The Race for Nazi Science: Manhattan Project to Operation Paperclip

Hitler once proclaimed to Europe he would unleash ‘hitherto unknown, unique weapons’.[i] These came to be known as the Nazi Wonder Weapons or Wunderwaffe in German and were both an object of fear to the European populace and a tool of propaganda for the Nazi who emphasised their value in turning the tide of war.

In 1944 following the invasion of Normandy and the beginning of the end of the Nazi Reich, Allied taskforces were set up to tail the frontline and do two things: determine how prepared was the Third Reich was for Atomic, Biological and Chemical (ABC) warfare and capture anything that would assist the Allied effort. Several Allied taskforces were set up for this mission and they vied for information and assets: the joint British-U. S Alsos mission which was an offshoot of the Manhattan Project and the 30 Assault Unit, a group of British commandoes led by none other than Ian Fleming.[ii]

U.S. Army V-2 cutaway drawing showing engine, fuel cells, guidance units and warhead. Wunderwaffe included experimental rockets, nerve gas and a failed nuclear program.

As the Allies advanced through bombed French villages and closer to the German border these taskforces followed, searching amongst factories and interrogating captured soldiers. Some Wunderwaffe never went further than theoretical: Alsos found German nuclear scientists who confessed the atomic program had fallen apart (largely due to the fact that the physics department was made up of many Jews). Other areas proved much more advanced than the Allies such as rocketry. The British had undergone a relentless campaign of V rocket bombardments during early 1944, ‘buzz bombs’ as they were nicknamed brought unnerving fear due to the random targeting and powerful destructiveness. Though the casualties were few compared to the earlier Blitz the rocketry required for the engines was years ahead the Allies[iii] and the weapons chief Werner Von Braun was at the top of the list for Nazi scientists to be captured and interrogated.

By early 1945 on the Eastern front, as the Red Army had pushed further and further into Poland they discovered the horrors of the death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. These death camps were vast networks of slave labour, many whom toiled and died building the Nazi Wunderwaffe.

For V-2 rocket labourers this was the claustrophobic and filthy underground tunnels of Mittelwork or Middle Works, (Dora was the codename of the camp and sometimes also referred to Nordhausen which was the closest town). With no fresh air, water, sanitation or ventilation, workers laboured 12-hour days every day of the week. They died in droves. Later investigators determined half of the 60,000 workers died from these deplorable conditions. As Jacobsen notes:

Humans and machine parts went into the tunnels. Rockets and corpses came out. [iv]

Another Wunderwaffe was a chemical code named Trilon 83. As both fronts drew closer and closer to the German home territory mentions of Trilon 83 cropped up more and more in the documentation, the mystery scared some, could it be used to halt the advances of the Allies?

The production facility of Trilon 83 was near a small Western Polish town called Dyhernfurth (Polish: Brzeg Dolny) in an underground lab hidden by a forest of planted pine trees. The advance of the Red Army brought a frenzy of destruction of documents and prisoners forced on death march to Germany.

Berlin’s Spandau Citadel today. Tabun and sarin were also militarized here in the Third Reich.

So important was the secretive Trilon-83 that Nazi commandoes returned in an operation to scrub clean the facility and avoid the Russians using this technology in the future. Trilon-83 was the first nerve agent discovered: Tabun, a colourless and tasteless liquid and could kill with exposure to skin. Camp slaves had to wear bulky suits much like a deep-sea diver with a tube at the back pumping breathable air.

By March 1945 many of the Nazi scientists were planning what was to happen after the war, they could see the writing on the wall. Many destroyed documentation that implicated them in war crimes and other human rights abuses. Some like Von Braun and some of his colleagues hid caches of documents in an abandoned mine with prescience they could use this as leverage in negotiations. Others made plans to flee the country, through the growing ratlines or by U-boat. One Nazi U-boat, 234, was caught on the U.S east coast bound for Japan loaded with documentation on V rockets, experimental submarine stealth equipment, an entire ME 262 jet fighter, 540kg of uranium and the scientist Heinz Schlicke. Others like U-977 and U-530 made it as far as Argentina, fuelling conspiracy theories Hitler survived the war (see Chapter 3). Bafflingly there were several who did nothing, Kurt Blome, head of the BW program, was captured at a checkpoint in May.

Manhattan Project to Operation Paperclip

With the death of Hitler and the surrender of Germany the hunt for the remaining scientists was on. The Americans dismantled and transported as many V-2 rockets before Mittelwork became part of the Russian zone. Scientists were being recovered but many of the American high command was unsure what to do with them, they knew too much, and the war was still raging in the Pacific.

Gadget, the first nuclear weapon detonated by the U.S from the Manhattan Project.

It was with these questions General Eisenhower cabled to Washington:

“Restraint and control of future German scientific and technical investigations are clearly indicated but this headquarters is without guidance on the matter and is in no position to formulate long-term policy.”

What he was asking was whether these men were going to be prosecuted for war crimes, interned or should they be released. While these questions remained unanswered other departments had already employed Nazi scientists, Dr Herbert Wagner and Heinz Schlicke. Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson wrote to the Chief of Staff to the president:

“I strongly favor doing everything possible to utilize fully in the prosecution of the war against Japan all information that can be obtained from Germany or any other source…

These men are enemies, and it must be assumed they are capable of sabotaging our war effort. Bringing them to this country raises delicate questions, including the strong resentment of the American public, who might misunderstand the purpose of bringing them here and the treatment accorded them.”[v]

Later that month the Pentagon agreed on a temporary policy of employing German scientist “provided they were not known or alleged war criminals.” This suggested policy was roundly ignored, the lust for the advanced knowledge and experience of Nazi scientists led many departments to cover up the shocking human experiments and crimes against humanity many of these scientists were party to. Approximately 1,500 German and Austrian professionals were relocated to the U.S and the U.K, many of whom later became U.S citizens., some of these men were known to have performed concentration camp experiments or took part in the operation of concentration camps which led to thousands of deaths and misery.

Some of the most notable scientists taken were:

Werner Von Braun

Walter Schreiber

Kurt Blome

Otto Ambros

Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,

A man whose allegiance

Is ruled by expedience,

Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown,

"Nazi, Schmazi!" says Wernher von Braun.

Don't say that he's hypocritical,

Say rather that he's apolitical,

"Once the rockets are up,

who cares where they come down?

That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun.

-Tom Lehrer, Wernher von Braun

The Soviets ran a similar and much larger program titled Osoaviakhim. Finding themselves losing scientists to the American, French and British, the Soviets rounded up at gun point and deport thousands of German scientists and their families on October 22, 1946, many were aviation and rocket scientists previously part of the V-2 program in Nordhausen. Neufield contends while the U.S managed to capture the best technology and scientists the Soviet program provided much more to the Soviets given how far behind their science and technology was. In real terms this meant they became a threat to the U.S much sooner than expected. [vi]

The rush for Nazi and Japanese science laid the foundations of the Cold War, the capture of ABC weapon technology and science spurred a race for stronger and better technology to both defend and destroy.

The power of ABC weapons had been shown with the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and by the epidemics which rampaged across China unleashed by the Japanese. Thankfully the Nazi Atomic program never fully developed, nor did they use their stockpiles of the Tabun when launching their V-2 rockets against the British The Allies didn’t use their stockpiles of mustard gas on the Japanese either.

What the USSR and U.S did not realise was these weapons programs were a poisoned chalice. It led them to conduct secretive human experiments on their civilian populace and prisoners with chilling similarities to both the Japanese and Germans, sometimes with the advice from the same war criminals who sadistically tested on prisoners and civilians in death camps.

Both countries to tested atomic weapons across the Earth contaminating hundreds of thousands if not millions. Veterans were left irradiated and facing cancer, downwinders showed increased rates of cancer and some places are still unhabitable. Open air BW tests altered the microbiology of the region and provide inspiration for terrorist plots. The sites were left contaminated meaning costly clean-ups. Accidents from the release of these weapons killed hundreds of people and destroy crops and livestock causing disaster. The secretive nature of these experiments inspired a conspiracy culture that promotes distrust in institutions and erratic terrorism.

Both the stockpiled munitions the Allies produced and captured from the Axis proved to be so hazardous and costly to hold and were eventually dumped in the oceans around the world, this has left an environmental time bomb. CW tests disabled veterans much like the radiation tests and the psychological tests left an invisible stain on the psyche of nations around the world.

[i] Ibid. page 10

[ii] Jacobsen, Annie. 2015. Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America. New York: Little, Brown and Company. 2014. page 27

[iii] Imperial War Museums. The Terrifying German ‘Revenge Weapons’ of the Second World War. n.d. https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-terrifying-german-revenge-weapons-of-the-second-world-war.

[iv] Jacobsen, Annie. 2015. Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America. New York: Little, Brown and Company. 2014. Page 13.

[v]

[vi] Neufeld, Michael J. Overcast, Paperclip, Osoaviakhim - Looting and the Transfer of German Military Technology.In: Junker, Detlef. Gassert, Philipp. Mausbach, Wilfried. and Morris, David B.  (eds.) The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945–1990. Washington DC: Cambridge University Press. 2004. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139052443.