’s slave labor factory at Auschwitz and the manager of the Dyhernfurth poison gas facility….well, as they said, the documents regarding human trials of thalidomide had been lost or destroyed during the war. And this is who we invited into America, post WWII.
In keeping with the other books this month, drugs were of course mentioned. While the chemist who first identified LSD was not German, and certainly not a Nazi, Albert Hofmann was Swiss, and the company he worked for sold LSD to the Russians. Which caused panic and caused the CIA to start experimenting. MKUltra got it’s start with Operation Paperclip scientists.
As the truth has slowly leaked out, the honors these men were awarded, plaques on buildings and awards in their name, have been slowly reversed. Except for by those who see the scientist, not the ideologue. Jacobsen’s is not the first book to be written on Paperclip, and an earlier book written in the 1980’s by CNN reporter Linda Hunt…again, back when reporter’s actually did their jobs.
This book was a fascinating, fast read, with quick snap shots of the atrocities that happened, without letting them become the overwhelming focus of the book. Because as awful as the holocaust was, this book is not directly about that. It’s about America’s complicity in shielding the incredibly guilty mass murderers who implemented the Holocaust, for her own benefit. I wish I could say I was scandalized, but with all the reading I’ve done over the last four years, this doesn’t even slightly shock me.
