WANTED: HITLER'S SCIENTISTS: Review

After the British bombed Peenemunde in 1943, much of the rocket operation was moved to Nordhausen, in the Harz mountains, where an underground factory was built and operated with slave labor from concentration camps. The director of production at Nordhausen was [Arthur Rudolph], later the director of NASA's Saturn 5 rocket project at Huntsville. Mr. [Tom Bower] says Mr. Rudolph was ''probably'' present at the regular weekly hangings in the tunnels at Nordhausen. According to one prisoner's account, an electric crane ''lifted twelve prisoners at a time, hands behind their backs, a piece of wood in their mouths . . . to prevent them crying out.'' After the war, Mr. Rudolph admitted to investigators that he had seen some of the prisoners hanged. ''One lifted his knees,'' he recalled. But these unpleasantries were overlooked in the higher interests of national security: Mr. Rudolph got his paper clip. At Dachau, Luftwaffe ''aviation doctors'' used in-mates to see how long it took a person to die when immersed in a tub of ice. Dr. Sigmund Rascher, who ran the experiments and was later executed on Heinrich Himmler's orders, suggested that the work be transferred to Auschwitz, a bigger place where it would attract less attention, since ''the subjects howl frightfully when they freeze.'' Thirty-four aviation doctors accepted Paperclip contracts and came to America. Presumably some had knowledge of the hideous experiments, but ''The Paperclip Conspiracy'' is not clear about how many, if any, knew. A handful of American officials protested what was happening, notably Samuel Klaus, a dogged bureaucrat in the State Department's visa section, and the F.B.I.'s William Underhill. But their efforts to screen out the worst of the Nazis were crushed. A Major Simpson, who was assigned to the military intelligence unit that ran Paperclip, warned a colleague of Klaus's: ''Get that little Jew off the committee.'' In time, he was removed. The military got to J. Edgar Hoover, and William Underhill, too, was brushed aside. What the German scientists ''did during the war was irrelevant,'' one American Army officer said. ''We had to keep the scientists out of the Russians' hands.''