The_Info_Web/40 - EVENTS/MAJOR_CONFLICTS/World War II.md at a14e456abaf80f959a4ed0c4b9b3c91c72d3c100 - disinfozone/The_Info_Web

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Raw Blame History

From the OSS to the CIA

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was established by military order on June 13, 1942, under the jurisdiction of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The order directed it to collect and analyze strategic information for the Joint Chiefs and to plan and operate special services.² It was headed by General William J. Donovan and created under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. On August 25, 1945, Donovan told the Bureau of the Budget that the agency was "working under what is in effect a liquidation budget."³

President Harry S. Truman dissolved the OSS by Executive Order 9621 of September 20, 1945. The order moved its Research and Analysis Branch and Presentation Branch to an Interim Research and Intelligence Service in the State Department, transferred all other functions, personnel, records and funds to the War Department, and terminated the Office, including the office of the Director of Strategic Services, as of the opening of business on October 1, 1945.⁴ The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group dates the disbanding to October 1945.⁵ The War Department units that inherited the clandestine side were the Strategic Services Unit (SSU) and its successors. The Central Intelligence Group was created by presidential directive on January 22, 1946, and the Central Intelligence Agency in September 1947.⁶⁵ The Working Group states that the CIA inherited intelligence operations and agents in Europe from the Army and from the organizations that succeeded the OSS, and that these operations later included the Gehlen Organization.⁵

General Walter Bedell Smith, who became CIA Director in 1950, had been Eisenhower's wartime chief of staff, and dozens of other senior CIA and military intelligence officials of the 1950s to 1970s had served in the OSS.

The Army's SSU ran an operation in Germany that it called Operation KEYSTONE and that was known as Operation RUSTY.⁷

Operation Paperclip and the German scientists

The program that became Operation Paperclip began with an earlier proposal from the Commerce Department. On December 4, 1945, Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace wrote to President Truman recommending the importation of a selected group of about 50 German scientists. His memorandum named Otto Hahn, a former director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, and Dr. W. J. Reppe, director of research of I.G. Farbenindustrie, among the men available.⁸ In August 1946 Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson sent the President a memorandum titled "Interim Exploitation of German and Austrian Specialists in the United States," and on September 4, 1946 Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson wrote that the policy had been agreed by the State, War and Navy Departments and urged approval because contracts for specialists already in the country were expiring.⁹

The policy excluded any person whom the Commanding General in Germany found "to have been a member of the Nazi Party and more than a nominal participant in its activities," or an active supporter of Nazism or militarism. It stated that a position or honors awarded under the Nazi regime "solely on account of his scientific or technical ability" would not in themselves disqualify a specialist.¹⁰ The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) of the Pentagon had sought authority to bring 1,000 former enemy scientists and to grant them citizenship. Truman's authorization of September 1946 was limited to "nominal participants" in the Nazi Party, and a panel from the Justice and State Departments ruled on each candidate on the basis of Office of Military Government dossiers built from Counter Intelligence Corps investigations.¹¹

The Working Group counts 765 scientists, engineers and technicians brought to the United States between 1945 and 1955 under Operation Overcast, Operation Paperclip and similar programs. It cites the historian Clarence Lasby for the estimate that up to 80 percent of the immigrant specialists had been members of the Nazi Party, and states that Wernher von Braun "had been an SS officer."¹¹ Annie Jacobsen writes that more than sixteen hundred of Hitler's technologists became America's own.¹²

Jacobsen's account of the clearance process is that a JIOA directive of September 3, 1946 required the State Department to "accept as final the investigation and security reports prepared by JIOA," that the State Department's Samuel Klaus understood the wording to let military intelligence officers withhold damaging information about scientists, and that the Office of Military Government sent the War Department 146 security reports that could create scandals if disclosed, among them the report on the rocket engineer Kurt Debus.¹³ Jacobsen also writes that on January 3, 1946 the War Department released a "sanitized" monograph, the Merck Report, as the first public account of the Army's biological weapons program, and that the department answered the first press accounts of Paperclip with a sanitized public version of its program.¹³

The Working Group report records the case of Arthur Rudolph, a chief production engineer for the V-2 program. Rudolph went to work for the War Department and then for NASA as project director of the Saturn V program. He left the United States in 1984 after the Office of Special Investigations found his role at the Mittelwerk underground factory, where numerous concentration camp inmates were worked to death or killed outright.¹⁴ A JIOA cable of December 4, 1947 on security reports for Paperclip specialists is reproduced in the report.¹⁴ On October 28, 1949 the Secretary of the Army approved the transfer of the Ordnance rocket group at Fort Bliss to Redstone Arsenal, including von Braun and his team, who had come to the United States under Paperclip in 1945 and 1946.¹⁵

The Gehlen Organization and the Eastern Front files

The Working Group describes Reinhard Gehlen as a man who "is not considered a Nazi war criminal" but who "had served as Hitler's senior military intelligence officer on the Eastern Front." After the war he became a U.S. intelligence resource, first for the Army and later for the CIA. His network, the Gehlen Organization, "included operatives and agents with Nazi, collaborationist, and war criminal backgrounds," was the foundation of the West German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), and "purportedly received millions in U.S. funding."¹⁶

The CIA's documentary history of the BND's origins records that "after the war, Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, a senior German army intelligence officer and expert on the Soviet Union, directed his officers to preserve their records and surrender to American forces." His wartime service was in the German army (Wehrmacht). The history includes the October 1, 1946 memorandum from Major General W. A. Burress to Lieutenant General Hoyt Vandenberg, then Director of Central Intelligence, on "Operation RUSTY: Use of the Eastern Branch of the Former German Intelligence Service."¹⁷ In October 2000 the CIA acknowledged, in a filing in the Freedom of Information Act case Oglesby v. Army, that it had maintained an intelligence relationship with Gehlen and held records about him, which the Working Group calls the agency's first acknowledgment of any relationship with him. The CIA approved release of the 2,100-page Army Gehlen file and released nearly 2,100 further pages from its own files, including files on many of the Organization's personnel and agents.¹⁶ Gehlen's network provided the CIA's primary human intelligence on Soviet bloc countries during the early Cold War, though it was heavily penetrated by KGB double agents.

The same CIA history records the agency's own assessments. In 1950 the CIA's Critchfield reduced the number of Gehlen's projects from 150 to 49 and then to 10, and told Gehlen that his organization was "considered definitely second class in any intelligence activity of a more difficult or sophisticated nature." In 1953 Deputy Secretary of Defense Roger M. Keyes criticized the agency's role in Germany, and Deputy Director of Plans Frank Wisner answered that there was "no adequate answer or correction of the assumption that we rely very largely upon the [Gehlen Organization] effort for intelligence on Eastern Europe generally," adding that the CIA had its own independent operations.¹⁸

The history states that Gehlen's service "suffered devastating penetrations by the KGB as seen by the Hans Clemons and Heinz Felfe spy scandals of the early 1960s" (the Heinz Felfe case), that the KGB's exploitation of former Nazis led to further penetrations of the BND by the East German Stasi until 1989, and that the agency had voiced concerns about the Organization as early as 1945.¹⁹ Gerhard L. Weinberg, who chaired the Working Group's Historical Advisory Panel, wrote that the panel had pressed the issue of the relationship of U.S. agencies to the Gehlen organization and that the newly released records would make clearer the story of an intelligence operation "financed for years by American taxpayers but largely run from Moscow."²⁰

Camp King, Bluebird and the MKULTRA lineage

The MKULTRA program, the CIA's Cold War research effort into mind control and interrogation, grew from earlier programs, several of which drew on wartime research and on the German specialists brought to the United States. Jacobsen writes that the Army's psychochemical warfare program began with a monograph by L. Wilson Greene, technical director of the Chemical and Radiological Laboratories at Edgewood Arsenal, titled "Psychochemical Warfare: A New Concept of War," which proposed a search for "a stable chemical compound which would cause mental abnormalities of military significance," and that she calls it the genesis of MKULTRA. She writes that Edgewood's Charles Loucks befriended the Paperclip chemist and Nobel laureate Richard Kuhn, who introduced him to LSD, later tested on soldiers at Edgewood.²¹

Jacobsen describes Camp King at Oberursel as a Cold War interrogation site where Soviet agents caught in the Gehlen Organization's web were held under the code name Project Bluebird and Project Artichoke, which she says was later renamed Artichoke, and where the Paperclip physicians Kurt Blome and Schreiber were post doctors from 1949 to 1952. Blome was tried at Nuremberg and acquitted, and Jacobsen writes that his declassified file notes work on an Army "Project 1975" that has never been declassified.²²

Ratlines and the Croatian escape network

The Working Group reports that the U.S. Army CIC in Germany recruited and sheltered Klaus Barbie, an SS officer later convicted for rounding up Jews in France, and that the U.S. Army smuggled him out of Europe through a "ratline" of secret escape routes. Barbie escaped justice for more than 30 years in South American hideouts.⁵

The report identifies Krunoslav Draganovic, a Franciscan priest who served the Nazi satellite regime in Croatia, as a man who "facilitated the escape of numerous Croatian war criminals to South America via the College of Saint Jerome in Rome." From 1959 to 1962 he worked as a spy for U.S. Army Intelligence against the Yugoslav regime, and the CIA kept a file on him. A June 19, 1961 memorandum to Col. Breen of the 163rd Military Intelligence Battalion, concerning Ljubomir Dedic, warned that Army intelligence considered Draganovic and other Dedic associates highly compromised. A paragraph of the memorandum was withheld until the Working Group asked the CIA to review it again, and the released text of the review states that the redacted paragraph concerned a source of information obtained from a foreign government organization on refugees and emigres associated with Dedic.²³ The State Department records reviewed by the Working Group also include the cases of Josef Mengele and Walter Rauff.²⁴

Nazi occultism and wartime psychic claims

In a 1977 article in the CIA's journal Studies in Intelligence, Kenneth A. Kress wrote that anecdotal reports of extrasensory perception had reached U.S. national security agencies "at least since World War II, when Hitler was said to rely on astrologers and seers."²⁵ A 1992 Defense Intelligence College thesis by Captain Michael E. Zarbo on remote viewing gave nearly the same account: "since at least World War II when Hitler reportedly relied on astrologers and seers for intelligence information."²⁶ An annotated parapsychology bibliography held in the CIA reading room describes the clairvoyant Erik Jan Hanussen, who gave seances in the Netherlands in 1930, as someone who "would often be consulted by Adolph Hitler."²⁷

Walter Schellenberg, who headed the foreign intelligence branch of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), wrote in his memoirs about the flight of Rudolf Hess to Scotland in May 1941. He stated that SD reports revealed Hess to have been a "silent adherent" of Rudolf Steiner and the anthroposophists, that Hess had made the flight "in accordance with astrological advice" and had close associations with astrologers, seers, mediums and nature therapists, and that collective arrests followed among both groups. According to Schellenberg, Heinrich Himmler told him that from the day of the flight Hitler's earlier interest in astrology "changed to an uncompromising antipathy," and Himmler was upset by the measures taken against the astrologers.²⁸ Schellenberg also wrote that on April 28, 1945 he took an astrologer from Hamburg, whom Himmler knew and thought highly of, to a meeting with Himmler in Luebeck, in order to soften Himmler's reaction to the failure of a peace initiative, and that with the astrologer's help he obtained Himmler's permission to discuss the ending of the German occupation of Norway and the internment of the occupation forces in Sweden.²⁹

The astrologer Wilhelm Wulff recorded Schellenberg telling him that mystical belief systems were "a suitable vehicle for the propagation of political concepts and for the political control of a nation," as reported in Jacobsen's Phenomena and on the vault pages for Wulff and Schellenberg.³⁰

The Ahnenerbe is described in the opening statement of the prosecution in the Doctors' Trial before the American Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The tribunal's printed record states that the name "literally means 'ancestral heritage'," that the society was "originally devoted to scientific and psuedo-scientific researches concerning the anthropological and cultural history of the German race," and that an Institute for Military Scientific Research was later set up within it. Wolfram Sievers, an SS colonel, was manager of the society and director of the Institute, a direct subordinate of Himmler as president of the Ahnenerbe, and a defendant.³¹ The prosecution quoted a February 1942 report from Sievers to Himmler (document NO-085) proposing the procurement of skulls of Jewish commissars to remedy a shortage of "Jewish race" specimens, and a September 1944 telegram from Sievers to Himmler's adjutant Rudolf Brandt about the skeleton collection assembled at the Reich University of Strasbourg under Professor August Hirt as the Allied armies approached.³²

Rocketry: GALCIT, Aerojet and JPL

Caltech's Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT) was the setting for the rocket work of Frank Malina and Jack Parsons. Caltech's history records that Malina and friends test-fired a rocket engine in a dry wash in 1936, the unofficial beginning of what became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and that Parsons, a self-taught explosives expert, and Edward Forman were part of the original group.³³ In 1942 Theodore von Karman and Malina set up a company named Aerojet to manufacture the group's rockets. Parsons and Forman went to Aerojet, and the rest of the original team left the rocket business.³⁴

The laboratory's first guided missile was the Corporal, first flown in an unguided version named the WAC Corporal, for "Without Attitude Control," which debuted at White Sands on October 11, 1945. Its Upper Atmosphere Rocket Research Panel, originally the V-2 Upper Atmosphere Panel, selected scientific instruments that flew on German V-2 rockets captured at the end of the war, and the Army settled von Braun and his team at Redstone Arsenal.³⁴

The Manhattan Project and Alsos

The atomic bomb program was placed under a Military Policy Committee chaired by Vannevar Bush, with Leslie Groves named to sit with it as executive officer. The Smyth Report states that the creation of the committee in effect placed all phases of the project under the control of Bush, James B. Conant, General Styer, Admiral Purnell and Groves.³⁵ The Los Alamos laboratory was the principal site of the work.

Operation Alsos followed the advancing forces into Germany to investigate the German nuclear energy project and to prevent German scientists from being moved beyond reach. Samuel Goudsmit, chosen as chief scientist at a meeting called by Vannevar Bush at the Office of Scientific Research and Development, was its scientific head. Its military commander, Colonel Boris Pash, wrote that the plan agreed with Goudsmit gave the scientific section the choice of targets (personnel, installations or equipment) and gave Pash the task of seizing and protecting them. Pash described Werner Heisenberg as the first priority, and described the occupation of Haigerloch and the securing of the laboratory of Otto Hahn.³⁶ Goudsmit published his own account, Alsos, in 1947.³⁷

Abwehr

A 1978 Soviet-sourced article translated into the CIA's collection describes Wilhelm Canaris as "Hitler's chief of military intelligence."³⁸

OSS and organized crime: Operation Underworld

The Senate's Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce heard testimony in 1951 from George Hunter White, who gave his name as George H. White and his occupation as supervising narcotic agent of the United States Treasury. He testified that he had served seventeen years, including four with the Army, that during the war he was a lieutenant colonel in charge of counterespionage training and later operations in India and parts of the United States, and that he was on active duty and attached to the OSS. The chairman remarked that "Col. George White is one of the best men in the game today."³⁹

White testified that in May 1943 an intermediary named August Del Grazio came to him, saying he acted for people interested in getting Charles Luciano out of prison. Del Grazio named two attorneys, George Wolf and Moses Polakoff, and Frank Costello as spearheading the effort. He said Luciano could arrange contacts for undercover American agents in Sicily if the Army arranged a parole. White told him that parole was impossible but that any information would be passed to the proper military authorities.⁴⁰

White testified that Luciano was paroled in 1946 on condition of deportation, that he went to Cuba on an Italian passport, and that after protests from the American government and an embargo on narcotics exports to Cuba, the Cuban government arrested him and returned him to Italy. He also testified that Charles R. Haffenden, a Naval Reserve officer attached to Naval Intelligence in New York, had interested himself in Luciano's case, that the Navy Department later denied any interest, and that part of the basis for the parole was a letter from Haffenden to Governor Dewey stating that Luciano had been of great service to the Armed Forces. He reported that the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps and the OSS had each categorically denied that Luciano furnished any information or services of value. He also testified that Luciano was alleged to have been accompanied aboard the departure ship in 1946 by Costello, Meyer Lansky and Albert Anastasia, and said he had no personal knowledge of it.⁴¹

Haffenden testified in the same part of the hearings. He stated that in 1942 Murray Gurfein, then connected with the district attorney's office, suggested over breakfast that an informant from the underworld would be useful to the Third Naval District, that Gurfein later introduced him to Polakoff as the attorney who was the contact to Luciano, that Luciano was moved from Dannemora Prison to a prison closer to New York, and that he did not make that request. He testified that the letter on the parole was written on his own stationery in a hospital after Polakoff showed him a letter from Governor Dewey's counsel, Charles Breitel, asking whether Luciano had been of any value, and that he had met Lansky once, after the parole.⁴²

Japanese biological warfare and Unit 731

The Working Group states that "in the name of securing a staunch ally against Communism in Asia and in return for information on biological warfare, the United States was lenient with important Japanese war criminals."⁴³ It records that the Simon Wiesenthal Center lobbied the Attorney General and the Pentagon for the release of documents on amnesties granted to supervisors of Japan's biological and chemical warfare program in exchange for data from experiments on humans in Unit 731.⁴⁴

The Working Group's essays on Japanese records state that the Allied prosecutions in Tokyo and elsewhere did not reach the former scientists of Unit 731, including its commander Shiro Ishii. They state that by the end of 1947 occupation authorities held evidence that a number of Japanese scientists had conducted biological warfare experiments on humans with Ishii's consent, that Ishii "hinted that he would be willing to provide more information if he were granted immunity from war crimes prosecution," and that the State Department sought to limit the commitment while most U.S. military and intelligence officials were receptive to a deal. The essays add that SCAP, the War Department's Civil Affairs Division, the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department each tried to shield Ishii and his colleagues from prosecution, and that the Soviet request in 1947 to interrogate Ishii was met only on condition that an American official be present and that the Japanese be told what responses to give.⁴⁵

In the autumn of 1947 two Fort Detrick scientists, Edwin Hill and Joseph Victor, interviewed Ishii and other Japanese scientists with the support of Major General Charles A. Willoughby. They reported that "no question of immunity guarantee from war crimes prosecution was ever raised during these interviews," that the Japanese scientists appeared to be withholding information that a guarantee of protection might produce, and that the human infection data had been secured with "a total outlay of $250,000 to date, a mere pittance by comparison with the actual cost of the studies."⁴⁵ The historian Sheldon Harris wrote that "under a cloak of immunity from possible prosecution, the 'open secret' became detailed fact in 1946 and 1947."⁴⁶

Business with the Reich

A Treasury Department memorandum of August 18, 1941, from Mr. May to Mr. J. W. Pehle under the subject "Union Banking Corporation," reports on a New York bank holding company. It states that the Union Banking Corporation was incorporated on August 4, 1924 and was wholly owned by the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart of Rotterdam, that the investigation "produced no evidence as to the ownership of this Dutch bank," that its president, Cornelis Lievense, claimed no knowledge of that ownership but believed it possible that Baron Heinrich Thyssen, brother of Fritz Thyssen, might own a substantial interest, and that Heinrich Thyssen was said to have acquired Hungarian citizenship. It records gold purchases of over eight million dollars in 1931 to 1933, of which $3,085,000 was delivered to the Federal Reserve Bank on June 15, 1934, and states that the rumor that Fritz Thyssen had large gold deposits in the United States might have arisen from them, while adding that all purchases were "satisfactorily accounted for" in the books. It states that in the fall of 1938 the corporation held two million dollars in currency in a New York safe deposit box, later deposited in its account with Brown Brothers Harriman.⁴⁷

The memorandum does not name Prescott Bush. On October 20, 1942 the Alien Property Custodian, Leo T. Crowley, signed Vesting Order Number 248 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, published in the Federal Register on November 7, 1942. It vested "all of the capital stock of Union Banking Corporation, a New York corporation," consisting of 4,000 shares of $100 par value common stock, and listed the registered owners and their shares: E. Roland Harriman, 3,991; Cornelius Lievense, 4; Harold D. Pennington, 1; Ray Morris, 1; Prescott S. Bush, 1; H. J. Kouwenhoven, 1; and Johann G. Groeninger, 1. The order states "all of which shares are held for the benefit of Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, N. V., Rotterdam, The Netherlands, which bank is owned or controlled by members of the Thyssen family, nationals of Germany and/or Hungary." A second paragraph vested all claims of that bank and of the August Thyssen-Bank, Berlin, against the corporation for indebtedness.⁴⁸

The Office of Alien Property Custodian's annual report for March 11, 1942 to June 30, 1943 lists property vested from German interests. Its schedules include the interests of I.G. Farbenindustrie in two patent contracts, one with the Pennsylvania Salt Manufacturing Company and one with Pen-Chlor, Inc., and the profits resulting from them.⁴⁹

The prosecution's opening statement in the Farben case before the American Military Tribunal at Nuremberg described the agreements between I.G. Farben and Standard Oil of New Jersey. The statement says that a 1929 agreement recognized Farben's priority in chemicals and Standard's priority in oil outside Germany, that a 1930 agreement created the jointly owned Joint American Study Company (Jasco) to develop new processes "on a basis of equality (50-50)," and that Frank A. Howard of the Standard Oil Development Company wrote in 1936 that "the IG may be said to be our general partner in the chemical business." It states that Standard turned over its butyl rubber process to Farben while Farben delayed the transfer of its buna rubber processes, and that after the outbreak of war in September 1939 Howard met Farben representatives at The Hague, where Farben transferred its Jasco interest to Standard but not the necessary know-how.⁵⁰ The indictment charged that the cartel agreements delayed the development and production of buna rubber in the United States until 1940.⁵¹ The Tribunal's judgment in the Farben case describes the 1939 Hague transactions as having been held by the U.S. Federal courts in Standard Oil Co. v. Markham (S.D.N.Y.) and Standard Oil Co. v. Clark (2d Cir., September 22, 1947) to be "sham transactions designed to create an appearance of Jersey ownership of property interests which, nevertheless, continued to be regarded by the parties as IG owned."⁵²

The New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell had German clients in the 1930s, according to Frank Lipsius and Nancy Lisagor's history of the firm, and John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles were partners of the firm.⁵³ IBM's German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft (Dehomag), is the subject of Edwin Black's account. Black wrote that Dehomag, "with the knowledge of its New York headquarters," custom-designed devices and applications for the Reich as an official corporate undertaking, and that IBM's New York management understood from 1933 that it was doing business with the upper echelon of the Nazi Party.⁵⁴

War crimes trials and the disclosure record

The International Military Tribunal sat at Nuremberg from November 14, 1945 to October 1, 1946.⁵⁵ The United States tried about 1,700 German and other Axis nationals at Dachau for concentration camp crimes.⁴³

The Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, Public Law 105-246 of October 8, 1998, directed the release of Nazi war criminal records and established the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group.⁵⁶ The Working Group's 2007 report is the principal government account of how those records were handled, including the Gehlen files and the Draganovic memorandum.⁵⁷

Footnotes

"World War II," Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-II ↩︎
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945-1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, Document 4, Memorandum from the Assistant Director for Administrative Management of the Bureau of the Budget to the Director (Stone), August 27, 1945, "Termination of the Office of Strategic Services and the Transfer of its Activities to the State and War Departments," and footnote 1 (OSS "was established by Military Order of June 13, 1942"). https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945-50Intel/d4 ↩︎
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945-1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, Document 3, Donovan to Truman and letter to the Director of the Bureau of the Budget (Smith), August 25, 1945. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945-50Intel/d3 ↩︎
Executive Order 9621, "Termination of the Office of Strategic Services and Disposition of Its Functions," September 20, 1945, 10 Federal Register 12033 (September 22, 1945), paragraphs 1 to 3 (termination "as of the opening of business October 1, 1945"). https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1945-09-22/pdf/FR-1945-09-22.pdf ↩︎
Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, Final Report to Congress (April 2007), pp. 12-13 (OSS disbanded October 1945; CIA created September 1947; CIA inherited operations that "later included the Gehlen Organization"; Army CIC and Barbie; the "ratline"). https://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/final-report-2007.pdf ↩︎
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945-1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, Document 71, Presidential Directive on Coordination of Foreign Intelligence Activities, January 22, 1946. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945-50Intel/d71 ↩︎
Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945-49, vol. 1, documentary history (declassified), editorial note on Operation RUSTY, "Operation KEYSTONE (SSU's project name for Operation RUSTY)." https://archive.org/details/CIAAndTheOriginsOfTheBND1945-1949 ↩︎
Memorandum from Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace to President Truman, "Proposed Importation of German Scientists for U.S. Science and Industry Benefit," December 4, 1945, Harry S. Truman Library, Paperclip document set (FOIA release printed April 21, 2009). https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/trumanlibrary-paperclip.pdf ↩︎
Memorandum from Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson to the President, September 4, 1946, enclosing the Acheson memorandum of August 30, 1946, "Interim Exploitation of German and Austrian Specialists in the United States." Truman Library Paperclip document set (same PDF as the Wallace memorandum). ↩︎
State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee paper SWNCC 257/22, Appendix B, paragraph 5. Truman Library Paperclip document set (same PDF as the Wallace memorandum). ↩︎
Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, Final Report to Congress (April 2007), pp. 14-15 (JIOA request for 1,000 specialists and citizenship authority; Truman's September 1946 authorization and "nominal participants"; review panel and dossiers; 765 specialists, 1945-1955; Lasby on up to 80 percent Nazi Party membership; von Braun "had been an SS officer"). https://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/final-report-2007.pdf ↩︎
Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Little, Brown, 2014), introduction ("more than sixteen hundred of Hitler's technologists would become America's own"). ↩︎
Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip, chapters on the JIOA directive of September 3, 1946 and the State Department's Samuel Klaus, on the 146 OMGUS security reports (Kurt Debus), and on the Merck Report of January 3, 1946 and the War Department's public presentation of Paperclip. ↩︎
Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, Final Report to Congress (April 2007), pp. 15-16 (Arthur Rudolph, Mittelwerk and the Office of Special Investigations; Figure 4, JIOA cable 4102, December 4, 1947, RG 330, JIOA General Correspondence 1946-1952). https://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/final-report-2007.pdf ↩︎
U.S. Army, Redstone Arsenal Historical Information, "1948 and 1949," entry for 28 October 1949. https://history.redstone.army.mil/ihist-1948.html ↩︎
Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, Final Report to Congress (April 2007), p. 48, Figure 12, "The Gehlen files." https://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/final-report-2007.pdf ↩︎
Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945-49, vol. 1, introduction (the Gehlen passage) and the document on Operation RUSTY, Burress to Vandenberg, October 1, 1946. https://archive.org/details/CIAAndTheOriginsOfTheBND1945-1949 ↩︎
Forging an Intelligence Partnership, vol. 1, introduction, p. xxvii (Critchfield's reduction of Gehlen's projects in 1950 and his remark to Gehlen; Keyes's 1953 criticism and Wisner's reply). ↩︎
Forging an Intelligence Partnership, vol. 1, introduction, pp. xxvii-xxviii (KGB penetrations, the Clemons and Felfe cases, the Stasi, and the agency's concerns "as early as 1945"). ↩︎
Gerhard L. Weinberg, Chair, IWG Historical Advisory Panel, "Perspectives," in IWG, Final Report to Congress (April 2007), p. 104. https://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/final-report-2007.pdf ↩︎
Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip, chapters on Edgewood Arsenal (L. Wilson Greene's monograph "Psychochemical Warfare: A New Concept of War," its recommendation of a "stable chemical compound which would cause mental abnormalities of military significance," and its description as the genesis of the CIA's MKUltra program; Charles Loucks and Richard Kuhn). ↩︎
Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip, chapters on Camp King (Operation Bluebird, "rechristened Artichoke" per John Marks; Kurt Blome and Schreiber as post physicians under Paperclip contracts, 1949 to 1952; "Army, 1952, Project 1975"; Blome's Nuremberg acquittal). ↩︎
Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, Final Report to Congress (April 2007), p. 56 (Draganovic; June 19, 1961 memorandum to Col. Breen, 163rd MI Battalion, concerning Ljubomir Dedic; Figure 13 and the redacted paragraph). https://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/final-report-2007.pdf ↩︎
Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, Final Report to Congress (April 2007), p. 66 (State Department records for the cases of Klaus Barbie, Josef Mengele, Walter Rauff and others). https://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/final-report-2007.pdf ↩︎
Kenneth A. Kress, "Parapsychology in Intelligence: A Personal Review and Conclusions," Studies in Intelligence, vol. 21, no. 4 (Winter 1977). CIA reading room, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200030040-0. ↩︎
Michael E. Zarbo, Remote Viewing: Parapsychological Potential for Intelligence Collection? (Master's thesis, Defense Intelligence College, November 1992), "Early US Interest." CIA reading room, CIA-RDP96-00789R002600250001-6. ↩︎
Annotated bibliography entry on Paul A. Dietz, "A successful psychometric experiment with the clairvoyant E. Hanussen," Tijdschrift voor Parapsychologie, 1930/31, CIA reading room, CIA-RDP96-00792R000700690004-2. The parenthetical about Hitler is the bibliographer's annotation. ↩︎
Walter Schellenberg, The Labyrinth: Memoirs of Walter Schellenberg (Harper, 1956; Pyramid Books ed. as Hitler's Secret Service, 1974), chapter "The Mystery of Rudolf Hess," pp. 190-191. ↩︎
Schellenberg, The Labyrinth, chapter on the Himmler talks of April 1945 (Pyramid ed., pp. 393-394). ↩︎
Wilhelm Wulff, Zodiac and Swastika (1973), as reported in Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis (Little, Brown, 2017); the quotation appears on the vault pages for Wilhelm Wulff and Walter Schellenberg. ↩︎
Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10, vol. I (The Medical Case), list of defendants (Sievers, "Reich Manager of the 'Ahnenerbe' Society and Director of its Institute for Military Scientific Research") and the prosecution's opening statement on the defendant Sievers. https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/NT_war-criminals.html ↩︎
Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, vol. I, indictment (the skeleton collection for the Reich University of Strasbourg) and the prosecution's opening statement quoting documents NO-085 and NO-087 and Sievers's telegram of September 1944. ↩︎
Erik M. Conway, "From Rockets to Spacecraft: Making JPL a Place for Planetary Science," Engineering & Science, Caltech, no. 4 (2007), pp. 2-3. https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/702/2/Spacecraft.pdf ↩︎
Conway, "From Rockets to Spacecraft," pp. 3-5 (Aerojet; Parsons and Forman; the Corporal and the WAC Corporal; the Upper Atmosphere Rocket Research Panel and captured V-2 instruments; Redstone Arsenal). ↩︎
Henry DeWolf Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes (Princeton University Press, 1945), sections 5.25 to 5.27 (Military Policy Committee; General Groves as executive officer). https://archive.org/details/atomicenergyform00smyt_0 ↩︎
Boris T. Pash, The Alsos Mission (1969), chapters on the formation of Alsos (Goudsmit as chief scientist; the division of tasks between the scientific section and Pash), the priority list headed by Heisenberg, and the occupation of Haigerloch and Otto Hahn's laboratory. ↩︎
Samuel A. Goudsmit, Alsos (Henry Schuman, 1947). ↩︎
Joint Publications Research Service, Translations on USSR Science and Technology: Biomedical and Behavioral Sciences (FOUO 37/78, December 6, 1978), CIA reading room, CIA-RDP96-00787R000500430001-1. The characterization belongs to the translated Soviet article. ↩︎
U.S. Senate, Investigation of Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, Hearings before the Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, Part 7 (New York-New Jersey) (1951), testimony of George H. White, pp. 1180-1181 (index entry "White, Col. George H., narcotics agent, United States Treasury, 1180-1187"). https://archive.org/details/investigationofo07unit ↩︎
Investigation of Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, Part 7, testimony of George H. White, pp. 1181-1182 (Del Grazio, May 1943). ↩︎
Investigation of Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, Part 7, testimony of George H. White, pp. 1182-1183 (parole, Cuba, Haffenden letter, service denials, departure of Luciano). ↩︎
Investigation of Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, Part 7, testimony of Charles R. Haffenden, pp. 1187-1198, with the Polakoff testimony in the same part (Gurfein and the Third Naval District; Dannemora; the letter and Charles Breitel; Lansky). ↩︎
Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, Final Report to Congress (April 2007), Executive Summary, pp. 4-7 (lenient treatment of Japanese war criminals; 1,700 tried at Dachau). https://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/final-report-2007.pdf ↩︎
Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, Final Report to Congress (April 2007), pp. 20-21 (Simon Wiesenthal Center lobbying on amnesties for supervisors of Japan's biological and chemical warfare program; Unit 731). https://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/final-report-2007.pdf ↩︎
Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, Researching Japanese War Crimes Records: Introductory Essays (National Archives and Records Administration, 2006), "Research Starting Points," pp. 96-99 (Unit 731, Ishii, the immunity discussions, the Soviet interrogation request, and the Hill and Victor report of autumn 1947). https://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/japanese-war-crimes/introductory-essays.pdf ↩︎
Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45, and the American Cover-Up (Routledge, rev. ed. 2002), p. 63. ↩︎
Treasury Department memorandum, Mr. May to Mr. Pehle, August 18, 1941, "Re: Union Banking Corporation," ref. 9-151, with handwritten notation by J. W. Pehle, declassified by NARA (authority NND 960103). Copy held in an archive.org collection of Bush-related documents. ↩︎
Office of the Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order Number 248, "All of the Capital Stock of Union Banking Corporation and Certain Indebtedness Owing by It," executed October 20, 1942, signed Leo T. Crowley, F.R. Doc. 42-11568, filed November 6, 1942, 7 Federal Register 9097 (November 7, 1942). https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1942-11-07/pdf/FR-1942-11-07.pdf ↩︎
Office of Alien Property Custodian, Annual Report for the period March 11, 1942 to June 30, 1943, schedule of vested interests (I.G. Farbenindustrie patent contracts with Pennsylvania Salt Manufacturing Co. and Pen-Chlor, Inc.). https://archive.org/details/officeofalienpro00unit ↩︎
Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, vol. VII (The Farben Case), prosecution opening statement, pp. 162-167 (1929 and 1930 Standard Oil agreements, Jasco, Howard's letter of 1936, butyl and buna, the Hague conference of September 1939; documents NI-10550, NI-10433, NI-10431, NI-10455). https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/NT_war-criminals.html ↩︎
Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, vol. VII, indictment, paragraph 57. ↩︎
Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, vol. VIII (The Farben Case), Decision and Judgment of the Tribunal, pp. 1273-1290 (Standard Oil agreements; Standard Oil Co. v. Markham, 64 F. Supp. 656 (S.D.N.Y.), and Standard Oil Co. v. Clark, 163 F.2d 917 (2d Cir. 1947), as quoted by the Tribunal). ↩︎
Frank Lipsius and Nancy Lisagor, A Law Unto Itself: The Untold Story of the Law Firm Sullivan & Cromwell (William Morrow, 1988), pp. 99-101 and 132-134. ↩︎
Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation (Crown, 2001), introduction. ↩︎
Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Proceedings Volumes, The Avalon Project, Yale Law School. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/imt.asp ↩︎
Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, Public Law 105-246, 112 Stat. 1859 (October 8, 1998), Section 2. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-105publ246/pdf/PLAW-105publ246.pdf ↩︎
Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, Final Report to Congress (April 2007), pp. 48 and 56. https://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/final-report-2007.pdf ↩︎

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