21 August 2007

Paperclip


I got a call yesterday from a reserve colleague who was trying to drum up interest in what is going to be an Operation Paperclip re-union in October. I was interested, naturally, but a little confused by the news that it is going to be in Alexandria, Virginia.

You can understand why.

I always think of Alabama when I think of Paperclip. It took me a minute to get it straight in my mind, and I had to ask who was going to be there. This is not a re-union of the scientists who first worked for Hitler building rockets and wonder-weapons before being hired by Uncle Sam in 1945.

This will be a gathering of the good people, are at least the only non-ambiguous ones. It is to be the suriviving men and women who translated the words and the papers that unraveled Hitler's secrets. It is supposed to be the first reunions of its kind, the program only being declassified a decade or so ago, and not a moment too soon considering how long ago this all happened.

If you need to refresh your memory, you can go look at the records they transcribed from the original German if you want; they are right across town, 1,500 personnel files in the original German, with translations, arranged neatly in alphabetical order by surname.

It is quite an extensive collection, with over a hundred and eighty boxes, so there is an index to all of the folders available in room 2400 of the National Archives building in College Park, Maryland. They might have the Arc of the Covenant out there, too. I haven't been to all the rooms yet.

The translators and interpreters have a unique history. Fewer and fewer of them are left as the years pass. They were native German speakers, for the most part, and likewise mostly were refugees from the Continent. Most wanted to get back at the Nazis for their unspeakable crimes, which they felt personally. Many became involved with the military as part of their desire to take up arms.

When the Army found out that they could speak the language of the enemy with perfect idiom, their value as a rifleman paled in comparison with their ability to understand the mind of the foe.

When the fighting was done, the great treasure hunt began. Four Armies sat in zones of occupation across the former Reich. Millions of people were displaced in the ruins; millions fled from the Red Army, and the British, Americans and French suddenly were in possession of research and development activities that had produced the V-2 terror rocket, the first jet fighters and bugs and gas, too.

There was more of that stuff, and more nightmares, too. What was worse was that the Russians were already stripping the Ostreich they occupied, dismantling factories and shipping them- and the engineers who had built and managed them- east. The secrets of the terror weapons were likely to go that way, too, unless something was done quickly.

Preparations for the treasure hunt had begun long before the Fuhrer Bunker was stormed. Committees were formed to examine all aspects of the destruction of a modern state. For example, the success of the strategic bombing campaign needed to be looked at, in case one were needed again. Others were formed to look at the infrastructure the bombs had intended to destroy. How did the Germans manage with so little access to oil? How were the ball-bearings on which their manufacturing relied protected? How close to the secret of the atom had the Nazis come?

The Germans who were already working for the Army were the logical ones to help look for the secrets, and that is precisely who formed the initial cadre of field investigators of Project Paperclip.

Some alumni of the organization are still under the impression that what they did remains classified. It might be true, for all I know; there are those who associate Paperclip with the wholesales importation of fervent Nazi war criminals, and flying saucers, and more, though there is nothing about that in the boxes at College Park.

The act of dealing directly with the men who were responsible for mass murder must have extremely unsettling. The oath of secrecy they took about Paperclip was significant, and promised the direst of consequences for talking about what they learned in the course of scouring Germany for secrets.

Secrets were taken seriously then, and many took them to the grave, even when disclosure could have meant personal vindication.

I had dinner with a charming older lady not long ago who had been a Woman Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service in the Navy- a WAVE. She casually mentioned that she had worked at Ward Circle in the District. As we talked, I realized she had probably been assigned to the highly classified Naval Security Group activity at the former girl's school on Nebraska Avenue.

The Navy had used thousands of women to process the secrets of penetrating German and Japanese codes with the first mechanical computers. I asked her point blank about that, excited, and while acknowledging she had worked there, immediately became evasive and nervous that I was about to have her arrested, more than a half century after the ink had dried on her security forms.

I had known of Project Paperclip for some time, but never thought I would have the chance to meet people who participated in it. I had been involved in funding a new building at the Redstone Arsenal to house an intelligence agency in the early 1990s, and when it was finally completed, went down for the grand opening of the Senator Richard C. Shelby Center for Missile and Space Intelligence.

It was logical to build the center there, since the Army had begun building rockets in the remote heart of Alabama just as soon as the first of the Germans began to arrive from Peenmunde. It was remarkable that such educated men had no association with the Nazi state, and that little enclave of German-speakers in the old Confederacy were so useful in the Age of the Rocket.

If there was a little ambiguity, it was part of the cost of winning the Cold War. Wernher Van Braun was the Chief of the enclave, and his illustrious career in the exploration of space subsequently made him at least as good and American as he had been a German.

It is a funny thing, though. Try as I might, I could not find his German personnel file in any of the boxes in College Park. They must have been misplaced or something.

I'll let you know more specifics about the reunion as it gets closer. I can't wait to talk to some of the people there. Maybe they can give me an idea where some of the records went.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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