“A Picayune Detail:” Nazi Science Heads West
Werner von Braun (in suit) with the leadership of the Wehrmacht at Peenmunde, outside the Nazi slave labor camp for V-1 and V-2 rockets.
As Allied forces crossed the English Channel during the D-Day invasion of June 1944, some 10,000 intelligence officers known as T-Forces were right behind the advance battalions. Their mission: seize munitions experts, technicians, German scientists and their research materials, along with French scientists who had collaborated with the Nazis. Soon, a substantial number of such scientists had been picked up and placed in an internment camp known as the Dustbin. In the original planning for the mission, a prime factor was the view that German military equipment – tanks, jets, rocketry and so forth – was technically superior and that captured scientists, technicians and engineers could be swiftly debriefed in an effort by the Allies to catch up.
Then, in December 1944, Bill Donovan, head of the OSS, and Allen Dulles, OSS head of intelligence operations in Europe operating out of Switzerland, strongly urged FDR to approve a plan allowing Nazi intelligence officers, scientists and industrialists to be “given permission for entry into the United States after the war and the placing of their earnings on deposit in an American bank and the like.” FDR swiftly turned the proposal down, saying, “We expect that the number of Germans who are anxious to save their skins and property will rapidly increase. Among them may be some who should properly be tried for war crimes, or at least arrested for active participation in Nazi activities. Even with the necessary controls you mention, I am not prepared to authorize the giving of guarantees.”
But this presidential veto was a dead letter even as it was being formulated. Operation Overcast was certainly underway by July 1945, approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to bring into the US 350 German scientists, including Werner Von Braun and his V2 rocket team, chemical weapons designers, and artillery and submarine engineers. There had been some theoretical ban on Nazis being imported, but this was as empty as FDR’s edict. The Overcast shipment included such notorious Nazis and SS officers as Von Braun, Dr. Herbert Axster, Dr. Arthur Rudolph and Georg Richkey.
Von Braun’s team had used slave labor from the Dora concentration camp and had worked prisoners to death in the Mittelwerk complex: more than 20,000 had died from exhaustion and starvation. The supervising slavemaster was Richkey. In retaliation against sabotage in the missile plant – prisoners would urinate on electrical equipment, causing spectacular malfunctions – Richkey would hang them twelve at a time from factory cranes, with wooden sticks shoved into their mouths to muffle their cries. In the Dora camp itself, he regarded children as useless mouths and instructed the SS guards to club them to death, which they did.
This record did not inhibit Richkey’s speedy transfer to the United States, where he was deployed at Wright Field, an Army Air Corps base near Dayton, Ohio. Richkey went to work overseeing security for dozens of other Nazis now pursuing their research for the United States. He was also assigned the task of translating all of the records from the Mittelwerk factory. He thus had the opportunity, which he used to the utmost, to destroy any material compromising to his colleagues and himself.
Georg Rickhey arrest photo from 1947 for his role in running the Mittelwerk, the Nazi slave labor camp that produced V-1 and V-2 rockets.
By 1947, there was enough public disquiet, stimulated by the columnist Drew Pearson, to require a pro forma war crimes trial for Richkey and a few others. Richkey was sent back to West Germany and put through a secret trial supervised by the US Army, which had every reason to clear Richkey since conviction would disclose that the entire Mittelwerk team now in the US had been accomplices in the use of slavery and the torture and killing of prisoners of war, and thus were also guilty of war crimes. The Army, therefore, sabotaged Richkey’s trial by withholding records now in the US and also by preventing any interrogation of Von Braun and others from Dayton: Richkey was acquitted. Because some of the trial materials implicated Rudolph, Von Braun and Walter Dornberger, however, the entire record was classified and held secret for forty years, thus burying evidence that could have sent the entire rocket team to the gallows.
Senior officers of the US Army knew the truth. Initially, the recruitment of German war criminals was justified as necessary to the continuing war against Japan. Later, moral justification took the form of invoking “intellectual reparations” or, as the Joint Chiefs of Staff put it, as “a form of exploitation of chosen rare minds whose continuing intellectual productivity we wish to use.” Endorsement for this repellent posture came from a panel of the National Academy of Sciences, which adopted the collegial position that German scientists had somehow evaded the Nazi contagion by being “an island of nonconformity in the Nazified body politic,” a statement that Von Braun, Richkey and the other slave drivers must have deeply appreciated.
By 1946, a rationale based on Cold War strategy was becoming more important. Nazis were needed in the struggle against Communism, and their capabilities certainly had to be withheld from the Soviets. In September 1946, President Harry Truman approved the Dulles-inspired Paperclip project, whose mission was to bring no less than 1,000 Nazi scientists to the United States. Among them were many of the vilest criminals of the war: there were doctors from Dachau concentration camp who had killed prisoners by putting them through high altitude tests, who had frozen their victims and given them massive doses of salt water to research the process of drowning. There were the chemical weapons engineers, such as Kurt Blome, who had tested Sarin nerve gas on prisoners at Auschwitz. There were doctors who instigated battlefield traumas by taking women prisoners at Ravensbrück and filling their wounds with gangrene cultures, sawdust, mustard gas, and glass, then sewing them up and treating some with doses of sulfa drugs while timing others to see how long it took for them to develop lethal cases of gangrene.
Among the targets of the Paperclip recruitment program were Hermann Becker-Freyseng and Konrad Schaeffer, authors of the study “Thirst and Thirst Quenching in Emergency Situations at Sea.” The study was designed to devise ways to prolong the survival of pilots downed over water. To this end, the two scientists asked Heinrich Himmler for “forty healthy test subjects” from the SS chief’s network of concentration camps, the only debate among the scientists being whether the research victims should be Jews, gypsies or Communists. The experiments took place at Dachau. These prisoners, most of them Jews, had salt water forced down their throats through tubes. Others had salt water injected directly into their veins. Half of the subjects were given a compound called Berkatit, which was supposed to make salt water more palatable, though both scientists suspected that the Berkatit itself would prove fatally toxic within two weeks. They were correct. During the tests, the doctors used long needles to extract liver tissue. No anesthetic was given. All the research subjects died. Both Becker-Freyseng and Schaeffer received long-term contracts under Paperclip; Schaeffer ended up in Texas, where he continued his research into “thirst and desalinization of salt water.”
Hermann Becker-Freising as a defendant in the Medical Case Trial at Nuremberg.
Becker-Freyseng was given the responsibility of editing for the US Air Force the massive store of aviation research conducted by his fellow Nazis. By this time, he had been tracked down and brought to trial at Nuremberg. The multivolume work, entitled German Aviation Medicine: World War II, was eventually published by the US Air Force, complete with an introduction written by Becker-Freyseng from his Nuremberg jail cell. The work neglected to mention the human victims of the research, and praised the Nazi scientists as sincere and honorable men “with a free and academic character” laboring under the constraints of the Third Reich.
One of their prominent colleagues was Dr. Sigmund Rascher, also assigned to Dachau. In 1941, Rascher informed Himmler of the vital need to conduct high-altitude experiments on human subjects. Rascher, who had developed a special low-pressure chamber during his tenure at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, asked Himmler for permission to have delivered into his custody “two or three professional criminals,” a Nazi euphemism for Jews, Russian prisoners of war and members of the Polish underground resistance. Himmler quickly assented and Rascher’s experiments were underway within a month.
Rascher’s victims were locked inside his low-pressure chamber, which simulated altitudes of up to 68,000 feet. Eighty of the human guinea pigs died after being kept inside for half an hour without oxygen. Dozens of others were dragged semi-conscious from the chamber and immediately drowned in vats of ice water. Rascher quickly sliced open their heads to examine how many blood vessels in the brain had burst due to air embolisms. Rascher filmed these experiments and the autopsies, sending the footage along with his meticulous notes back to Himmler. “Some experiments gave men such pressure in their heads that they would go mad and pull out their hair in an effort to relieve such pressure,” Rascher wrote. “They would tear at their heads and faces with their hands and scream in an effort to relieve pressure on their eardrums.” Rascher’s records were scooped up by US intelligence agents and delivered to the Air Force.
The US intelligence officials viewed the criticism of people like Drew Pearson with disdain. Bosquet Wev, head of JOIA, dismissed the scientists’ Nazi past as “a picayune detail”; continuing to condemn them for their work for Hitler and Himmler was simply “beating a dead horse.” Playing on American fears about Stalin’s intentions in Europe, Wev argued that leaving the Nazi scientists in Germany “presents a far greater security threat to this country than any former Nazi affiliation they may have had or even any Nazi sympathies which they may still have.”
A similar pragmatism was expressed by one of Wev’s colleagues, Colonel Montie Cone, head of G-2’s exploitation division. “From a military point of view, we knew that these people were invaluable to us,” Cone said. “Just think what we have from their research – all of our satellites, jet aircraft, rockets, almost everything else.”
First page of a telegram denouncing the recruitment of Nazi scientists under Operation Paperclip sent to President Harry S. Truman on December 30, 1946 by the Council Against Intolerance in America, signed by Albert Einstein and others.
The US intelligence agents were so entranced with their mission that they went to extraordinary lengths to protect their recruits from criminal investigators at the US Department of Justice. One of the more despicable cases was that of Nazi aviation researcher Emil Salmon, who during the war had helped set fire to a synagogue filled with Jewish women and children. Salmon was sheltered by US officials at Wright Air Force Base in Ohio after being convicted of crimes by a denazification court in Germany.
Nazis were not the only scientists sought out by US intelligence agents after the end of World War II. In Japan, the US Army put on its payroll Dr. Shiro Ishii, the head of the Japanese Imperial Army’s biowarfare unit. Dr. Ishii had deployed a wide range of biological and chemical agents against Chinese and Allied troops, and had also operated a large research center in Manchuria, where he conducted bio-weapons experiments on Chinese, Russian and American prisoners of war. Ishii infected prisoners with tetanus; gave them typhoid-laced tomatoes; developed plague-infected fleas; infected women with syphilis; and exploded germ bombs over dozens of POWs tied to stakes. Among other atrocities, Ishii’s records show that he often performed “autopsies” on live victims. In a deal hatched by General Douglas MacArthur, Ishii turned over more than 10,000 pages of his “research findings” to the US Army, avoided prosecution for war crimes and was invited to lecture at Ft Detrick, the US Army bio-weapons research center near Frederick, Maryland.
Under the terms of Paperclip, there was fierce competition not only between the wartime allies but also between the various US services – always the most savage form of combat. Curtis LeMay saw his newly minted US Air Force as certain to prompt the navy’s virtual extinction and thought this process would be sped up if he were able to acquire as many German scientists and engineers as possible. For its part, the US Navy was equally eager to snare its measure of war criminals. One of the first men picked up by the Navy was a Nazi scientist named Theodor Benzinger. Benzinger was an expert on battlefield wounds, expertise he gained through explosive experiments conducted on human subjects during the waning stages of World War II. Benzinger ended up with a lucrative government contract working as a researcher at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.
Through its Technical Mission in Europe, the Navy was also hot on the trail of state-of-the-art Nazi research into interrogation techniques. The Navy’s intelligence officers soon came across Nazi research papers on truth serums, this research having been conducted at Dachau concentration camp by Dr. Kurt Plötner. Plötner had given Jewish and Russian prisoners high doses of mescalin and had watched them display schizophrenic behavior. The prisoners began to talk openly of their hatred of their German captors and to make confessional statements about their psychological makeup.
Dr. Kurt Friedrich Plötner, a Nazi medical medical doctor who conducted human experimentation on Jews and Soviet prisoners of war in German concentration camps and was recruited by the CIA under Project Bluebird.
American intelligence officers took a professional interest in Dr. Plötner’s reports. OSS, Naval Intelligence and security personnel on the Manhattan Project had long been conducting their own investigations into what was known as TD, or “truth drug.” As will be recalled from the description in Chapter 5 of OSS officer George Hunter White’s use of THC on the Mafioso Augusto Del Gracio, they had been experimenting with TDs beginning in 1942. Some of the first subjects were people working on the Manhattan Project. The THC doses were administered to targets within the Manhattan Project in varied ways, with a liquid THC solution being injected into food and drinks, or saturated on a paper tissue. “TD appears to relax all inhibitions and to deaden the areas of the brain which govern the individual’s discretion and caution,” the Manhattan Project security team excitedly reported in an internal memo. “It accentuates the senses and makes manifest any strong characteristic of the individual.”
But there was a problem. The doses of THC made the subjects throw up and the interrogators could never get the scientists to divulge any information, even with extra concentrations of the drug.
Reading Dr. Plötner’s reports, the US Naval Intelligence officers discovered he had experimented with some success with mescalin as a speech- and even truth-inducing drug, enabling interrogators to extract “even the most intimate secrets from the subject when questions were cleverly put.” Plötner also detailed research into mescalin’s potential as an agent of behavioral modification or mind control.
This information was of particular interest to Boris Pash, one of the more sinister figures in the CIA cast of characters in this early phase. Pash was a Russian émigré to the United States who had gone through the revolutionary years at the birth of the Soviet Union. In World War II he ended up working for OSS, running security for the Manhattan Project, where, among other activities, he supervised the investigation into Robert Oppenheimer and was the prime interrogator of the famous atomic scientist when the latter was under suspicion of helping leak secrets to the Soviet Union.
In his capacity as head of security, Pash had supervised OSS officer George Hunter White’s use of THC on Manhattan Project scientists. In 1944, Pash was picked by Donovan to head up what was called the Alsos Mission, designed to scoop up German scientists who had been involved in atomic, chemical and biological weapons research. Pash set up shop at the house of an old prewar friend, Dr. Eugene von Haagen, a professor at the University of Strasburg, where many Nazi scientists had been faculty members. Pash had met von Haagen when the doctor was on sabbatical at Rockefeller University in New York, researching tropical viruses. When von Haagen returned to Germany in the late 1930s, he and Kurt Blome became joint heads of the Nazis’ biological weapons unit. Von Haagen spent much of the war infecting Jewish inmates at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp with diseases, including spotted fever. Undeterred by the wartime activities of his old friend, Pash immediately put von Haagen into the Paperclip program, where he worked for the US government for five years, providing expertise in germ weapons research.
Kurt Blome as a defendant in the Medical Case Trial at Nuremberg. Blome conducted biological weapons research on Jewish concentration camp prisoners. After the war, he worked for the CIA’s MK-Ultra team and the US Army Chemical Weapons Unit.
Von Haagen put Pash in touch with his former colleague Blome, who was also speedily enlisted in the Paperclip program. There was an inconvenient hiatus when Blome was arrested and tried at Nuremberg for medical war crimes, including the deliberate infecting of hundreds of prisoners from the Polish underground with TB and bubonic plague. But fortunately for the Nazi man of science, US Army Intelligence and the OSS withheld incriminating documents they had acquired through their interrogation. The evidence would not only have demonstrated Blome’s guilt but also his supervising role in constructing a German CBW lab to test chemical and biological weapons for use on Allied troops. Blome got off.
In 1954, two months after Blome’s acquittal, US intelligence officers journeyed to Germany to interview him. In a memo to his superiors, H. W. Batchelor described the purpose of this pilgrimage: “We have friends in Germany, scientific friends, and this is an opportunity to enjoy meeting them to discuss our various problems.” At the session, Blome gave Batchelor a list of the biological weapons researchers who had worked for him during the war and discussed promising new avenues of research into weapons of mass destruction. Blome was soon signed to a new Paperclip contract for $6,000 a year and flew to the United States, where he took up his duties at Camp King, an army base outside Washington, D.C. In 1951, von Haagen was picked up by the French authorities. Despite the tireless efforts of his protectors in US intelligence, the doctor was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to twenty years in prison.
Boris Pash, head of security for the Manhattan Project and later head of the CIA “networks” program PB-7, which conducted kidnappings, interrogations and assassinations.
From the Paperclip assignment, Pash, now in the newborn CIA, went on to become head of Program Branch/7, where his ongoing interest in techniques of interrogation was given ample employment. The mission of Program Branch/7, which came to light only in Senator Frank Church’s 1976 hearings, was to oversee CIA kidnappings, interrogations and killings of suspected CIA double agents. Pash pored over the work of the Nazi doctors at Dachau for useful leads in the most efficient methods of extracting information, including speech-inducing drugs, electroshock, hypnosis and psychosurgery. During the time Pash headed up PB/7, the CIA began pouring money into Project Bluebird, an effort to duplicate and extend the Dachau research. But instead of mescaline, the CIA turned to LSD, which had been developed by the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman.
The first CIA Bluebird test of LSD was administered to twelve subjects, the majority of whom were black, and, as the CIA psychiatrist-emulators of the Nazi doctors at Dachau noted, “of not too high mentality.” The subjects were told they were being given a new drug. In the words of a CIA Bluebird memo, CIA doctors, well aware that LSD experiments had induced schizophrenia, assured them that “nothing serious or dangerous would happen to them.” The CIA doctors gave the twelve 150 micrograms of LSD and then subjected them to hostile interrogation.
After these trial runs, the CIA and the US Army embarked on widespread testing at the Edgewood Chemical Arsenal in Maryland, starting in 1949 and extending over the next decade. More than 7,000 US soldiers were the unwitting objects of this medical experimentation. The men would be ordered to ride exercise cycles with oxygen masks on their faces, into which a variety of hallucinogenic drugs had been sprayed, including LSD, mescalin, BZ (a hallucinogen) and SNA (Sernyl, a relative of PCP, otherwise known on the street as angel dust). One of the aims of this research was to induce a state of total amnesia. This objective was attained in the case of several subjects. More than one thousand of the soldiers who enlisted in the experiments emerged with serious psychological afflictions and epilepsy: dozens attempted suicide.
One such was Lloyd Gamble, a black man who had enlisted in the air force. In 1957, Gamble was enticed to participate in a Department of Defense/CIA drug-testing program. Gamble was led to believe that he was testing new military clothing he was testing new military clothing. As an inducement to participate in the program, he was offered extended leave, private living quarters and more frequent conjugal visits. For three weeks, Gamble put on and took off different types of uniforms, and each day in the midst of such exertions was given, on his recollection, two to three glasses of water-like liquid, which was in fact LSD. Gamble suffered terrible hallucinations and tried to kill himself. He learned the truth some nineteen years later when the Church hearings disclosed the existence of the program. Even then, the Department of Defense denied that Gamble had been involved, and the cover-up collapsed only when an old Department of Defense public relations photograph surfaced, proudly featuring Gamble and a dozen others as “volunteering for a program that was in the highest national security interest.”
This is adapted and updated from a chapter in Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press.
