Corps, arrived at Dora a week after Private Galione discovered it and the site had been secured. Starver pretty much knew what to expect at Mittelwerk based on intelligence provided by Otto von Bolschwing and other informants. The liberation of prisoners was not his objective. The V-2s were, and Starver didn’t have much time. The Soviet army was less than two weeks away and eager to claim the spoils in its postwar zone.
Starver and his crew picked the tunnels clean of partially assembled V-2s, fully assembled V-1s, rocket parts, and machinery. An informant led him to the mine where von Braun had buried his blueprints. Soldiers dug them out. Then they loaded the loot on a train, blew up any buildings the Soviets might find useful, and chugged off. When the Soviets finally arrived at Dora in early July, they found Mittelwerk stripped. It was one of the biggest heists of the war, and Starver laughed with his spoils all the way to the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico.
Private John Galione wasn’t laughing. To his relief, the army did not court-martial him, for fear that a trial would publicize the Dora atrocities and the role that von Braun and other Paperclip scientists played in them. Instead, the army swore him to silence. Galione took his secret to the grave—with one exception. He told his story to his daughter, who published it in 2004, nearly sixty years after her father discovered the hidden camp. Testimonials in the book from Galione’s Timberwolf colleagues substantiate his story.
Von Braun and his colleagues on the V-2 project—SS Major General Walter Dornberger and Arthur Rudolph —all eventually came to the United States as part of the Paperclip program. Because they were never actually tried for war crimes, evidence and eyewitness testimony against them has never been fully explored. What is known about their role at Dora is, therefore, sketchy but damning.
All three were responsible for the use and abuse of the slave laborers they needed to do their jobs: as production director of Mittelwerk, Rudolph needed slaves to assemble the V-2s; as chief rocket designer, von Braun needed slaves to deliver V-2s for testing; and as chief rocket military officer, Dornberger needed perfected V-2s to launch against the Allies. All three sat in on meetings where the use of slave laborers was discussed. All three supported the decision to use them, first at Peenemunde, then at Camp Dora. From time to time, all three asked for more skilled laborers. All three visited the tunnels to check on excavation progress and witnessed the abuse of prisoners, as Albert Speer had. Rudolph permanently moved to Mittelwerk in January 1944. Dornberger and von Braun spent chunks of time there. All three witnessed the hangings. And like Bishop Trifa, all three would later argue: “But I never killed anyone.”
There were several Camp Dora trials in Germany. In the end, five Nazis were hanged and more than twenty received prison sentences. For his part in approving the use of slave laborers, among other crimes, Albert Speer— who also never killed anyone—was sentenced to twenty years in prison. He served his full term and was released.
The United States brought von Braun and Rudolph to the White Sands Proving Grounds immediately after the war. Then it sent them to the space center in Huntsville, Alabama, to spearhead NASA’s man-in-space program.
Like his friend von Braun, Dornberger had surrendered to the Allies. He was imprisoned and questioned by the British, then released to U.S. Army intelligence, which had asked for him. He worked for the CIC in Germany, then for the U.S. military at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, with a yearly salary of $8,004, the equivalent of about ten times that today. The U.S. Air Force transferred him to NASA’s guided missile program in Huntsville, where he became a member of von Braun’s team. Later Dornberger went to work for Bell Aircraft.
When Dora survivors began publishing memoirs and Paperclip was finally making news in the early 1980s, the spotlight focused on Rudolph. Von Braun and Dornberger were already dead. Rather than face a public deportation trial for immigration fraud, Rudolf struck a deal with U.S. prosecutors. Like Hermine Braunsteiner, he agreed to voluntarily relinquish his U.S. citizenship and move to Germany if the United States would not prosecute him. Once Rudolf was settled in Hamburg, the German government declined to try him for war crimes, claiming that the evidence provided by U.S. prosecutors and investigators was insufficient.
The government knew that von Braun was a dangerous man. The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, which oversaw Operation Paperclip, warned in a secret 1947 memo that von Braun posed “potential or actual threats to the security of the United States.” In spite of his war criminal background, von Braun was awarded the National Medal of Science and the President’s Award for Distinguished Service, the highest honor the nation confers on its civil servants. NASA gave Rudolph medals for Exceptional Service and Distinguished Service. West Germany awarded Dornberger the Eugen Saenger Medal, named after a famed German space scientist. All three died free men.
Some may argue that the use of Nazi war criminals to protect Americans from the Soviet Union was a distasteful but necessary compromise. After all, truth and morality are the first casualties of war. Others will counter that by all human standards, the United States crossed a moral divide that even the most pragmatic American would find difficult to justify.
The fact is that, long before it put Nazi doctors on trial at Nuremberg for medical experiments on humans at Dachau and Auschwitz, the U.S. military was conducting similar medical experiments on its own servicemen. To continue and advance those experiments, it hired some Nazi war criminals under the Paperclip project and put them to work at secret locations.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The experiments on U.S. soldiers began in the early 1920s at the Naval Research Laboratory in Anacostia, a section of Washington, D.C., where the military maintained a gas chamber not unlike the Nazi gas chambers at Dachau. Servicemen were conned into volunteering as guinea pigs, then given a dose of mustard gas. The “volunteers” were never told the true nature of the experiments or warned of the dangers.
Unlike the Nazis, who didn’t care if they killed their victims for the sake of science, American doctors and scientists were more sensitive. They worked hard to bring their victims to the point of death, without crossing the line, for a pragmatic reason. They didn’t want the public to know what they were doing behind barbed-wire fences or in hideaways in the woods. They could always cover up an occasional mishap by explaining that “he died during a training exercise.” But hundreds of deaths?
The U.S. Army also built a gas chamber at its Edgewood Arsenal, camouflaged deep in the woods of Maryland near the Chesapeake Bay. In 1941, the arsenal was under the command of the 2nd Special Chemical Battalion, which included Companies B and C and a “medical detachment.” The Edgewood battalion was part of an offensive chemical warfare unit created in 1917 by the War Department.
While Nazi doctor Sigmund Rascher was experimenting on Dachau prisoners in his Skyride Machine and ice tanks, American doctors and scientists were giving sailors like Nathan Schnurman heavy doses of mustard gas at Edgewood.
When the navy put out a call in 1940 for sailors to test a new line of summer clothing, seventeen-year-old Schnurman volunteered. He had just finished basic training at the naval station in Bainbridge, Maryland, on the Susquehanna River just north of Baltimore. The three-day pass the navy offered as a reward was too sweet for the young sailor to pass up.
Schnurman and four other volunteers, who were never told where they were going, boarded a bus and headed south. After about an hour on mostly back roads, the bus turned onto a dirt lane winding through the woods. It stopped in front of two Quonset huts. The ground was covered with snow. There was no sign of life, not even a barking dog. Attached to one of the huts, like an afterthought, was a smaller structure.
Army soldiers led Schnurman into a Quonset and dressed him in protective clothes, rubber boots, and a gas mask. Then they led him through a steel door and locked him inside a bare, windowless, ten-by-fifteen-foot concrete chamber. There was no place to sit.
As Schnurman stood inside, wondering why he was wearing a gas mask if he was testing new summer clothes, technicians released a fifty-fifty mixture of sulfur-mustard gas and lewisite, which contains arsenic, known to cause heart attacks. Both gases, which are vesicants, or blistering agents, are absorbed into the body through the lungs and the skin. They burned moist tissue—sweaty areas like skin folds and testicles, lungs and mucous
