Frankfurt and the American zone, November–December 1945: the author joins the collection apparatus later notorious as Paperclip and conducts his first gathering: a beaten engineer, a cold parlor, a tin of coffee. He sets it down as very nearly a rescue; the reader is invited to notice who dug, who carried, and who signed. —Ed.
They allowed us ten days of the Homestead; on the first of November Bunny went home to Lake Forest; on the second I sailed from New York for my second war, which paid better than the first and shot at me less. The crossing was eleven days of grey Atlantic in a liner full of replacement officers and civilians of my own new species: government men in new overcoats who talked the whole way about what the Germans had that we wanted. My papers said HALSTED INSTRUMENT & EXPORT, GOVERNMENT LIAISON, and nobody aboard could have said what it meant, the author included.
From Le Havre they flew me into Frankfurt in a C-47 full of mail sacks, and I had my first look at what we had done to Germany: towns announcing themselves miles off as a change of texture, honeycomb with the bees burned out. Frankfurt on the ground was rubble worked like a quarry, women in head-rags passing brick from hand to hand, and in the middle of it one enormous miracle: the I.G. Farben building, seven curved stories of limestone, lawn raked, untouched, as though the bombers had been paid off; and nobody in the zone believed anything else.1 The Army had it for headquarters; Sennett's outfit had a corridor on the third floor.
Sennett's man on the ground was a Reserve colonel named Considine, a leathery Kansas City lawyer who wore his eagles like a borrowed hat. "You know what this is?" he said, holding up a mimeographed book as fat as a hymnal. "The Black List. Every laboratory, factory, and doctor-professor in Germany worth taking, by subject and street address. Twelve years these people spent money on research like a drunk fleet on shore leave: rockets, jets, fuels, tape that records sound. Now it's lying across three zones like a dropped collection plate, and every victor is down on his knees picking. The Russians don't pick; they took whole factories out of their zone, machines, rails, and the men to run them, in trains a mile long. Our end is men and paper first, hardware second, and everything before the snow or the Russians shut the roads."2
"And my end?" I said.
"Sennett read your war file. Two years standing next to the biggest secret this country ever kept, and your name on nothing: not a log, not a chit, not a laundry list. Every colonel in this zone is signing receipts for what he liberates, and in five years there'll be committees reading every receipt. Your job is to acquire what can't be seen being acquired. The professors sign, the captains sign, Washington signs. You're the man in between, and the in-between keeps no books." It was the only job description ever handed me that fit like my own coat; my orders read Frankfurt first, and after Frankfurt wherever the gathering was good.
They billeted me in a requisitioned villa in the Westend, the owners moved into the gardener's cottage, quieter than mice. A Frau Huber cooked my Army rations into food; her husband had fallen at Kursk and had never, she wished me to know, held with any of it; nor had anybody: in three weeks in the zone I never met my first Nazi, the whole Reich having been conducted over the Germans' unanimous private objection, forty million souls twelve years in a cellar disapproving, and you wondered who had been upstairs doing the saluting. I tipped her in Chesterfields, which that winter was tipping in gold.
It is a fine thing to be twenty-two and a victor: hot water in a cold country, white bread, a beaten nation's silver on the table. Bunny wrote every Tuesday, three lines: the club, the weather, and "Daddy asks are you finding good things." Under the shirts lay the last article out of my old duffel, a plain card with a Berlin address, now carried an ocean toward its own return address — which I arranged not to think about, and mostly didn't.
Considine gave me my first errand the first Monday of December. "Instruments man in Oberursel, in the Taunus, name of Kessler. Gyroscopic platforms: he held a rocket's nose straight while it climbed, which is a harder trick than making it climb. The British sent a major at him twice and got tea and a lecture on patent law. Last week somebody sent him a ham from the east, so the clock's running. Go make him love us."
We went up in a jeep through a morning like iron, my driver a corporal named Getz who had pushed a cab in Cleveland and drove Germany the same way, on the horn. The road was all traffic and no vehicles: women hauling handcarts, children running at the jeep, and everywhere the DPs, the liberated, drifting between camps, whom we had freed at a fair price in American blood and who were showing their gratitude that winter by stealing everything that would burn and complaining of the rations in eleven languages. At the checkpoint below Oberursel a snowdrop read my papers a long time. "Halsted Instrument and Export. Which is it?" "Both," I said, and we were waved through.
A British major came out of the gate as we pulled up and gave the jeep a look you could have iced fish on. "If you're for the Herr Doktor, save the petrol. The drawings burned in April, at the works, by order. He has the story quite polished by now." "Then he can polish it once more," I said, and he remarked something about Americans to his driver and left.
The Doktor received me in a parlor you could have hung meat in, wearing overcoat, felt boots, and mittens with the fingers out; a small, grey, precise man of fifty-odd with chilblains and a duelist's posture. On the sideboard, half filled in, lay the Fragebogen, the military government's hundred and thirty-one questions, answered that winter by every German of consequence the way you would answer St. Peter if he ran spot checks.3 I set my tin of coffee between us and worked the lid loose without offering any (you let Brazil into a room like that and let it work), dealt cigarettes, and sat down to be lied to.
"There is nothing in this house, Herr Klipspringer." His English was engineer's English, off journals, better than most of Congress. "Your British colleague had the same disappointment twice. The drawings were destroyed in April, at the works, by order. I am told you have heard this of us, that we are a people who follow orders."
"I didn't come for drawings, Doctor. I came because a man at Wright Field quoted me the drift rate on your last platform, and I called him a liar to his face."
That reached him. I had the number off a CIOS sheet and understood it the way I understand Scripture, but I gave it to him in its own accents (gimbals, precession, a tenth of a degree the hour), the trade Kowalczyk taught me on radios, run now at a professor. He corrected me, which in a proud man is the beginning of surrender; for one bad moment he asked a question back with mathematics in it, and I did the thing that has saved my neck a hundred times: looked disappointed in the question, and lit his cigarette. "The figure is low," he said, and color came into his face. "It was better. I will tell you why." And he did, for forty minutes, while I nodded in the right places and his wife brought in what that winter was called tea, the cups clicking in her hands.
When he ran down, I nodded at the sideboard. "Question forty-one giving you trouble, Doctor?"
He went very still. "Since 'thirty-seven," he said. "It was the party card or the institute. You will not believe me."
"Doctor, I wouldn't care if you'd been Gauleiter of the Taunus." And that part was gospel; I hadn't crossed four thousand miles to grade souls. "That form, filled in your own hand, goes to one office, and things follow. Stapled to a War Department contract, it goes to a different office, and different things follow. Dollars, banked in New York. Rations. Coal on Thursday. There's an Army chest man in Frankfurt could hear your daughter's cough this week. And the gentlemen who sent the ham will be back for it, and they won't bring a contract, Doctor. They bring a truck with the back doors standing open."4
He looked at the coffee, and the form, and asked the only question that cost him anything. "And the work. It goes to whom?"
"To men who will finish it," I said, "and who'll know whose it was, because I'll tell them." Whether anyone was told, I can't say; I was gathering, not promising. Or rather I was promising the way I gather, nothing on paper.
Here is the whole art of the gathering trade, free to whoever takes it up: you cannot buy a beaten man's life's work; money alone makes him a looted man, and he will burn the thing in fact as he burned it in testimony. Admire it instead, accurately, in its own language, at length, and he will not only hand it over; he will help you carry it to the jeep, and thank you at the gate, feeling himself, poor devil, understood.
He spoke to his wife in German too fast for my forty words of it, and she put on a man's coat and lit a lantern, and we went out into the garden. I carried the spade myself; it seemed politic. Under the third apple tree from the well, two feet down and frozen in, lay a zinc washboiler with the lid wired shut, and we were kneeling over the wire when a shot went off up the street — and I was flat on my face in the frozen mud before the echo, cheek on the boiler lid. An MP discouraging somebody off a coal pile, I learned afterward. The Doktor and his wife simply stood, mildly interested; five years of the real thing had taught them a pistol from a war. I got up wearing a fair sample of the garden and said something about the ice underfoot, and neither of them smiled, which was courtesy, and Getz grinned the whole road home, which was insubordination.
In the boiler, in oilcloth, were the drawings that had burned in April: the full working set, microfilm besides, and a black notebook of everything he had not yet built. He carried them out to the jeep himself. He thanked me at the gate. I said it was nothing, and for me it was.
The rest was liturgy, performed by other clergy. A captain from the technical agency came up Thursday with the receipt book; the Doktor signed, the captain signed, Getz witnessed; the contract went to Washington under Sennett's stamp, the questionnaire went to its different office, and the coal actually came; I saw to that, the small coin being what gets remembered. Somewhere a dossier opened containing every name in the affair but one. I conceived the business, conducted it, closed it, and I stand in its record the way glass stands in a window. Sennett's cable to Considine that week ran to one word: MORE.
By Christmas week I had the shape of the thing: not a raid, a harvest. Microfilm went home by the ton. Wind tunnels went west in numbered crates with the engineers' names stenciled off. Whole design bureaus emigrated as families, professors' wives dictating furniture inventories to Army stenographers. The Romans took gold; we were taking what gold had bought: twelve years of another country's thinking, and the men who had done the thinking.
Considine came in without knocking on the twenty-seventh of December and dropped a folder on my table, thick, dog-eared, a Washington routing slip on the cover. "Instrument men are penny stocks," he said. "Sennett wants the mint bought whole. The rocket people: Peenemünde, the ones who put a ton on London from two hundred miles. A hundred-odd of the best of them are wintering under guard down in Bavaria, half their paper is still walled up in a mine, and everybody is bidding: Ordnance, the Air Forces, the British, the friends who send hams. Somebody has to go down there before spring and make the head man love us." I turned back the cover. On top lay a photograph of a big fair-haired man in his early thirties, left arm in plaster to the shoulder, grinning into an Army camera like a man who had just sold it something. VON BRAUN, WERNHER, said the tab; and under the photograph, in a small backhand I would come to know as Sennett's own: This one. Whatever it wants, it gets.5
Frankfurt am Main ended the war with roughly half its dwellings destroyed; the raids of March 1944 had burned the medieval Altstadt and killed well over a thousand. The I.G. Farben headquarters, on its completion in 1931 the largest office building in Europe, came through with trifling damage and was requisitioned as headquarters of United States Forces, European Theater, General Eisenhower's office among them. Zone legend held that the building had been deliberately spared by the bombers with the occupation in mind; the surviving target documentation shows no such order, which has never dented the legend. —Ed.
The book the colonel brandished existed. The Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS), an Anglo-American body, issued its "Black Lists" of German scientific and industrial targets before the Rhine crossings, and specialist "T-Force" detachments followed the combat troops onto the listed addresses; in the American zone the take was administered by the Field Information Agency, Technical (FIAT). The program for the specialists themselves, approved by the Joint Chiefs in July 1945 as Overcast, was renamed Paperclip in March 1946 and ran for years beyond its announced limits. The Washington office the author calls Sennett's answers in function to the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, on whose rosters no Sennett appears. A contemporary magazine account of the document harvest called it "the first orderly exploitation of an entire country's brain-power ever attempted"; official estimates of the value of the paper alone ran into the billions of dollars. —Ed.
The Fragebogen, Military Government's denazification questionnaire, put one hundred and thirty-one questions to every adult German seeking employment or position; the party-membership questions determined arrest and dismissal categories, and false answers were prosecutable. For specialists wanted under Overcast the form was, precisely as the author promises his engineer, handled in a different office: the sanitizing of derogatory security findings in Paperclip dossiers is the documented scandal of the program. The official German ration in the American zone that winter stood near 1,550 calories and frequently went unmet, and the cigarette was the zone's effective currency; a carton of American cigarettes exchanged for more than a skilled man's monthly wage. The author's tipping arrangements were, in the money of the place, princely. —Ed.
The courtship from the east was real: Soviet recruiters offered western-zone specialists contracts, superior rations, and gifts, and obtained a number of useful men on those terms. In October 1946 the Soviet administration concluded its courtship in its own zone by Operation Osoaviakhim, removing more than two thousand German specialists and their families to the Soviet Union by train in a single night, which rather bears out the author's remark about the truck, whatever one thinks of the man making it. FIAT's receipt books for December 1945 record an instruments specialist of Oberursel contracted in the second week of the month; the name is not Kessler. The author, as readers of the first bundle know, renamed the men he handled gently. —Ed.
The Peenemünde group surrendered to the Americans in the Bavarian Alps in the first days of May 1945 (the chief designer's younger brother bicycled downhill to find an American private to surrender to), and some fourteen tons of the project's documents were recovered that summer from a mine gallery in the Harz, where the team had walled them up against all comers. Through the winter of 1945–46 upward of a hundred of the team waited under guard in Bavaria, on Overcast contracts, for shipment to Fort Bliss, Texas; the first parties had already crossed that autumn. The photograph the author describes, plaster and grin entire, exists and is widely reproduced. What the folder asked of him is the business of the number that follows. —Ed.