Annie Jacobsen, "Operation Paperclip"

annie jacobson is a journalist and is the author of area 51 her current book operation paperclip discusses the end of world war ii and the american government's decision to accept high-level german scientists inside its borders some of which had done monstrous things this decision accelerated u.s scientific capabilities but also brought into question its ethical standing so to talk about that please welcome annie jacobson how's the sound good uh thank you so much politics and prose for having me and welcome everyone i'm annie jacobson i'm going to talk to you tonight about operation paperclip and i really want to thank everyone for coming um it's really my favorite part of the book tour and really writing the book is just being able to look people in the eye that that read my book and uh and speak with them about it so i'm going to take you through about 60 slides and um tell you a little bit about operation paperclip and then i welcome your questions one of the things that people often ask me is why would i write about such a subject operation paperclip was a classified military program it had a public face so the idea was that you couldn't very well have sixteen hundred germans running around the united states in various military facilities or ultimately in academic institutions and not have an explanation why and so with the german scientists came a propaganda campaign to call them good scientists that may be the case there were sixteen hundred of them that may certainly be the case with some of them and i've actually had people at every one of my book reading so far who had a father or an uncle that was part of paper clip but what i will tell you is the men that i focused on um had very dark paths and i'm going to tell you a little bit about that so how did i report the story i was originally working on this book my first book area 51. when i came across these two aircraft designers and they were the horton brothers they designed this aircraft the horton all-wing five and you can see it looks remarkably like the b2 stealth bomber and when i first saw those two images next to one another i suddenly realized without very much more explanation how much technology we in fact got from the reich and i wanted to know more what i learned was that the while the horton brothers were overlooked for paper clip their boss was not this is their boss this is colonel siegfried nehemiah he was one of the reich's top ten pilots and he flew on spy missions this photograph here is kanameir about to fly over norway to choose bombing targets can nehemiah you see that's his paper clip photo there and when i learned nehemiah came to the united states i wondered how you could go from having herman goring as your boss as he was now keep in mind goring was in charge of the german air force the luftwaffe nehemiah was so important to goring that in documents he refers to him as my boy so the question for me in my mind was how do you have this as your boss and then suddenly have the pentagon as your boss i learned that when nehemiah retired from the u.s air force in the mid-70s he was given the department of defense distinguished civilian service award and that is the highest award that a scientist can get from the defense department and i wanted to know how this could be i tracked down one of nehemiah's grandchildren who courageously agreed to share the story of his grandfather with me including a box of papers that he had in the attic and one of the most interesting things that dirk nehemiah said to me and made me know that i wanted to write this story to research and report it was he said annie many of my family members say do not speak about siegfried's past but he being my age said you know a google search very quickly reveals that nehemiah was goring's right-hand man and he said he would rather know the truth about his grandfather than not know it and so that was one example of a seed planted that i knew there is more to be learned about operation paperclip i'm going to take you back briefly to the fall of 1944. this is germany there in dark blue and of course the allies have landed at normandy normandy they're going at germany this way the soviets are coming this way and immersed inside the army soldiers are a group of scientists led by a particle physicist named samuel goodsmith and that operation was sort of the precursor to paperclip it was called operation al sauce samuel goodsmith and his team have one mission that is to find out about what was known as abc weapons atomic biological and chemical they find out very quickly that hitler's atomic program is not what that we had feared that was lucky for us but as hitler told his war and weapons minister albert speer nuclear science is jewish science this is what hitler said and therefore that atomic program had not progressed the same way that the biological and chemical weapons had very quickly samuel goodsmit in a small hote in a small apartment in strasbourg france learns about this man dr kurt blum the deputy surgeon general of the reich and he also learns about this man dr walter schreiber the surgeon general of the third reich what good smith's fines and these papers that i looked at were remarkable because they're just a sort of seemingly benign correspondence between scientists the apartment belonged to a doctor named dr oygen haagen once a temperate man worked in the united states on a rockefeller foundation scholarship and hagen was writing to himmler and saying of the hundred prisoners you sent me a group of them died in transport please send more and this is a terrifying moment for operation el sauce because they realize that the reich is experimenting on humans from the concentration camps to push medical science in a manner that cannot be pushed if you're experimenting on rabbits and guinea pigs so dr blum and dr schreiber are now on the top of the target list for operation al sauce and ultimately paperclip there you have hitler and goring and of course the third horrible triad of this group of folks who are in the target eye of the allies is himmler and himmler is overseeing a vast network of state-sponsored slavery and it's the slaves from the concentration camps that are assembling the weapons so you have prisoners being experimented on for some for some of the programs and you have prisoners being used to build rockets and such for the other weapons programs as we're moving across germany all across the reich the allies are coming across hidden troves of treasure like this this is a famous photograph of gold but also in these caves allies are finding documents and they're finding weapons and this is one example this little innocuous looking entrance is actually the entrance to nordhausen which was the underground tunnel facility where warner von braun general dornberger and many other scientists who would later come to america are working to build the rockets for the reich so you see down on the bottom photograph those are train tracks the rocket parts would go in the slave laborers would build them and out of the tunnels on those trains would come v2 rockets and body parts this is the v2 rocket so one of our teams was sent in these men were sent to capture a hundred rockets and to ship them back to the united states so that we could fly them here at the white sands missile range but this is where you really see operation paperclip begin because also at the same time you have the scientists and you see that an intelligence officer the program sort of begins in bits and pieces and and one intelligence officer says we have the rockets but how about the scientists this is von braun this is dornberger and two others who i write about in in paperclip what's left out of the issue is that dornberger you can see here he's with himmler they're both wearing leather coats i find this photograph remarkable i was not able to get permission to publish it in my book i'm happy to show it to you here general dornberger went on and became a very important part of the paperclip program he worked for bell aircraft for years he had one of the highest clearances at the pentagon he was a recruiting officer for paperclip and nothing was ever mentioned of his past and this photograph was certainly kept hidden for a rather long time arthur rudolph george rickey and dornberger those are all their paperclip photographs part of what i write about in the book is how the u.s military was complicit and this is a great moral conundrum because we were complicit in needing these scientists to be put forth as the good germans as the benign scientists who somehow were hiding out from the from the reich but of course we know from the photograph with general dornberger that is a fiction and for example nearby at nordhausen was the buchenwald concentration camp and when i traveled to germany this to research the book you know this sign really comes came came across to me as as really remarkable and and something i thought about often it says zaina it's an old german proverb and it means does everyone get what they deserve and i often wondered as i was researching and reporting this question exactly that the scientists were taken to this castle ironically this had been gorings one of goring's luftwaffe headquarters it's outside frankfurt and when i went there also to speak to the old time caretaker he had lots of stories which i write in the book about what it was like when the u.s military took over and set up all the scientists that we were collecting throughout the ruins of the reich we set them up in this facility and we began to interview them these are a number of the scientists who were in it was called dust bat dustbin a little humor by the allies there but these are some of the scientists who were um kept there one of the scientists we couldn't find it first was dr ambrose ambrose i think is probably the most nefarious character that i write about in the book and i'm going to tell you briefly why ambrose was hitler's favorite chemist and i don't say that lightly i found a document in the national archives that i don't believe it had ever been been reported before it shows an award that ambrose was given by hitler of one million reichsmarks and the reason that ambrose was given that was because he was he invent co-invented sarin gas the a in sarin stands for ambrose but he also invented synthetic rubber for the reich and this was a very big deal to hitler tanks need treads aircraft need tires hitler knew the reich was running out of rubber and so when ambrose invented rubber the furor bestowed him with favor in the form of this giant financial reward ambrose was also put in charge of a slave labor factory none other than at auschwitz and this is an allied intelligence photo of the auschwitz-birkenau complex in june of 1944. it's a little hard to interpret to the naked eye but because it's from so high up but you see there's auschwitz up there it's labeled there's berkey now and down on the bottom you can just barely see it says auschwitz iii buna buna is the name for synthetic rubber and this was where where ambrose was manager and slaves who were spared the gas chamber some of whom i interviewed for the book were sent to buna to work most of them were worked to death of all the photographs that i found on my research and reporting none bothered me to the degree that this one did it was not the bodies stacked like cordwood that we all have seen and have horrified us but rather it was this and it's because of what that sign says it says company sporting club ig auschwitz and those are two of otto ambrose's colleagues fencing so after a day in the laboratory they would go for sport and fence and as it was explained to me by the academics at the fritz bauer institute who allowed me to publish this photograph they told me that the this sporting event would take place in the afternoons well within the site of the three large chimneys of the death camps crematoria that otto ambrose became part of paperclip is horrifying dr bloma captured by the allies begins talking he's the first high-ranking member of the third reich also close to hitler he wore the golden party badge which means he had favor from the fuhrer and he begins cooperating with the allies and tells them about atrocities mass sterilization and gassing of jews there's a tug of war going on the sign one group of scientists is extremely interested in dr blum he's in charge of hitler's biological weapons program he's been working on a bubonic plague weapon but there's a there's a tug of war going on because here you have dr leopold alexander who has been sent to germany not to try to find scientists interrogate them find out their knowledge and decide whether or not they should be part of operation paperclip but rather to look for men specifically science specifically doctors who might be tried at the nuremberg war crimes trials at the same time you have harry armstrong later the second surgeon general of the third reich armstrong is interested in enhancing pilot performance in the united states the next war will involve pilots who fly high fast and far and the reich harry armstrong knows is far advanced in pilot physiology at this point than the u.s army air force's and he wants those german doctors he teams up with dr hubertus strughold known as the father of space medicine we'll talk about strokehold a little bit later on um stroghold was the top man in luftwaffe medicine when i was doing an interview recently someone said well could people that were this high up not have known and the best analogy i can give you is imagine being a hedge fund manager today and trying to say that you're not interested in capitalism if you were to rise to the top of your field in the third reich you had knowledge of things and you had a commitment to an ideology that is almost impossible in my estimation to say that you didn't know nevertheless harry armstrong and hubertus struggled create a partnership in germany and they hire these men this photograph never published before richard kuhn is in the center a very famous nobel prize-winning um chemist and many other scientists who would come to the united states as part of operation paperclip to work in texas but before that happened there was a knock on the door in the institute where they were all set up to work in germany before their passage to the united states could be arranged and that was from as i told you dr leopold alexander he wanted these three for war crimes as he wanted dr theodore benziger um dr theodore benziger when i read about his obituary in the new york times published in 1999 when benzinger was 94. uh the the new york times louded his long career for the u.s navy as a doctor it talked about how he invented the ear thermometer but it left out entirely that dr theodore benziger was part of a small group of doctors that worked with himmler and when himmler would show films of medical murder experiments at the reich air ministry he had dr theodore benziger do the introductions so this is this kind of whitewashing i found astonishing and even more troubling when i looked deep into the nuremberg files i found out that dr theodore benziger was on the initial list to be tried at the doctor's trial and yet mysteriously just three weeks before trial he was released into custody of harry armstrong of the u.s army air forces and he was on his way to the united states part of dr alexander's role was to find witnesses to find the few survivors of those horrific concentration camp medical experiments and put them on trial so we had the doctor's trial there you see dr bloma in the center he would be acquitted and he would later become part of paperclip and there you see dr alexander with a witness who comes into the story later at the nuremberg doctors trial this is a one of the doctors you know someone once asked me did any of the doctors know each other and they absolutely did dr alexander part of the reason why he was chosen to be the chief medical expert for the nuremberg trials was that he had grown up in vienna and he left when the nazis took power so he was a fluent german speaker and he was astonished to figure out at the doctor's trial that he was in the same medical class with dr biegelbach carl holland rainer one of the few survivors of those experiments i tell this story in the book but there's so many moments that i came across that are just lost to history i couldn't believe that they had never i had never heard of them and they seemed to not have been written about anywhere carl holland rainer was the subject of the salt water experiments and i won't give you the details because they're gruesome you can read some of them in the book but holland rainer was so outraged at beaglebock who had performed those experiments on him he came into the nuremberg trials with a dagger hidden in his pocket and while he was on the witness stand he leapt off the the stand and he tried to stab a beaglebock and one of the nurenberg judges was so upset with him because he said we are here to show what democracy is all about that he sent poor colin carl hollenreiner back into the prison with the nazi doctors dr walter schreiber hold that thought he was absent from the doctor's trial he'd been captured by the soviets jumping over to another program briefly and quickly some of the men who worked for the u.s army really felt that this program was terrible and they didn't want to be working with nazi potential war criminals but there was also a soviet threat and they felt that it was perhaps the lesser of two evils other army officers really seemed to like these scientists with full knowledge of how complicit they had been in war crimes and that was very disturbing um general luke's here was one of them there he is holding an incendiary bomb and there he is um i found this actually in general luke's personal papers at the u.s army heritage institute in upstate pennsylvania and i'm going to speak for a second about reporting the story and how stories like this get reported there's sort of an idea that you just file a freedom of information act and magically all these documents appear and that's of course not the case i often think of myself a bit like a detective and that you have to really find your way to the story but when i saw this photograph of general luke seeming to enjoy himself at a cocktail party with hitler's chemist i decided to track down luke's personal papers which i found at the history institute and that's where i found out how to jump forward i found general luke's diaries and this is that incredible human element of it all where you know i keep a diary um maybe lots of you do and you sort of write like things maybe you're not supposed to write and uh general lukes wrote you know attended a conference with dr shiber classified matters and all along the department of defense had been telling me that sheber had never been part of paperclip that's sheber he was ss brigade fuhrer he served on reichsfielder ss himmler's personal staff he worked on concentration camps experiments he was a chemist there he is wearing the golden party badge i told you about that means he had favor from the fuhrer um but the reason that sheber was never known to be part of paperclip was because he was later hired by the cia and they were able to put a different classification on his papers so up until this point scheber's participation in this program was not known his courageous family members in germany also gave me some very interesting information which i report in the book but just to show you how high up shiber was and why it was necessary to keep him a very big secret there he is i couldn't get permission to publish this photograph i'm happy to show it to you here there he is shaking hands with himmler with hitler in the forest but ultimately i was able through the that sort of detective work and finding out about dr sheber's participation in paper clip and i was able to get that list and there it is that's the official list of all the high-ranking chemical weapons experts on hitler's roster who ended up working as part of paperclip and just a fascinating photograph of shiber that his family shared with me and that's when he was working for the cia so people often ask how could this have happened and um this is why you know there was a very real threat and that was the soviet union and the threat was thermonuclear war um very quickly the cold war heated up and all of those criminals that we had sent to prison well we needed germany as an ally and so john mccloy u.s high commissioner he left his position as president of the world bank and agreed to go to germany to serve as high commissioner and he released the majority of those convicted nazi war criminals they had been in landsberg prison those are the uh unmarked grave graves of the 486 who had been hung but he released a lot of them including ambrose i found this picture to be incredibly disturbing that's ambrose i told you the a for ambrose and sarin gas hitler's favor favorite chemist he was running the managing the auschwitz three buna factory um he was actually tried at nuremberg he was convicted of mass murder and slavery there he is in a nurnberg photograph laughing with his lawyers perhaps he had foresight and knew that he would be given clemency by u.s high commissioner john mccloy released and he would become later on contract with the u.s department of energy some of the doctors were such hot potatoes that was the actual term that they used if someone couldn't come to the united states and so they were sent to this facility outside frankfurt it was a black site i sort of think of it as the original post-war black site um and that is where we worked on enhanced interrogation techniques with soviet bloc prisoners ultimately this program would become known as the infamous mk ultra program but it began here much earlier than thought and lo and behold who were the two physicians at camp king dr schreiber released from the russians many thought he was a soviet mole and dr kurt bloma but the reason that blama got the position was because schreiber came to the united states and this was one of the most horrifying moments to to research and report was that dr schreiber whose specialty was actually lethal phenol injections it was a quick way to get rid of someone at a concentration camp he oversaw those experiments we knew it we couldn't prosecute him at nuremberg because he was uh in the soviet union and he actually was a witness for the soviet union at the nuremberg trials but now he was on the american team and he was sent to america to this place the u.s air force school of aviation medicine at randall field harry armstrong whose photograph i showed you he had set this place up this would become the bastion of era of u.s aerospace medicine ultimately and um when dr schreiber the former surgeon general of the third reich arrived in the united states and here's where circumstance plays into the story i really love when fate and circumstance work in a very interesting way that perhaps justice cannot schreiber there's a small article in a air force medical journal about him and it just describes him as an ex-soviet prisoner this is the former surgeon general of the third reich that's what it says about him a little hubris that he had agreed to or wanted to have this article there and who happened to read that journal at that exact time that moment in time in 1951 but dr leopold alexander the chief war crimes prosecutor from the doctor's trial and he was outraged and he called up harry armstrong who is now the surgeon general of the u.s air force and says this man is a nazi war criminal and there must be some mistake but there is no mistake schreiber schreiber's working among these guys 34 of whom are at randolph field working on u.s space medicine and they don't want to have to call attention to this and they do not want to have to let go of dr schreiber and so there's a dramatic tug of war behind the scenes um dr alexander decides to go to the press he calls up a reporter from the boston globe and says that schreiber's in the country but also as fate and circumstance would have it at this exact time i showed you this photograph earlier this is a witness from the ravensbrook concentration camp who was part of the medical experiments that schreiber was part of she just so happened to be coming to the united states at this time dr alexander and a colleague in boston are giving pro bono medical treatment to anyone who is a victim and a survivor of the nazi concentration camp medical experiments she's in the united states at this exact time just to give you an idea that's what her leg looked like from some of the experiments dr alexander and uh alexander hardy who is assistant prosecutor together wrote to president truman and said dr schreiber must be expelled and a little bit of justice this was the article in the new york times as he left for argentina and it says nazi physician leaving so in the end paperclip those sixteen hundred scientists had different trajectories in their life i write about what their lives were like in my book but of course the most famous among them was warner von braun and arthur rudolph who had been in charge of the uh underground weapons facility at nordhausen where 30 000 slave laborers died building the v2 rockets he was one of the few german scientists who was investigated by the department of justice not until 1983 but investigated nonetheless and rudolph was given a choice he could stand stay here and stand trial for war crimes or he could go back to germany and he chose to go to germany kurt davis the first director of the jfk space center toward the end of my research i was learning about debuts he wore the ss uniform to work he also in documents that i read through thoroughly uh turned over a colleague to the gestapo who had for making anti-hitler remarks and there's this incredible moment in that in the early part of paper clip where one group of american intelligence officers who are recruiting for paper clip find davis's information out and they notify the joint chiefs who and the the group working at the pentagon to get this different individual scientists here and they say debuts cannot be brought to the united states he deliberately and viciously turned over a colleague to the gestapo who went to prison but the joint chiefs say we need him and he comes to this day the national space club gives out the dr kurt davis award and there he is when i asked the director of that award what he says when a journalist asks him why do you continue to give out an award to an a known nazi he said that no one had ever asked him that question before i think ultimately einstein had it right einstein left germany as soon as the nazis took power and his quote was that the reason he had left was because science and justice were now in the hands of a raw and rabid mob of nazi militia there he is getting his u.s citizenship the majority of the 1600 operation paper clip scientists who came here were given that coveted u.s citizenship so i leave you with the last thought which is yadam das zaina that sign over the buchenwald gate uh we know from a document that warner von braun himself would go to the buchenwald camp and hand-pick slave laborers to work on the rockets so is that really true does everyone get what he deserves i sought out that question i sought out that answer from all the different individuals that i interviewed but the best answer that i got came from now 91 year old gerhard muschowski and as a teenager he was spared the gas chamber at auschwitz because he could work he became a slave laborer at buna at that factory that otto ambrose ran and i said gerhard you know is it true and what lasts and he smiled and he pulled back the sleeve of his arm and he showed me that blue ink auschwitz tattoo and he said this is what matters this lasts and it's a record of the truth i want to thank you all for coming tonight and i welcome your questions so i'm sure there are many questions just make your way to one of the microphones well thank you thank you very much i have two questions um i've also done a lot of this type of research in archives in your research did you come across any evidence that documents had been destroyed or you were denied documents and my second question is what does this say about allied densification efforts so the first part of the question absol i mean lost or missing is kind of a euphemism for something which i haven't quite figured out but otto ambrose would be the best case in point um otto ambrose who got that department of energy contract and i think i neglected to mention the worst part of the story was that when otto ambrose was given clemency by u.s high commissioner john mccloy his finances were fully restored so that one million reichsmarks bonus came back to him and i wanted to know how it was that otto ambrose came to the united states because he was a convicted nazi war criminal he came here i know twice possibly three times and so in filing freedom of information act requests with the state department those ambrose files of those travel documents he would have had to have been given special permission always came up lost or missing and the second part of your question just remind me if you would what does this say about allied denotification efforts i mean it was a a huge effort you know many people were imprisoned interrogated yes re-education in germany you know massive changes that occurred i mean just your comments and thoughts on the um sincerity of these efforts well um germany was divided up into four parts for the allies and of the part that we had which had 20 million germans uh u.s occupation authorities originally determined that there were 3.9 million indictable offenders they whittled down that figure to 970 thousand of that 970 000 ultimately 170 000 were tried in those denotification courts that you're speaking of 50 000 were held were given criminal sentences a lot of times it was work or paying a fine and of that just around a thousand were put in prison thank you um once the united states and allies decided that there was going to be west germany many nazis became part of the uh secret service intelligence service in germany in fact there's a general whose name i forgot he became yes he became the chief there so galen became the chief immediately after yes so um don't you think that they were not thinking about the victims of this man oh i think not anymore they were more interested in um acquiring the knowledge from the germans and also be strong to face the new enemy which was russia yes you're absolutely right and and and i i write about that at length in the book because the soviet threat was considered extreme much earlier than you know than we think it was really in the months after the war the joint intelligence committee that reported information to the joint chiefs of staff gave a document to the joint chiefs of staff and said we must prepare for total war that was the quote they used with the soviets and they said it will involve abc warfare atomic biological and chemical so we absolutely the position was we must get these scientists or the soviets will thank you for your wonderful talk um is there a statue of limitation on war crimes and are any of these people still alive today as far as i know all of the as far as i know all of the operation paper clip scientists have died um the statue of limitations that was a question that came up when dr schreiber when the when we were trying to get rid of him after this enormous press situation happened when the uh war crimes victim you know testified to the fbi that this was the schreiber from raven's book concentration camp a time magazine officer asked a time magazine journalist asked the head of the air force that that exact question you know and he said we're not going to start the nuremberg trials over so that sort of answers your question and that was in 1951 also were the mossad at all trying to get to these people does anybody know that having known that people out of argentina could they have not found them on the streets in the united states why was that so difficult i don't really deal with the mossad in my book but i mean there were programs going on all over the middle east as well yes yeah you mentioned uh the soviets were interested in in these scientists as well so there was some kind of competition so how successful uh may not be the right word but how did the efforts compare to the soviets that's that's a very important question i mean particularly with the rocket scientists because we knew the most about that uh prior to the end of the war and there was a real time crunch getting those german scientists out of nordhausen because that area was going to be in soviet control we got 114 of them the russians got 200 500 900 depends on which source of information used but here's the rub with that the soviets loathe the germans and vice versa because of the war for the most part and so the soviets treated their german scientists as second-class citizens whereas our german scientists the rocket scientists in particular were put up on a pedestal and you know given leadership positions in the program the german scientists were considered second-class citizens as far as the russians were concerned so much so that they squeezed them of information and then sent them back to germany at which point the cia created a program called operation dragon return and they sent cia officers into germany to gather up information and testimony from every german scientist who had been in the soviet union to find out what they knew about the soviet missile program which was almost nothing because they were kept from the information so the end story of that is the soviet program went very well without the help of the nazi scientists which which you must ask the question then did we really need them thank you i'm curious about um your access and researching you mentioned a few instances and just your talk about you know some not being allowed publishing and fifa access tonight and so if you could talk about the challenges of that and some more at length yeah i mean there is always a challenge but as a journalist you just or at least the way that i work is i just find my story however i can and ultimately if you keep searching and keep knocking on doors you you find out you find what you're looking for i mean one example i was really fascinated with dr blom and dr schreiber just because they were such high-ranking members of the reich dr blohm's son spoke to me invited me into his home he had never spoken with a journalist before he's in his 70s he shared lots of information with me very courageously you know we all have father issues that's a real father issue on the other hand dr ambrose uh you know and mindful of this money being restored to ambrose i i found out that ambrose had a villa in switzerland and i really wanted to know about that money so i tracked down ambrose's son um but he refused to speak to me you know we we had sort of a correspondence a little bit and when i asked him could you tell me a little bit about how you present this information to your family to your grandchildren for example who happen to live uh not far from where i live in los angeles um you know he ceased conversation with me and he said that is a private matter there's got to be more questions this looks like a curious group yes one has to keep in mind the standards of ethics back then were not what they are now they were human experiments in the united states for example where they inoculated african-americans and hispanics with the gonorrhea bacteria citizen so i don't think that that the people who brought the nazis here have very thick skins some of them probably are or antisemitic you know if you if you know some of these characters they may have been you know uh they don't quite meet our standards of today that i think is the great moral conundrum of paperclip and it's why the book is so long because i um you know i profile these 21 scientists and i try to tell you as much about each of them that i could learn starting with what they were doing during the war and let you come to your own conclusion about the morality of it all yes two simple questions one is uh where did operation paperclip come from and that name those two groups i was telling you about the those in germany who were in interrogating or rather interviewing the german scientists and preparing them for passage to the united states some of them were very much against the program and so as a means to kind of make sure that the files got to the right people the pro paperclip officers intelligence officers would fasten a paperclip it was not called paperclip then it was called overcast and they would fasten a paperclip onto the top of the file to kind of give an indication this file should go to the right person and that is how paperclip got its name and certainly the america the german scientists worked with side by side with american scientists some of whom probably fought in the war what was their reaction to working with a former nazi yes i mean that's an interesting question some of them were jewish i invented i invented i interviewed a lot of these scientists for my earlier book area 51 and the idea was that these were the good german scientists and you know on average on balance there would be no reason why you would not believe your government when they were that you worked for when they told you that so the joint chiefs knew about the truth behind the real information but very few people outside of that inner circle really knew thank you um actually that's a really good segue into my question um your last book was actually um criticized a little bit for having some fact checking issues and i was curious you know what kind of efforts you made to maybe do a bit better for this uh for your latest book well i don't know specifically what what you're referring to about the fact checking but um what i did for this book as i do for all of my research is source things in the back of the book the book is almost 600 pages and i think the last 110 or so are foot footnotes and i did that in area 51 as well so that other researchers can look at those notes and then of course use that as a means to do their own research sure but i mean i've read your last book and despite the the you know large number of footnotes i mean there's still things uh where you say you know curse lemay was the one responsible for not uh the decision not to bomb on um the bay of pigs i'm just curious if you've made an extra effort on on this one over your last book i think the standard is always the same that as a journalist you do your best to to work hard to make sure that the facts are specific and tie those to footnotes hi i'm wondering if you could envision an alternative history for a moment and answer one of the questions that you posed which was did we really need these scientists so can you imagine what would have happened if these guys had been prosecuted and never came to the united states to build this thing and and and in other words does the end justify the means um for that question you know i i like to interview current members of the u.s military because they're always the ones that remind me in an important way that as a journalist i'm never the one in the position of making national security decisions and so it's almost impossible to imagine that situation because the the people who were in charge of paperclip the joint chiefs and their staff were in that critical position of believing the intelligence that they were getting that the soviet union was preparing for total war and that we too needed to prepare for that so one would never want to stand on a pedestal and wag the finger back at history that's something i'm i'm always reminded and um and i do try i need hundreds of these scientists would five done thank you yeah yes yes um your book treats uh 21 uh special cases the the most notorious probably of the of the group did you get any sense of what the nature my grandfather was one of the less prominent paper clip scientists and he was a physical chemist to my knowledge he was not a war criminal but does your book talk about how the large majority of them were just actually good scientists or or well i would have no way of knowing if they were good scientists because i didn't look at their case their specific cases i understand these 21 were outrageous but um most of the relatives of the other uh 1519 are running around like me and and could tell you something about about those people i mean yeah i i you i would say you would need to research your own family history to really know for yourself what went on during the war i mean the best example i can give you is shiber's son claimed to have no idea that his father was on himmler's personal staff um it's not exactly dinner conversation after the war and so i don't know i mean but interestingly at every one of my readings as i said there has been someone who has been either a child or a grandchild of a of one of the scientists who came here on paper clips so no doubt there are other stories to be told well they were the propaganda work because my grandfather's family was treated very well in tennessee where they were relocated and um and he was given a later an institute at a university and and he had a he had a good career here in america he was more than 50 when he was brought over and he worked until he was 88 and published and and so forth and and i mean obviously to sell a book you have to focus on the most outrageous part of it but i'm just i'm just wondering if at any point in the book you you talk about this this this bigger picture well i do talk about the bigger picture but i'll give you another example kane meyer his grandson and i have this conversation often because nehemiah was guring's right-hand man so the immediate rush to judgment so to speak would be how horrible but what the grandson and i discuss is you know his dirk is his name and his position is you know my grandfather was an engineer and he's been called guilty by association so i understand and empathize with how complicated an individual story is um but the reason that i focused on these 21 was because i found them the most interesting and also because i could access their information another interesting postscript is that i had the son of one of these not mentioned in your book uh on my faculty um he had a phd from from berkeley and in his 40s he decided he wanted to go back and go to medical school and he went back to the university of um which took him as an overseas german i found the whole thing i told him i thought he was crazy at this point at that point in his life to have done this um but you know they they considered him german he clearly was on an american passport and had gone and been educated here thank you for sharing that yeah anyone else yeah i just wanted to share an observation also you were giving the figures about denotification and what it came down to and i certainly see the moral concerns involved on the other hand i've worked in iraq and in iraq with much less justification i think in many ways as you probably know they dismissed all of the civil servants who'd been ba party members even though that was basically a requirement and it hugely uh it was a great blow to the government and they dismissed all of the army and dismissing everyone with guns is even more questionable so i don't know i guess well what has our moral judgment gotten better or is the answer somewhere in between i think you're bringing up a great point which is that always in war there are these issues and we saw it then and we see it now and interestingly all of those one of the first things that the one group of us army intelligence officers did in iraq was capture all of saddam's documents because and you probably know this and they're now at the hoover institute and iraq says well we want our documents back but we're not going to give them back because out of the fear that what is in those documents shows who snitched on who and who was hung um and there again is the the same moral conundrum who owns those documents who gets to be in charge of their own past so two more questions yes yes yeah do you have any idea why the the germans the nokia scientists could not get the atom bomb i mean that a lot has been written about it and i would encourage you to read those books but the what little i touched upon because of course also learned quickly that that program was not advanced and i think in summation that the the idea that hitler thought it was jewish scientist jewish science really kept that program from blossoming the way that their chemical weapons program i mean they had enormous caches of chemical weapons that we came upon you know bombs that were supposed to be dropped by the luftwaffe loaded with sarin gas bunkers full of them hundreds of tons of this why these chemical weapons were not used remains a great mystery um but that atomic bomb issue is really many people have written about that and it's sort of the great mysterious good fortune that that program did not advance thank you mm-hmm yes i wonder if if you could elaborate on what still mystifies me is the most mystifying thing you've said and that these german scientists working side by side with highly educated uh people who grew up in in world war ii when we were brought up to believe that there was no such a thing as a good german and yet the and and yet they didn't suspect that these people who were also educated and also knew a great deal of science and also presumably worked in science in germany were they was not one person suspicious enough to say this these cannot be good germans who just uh lived in a cave during world war ii yes and i think that that is where the the us army in particular became complicit in that idea because they really helped promote that fiction and i think that if there's one thing i really sought out to do and i hope i did do with this book is help reconcile the past in terms of the fiction versus the facts thank you you

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 5,785,298

Rating: 4.691328 out of 5

Keywords: P&P TV, Washington DC, Politics and Prose, Authors, Books, Events, Operation Paperclip (Event), Annie Jacobsen, Nazi Germany, Holocaust

Id: HHs5M3pyd3Q

Length: 57min 3sec (3423 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 15 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/MuchoGrandeRandy]

This is not an untold story. It is well known.