30 August 2007

The High Castle

Original PAPERCLIP team at Fort Bliss, TX, 1946

Last year, the papers associated with the deliberations of the British War Cabinet revealed that attitudes about punishing the Nazi leadership were hardening as early as 1942, when the notion of actually having them in custody was still perlously close to a hallucination.

Winston Churchill was an advocate of summary execution for the leadership, excepting ordinary soldiers who were only doing their duty. No precise formula existed for differentiating the two classes of Germans, monsters from the men. He was only dissuaded from the immediate execution policy by pressure from the U.S.

Stalin was in agreement with Churchill; he proposed the immediate killing of up to 100,000 German staff officers at the Tehran Conference in 1943, when the prospect of implementation was becoming less dreamlike. President Roosevelt thought he was joking.

Everyone agreed that war criminals should pay for their crimes; a scheme devised by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau was to de-Nazify the Reich by using forced labor to strip it of industry. There was enough support for it that Churchill and Roosevelt attempted to have it authorized at the Quebec Conference in 1944.

Stalin, ever the contrarian, preferred a judicial solution, having some experience with directed outcomes in his show trials and purges. Secretary of War Henry Stimson came up with a plan for trying Nazi war criminals in April of 1945, and new president Harry Truman was onboard with it.

The tribunal to judge the major Nazis who survived was convened in the ruins of Nuremberg in November of 1945. The war in the Pacific was over, and the world was at peace for the first time after a decade of unimaginable violence.

There was a problem. Parts of the US Government were committed to the orderly implementation of the Stimson plan, working in an orderly manner through the various levels of murder. Others were not.

Competition for the scientific wonders of the Reich had reached a white-hot level, and the secrets revealed by the cargo of the U-234 only whetted the appetite for more. Considering what already existed, what wonders might yet exist in the imaginations of the engineers, and be conjured into a new reality?

The French and British were interested. The Russians regarded the secrets as their right by conquest, and had paid in blood. The competition began in earnest to secure Hitler's intellectual property. The German scientists who only months before would have been headed for interrogation at Fort Hunt were suddenly on per diem, and staying in hotels.

The first scientists began to arrive in America in July of 1945, while the Japanese were still fighting. A program administered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff was established that same month, concentrating initially on rocket and guided missile research. More scientists began to arrive in September. A State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC), approved procedures to be used in the exploitation under the codeword OVERCAST.

The codeword was changed due to compromise the same month that Admiral Doenitz and Hermanns Goering and the other top Nazis went into the dock at Nuremberg. Project PAPERCLIP, the administration and exploitation of Nazi technology, began its march into history.

The Army and Navy were each still cabinet positions in those days, and accustomed to wide autonomy in the way their conducted their affairs. The Navy Department was interested in technical applications for the improvement of torpedoes, submarines, electronics and guided "cruise" missiles.

The Army and its Air Corps were interested in the new long-range artillery- the V-rockets- and anything related to jet and rocket-propelled aircraft.

There were also some troubling research that entwined the activities of a criminal state with the wondrous technology. Slave labor had been used to create the rockets, and the engineers knew it. In order to support the human factors of the new weapons, unspeakable experiments had been conducted on human beings.

The Germans managed medical experiments that clinically dissected living prisoners; exploded them in altitude chambers, froze them alive; measured the effect of gunshots, and injected them with seawater. Captives were de-fleshed; had limbs removed, their flesh burned and blasted in chemical tests. All the results were carefully recorded, and provided a body of knowledge that ethically could never be collected in a civilized world.

This was an intrinsic component of all the technology, and all the scientists were tainted in some degree with their association with the Nazi Party.

Werner Von Braun was the brightest light of the German Rocket Program, and his career demonstrated the ambiguity of serving the Reich. He had been detained by Himmler's SS on suspicion of disloyalty for his enthusiasm for manned space flight. He later accepted a commission in the same SS, and spent time in the underground factory where the slaves produced his rockets.

That was the ambiguity that was being absorbed by PAPERCLIP. At Nuremberg, the medical crimes would have their own tribunal, the “Doctors Trial” in December of 1946. The people who had conducted the experiments would be tried for their crimes. The data they collected, though. Well, that was useful, if tainted.

It is still out there, the product of a criminal regime and part of the industrial base of a brave new world that traveled to the Moon.

The number of German Scientists in America was burgeoning. By mid-1946, with preparations for the Doctor's trial underway, 190 scientists were at work, with 200 others in the pipeline to be used by the various technical services of the War and Navy Departments.

A revision of PAPERCLIP was considered urgent. The policies in place were those that applied to the vanquished. German science was now a growth industry in America, Russia, France and Britain. As inducements, scientists were offered preferential treatment to reunite their families. Cash payments were authorized.

As the Doctor's trial began in   Nuremberg, Von Braun and a cadre of rocket scientists were at Fort Bliss, under contract as special War Department employees. They would eventually find themselves assigned an enclave in the sleepy town of Huntsville, Alabama, near the Redstone Arsenal.

The Germans who worked for the Navy found themselves in a castle that overlooked a mile of beachfront on Long Island's Gold Coast. The property had been owned by the prominent aviation enthusiast Harry F. Guggenheim, scion of the great copper mining fortune. Harry liked to be called The Captain, in deference to his service as a Naval Aviator in both the Great Wars.

The arrangement for the Navy to occupy the castle was said to have been brokered by Harry's great friend Charles Lindbergh, the greatest aviator of the Age, and who had gained a reputation as an anti-Semite in the isolationist movement before the war.

The Germans were moving to Long Island as the camp at Fort Hunt was being converted to baseball fields and picnic areas. The story of how Nazi scientists came to have free run of the castle of a prominent Jewish industrialist family is illustrative of the ambiguity of the New World Order.

That will have to wait until tomorrow, though. There is work to be done today.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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