American Raiders: The Race to Capture the Luftwaffeâ??s Secrets

29. How Captain Wenzel Made American Citizens Out of Enemy Aliens

[ 400 ] HOW CAPTAIN WENZEL MADE AMERICAN CITIZENS OUT OF ENEMY ALIENS The first four German scientists destined for Wright Field—Doctors Braun, Edse, Zobel, and Nöggerath—had accompanied Karl Baur in September 1945 on his flight via the Azores to the United States. Dr. Rister and Mr. Bock, assistants to Dr. Zobel, joined them two days later. The six men were promised that their families would soon follow and that their short-term contracts would be changed to a longterm basis. But things dragged on. Their morale hit rock bottom. First, there were no quarters at Wright Field for the families; then a hassle developed over the term “dependent”—who was and who wasn’t. By the time all of these time-consuming issues were debated and resolved to everyone’s grudging satisfaction, the contracts of the six scientists at Wright Field were running out and temporary extensions had to be negotiated. When Baur and Sebald returned to Fort Strong, in late December, things looked bleak for the six men at Wright Field. Karl Baur recalled, “Most of the scientists envied us for 29 Wenzel Made Americans Out of Enemy Aliens [ 401 ] going home. Dr. Zobel also had in mind to cancel his contract— which was due for renewal on 18 December—in case he would not be allowed to do any productive work. However, I recommended to him it might be better for him to sit it out a while longer.”1 Another year passed before Dr. Zobel’s wife and two children were able to join him at Wright Field. Mrs. Zobel traveled on November 22, 1946, by train with her two children from Landshut to Bremerhaven, the American enclave in the British zone of occupation. There, she and her children boarded the USNS General Henry Gibbins, one of several Liberty ships plying the North Atlantic between the United States and Germany. Frau Zobel und Kinder were accompanied by Frau Braun and her two children and by Frau Patin, the wife of the industrialist and inventor Albert Patin, whose autopilots were sought in May 1945 by Bill Jack, of Jack & Heintz. The families arrived in New York on December 4, having experienced en route an American Thanksgiving with turkey, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, and all the trimmings. In New York, they were met by Captain Lloyd Wenzel, who escorted them on their final leg of travel by train to Dayton, Ohio.2 By March 1947 a total of “338 German scientists were in the United States under military exploitation,” with 149 arriving at Wright Field and at the Army Air Forces School of Aviation Medicine in San Antonio, Texas. All of the AAF exploitees were under the control of Air Materiel Command, under General Putt’s supervision. Conditions had improved by that time to a point where some of the scientists worked on military projects away from Wright Field in industries with contracts with the War and Navy Departments. Families of fiftyone scientists had arrived in the United States, living in either military or civilian housing procured by the War or Navy Departments. At Wright Field the families were quartered in renovated barracks in the segregated NYA area—safely hidden away from the outside world.3 It wasn’t yet smooth sailing. Many in the American Jewish community were not thrilled about the presence of the German scientists, nor Wenzel Made Americans Out of Enemy Aliens [ 402 ] were some of America’s scientists. An influx of the former enemy’s “brain trust” could only mean more competition in an already tight job market. On March 24, 1947, the Dayton Daily News reported that the executive secretary of the Federation of American Scientists wanted nothing to do with German scientists in this country, saying that “Any favor extended to such individuals even for military reasons represents an affront to the people of all countries who so recently fought beside us, to the refugees whose lives were shattered by Nazism, to our unfortunate scientific colleagues of formerly occupied lands, and to all of those others who suffered under the yoke these men helped to forge.”4 The nascent opposition never organized into a political force, the drum America marches to, and the protests vanished quickly. As for political Washington, it was in the midst of transitioning the nation from a war-based economy to a civilian economy. World War II was rapidly slipping into the...