All this and much more on booktv on cspan2 this weekend. For the full schedule, visit booktv. Org. Annie jacobsen is next on booktv. The author recounts the u. S. Governments clandestine program to employ german scientists following world war ii. The program, dubbed operation paper clip, brought several scientists and their families to the United States despite the fact many were accused of war crimes. This is a little under an hour. [applause] thank you so much. Good evening, everybody. I am annie jacobsen. I want to thank book passage for having me. Of its really delightful to be here, and thank you all so much for coming. Theres nothing that makes this author happier than meeting readers, so thank you. Tonight im going to be talking about operation paperclip, and im going to tell you a little bit about what the program was, a little bit about how i became interested in writing and researching and reporting operation paperclip, and then im going end by telling you some very what i think are interesting ways in which the story gets reported. So to start with, my book, operation paperclip, these gentlemen are 31 of approximately 21 of approximately 1600 german scientists who came to america to work for the u. S. Military and intelligence agencies after the war. I focus on these men because i found them to be particularly unique and interesting and somewhat nefarious on varying degrees. And i think its important to also realize that whenever youre reporting a story like this, its about riding on the heels of many important journalists and historians who have come before. So while i do bring lots of new information to the table, academics also have been involved in unearthing this story over the decades. But i think now theres really a light cast on operation paperclip that ahas not been shown before. The story for me began when i was reporting this book, area 51. And when i was working on that, i came across these two nazi aircraft designers named walter and rymar horton. And they were working on this aircraft which looks a lot like the b2 bomber. Hitlers weapons were very interesting to the allies during the war and immediately after. I found out when i was researching the horton brothers that he had a boss, and when he was at the lift waf that, he worked for herman gor goering. But in between them was this guy. And this is zig freed colonel cig field knemeyer, and he was one of the top ten pilots. He flew on spy missions over norway to decide which was the best places to bomb, and he was also an incredibly talented engineer. So as he rose up through the ranks, he caught the attention of goering who made him chief of all technical and engineering development. And goering felt that knemeyer was so important to him that he called him my boy. Now, i found out when i was researching knemeyer that he came to the United States and worked under this program which i at the time did not know anything about was called operation paperclip. And i thought to myself, how does this work . How do you go from having goering as a boss to having the pentagon as a boss . [laughter] and not only that, when knemeyer retired in the middle 1970s, he was given the distinguished civilian Service Award which is the highest award that the department of defense can give to a nonuniformed person. So operation paperclip, to understand you really must go back to the fall of 1944. And it was a very dark time. This is a map from william shirers rise and fall of the third reich. And you see that we have landed at normandy, and were pushing toward munich and before lin. And among the soldiers and berlin. And among the soldiers are scientists with the u. S. Military. And theyre part of a secret mugs. And the mission is to find what they called abc webs, atomic, biological and chemical weapons. And the real threat at the time was atomic weapons. But very quickly the head of the operation who was a particle physicist, he learned sitting in an abandoned apartment of one of the scientists in strasbourg, france in november of 1944 that the Atomic Program was nothing that we thought it was. And the reason was because, as hitler told his minister of armaments, atomic science is jewish science, so lets not concentrate on that. Im paraphrasing him, but you get the idea. But hitler was very interested in chemical weapons and biological weapons. And what samuel learned in that apartment was that the reich was experimenting with these weapons on humans that had been culled from concentration camps. And this was the first time that this information became available to American Military intelligence. The Mission Director came across this man in a letter, and this is dr. Kurt bloma, he was the Deputy Surgeon director of the third reich. Its very difficult to imagine that he later became part of operation paperclip, and certainly at the time that samuel found out this information, he probably would have never believed that and later he actually wrote in his memoirs that he could not believe that. Also in those documents that samuel came across was dr. Walter schreiber, Surgeon General of the third reich. Also later became part of paperclip and would wind up living in texas. Dr. Schreiber was in charge of Vaccine Program for the reich. So while blom was heading up the biological weapons division, the reich was trying to create abu bionic plague a bubonic plague weapon. But at the same time, the reich knew they needed to create a vaccine against such a weapon because were they to unleash this on the allied forces, their own soldiers would be, you know, subject to this kind of biological agent if they didnt have a vaccine. So schreiber here was in charge of the Vaccine Program, and to do that he was working with concentration camp inmates. So here we have with this man and hiltler in paris hitler in paris and this is goering, he was head of the Reich Research council. And the third part of this triangle which plays into operation paperclick is heinrich himmler, and here you see himmler whos the head of the ss, but hes also many charge of this vast network of statesponsored slavery which has been reinstituted. And the slaves are used to build weapons for the reich. Tame, it at the same time, it becomes apparent that the third reich is crumbling. And so stashes begin to happen. And these are, this is a very famous photograph of a huge trove of money that was found in a cave. But also across the third reich military Intelligence Officers begin stashing weaponry and, more importantly, documents related to how those weapons are built. So suddenly theyre look for weapons, theyre looking for documents, and theyre looking for scientists. Be you see this lit if you see this little innocuouslooking tunnel up there, thats an example of one of the slave labor facilities that the slaves that himmler was organizing and shipping off to the various scientific and weaponry departments, this up here is nordhawzen, and this is where the v2 rockets are being built. And you see here on the bottom, this is inside of that cave. Entire trains could go in, and they as i write in the book rocket parts would go in, and full rockets and bodies would come out because the laborers were worked to county. To death. So the scientists are rounded up, and theyre sent here to castle cranburg. Now the war is at its end, so were now moving into may of 1945, and the military is in charge of this castle, and its called dust have bin as a dust bin as a mix name. And the scientists are set up there, and they begin to be interrogated. And when i went to germany and went through a lot of the different archives, i was fascinated reading some of the original transcripts of these scientists, and these are sort of 70page documents which show in a very subtle way how this program began. So you have these mill tower Intelligence Officers military Intelligence Officers learning about hitlers nerve Agent Programs that we did not know about, learning about hitlers biological weapons programs that we did not know about, interviewing the scientists and is trying to find out all that we can. But also you see decisions being made, and that real decision comes down to this should this scientist be hanged, or should this sign tuft be hired . Scientist be hired . This here is castle cranburg. It was very interesting, the scientists were all Walking Around here. You had spear out in the garden Walking Around to himself, you had karl brant leading gymnastics. Some of the scientists would give lectures, and all the while theyre going in and out of these little rooms and being interrogated by these different more than military officers American Military officers. Underneath the castle and, remember, this was one of goerings headquarters during the war, now were in charge of it and under the castle there was this bunker which was where hitler planned to go with his inner circle in the event that the reich made the decision to use nerve agents, to use serin gas which plays an Important Role in operation paperclip. And, you know, why that nerve agent was never used remains one of the great mysteries of the war. We, allied intelligence, discovered these giant bunkers filled with bombs ready to be loaded onto lift waf that planes that con contained serin gas, but hitler never gave the order. He had albert spear design this bunker for him, this is where they were going to hang out. So again it was this great, sort of mysterious irony that this was where the scientists were held who invented these nerve agents. These are some of the guys who were in castle cranburg s and well get to their stories in a moment. Meanwhile, youve got Something Else going on at nord housen which is the rockets, and these officers that are there are realizing the incredible breadth and scope of the v2 rockets that were there. And they had orders to gather a hundred of these rockets and to bring them back to the United States so they could be launched out in new mexico. But then suddenly they come across not only the rocket, plural, but they come across the scientists. And this is von brown right after husband actually, he wasnt captured, he surrendered. He knew he would be valuable to intelligence, and he was right. And also theres general dornberger, he became an American Hero, and you see him in his leather dont that he liked to wear. Dor 234rbgsberger recruited for the pentagon, he would fly back and forth to germany looking for more german scientists. He had a top secret clearance into the middle 50s, and he was really a favorite in the washington inner circle. When i started reporting the program, this was one of the only photographs i could really find of the rocket scientists. And then there you have so you can get an idea how quickly we brought these rockets over and the scientists, and there it is. Just a couple years after the war, the first v2 rocket, thats an actual v2 rocket, carrying albert, the first monkey astronaut. Albert didnt survive. Back to the chemical weapons, so that serin gas by i was speaking of, this is dr. Otto ambrose. And i think i would have to say one of the more nefarious elements of operation paperclip. And im to not going to tell you all the narratives that are in the book, but i will tell you one briefly about dr. Ambros, and the reason i think his story so horrific, ambros was hitlers favorite chemist, and i say that literally. He also invented synthetic rubber which was extremely important because tanks need treads, aircrafts need wheels, and the synthetic rubber that was produced was so important to hitler, that he awarded ambros here a one million reichs marks bonus, a document i found in the National Archives which had never been written about before. Thats how important ambros was. And further, the reich was building synthetic rubber at auschwitz. So this here is a satellite photo from 1944, june, and you have auschwitz and the gas chambers up there. But down in the lower corner here you have a slave labor facility run by ig farvin who was making synthetic rubber down there, and ott to ambros was in charge of that facility. Of all the photographs that i came upon in researching this book, and we all know those, you know, horrific photographs of the bodies as cordwood, nothing disturbed me more than this photograph. And thats because of what it says. It says company Sporting Club ig our puts up top, and those are two of otto ambros colleague fencing as they would after what they thought was the end of a long day at auschwitz. As i learned from the fritz bauer institute, this was well within the view of the chimneys at auschwitz. So blom is captured, and he cooperates with allied intelligence. Hes the first high Ranking Member of hitlers inner circle that speaks of atrocities and gassing of jews. He becomes a key player in this story because hes the first person who cooperated. But at the same time, you have colonel Harry Armstrong who is a top physician for what was of then called the army air force, later the u. S. Air force. And armstrong was on a mission in berlin looking for nazi doctors. He called them german physicians. And for many years the idea, the fiction was that they were german physicians. But really i and others before me have put together the very color picture of clear picture of what most of these men were doing during the war. And you see them here, this photographs never been printed before. This is 34 of the top leading physicians who worked if a classified program, one of the very first programs that was part of operation paperclip inside germany in hiding berg, you know, starting days after the war ended. Because the Army Air Forces knew that to bring these men to the United States so quickly would never fly. And so they had them working there in heidlburg. Later, 34 of them would join Harry Armstrong at a facility in texas. Hubert [inaudible] the father of space medicine, well get to a little more about him in a moment. But in the meantime, as all those theres that i just showed you doctors that i just showed you were working under Harry Armstrong, another element of military intelligence kale knocking, and they had came knocking, and they had information that suggestion of these doctors were wanted for war crimes. And so six of them went off to nuremberg. These three would become part of paperclip. Some before, some after. This is dr. Theodore men zigger, he was taken away to nuremberg, but what i was so is really startled by was when i first read about him, i read his obituary in the New York Times which was published in 1999. And out spoke, it lauded his career for naval intelligence. He was a fizzologist for the navy, and it talked about how he invented the ear thermometer and what great contributions he had given to military medicine. But it never mentioned his wartime work. And what i found in berlin were documents that showed that benz inger was on the original list of criminals that were going to be tried at the nazi at the doctors trial at nuremberg, but he was mysteriously released just a few weeks before the trial. He was turned over to custody of the u. S. Airplane Army Air Forces, and he was brought to america. Thats the nazi doctors trial. You see bloome in the middle. He was acquitted, he would later work for paperclip. Dr [inaudible] i write about him at length in the book. And one of the only surviving witnesses to what went on in the concentration camps, karl harlanreiner. Its amazing how these little nuggets are lost to history. When i was with reading the trial transcripts, when he was put on the witness stand because the doctor that you just saw removed a piece of his liver without anesthesia, they were trying to test how long someone could survive in the ocean, a downed pilot and how long how much sea water you could drink. So they were simulating these tests written by the other doctors who would later come to texas. But he was so angry. He had a dagger hidden in his pocket, and he leapt off the witness stand, and he ran to the dock to try to stab the doctor. Its this incredible moment, i couldnt believe i had never heard of this before. And then the great tragedy of it was the judge, the american judge who really believed firmly that we were at nuremberg to show how democracy works put him in the prison with the very doctors who had done this to him. One doctor was in charge of all the nazi doctors, he became our father of space medicine, and there he is with the library that was named after him. Which was, ultimately, taken down. You know, the program went all the way up to the pentagon, and the joint chiefs of staff were in charge of the program. And when you when i would read over some of these documents, it was fascinating how you could really see the different, you could see some of the military generals who were reporting to the joint chiefs were just pained at having to bring these individuals here to the United States to work on our weapons programs. But it was also kind of shocking to me that some of the generals did not feel that way at all. They actually respected and admired some of the nazi scientists, and i was surprised to find that this was one of them, general lukes was in charge of the chemical corps. And i dont say this lightly, and i dont i mean, its very important that one has as a journalist one has the documents to back this up. The nerve Agent Program is still largely classified, but i traveled to the u. S. Army military History Institute in pennsylvania to look at general lukes papers, and it was there that i found these personal diaries that he wrote which told much of the story which i report in paperclip. There you see lukes at a party hes having. And it was in those papers that i discovered that ss brigade Walter Schreiber never known to be part of operation paperclip, but he was. He was so close to himmler, he was on himmlers perso