The Nazis Next Door by Eric Lichtblau

typical of the changing fortunes experienced by the Nazi scientists. At the close of the war, he was classified as a “potential security risk” because of his deep ties to Hitler and to the Nazi Party as a decorated officer. Within months, however, his hiring as a rocket scientist was suddenly reclassified as vital to America’s national security. He was brought to Texas—along with his parents, his new bride, his brother, who was also a scientist at Peenemünde, and nearly a hundred members of his German V-2 team, now recongregated under von Braun at Fort Bliss.
    Even with the standards for barring Nazi Party members virtually abandoned, military officials complained that their counterparts at the State Department and the Justice Department were still too slow to sign off on the scientists because of concerns about their Nazi records. Military officers fumed over the delays. The bureaucrats slowing the scientists’ arrivals needed to bring “an iota of realism” to their task and to recognize that German scientists with Nazi links would ultimately have to be let in, the military’s gatekeeper for the project, a Navy captain named Bosquet Wev, seethed in a memo in 1947. Echoing the views of other officers, the captain wrote: “In so far as German scientists are concerned, Nazism should no longer be considered a serious consideration from a viewpoint of national security when the far greater threat of Communism is now jeopardizing the entire world . . . To continue to treat Nazi affiliations as significant considerations has been aptly phrased as ‘beating a dead Nazi horse.’Considerations such as these, which delay or prevent action being taken in the cases of scientists who can further the scientific research and development of the United States, are detriments which should be removed.”
    Soon enough, there was not even the pretense of keeping out Nazis, ardent or otherwise. The Air Force brought Emil Salmon, an SA Nazi troop leader, to an Ohio air base as a jet engineer, even after he was convicted in a denazification court of torching a synagogue. The military said it was “cognizant of Mr. Salmon’s Nazi activities and certain allegations made by some of his associates in Europe, but desires his immigration in spite of this.”
    And so they came: German chemists from IG Farben, the notorious chemical company that supplied the deadly gases for the Nazi gas chambers; the rocket scientists under Dornberger and von Braun at the missile-building slave camps at Peenemünde and Dora-Mittelwerk; doctors at concentration camps who practiced their own brand of medicine on prisoners; and hundreds more. The professionals were generally paid six dollars a day in America and given comfortable housing, a laboratory with research assistants, and the promise of citizenship if their work proved valuable. Family members were welcome to join them later, too. The scientists were elated.
    Despite the military’s best efforts to keep the operation secret, word began leaking out within months of the arrival of the first batch of recruits in 1946. It was hard to hide a thousand scientists with German accents, even on a military base. As the State Department had warned, many Americans were outraged to learn that the military was bringing Hitler’s scientists to live as their neighbors at military bases from Florida to California. Some objected on national security grounds: the Germans couldn’t be trusted to stay loyal to America, they charged. Others voiced moral concerns; given their Nazi backgrounds, the scientists were “potentially dangerous carriers of racial and religious hatred,” read one letter of protest signed in 1946 by Albert Einstein, Norman Vincent Peale, and some three dozen other noted Americans. One critic put out a mocking notice in a magazine: “Memo to would-be war criminal:If you enjoy mass murder, but also treasure your skin, be a scientist, son. It’s the only way, nowadays, of getting away with