Ret. Maj. Arnold Kohn finally tells his story of the secret POW camp that changed the world.

• • • – – – • • •

Kohn soon learned that the interrogation camp was undergoing a shift in strategy that corresponded to the larger military machine’s shift from winning WWII to positioning for the quickly accelerating Cold War. During WWII, Fort Hunt primarily processed U-boat crew members who had survived the sinking of their submarines in the Atlantic Ocean, seeking to decipher the maneuvers and machinery that gave the Germans a decisive advantage in the world’s waters, as well as downed German pilots. As the war drew to a close, PO Box 1142 shifted its aim to interrogating captured physicists, engineers and rocket scientists.

Because Germany was a now a badly wounded nation, racked by poverty and hunger – and because the scientists saw a chance to elude capture by the Russians (as Bies points out, “Around 1 million German POWs died in Russian captivity”) – most were willing prisoners. In fact, many even negotiated contracts to share their knowledge and expertise in exchange for an annual stipend and guaranteed safekeeping for their families.

But they also came illegally. Initially the Red Cross was not notified of their presence in the US (in accordance with international law) until they had already passed through Fort Hunt; later, they were brought in under military custody so visas wouldn’t be needed.

Therein lay another reason for secrecy – beyond the big, obvious strategic reasons for the Army and Navy to keep what they were learning about weapons, fighter planes, wind turbines and diesel engines from their Russian rivals. National security was one thing, national outrage another: The country might not have have taken well to Nazi party members being smuggled into the United States and funneled through Fort Hunt into American society.

Kohn would later be the point man personally responsible for taking the German POWs from the arrival port and past US Customs. First, he had to learn to understand why their escape from Germany and illegal chance to resettle in the US helped create a convivial interrogation scenario that, in today’s modern climate of kidnapping and torture stories, seems hard to believe.

Santucci says he has focused on these issues with Kohn’s former colleagues. “The interrogation technique is something we spent a lot of time talking with these men about,” Santucci says. “We’ve gotten a consensus. Most of the German prisoners were officers, scientists, likely from aristocracy, the wealthier, more educated portion of society, happy that they’re off frontline and being treated fairly decently by Americans.

“In Russia they’d be dead by now, by and large, so they were much at ease. ‘I’m not going to die.’ Kind of relieved. So they tended to cooperate.”

But that didn’t mean that old loyalties weren’t in play. Not every former German officer who came to the US was eager to burp up the keys to his country’s rich expertise at their sworn enemies’ beckoning.

But PO Box 1142 had a pair of techniques that effectively drew this invaluable information out. In his memoirs, Kohn describes those tools as “the >>real secret about PO Box 1142” and “a little practical joke.”

The secret lay in the ceilings of the prisoners’ quarters and in the trees around them. “Every foot of the network of paths that threaded these woods where the paroled prisoners were allowed to walk was covered by the most technically advanced microphones,” Kohn writes. “Every word spoken in the interrogation rooms, in the prisoners’ rooms, in the cabins where some special prisoners lived, in the bathrooms (even if the water was left running) could be overheard, monitored and recorded.”

Knowing this, interrogators could skirt around topics they were truly interested in – for instance, the anti-sonar coating on the hulls of the German U-boats – asking about everything but that (hull construction, anti-fouling paint, and so on) – and patiently laying a trap that would, with patience, net everything they really needed. Eventually, the more stubborn prisoners would talk with a roommate in their cabin or a comrade in the woods, their vital intel fed to a building completely camouflaged beneath a mound of dirt and shrubs.

The practical joke, meanwhile, went by the name of Iwanowski, and looked as mean and ugly as Russian soldiers could come. “The information we were able to get from prisoners was certainly not – as far as I know – because any of them were tortured or even mistreated. Unless the little practical joke that Captain Iwanowski liked to play on them could be called mistreatment,” Kohn writes.

“Iwanowski had been born and raised in Ohio and knew only the few words of Russian he had learned from his parents, but he sure looked Russian. (Especially when he wore the uniform of a Russian officer.) His ‘office,’ when the occasion called for it, was deep underground in what had been the ammunition bunkers. ‘Uncooperative’ German prisoners were told that the Americans were giving up on them and were turning them over to the Russians: one glance at Ivanowski’s ugly Mongolian face, lit-up with a theatrical colored spot light, waiting at the bottom of the steep, wet, moss-covered, concrete stairs, slapping his riding crop against his boots, with the recorded sound effects of groans and screams of agony, was usually all it took for a prisoner to want to talk to the ‘nice Americans.’ ”

Santucci and Bies are unequivocal about the results of this sly operation.

“As we learned American history in school, we weren’t presented with all of the facts,” Santucci says. “Some of those facts are coming to light with our research with the veterans of 1142. America did not become a world power simply by the way we shot our rifles and maneuvered our tanks, but by the way we acquired defense and scientific technologies from top German military and scientists. That’s tied to [Operation] Paperclip.”

An author named Linda Hunt, however, is not so enthusiastic. She wrote >>Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists and Project Paperclip, a relentlessly researched book that demanded that she evoke the Freedom of Information Act constantly to get relevant documents from the US government.

From the arrival of the first German specialist in the US, a missile design engineer named Herbert Wagner, she didn’t see the operation as the gift to America that others believed it to be.

On “May 19, 1945,” she writes, “Wagner’s surreptitious arrival marked the beginning of a massive immigration of Nazi scientists to the United States and a long, sordid chapter in postwar history. Had he been kept overseas, Wagner almost certainly would have been questioned about his Nazi past in a denazification court. Instead he and many of his colleagues were able to take advantage of Project Paperclip, which, in direct contravention of official US policy, gave the Nazi scientists an opportunity to escape justice and start afresh in America.”

She notes that this all took place while thousands of Jewish refugees remained on immigration wait-lists.

Kohn, himself a Jew, eventually was handed Operation Paperclip duties that required him to smuggle dozens of scientists past US Customs. “Every couple of weeks,” he writes in his memoirs, “I would have to go to New York and pick up a newly-arrived group of these scientists, sneak them by customs and the immigration authorities by permitting them, after I had ostentatiously looked in all directions, a mere glimpse of the orders I carried, stamped SECRET in large red letters, and then bring the Germans down to Fort Hunt by chartered bus.

“This work was given the code name Paperclip, and as the other activities of the post were phased out or transferred, it became the only important operation left at Fort Hunt.”

Kohn acknowledges that what started out as a “pretty straightforward military mission with clear-cut goals, objectives and limits” saw its goals “becoming more shadowy and the limits more elastic.”

“Project Paperclip,” he writes, “like a robot out of control, set its own policy and winked when a former Nazi was found among the German scientists.”

Kohn’s role as Paperclip pointman and his rank as chief intelligence officer of PO Box 1142 will make the rangers’ next visit to Pacific Grove, in their eyes, a very special one in their catalog of interviews.

“It’s a very special scope of knowledge he was briefed on and knowledgeable about,” Santucci says. “The interrogators were enlisted men, trained to deal with specialized information, which was compartmentalized. He saw over the integration of information...which could only could happen at higher levels [with] somebody who is >>really sworn to secrecy.”

His elevated insight has also necessitated a special deal with the Army not needed for most of their other interviews.

“We’re going to need a letter saying he is free of any secrecy agreements with the United States Army,” Santucci says, “that he is not only permitted to speak, but encouraged to.”