Operation Paperclip by Annie Jacobsen EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Annie Jacobsen
- Language: English
- Genre: Conventional Weapons & Warfare History
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 9.6 MB
- Price: Free
The War and the Weapons
It was November 26, 1944, and Strasbourg, France, was still under attack.
The cobblestone streets of this medieval city were in chaos. Three days
before, the Second French Armored Division had chased the Germans out
of town and officially liberated the city from the Nazis, but now the Allies
were having a difficult time holding the enemy back. German mortar rounds
bombarded the streets. Air battles raged overhead, and in the center of
town, inside a fancy apartment on Quai Klébar, armed U.S. soldiers guarded
the Dutch-American particle physicist Samuel Goudsmit as he sat in an
armchair scouring files. The apartment belonged to a German virus expert
named Dr.
Eugen Haagen, believed to be a key developer in the covert Nazi
biological weapons program. Haagen had apparently fled his apartment in a
hurry just a few days prior, leaving behind a framed photograph of Hitler on
the mantel and a cache of important documents in the cabinets.
Goudsmit and two colleagues, bacteriological warfare experts Bill
Cromartie and Fred Wardenberg, had been reading over Dr. Haagen’s
documents for hours. Based on what was in front of them, they planned to
be here all night. Most of Strasbourg was without electricity, so Goudsmit
and his colleagues were reading by candlelight.
Samuel Goudsmit led a unit engaged in a different kind of battle than the
one being fought by the combat soldiers and airmen outside. Goudsmit and
his team were on the hunt for Nazi science—German weaponry more
advanced than what the Allies possessed. Goudsmit was scientific director
of this Top Secret mission, code-named Operation Alsos, an esoteric and
dangerous endeavor that was an offshoot of the Manhattan Project.
Goudsmit and his colleagues were far more accustomed to working inside a
laboratory than on a battlefield, and yet here they were, in the thick of the
fight. It was up to these men of science to determine just how close the
Third Reich was to waging atomic, biological, or chemical warfare against
Allied troops. This was called A-B-C warfare by Alsos. An untold number
of lives depended on the success of the operation.
Samuel Goudsmit had qualities that made him the mission’s ideal
science director. Born in Holland, he spoke Dutch and German fluently. At
age twenty-three he had become famous among fellow physicists for
identifying the concept of electron spin.
Two years later he earned his PhD
at the University of Leiden and moved to America to teach. During the war,
Goudsmit worked on weapons development through a governmentsponsored lab at MIT. This gave him unique insight into the clandestine
world of atomic, biological, and chemical warfare and had put him in this
chair, reading quickly in the flickering candlelight. Just days before,
Goudsmit’s team had captured four of Hitler’s top nuclear scientists and had
learned from them that the Nazis’ atomic bomb project had been a failure.
This was an unexpected intelligence coup for Alsos—and a huge relief. The
focus now turned to the Reich’s biological weapons program, rumored to be
well advanced.
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