today I'm gonna post about Operation Paperclip, the concept and book, or as I call it, "damn why do we keep getting blowback all the time?", as well as a glimpse at "the Original Cancel Culture"

today it'll be less of an explanation of the entire program (read the book if you want that), but a bunch of interesting nuggets from this book, an analysis of the book, and a few things I found apart from the book

so, unless you're a real WWII nerd or have read and somehow understood Gravity's Rainbow, most people don't know about Heeresversuchsanstalt Peenemünde, the Nazi proving grounds and underground missile factory

it was at Peenemünde where the Nazis developed and made V-2 rockets, "the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile", which were the Nazis' last-ditch effort at making wunderwaffe, or superweapons that might help them win the war

the V-2 really was a marvel. apart from the atomic bomb, probably the most advanced piece of tech in the world at the time. it flew at supersonic speeds, so you would actually die before you heard the rocket, as discussed in Gravity's Rainbow

the V-2 rocket was the brainchild of Wernher von Braun, who we'll definitely talk about later. the V-2 (aside from the V-1) rockets, when fired, probably killed around 9,000 people, particularly terrorizing London and Antwerp

fewer people know about the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, near Buchenwald. something like 60,000 prisoners stayed there, with 20,000 of them dying, with Romani and political prisoners making up most of the inmates

the Nazis, under heavy bombing, looked to hide more and more of their infrastructure underground. well, at Mittelbau-Dora, they had the Mittelwerk, a large underground factory that built the V-2 and other weapons

the Mittelwerk used slave labor to build the V-2 rockets. "during its three-month existence, about 6,000 prisoners passed through the camp and almost 3,000 died there under "indescribable" conditions."

so at the tail-end of WWII, there was a mad rush for Nazi resources of all types - with the rivalry being especially fierce between the US and the Soviets scooping up everything they could. many of the Nazi scientists hid their research to use as leverage

the Peenemünde scientists and administrators hid their V-2 designs in a mine shaft, blew up the entrance, and then went to wait out the invasion in relative luxury in the Alps

that's where Wernher von Braun, Arthur Rudolph, Georg Rickhey, and hundreds of others hid, at resort Haus Ingeburg, sunbathing. they surrendered to the US Army's Forty-fourth Division’s U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps

"So confident were von Braun and [General] Dornberger about their value to the U.S. Army, they demanded to see General Eisenhower, whom they called “Ike.”"

under the belief that the V-2 rockets might help them win the Pacific theater, enough components to make 100 V-2 rockets were brought over to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland

von Braun and about 80 Nazi scientists were brought into the US in 1945, sent to Fort Bliss, Texas. the majority of them would stay in the US and/or got US citizenship

we'll come back to rockets, but let's talk about other Nazi scientists the US scooped up. at the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, 3,000 slave laborers had been making "tabun", an unprecedentedly deadly nerve agent

"A tiny drop to the skin could kill an individual in minutes or sometimes seconds. Exposure meant the glands and muscles would hyperstimulate and the respiratory system would fail. Paralysis would set in and breathing would cease."

"a human’s death by tabun gas resembled the frenetic last moments of an ant sprayed with insecticide".

guess who made tabun (other than slave labor)?

our good friends at IG Farben

a man named Otto Ambros worked for IG Farben, designed the factory making tabun, and then worked to make it look like they were manufacturing soap before the Allies could discover it. he worked directly under Albert Speer

“I asked [the Farben employee] is it known to you and Ambros and other directors in Auschwitz that the gases and chemicals are being used to murder people?”
“What did he say?” asked Major Tilley.
“Yes; it is known to all the IG directors in Auschwitz,” von Schnitzler said.

the US scooped up Dr. Friedrich Hoffmann, a Nazi scientist working on tabun, and brought him to the Edgewood Arsenal. he later worked on LSD, Agent Orange, and all kinds of poisons

one thing I learned is that many Nazi scientists were incredibly talented, many were hacks/conmen, but if there's one thing that seems to be true of them all, it's that they just loved human experimentation. they couldn't stop doing it! even in the US

"Sometime in the spring of 1947, scientists at Edgewood Arsenal began conducting human experiments with tabun nerve agent. All soldiers used in these experiments were so-called volunteers, but the men were not made privy to the fact that they were being subjected to ...tabun"

they went all-in on testing for tabun and sarin, another Nazi discovery. ultimately, they used this research to make VX, which was 1,000x more lethal than tabun and sarin

"VX would be much more effective on the battlefield than sarin ever would be; sarin dissipated within fifteen or so minutes, but when VX was sprayed, it stayed on the ground for up to twenty-one days"

in some ways, these are deadlier than nuclear weapons

so, all in all, they estimate that around 1,600 Nazi specialists were brought to the US, including not just scientists but also bureaucrats, businessmen, accountants, and lawyers

I liked this passage: "Churchill wanted Nazis leaders to be treated as “outlaws.” He argued that they should be lined up and shot rather than put on trial. Stalin, rather unexpectedly argued for “no executions without trial.” FDR wanted a war crimes trial"

[computer crashed, one sec]

Jacobsen writes of the Nazis captured at Stalingrad "Of the ninety-one thousand Germans taken prisoner by the Soviets, only five thousand would come out of the prison camps alive" which lol

everything's back up except my notes, lol. fuck it, we'll do it live

here's another Paperclip scientist, Dr. Heinz Schlicke, who "was one of the most qualified Nazi scientists in the field of electronic warfare. His areas of expertise included radio-location techniques, camouflage, jamming and counterjamming, remote control, and infrared"

when they scooped him up, the Navy temporarily placed him in "Hempstead House, a great stone castle on Sands Point, on the North Shore of Long Island, that was formerly the home of Daniel and Florence Guggenheim"

FDR's VP was Henry Wallace, a weirdly progressive Democrat with interesting, weird ideas. some were cool, like his ideas on hybrid corn and agriculture, some weren't, like his interest in theosophy. but in another quirk of history, he championed the Paperclip scientists

"Wallace said, and nothing had a higher national priority in peacetime than American jobs. It was “wise and logical” to bring to America “scientists of outstanding attainments who can make a positive contribution to our scientific and industrial efforts,” Wallace wrote.

Wallace used a benign example, a concrete expert named Dr. Graff, who had helped design the autobahn. “If you agree that the importance of a selected few would be an asset to our economy, I suggest you declare that this to be U.S. policy,” Wallace urged the president

one thing I didn't realize was that of the 22 top Nazi officials sentenced to death at Nuremberg, after the executions by hanging, they were actually cremated at Dachau, which seems fitting I guess

Georg Rickhey was an engineer/general director of the Mittelwerk at Peenemünde, where he had overseen the underground construction of more than 1,500,000 square feet of space. in the US, Rickhey consulted with American engineers on underground engineering projects for the army

so uh, they brought over Nazi experts on underground construction to build underground engineering projects for the US army?

Nazi US Army underground bases, cool

Rickhey also oversaw construction of the Führerbunker, which was itself something of an engineering feat. the underground factories and bunkers, the US army definitely wanted that expertise

"As the Cold War progressed, the U.S. Army would begin the secret construction of such facilities, notably ones that could continue to function in the aftermath of a chemical, biological, or nuclear attack."

"several sprawling, multifloor, underground command centers had been secretly built for this purpose, including one in the Catoctin Mountains, called Raven Rock Mountain Complex, or Site R, and another in the Blue Ridge Mountains, called Mount Weather"

also, check this out. Colonel Loucks, overseeing the Nazis at the Edgewood Arsenal, also happened to work with Walt Disney to make a kid-friendly gas mask.

looks like something out of a punk album cover

in 1946, one of the Nuremberg trials was for Nazi doctors, which I mean, say what you will about Koba, at least he knew what to do with doctors if you know what I mean

at the trial, they called on Karl Höllenreiner, a Romani survivor of the "saltwater experiments". Höllenrainer was deprived of food, forced to drink chemically processed seawater, and then monitored for signs of liver failure and madness

Höllenreiner pointed out Dr. Wilhelm Beiglböck, a Luftwaffe doctor who had removed a portion of his liver w/o anesthesia

He paused for just a moment,” a reporter remembers, “with his eyes seeming to be fixed on a doctor in the second row of the prisoners’ dock. Then, in a [flash] he was gone from the witness stand!”

"Höllenrainer seemed to leap over the German defense counsels’ tables and “appeared to be almost flying through the air toward the prisoners’ dock.” In his right hand, stretched up high in the air, Karl Höllenrainer clutched a dagger"

“He was reaching for Dr. Beiglböck, the consulting physician to the German Air Force. security subdued him just before he reached Beiglböck, “preventing him from delivering his own brand of justice”

"Your Honor, please excuse me. I am so worked up. That man is a murderer,” Höllenrainer begged, pointing to the expressionless Dr. Beiglböck. “He has ruined my whole life!” and later talked about how he suffered from a “tremendous feeling of inner rage” when thinking about it

however, in a sign of things to come, the judge had Höllenrainer arrested and confined in the same prison holding the Nazi doctors on trial, receiving a 90-day sentence

re the doctors trial, "Of the 23 defendants, seven were acquitted and seven received death sentences; the remainder received prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life imprisonment"

one of their defense strategies included bringing up history of US human experiments, including experiments on prisoners at Terre Haute, and Walter Reed's Yellow Fever experiments on soldiers

this defense was partially successful

there's not really any one thing to add, but now I have a clearer grasp of how Nazi physicians and chemists from Operation Paperclip would work on jointly operated classified programs code-named Chatter, Bluebird, Artichoke, MK-Ultra. as much as is declassified, anyway

another thing I learned is that "cancer research" is often a euphemism for biological weapons work, as is evidenced by Dr. Kurt Blome, who said he worked on that, but actually worked on, you know, causing cancer, as well as plagues, gasses, etc.

sort of puts David Ferrie's "cancer research" in a new light though, doesn't it? lol

another thing that's super interesting is the Nazis' research into rinderpest and foot-and-mouth disease.

“Germany depended on milk and butter for 60% of her fat resources,” said Blome.

“In 1944 it would have resulted in a great catastrophe if foot-and-mouth disease had been used against Germany. It would have been the greatest catastrophe ever faced if a country relies on all its fat resources to get milk and butter."

"Once the disease starts there is no stopping it.” The Detrick scientists were very interested to learn more"

oh, I'm sure they were. really makes you think about who's afflicted by it today, huh?

another interesting factoid is the high number of Paperclip Nazi scientists who worked for or received grants/fellowships with the Rockefeller Foundation. you know, both before and after WWII.

the list includes at least Eugen Haagen, Georg Weltz, Humbertus Strughold, and Erich Traub, possibly more. just something to think about.

I also have the suspicion or false memory that a fictional version of Strughold, working at the University of Chicago as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow back in the 1920s, appears in Against the Day, but finding anything in that 1k+ page book is impossible

"The Eight Ball at Camp Detrick. Airtight, bombproof, and weighing 131 tons, this one-million-liter chamber allowed Detrick’s scientists to understand how aerosolized biological agents would work at different altitudes in the open air. Monkeys and human test subjects sat inside."

years ago, I went to school with someone once who came from a NASA town, a NASA superfan who told me she was reading a von Braun biography. I made the mistake of being like "lol wasn't he a Nazi" and that really set her off

but...

Wikipedia says horseshit like "von Braun had an ambivalent and complex relationship with the Nazi Third Reich", which is what they say now that they have to admit he was a Nazi

there are records showing him discussing the slave labor, which of course he knew about, since he was Technical Director at Peenemünde, and he visited the underground tunnels in an official capacity at least ten times during the winter of 1945

to start wrapping up here, when the US set up a permanent command in Europe, they occupied the IG Farben building. It was also the headquarters of the CIA in Germany. It was informally referred to as "The Pentagon of Europe."

another Nazi scientist, Hubertus Strughold, who I've mentioned before, was known as the "father of space medicine". he also definitely did war crimes at Dachau, but the US army covered it up because they wanted his research

in response to attempts to prosecute or deport Strughold, the Texas Senate declared a Hubertus Strughold Day in his honor. that's Texas for you.

like, apart from their crimes, Strughold was probably one of the sickest fucks, because instead of avoidance, he went the route of lying about his Nazi past. despite being the highest-ranking doctor in the Luftwaffe, he tried to say that he was never a Nazi in any sense

I was against Hitler and his beliefs, I sometimes tried to hide myself because my life was in danger from the Nazis,” he said.
“Were you ever forced to join the Nazi Party?” Thomas asked.
“It was tried,” Strughold said. “They tried it”

Strughold told a journalist that, out of the entire Aviation Medical Research Institute in Berlin, “Only the janitor and the man who took care of the animals” were members of the Nazi Party. in reality, of course, many of them were, himself included

also, I'm not sure how to explain it, but in the chapters discussing the Paperclip scientist legacies, I noticed an interesting dynamic that's like "cancel culture" that happened to many of the Nazi scientists once the public found out their existence

the Nazis and the army brass complained about "witch hunts" and "mob rule", not unlike bitching about cancel culture now, except almost without exception, everyone targeted was actually a legitimate war criminal who deserved worse than they ever got

there was even a "Hubertus Strughold Award" from the Space Medicine Association, eventually discontinued due to, you know, the crimes.

there were stories of East Germans harassing West German Nazi doctors who were never prosecuted, which is pretty funny

there were various Jews in different countries, who managed to achieve different levels of justice, like, Otto Ambros never got real consequences, but eventually Israelis kept bothering the companies who had him on their boards until he finally retired, which is something I guess

another legacy of Nazi science and IG Farben is the thalidomide scandal, which is bizarre, because it probably was tested on people in concentration camps. like, the whole story on that affair probably hasn't come out yet imo

I know this thread was all over the place, but you can blame the disappearance of my notes for that, lol

let's finish by talking about Annie Jacobsen, the author

here are her books: Terror in the Skies: Why 9/11 Could Happen Again (2005), Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base (2011), then Operation Paperclip, then