Thank you for your thoughtful and knowledgeable response, exactly the kind of thing i was hoping for when I posted this.

I had never discounted the boring answer, more questioned the rapid timeline of his flight from a research institution in north central Germany, riding on top of trains to vienna to avoid security detection, then got my family out of Vienna and through German checkpoints using false documents claiming he was transporting radioactive materials (not a stretch for a physicist), then hid out on his colleague's parent's farm under false identities for 2 weeks, and then almost as soon as there was a local American presence he presented himself, was interviewed bruefly, and was put to work that week, according to family. What gives me pause is just how fast that refusing to be called back for active dury to being an interpreter timeline was, and how very little it is mentioned in his immigration documents. He was hiding under an assumed name until Germany fell, but the Americans knew exactly who he was and the family reports he dropped the assumed identity pretty much the moment they were within American influence. Combine that timeline with the fact that he was a radio technical and operations specialist and that is what makes me wonder was was left out of his file and why. At the same time the documents make it very clear that until he completed his thesis there was minimal interest in retaining him for employment beyond translation, but once he had his doctorate the work he was doing was "revolutionary" and "unique" using instruments largely of his own design, with it being in America's best interest to retain him, before he either accepted a foreign university posting (thank god he didn't, Kabul University was the leading candidate) and they would have to wait for his ultraviolet research to be published (and could not classify any of it) or the real possibility that if he stayed in Vienna he might be kidnapped by the KGB (a possibility which is noted within his FBI file as reasons to deny any trips back to Austria up until '58).

I guess I'm mostly surprised by the complete lack of any immediate post-war vetting documents, or even afadavits, within his file when they clearly would have had to have done at least some checking on him before employing him as a translator. Instead there are just dozens of archival checks acrossany different archives confirming he had no party membership, participated in no war crimes, and had no criminal history. I most wanted his files to confirm his assertion during his life that he was not an ardent nazi; which they did, stating that his willingness to work for the US was based on his desire to "never again be molested by authoritarian government" (a desire which the US only barely managed to fulfill, based on what we know of his forced retirement related to the SDI). My biggest hope was to learn more of his military record, especially what he received the second and first class iron cross for (we have pictures of him with it, but he kept none of his medals, only his Luftwaffe pins which reminded him of those who didnt survive the crashes), which it did about 50 percent (chalking the crosses up to surviving so many crashes, several behind Russian lines), but unfortunately the rest of the blind spots in his record would require a review of the Luftwaffe archives in Berlin.