“Competition is fierce,” one observer put it mildly. Highly trained American teams would sneak into French, British, and Soviet zones in Germany and Austria to kidnap scientists. And the army, air force, and navy began “stealing from” each other in competing operations with code names like Backfire, Safehaven, Overcast, Lusty, and National Interest.
In the end, the United States came out the big winner. It captured prototypes of every conceivable war vehicle, weapon, and device—Walter submarines, thirty-nine different airplanes, partially assembled V-2 rockets, sophisticated bombsights. It took samples of poison gas and dismantled and reassembled whole chemical warfare labs. It appropriated nearly four hundred tons of documents and it microfilmed another four million pages, including patent applications.
While the highly funded and focused T-teams were finding, kidnapping, and interrogating German and Austrian scientists for their export value, the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) was wrestling with two interrelated tasks: to denazify more than 120,000 SS officers, Gestapo, and high-ranking military leaders in the American zone, and to find the suspected war criminals among them. In contrast to the planning, urgency, and organization of war spoils operations, both CIC tasks were underplanned, understaffed, underfunded, and underled.
On paper, denazification was simple. Find the SS officers, Gestapo, and high-ranking military officers, secure and interview them, then place them in one of five categories: major war crimes offender, offender, lesser offender, follower, and exonerated person. The CIC used the Seventh Army to conduct Nazi sweeps in the American zone under code names like Tally Ho, Lifebuoy, and Choo Choo.
The sheer magnitude of the effort was daunting.
So was the mandate to find suspected war criminals. Thousands of them had strolled out of makeshift and underguarded holding pens. They wandered back home or hitched rides on ratlines to the Middle East and South America. Furthermore, the Pentagon failed to design a system to locate and question the hundreds of thousands of war crimes eyewitnesses trapped in DP camps. There were no T-teams with specific targets, no mobile units to guide them, no top-priority status with the authority to commandeer. The task was impossible. And that was no accident.
Even before the war was over, the Pentagon approached the war crimes issue with amoral pragmatism. It instructed General Eisenhower, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, to arrest and hold all war criminals. Then it instructed him to
This clear, deliberate dichotomy between finding, shielding, and employing Nazi scientists with urgency, efficiency and capital on the one hand, and finding, exposing, and punishing war criminals with confusion, disorganization, and lack of resources on the other became the postwar mind-set of the Washington bureaucracy dominated by the military. It was the root of U.S. hostility toward finding and investigating Nazis hiding in America.
CIC investigators worked with dedication and speed. A U.S. denazification tally issued in September 1946— sixteen months after the war ended—reported that the CIC had registered and categorized more than eleven million Germans. Of those, more than one hundred thousand were eventually charged with war crimes. Few, if any, of the hundred thousand were Nazi collaborators or other war criminals living in DP camps in the American zone.
Needless to say, it wasn’t the prototype subs, airplanes, nerve gas, and weaponry that the United States lusted after, as useful as they were. The War Department wanted the scientists who had created them. Once it found them, it had to craft a subterfuge to sneak them into the United States. To cover their tracks, the military and the State Department sent covert agents dressed in army and air force uniforms to infiltrate the CIC in Europe. Their job was to “smoothly and conspiratorially” expunge the names of its targeted scientists from the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects (CROWCASS) and to make sure that the CIC did not issue any “derogatory information” reports on them. (
In approving the postwar military talent grab, President Truman made a clear distinction between Nazis and SS officers who had committed war crimes, and “normal” Nazis who had joined the party merely to advance their careers or who had accepted positions as a reward for their achievements. This latter group fell in the CIC category of “follower.”
Truman welcomed followers to the United States, and then authorized the military to make the scientist program public. Three months after the war ended, the Department of War issued a press release: “The Secretary of War has approved a project whereby certain outstanding German scientists and technicians are being brought to this country to ensure that we take full advantage of those significant developments which are deemed vital to our national security.” The War Department also released photos of smiling American and German scientists working side by side.
Other than short-lived shouts of anger from Jewish organizations that suspected there was more to the German scientists than science, Americans accepted the employment of German and Austrian scientists with can- do pragmatism. The old war was over. The new war had begun. It was time for all anticommunists to work together with determination and harmony to defeat the new enemy. Let’s put a man on the moon. And God bless America.
Thus began “the biggest, longest-running operation involving Nazis in our country’s history.” The air force got the biggest slice of the pie for its missile, space, and jet fighter program. The navy came in second.
Worried that other countries, especially the Soviet Union, would hire or kidnap valuable scientists, the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC)—the predecessor of the National Security Council—approved an expanded scientist plan in May l 946, eleven months after the war ended. In one of a series of top secret reports, SWNCC recommended that the United States bring up to one thousand German and Nazi scientists to America to work for the military as well as private industry, and to teach and conduct research in U.S. universities. SWNCC called the expanded program Operation Paperclip.
“It is the policy of the Government to exploit selected German and Austrian specialists in the United States, and thereby
In formulating that policy, SWNCC expressed a concern that the American public might suspect that Operation Paperclip condoned the use of Nazis war criminals. To forestall criticism and perhaps outrage, the committee ruled that any German or Austrian scientist who fell into CIC’s “automatic arrest category” (major offender) be barred from the program.
As a result, the Operation Paperclip recommendation that SWNCC sent to President Truman for his approval in August l 946 contained a tough anti-Nazi clause. “The War Department,” the top secret recommendation said, “should be responsible for…excluding from the program persons with Nazi or militarist records.” The mandate not only looked good on paper, it also provided plausible deniability to the White House and the Department of State in case Americans ever learned that their government was secretly employing Nazi war criminals.
In approving the SWNCC Paperclip recommendation, President Truman was either naive or duplicitous. The U.S. military establishment had no intention of excluding Nazi war criminals from the program. And to make sure that they could be employed, SWNCC created three giant loopholes. First, it gave the U.S. European military command the authority to remove the name of any Nazi or Nazi collaborator from the major offender category, rendering the exclusion clause impotent. Next, SWNCC declined to bar from Operation Paperclip the use of Nazi scientists in the
In effect, the Truman anti-Nazi policy was no policy at all. It was merely window dressing. If the military wanted a scientist who was a suspected Nazi war criminal, it had plenty of room to wiggle around the law. As a result, an estimated 80 percent of the scientists brought to the United States by the military to be employed by the military were former Nazis and SS officers. Among them were “some of the world’s vilest war criminals.”
