The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (38 page)

Michel argued forcefully that very little would be accomplished if each name associated with Rainbow was investigated individually. It would take too much time, and as word spread after a couple of arrests, the conspirators would go to ground. On the other hand if their prize was kept in play it might be possible to acquire precise information on hundreds, even thousands, of targets.

‘How can we possibly trust these two?’ the colonel objected. ‘The minute we give them their freedom and they see an opportunity, they’ll take off. Not only will we lose them but they’ll wise up everyone else.’

‘That’s easy,’ Michel said, comfortably. ‘They both have wives and children. I know where they live. I’ll let Lermer and his friend know that I know where they live.’

The colonel looked as if he were about to have a coronary. ‘You may be unaware, but in the United States it is not customary to take hostages, or to punish or threaten the families of criminals,’ he said in a voice of suppressed thunder. ‘We don’t do that sort of thing.’

‘You know that and I know that,’ Michel said with a shrug. ‘But our friends from the RSHA only understand the way Nazis operate. We don’t have to tell them what we will do or won’t do. Simply by mentioning their wives and children they’ll draw their own conclusions. I don’t have to threaten them - their imaginations will do the work. Because for them blackmail and murder are the laws of life.’

The colonel gave Michel a long, hard look. He then announced that CIC would act upon the report’s recommendations. The plan was adopted and a task force set up, although Michel did not participate because of his workload in Munich. Lermer and his associate were incorporated into a small unit that worked to pull in people on the list.

Michel was later contacted by CIC HQ in Frankfurt and told that the mission was completed and that Lermer should now be arrested. He refused to carry out the order. A week later he received a letter from Lermer, who was interned in a camp. ‘He did not complain about having been arrested or being put in a camp. He only complained that there was so much more work to be done. There was nothing I could do. I argued strongly for the task force to be re-formed, but was rebuffed. I don’t know if they located and reclaimed the funds reported to be stashed in Switzerland. Or if the authorities truly understood what Rainbow meant. I heard nothing more.’

However, Rainbow gave Michel the idea for his boldest plan. He would beat the underground at its own game by creating a pseudo organisation masquerading as the main movement conceived by Himmler. The idea was to bring his fictitious organisation to the attention of the genuine underground groups in the hope they might be tempted to join forces with the more powerful organisation. The seed for Dr Frundsberg and the Grossorganisation had been sown.

But a more pressing priority than catching Nazis, or even war criminals, was now imposed on CIC. A free-for-all had broken out among the Allies over the seizure of German technology and the recruitment of top scientists and engineers, particularly those involved in weapons’ technology. The Allies now engaged in a ruthless drive to obtain the knowledge of German scientists and engineers, who were greatly superior in many areas of rocketry, aviation and weaponry. Thousands of Allied officers were allocated to the task, a much greater number than were charged with hunting down war criminals. Eisenhower felt that German scientists were ‘the only reparations we are likely to get’.

The declared aim of Project Paperclip, as the mission was codenamed, was to locate nine thousand of Germany’s top scientists, engineers and military technicians and put them under American and British control. Special American units known as T-Forces - because of a red ‘T’ emblazoned on their helmets - had been put in the field before the end of the war. A mobile HQ, comprising two hundred and thirty men, co-ordinated the activity of three thousand trained specialists who followed in the wake of advancing Allied armies. The T-Forces had extraordinary powers and could commandeer transport at will, including trains, and had the authority to call on military units for support.

The scientific bounty to be had from Germany was a treasure beyond price, and the welter of reports that came across Michel’s desk indicated there was no limit to the loot. Significant finds were reported every day and were there for the taking under the terms of unconditional surrender. Forty-five miles south of Munich, for instance, there was a sophisticated wind-tunnel complex for testing aircraft that was far in advance of anything possessed by the Allies. At Muhldorf, east of Munich, there were repair shops above and below ground that employed ten thousand men, day and night. Heinkel blueprints were found hidden in a tunnel in the area, and a previously unknown underground Messerschmitt factory was discovered.

Michel spent time looking for a rocket production plant in Bavaria and was detached on a temporary basis from the 45th Division to the Third Army CIC so he could continue his work uninterrupted. Time was of the essence, for it was well-known that the Russians were illegally active in the American zone. The rocket blueprints were found in the basement of a building south of Munich and a truck and an agent from CIC HQ in Frankfurt were sent to collect them. ‘As we went to load them we found a senior member of the French Mission in the zone. It was a scandal - a high French official spying in the US zone and preparing to steal.’ The Frenchman was declared persona non grata by the Americans and rapidly removed.

The sheer volume of technical intelligence, plus the mass of valuable equipment, created a competitive feeding frenzy among Allied intelligence agencies. On paper there was an inter-Allied agreement over the control of all German scientific institutions. Allied scientists and intelligence officers were supposed to collaborate in their efforts to collect and analyse the work of Germany’s wartime scientists, much of whose resources were buried in safes and bunkers beneath the rubble and ruins of its destroyed cities. At first western experts freely made their findings available to the Soviets, but soon discovered their mistake when the Russians failed to reciprocate. The Russian zone was closed tight and all scientific material, and at least two thousand of the scientists themselves, were sent directly to Moscow.

The Soviets virtually kidnapped these scientists, giving them a choice between signing lucrative five-year contracts or a document stating, ‘The undersigned herewith declares his unwillingness to assist in the reconstruction of the Soviet Union.’
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Under Stalin, this amounted to a death warrant. The French, for their part, offered important scientists good jobs and citizenship, and displayed scant interest in probing murky political pasts. Army trucks picked up forty BMW engineers just after the end of the war and drove them secretly into the French zone, and eighty more followed over the next six months.

At first, the Americans and the British were more squeamish, but soon overcame their reservations in various covert operations. The American Advanced Communications Section ran a daily train - the ‘Toot Sweet Express’ - to take plundered equipment, drawings and technical records to a Paris depot for transportation to the United States. The British transported entire factories to England, and the French did the same to France. The Russians transported the Bosch fuel injection factory, among others, from Berlin to the Soviet Union, along with the engineers to run it. Germany was being stripped.

The rocket base of Nordhausen, together with its adjoining slave-labour camp, had been liberated by the Americans but was situated in what was to become the Russian zone. As the deadline for the Americans to withdraw westwards on 1 June neared, troops arrested four hundred V-2 rocket scientists in the vicinity. The underground tunnels of the complex contained a wealth of rocketry - a magician’s cave, American scientists called it - and four hundred tons of equipment consisting of thousands of rocket parts were moved by train and truck to Antwerp for shipment to the States. The authorities were more interested in the scientists than the SS men, besides which the T-Forces had neither the resources nor the authority to pursue them. Out of a force of three thousand SS men who ran Nordhausen and Camp Dora, only thirty-nine were eventually prosecuted for war crimes.

The scientist in charge of Nordhausen, General Walter Dornberger - described as a ‘menace to security’ - was secretly taken to the United States and employed by the air force in a classified rocket programme.
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Dr Arthur Rudolf, accused of committing atrocities at Nordhausen’s Camp Dora, and of being ‘one hundred per cent Nazi’, was recruited to play a major role in the American missile programme, and was later granted US citizenship. Wernher von Braun, mastermind of the entire V-2 rocket programme, also travelled to the United States and eventually became an honoured citizen. These Nazi scientists would be instrumental in putting an American on the moon.

American officers with lists of names visited rocket bases throughout the region and told scientists to accept immediate evacuation or remain in the Soviet zone at their peril. The Seventh Army removed twenty-three aircraft engineers and two hundred university professors across the Demarcation Line, and in one instance a train carrying a thousand scientists and their families crossed into the American zone only hours before the arrival of Russian troops.

Some five thousand German scientists and engineers were forcibly uprooted, often without wives or children, and while the cream went on to new lives in America - and some in Britain - many were later abandoned with no prospect of employment. Some of the older men attempted suicide in despair. The scientists compared their fate to that of their colleagues in the French, and even the Russian, zone who received privileged treatment. Two hundred and fifty scientists moved by American Army intelligence units to Austria were left destitute.

Recruiting officers from Paperclip selected those scientists who were to be offered contracts and passage to the United States. (A host of secret projects with silly names came into being at this time: Pajamas sought German personnel for forecasting European political trends; Apple Pie recruited key figures in Nazi intelligence who were expert on industrial and economic matters, and so on.)
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In order to compete with the French and the Russians, senior US military officers wanted German scientists to have the status of their peers in the USA, with good pay and the freedom to travel. But extending such largesse to the enemy, especially in the wake of outrage over the revelation of slave-labour and extermination camps, was not popular with the general public. Secrecy was essential if Paperclip was to avoid being smothered at birth.

The State Department, which automatically denied entry to war criminals and undesirables, was misled when Army intelligence shipped the first forty rocket scientists to America. The scientists were under arrest, so technically did not require visas, and the State Department believed that once the men had been interrogated by experts they would return to Germany within a period of four to six weeks. Many not only remained for years, but also became American citizens after their Nazi pasts had been suitably doctored by their intelligence sponsors. Later on, Paperclip was used as cover for scores of German intelligence agents who would never have passed the State Department’s criteria for entry into the country.
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The 66th CIC, headquartered in Frankfurt, was in charge of a dozen regions throughout the American zone, each with its own headquarters and field offices. In August, Michel returned to his original unit which had moved to Ulm, a small city between Munich and Stuttgart. The 970/55th CIC, Region I, comprised half a dozen agents in Ulm, with another four in a branch office in Heidenheim. The local HQ was in Goppingen, and the regional command in Stuttgart. Ernest T. ‘Swifty’ Gearheart Jr, whom Michel had served with since his transfer to CIC in France, was still in charge, and Ted Kraus, a Catholic with a German background, arrived in September as second-in-command. ‘I felt very sorry for the Germans,’ Kraus said. ‘They lived in terrible conditions. I had empathy for them as I had a fondness for things German. There were obviously many people who had no control over their lives.’

The city of Ulm was a place of total desolation and the only things left standing in its centre were a single tree and the steeple of its seven-hundred-year-old cathedral. But despite the post-war chaos, life for the CIC agents was rather comfortable. They were billeted in a complex that included an eight-bedroom house, the Villa Rauderer, in a beautiful undamaged suburb on a hill overlooking the Danube. A German caretaker looked after the grounds, half a dozen displaced Polish girls cleaned the house, and meals were cooked by a chef who had previously worked in a top Munich restaurant.
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‘We had to scrounge our own food,’ Ted Kraus remembered. ‘We would send someone to the army supply depot and he would come back with whatever provisions he could get. It’s amazing what a gifted person can do, even with army rations. The excellent chef concocted delectable items.’

One of the first things Michel did in Ulm was to locate all existing documents dealing with the town’s civil administration and have them brought to the villa. He then employed three German secretaries to sort through them and put aside anything to do with the Nazi Party. A policy of automatic arrest and internment was in place and applied to members of the Allgemeine and Waffen-SS, Gestapo, Wehrmacht intelligence officers, high party officials and assorted small fry in local government.

‘A lot of the time was spent in meetings with the mayor or police chief of the towns we were in,’ Ted Kraus said. ‘And other administrative heads. A rather mundane occupation most of the time. And we would send these reports up the line.’ It was clear to Kraus from the beginning that Michel had a more ambitious agenda and that he displayed superior skills as an interrogator. Although he was technically Michel’s superior officer, and would later be put in charge of the Ulm office when ‘Swifty’ Gearheart left for the US, Kraus had the sense to leave his ‘subordinate’ to his own devices.