Review by Choice Review
This is a compelling and important book tracing the employment of ex-Nazi scientists, doctors, and technologists in the US. Freelance journalist Jacobsen (Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base, 2011) traces the origins of Project Paperclip, a program started shortly after WW II to offer selected members of the Nazi science and technology establishment the opportunity to work for the US government. The author draws on an impressive collection of primary sources, expanding and building on previous studies by Clarence Lasby, Linda Hunt, Vivien Spitz, and Michael Neufeld. Many of the Project Paperclip transplants (most notably, rocketeer Wernher von Braun) subsequently rose to the highest levels of US science and technology. But the program also enabled some having strong Nazi sympathies to mask and distort their role's as scientists, physicians, and technologists serving the Nazi state. This included individuals such as engineer Arthur Rudolph and medical researcher Hubertus Strughold, who participated in the exploitation, and even murder, of concentration camp prisoners and slave laborers. Revelatory, sobering, and occasionally deeply moving, this is popular science history at its very best. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. R. P. Hallion Hallion Associates
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
AMONG THE TROPHIES of the Second World War captured by Allied intelligence agents were Nazi scientists and their research on biological and chemical weapons. In a classified memorandum titled "Exploitation of German Scientists in Science and Technology in the United States," the Joint Chiefs of Staff described these men as "chosen, rare minds whose continuing intellectual productivity we wish to use." Such intellectual spoils were not to fall into Soviet hands. In 1945, Operation Overcast (renamed Operation Paperclip for the paper clips attached to the dossiers of the most "troublesome cases") began. More than 1,600 Germans were secretly recruited to develop armaments "at a feverish and paranoid pace that came to define the Cold War." Although some of these men had been Nazi Party members, SS officers and war criminals, they were valued as vital to American national security. Thus it was O.K., American government officials reasoned, to ignore these scientists' roles in developing biological and chemical weapons, in designing the V-2 rockets that shattered London and Antwerp and in the countless deaths of concentration camp inmates who fell victim to medical experiments at Dachau and Ravensbrück. The journalist Annie Jacobsen's "Operation Paperclip" is not the first unveiling of the program. The New York Times, Newsweek and other media outlets exposed Paperclip as early as December 1946. Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt and Rabbi Steven Wise publicly opposed the program, and according to a Gallup poll, most Americans at the time considered it a "bad" idea. But Jacobsen's book is the first on the topic to appear since President Clinton signed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in 1998, which pushed through the declassification of American intelligence records, including the F.B.I., Army intelligence and C.I.A. files of German agents, scientists and war criminals. Jacobsen's access to these documents, along with her research in various special collections and her interviews with former intelligence personnel and relatives of the scientists, make her study the most in-depth account yet of the lives of Paperclip recruits and their American counterparts. Jacobsen tracks 21 of these Nazi scientists and technicians. Eight of her subjects had worked directly with Hitler, Himmler or Göring; 15 were active Nazi Party members; 10 served in paramilitary squads like the SA and SS; and six were tried at Nuremberg. A few familiar figures pop up, including several pioneers in space exploration - Wernher von Braun, Hubertus Strughold, Walter Dornberger and Arthur Rudolph. The "classified body of secrets and lies" behind Operation Paperclip is complex and crowded, and in some places the narrative becomes muddled, as infamous Nazis and American intelligence operatives appear alongside present-day historians and archivists who are unnecessarily cited to provide basic facts. To her credit, Jacobsen deftly untangles the myriad American and German government agencies and personnel involved, though not without repetitious reminders of who is who. More gripping and skillfully rendered are the stories of American and British officials who scoured defeated Germany for Nazi scientists and their research. One well-known find was the Osenberg list of thousands of German scientists and facilities, which was retrieved from a toilet at Bonn University. Another was a huge cache of tabun (a sarin-like chemical). While searching the I.G. Farben laboratories on the German-Polish border, British soldiers uncovered 175 forested bunkers storing aerial bombs with a powerful organophosphorus nerve agent. They called in American Army chemists, who tested the chemical and found that just a drop on the skin would kill a rabbit in minutes. In 1945, 530 tons of tabun were shipped to various locations in the United States including Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. There, Jacobsen writes, American soldiers became unknowing guinea pigs for Dr. L. Wilson Greene, an American. In a gassing chamber, soldiers were exposed to low levels of tabun. Greene was pleased with the effects: Though the soldiers were "partially disabled" for one to three weeks, they eventually recovered. Thus nerve agents and hallucinogenic drugs could serve as more "gentle" weapons, immobilizing the enemy but, Greene hoped, avoiding the "wholesale killing of people or the mass destruction of property." Greene assigned his colleague, the German chemist Fritz Hoffmann, to research other toxic agents for military use. Hoffmann (who died in 1967) studied everything from street drugs to Mongolian hallucinogenic mushrooms, and may have contributed his research to the development of Agent Orange. Hoffmann's daughter remembered that her father was interested in producing a substance that could defoliate trees in Vietnam "so you could see the enemies." In an interview with Jacobsen, she remarked: "Agent Orange turned out not only to defoliate trees but to cause great harm in children. Dad was dead by then, and I remember thinking, Thank God. It would have killed him to learn that. He was a gentle man. He wouldn't hurt a fly." American intelligence agents, Jacobsen argues, were blinded by brinkmanship. Some became consumed by the search for weapons and were double-crossed by German scientists. One such man was Gen. Charles E. Loucks, chief of intelligence for chemical warfare stationed in Heidelberg. So dedicated was Loucks that he found the task of securing the German arsenal of chemical weapons for his country to be "more interesting than going down to Paris on weekends." He became charmed by the notorious SS Brig. Gen. Walter Schieber, who eventually worked as a chemist for the American Army's Chemical Corps and then for the C.I.A. Schieber turned out to have been a Soviet mole and international weapons dealer, as Jacobsen discovered in the declassified files. THERE ARE FEW satisfying explanations in Jacobsen's account of this "tawdry group of amoral war opportunists, many of whom were linked to war crimes." In the end, it is not clear who was exploiting whom - the Nazi scientists or their American recruiters. What is clear is that contemporary public opinion had it right: Operation Paperclip was a bad idea. By shining light on the human, ethical and monetary costs of the program, Jacobsen's book reveals just how bad. Nazi scientists were generously remunerated for developing biological and chemical weapons whose cleanup and disposal took decades and cost approximately $30 billion. American experimentation on humans continued during the Cold War in violation of the Nuremberg Code. A lethal chemical might have been developed for warfare, with terrible consequences. Jacobsen ends her study by asking Gerhard Maschkowski, a Jewish survivor of the I.G. Farben camp at Auschwitz, "What matters, what lasts?" In response, Maschkowski reveals his blue-ink tattoo. Yet certain truths are obscured in Jacobsen's disturbing account. She writes that the Germans didn't use any chemical or biological weapons in World War II. Although they may not have deployed such weapons on the battlefield, the Germans did use carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide (Zyklon B, a pesticide) in mobile gas vans and gas chambers. In 1942-43, the Allies threatened retaliation if the Germans used chemical weapons. Apparently this warning applied only to Allied soldiers in combat and civilians in Allied cities, not to the Jews, Soviet P.O.W.s and others who were murdered in Auschwitz, Birkenau and other Nazi extermination sites. WENDY LOWER is the author of "Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields," a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 9, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* By the end of 1945, the alliance of the Western powers with the Soviet Union had frayed, and the basic outlines of what would become the Cold War had taken shape. At the same time, military, scientific, and political leaders in the U.S. had become acutely aware of the value of German scientists responsible for great advances in rocketry and biological research under the Nazis. So, in August 1945, President Truman authorized the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), a division of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), to aggressively recruit German scientists to come to the U.S. and to work for various government-affiliated programs. Truman had stipulated that members of the Nazi Party were not to be included. As Jacobsen, an investigative journalist, illustrates, the JIOA adroitly sidestepped Truman's directive through an intense program of fraud and deception. Documents were forged or altered, wartime activities were covered up, and, in some cases, entirely new identities were created, all in the service of our national interest. Some of these men were only marginal Nazis, but some were fervent true believers directly responsible for war crimes. This is an engrossing and deeply disturbing expose that poses ultimate questions of means versus ends.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
As comprehensive as it is critical, this latest expose from Jacobsen (Area 51) is perhaps her most important work to date. Though Americans are quick to remember the United States' heroic feats in WWII, they tend to be more amnesic (or allergic) toward some of our nation's shadier activities in the effort-one of which seems to have been forgotten altogether. For just as some Nazis awaited trial at Nuremburg, others-namely prominent, potentially useful scientists-were secretly smuggled into the country by the U.S. government to help prepare for an ostensibly impending "total war" with the Soviets. In fact, even an appearance at Nuremburg didn't rule out a trip to the States. Needless to say, what to do with potentially useful war criminals posed an unusual predicament. If such a claim sounds dubious, Jacobsen persuasively shows that it in fact happened and aptly frames the dilemma in terms of "Who would be hired, and who would be hanged?" Rife with hypocrisy, lies, and deceit, Jacobsen's story explores a conveniently overlooked bit of history the significance of which continues to resonate in the national security issues of today. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
As World War II was coming to an end in Europe, American military planners, intent on finishing the war in the Pacific and already anxious about a Soviet army occupying much of the continent, undertook a secret program to recruit the Nazi scientists responsible for Germany's advanced weaponry. This plan, which came to be called Operation Paperclip, brought experts in the fields of rocketry and chemical and biological warfare into the highest reaches of U.S. defense development and planning while systematically hiding their often criminal pasts. Jacobsen, through exhaustive research in government archives and using documents newly declassified through the Freedom of Information Act, follows the participants in Operation Paperclip, perhaps most notably Wernher von Braun, dwelling at length on the moral ambiguity of the program: Did the goal of defeating Japan and deterring the Soviet Union justify embracing war criminals? As read by the author, the narration is uneven but often gripping. verdict Recommended for serious students of the era. ["Built upon archival records, court transcripts, declassified documents, and interviews, Jacobsen's impressive book plumbs the dark depths of this postwar recruiting and shows the historical truths behind the space race and postwar U.S. dominance," read the starred review of the Little, Brown hc, LJ 2/1/14.]-Forrest E. Link, Coll. of New Jersey, Ewing Twp. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The story of how perpetrators of World War II were treated as spoils of war, brought to light with new information in this diligent report. Generations after Germany was defeated, disturbing revelations about the recruitment of Nazi scientists--Operation Paperclip--still appear. Jacobsen (Area 51: The Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base, 2011) expands previous material with the use of documents recently released under the Freedom of Information Act, as well as personal interviews, memoirs, trial evidence and obscure dossiers. It's not a pleasant story. Weapons of mass destruction were born at war's end, and in Europe, scientists were victors' prizes, reparations for conquerors who coveted their special talents. They were Luftwaffe doctors, rocket scientists, managers and chemists working on all sorts of bad science for bad ends. Japan was still to be defeated, and national security required their services; it was important for business. However, the primary reason posited as the Cold War developed was: If we don't get those wizard warriors, Russia will. As such, the oncehigh-ranking Nazis who used slave labor to fabricate V2 rockets, who killed concentration camp prisoners in cruel experiments and who sought to weaponize bubonic plague became the property of the United States. Of the many hundreds of Paperclip scientists, many were convicted war criminals. Former enemies became American citizens; rewarded for their work, they lived the American dream. The operation took paperwork, and Jacobsen, in her research of the documents, found countless instances of mendacity. She provides snapshots of the scores of villains and the few heroes involved in collusion of the Nazis and U.S. military and intelligence agencies. Throughout, the author delivers harrowing passages of immorality, duplicity and deception, as well as some decency and lots of high drama. How Dr. Strangelove came to America and thrived, told in graphic detail.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
