Besides the U.S. Air Force and Navy, universities like Yale, Michigan State, Wisconsin, Oregon State, Chicago, and Ohio State were among the winners. As were companies like Boeing, RAND, Lockheed, Dow Chemical, Raytheon, GE, Northrop, Westinghouse, and RCA.
Even Congress got into the spoils race. Tucked inside its CIA Act of 1949 was a provision that slid through the Capitol as smoothly as a puck on ice. The bill authorized the INS to grant permanent residency for up to one hundred individuals and their families per year in the interest of national security and intelligence gathering, and “without regard to their admissibility”—code for Nazis scientists and high-ranking military officers. The act further authorized the CIA to hire three of these individuals annually, even specifying their salary range. The act had no accountability provision for the “one hundred” program, making it a secret Nazi carte blanche.{Citing national security, the CIA rejected my FOIA request for the names of the scientists and intelligence specialists it brought into the country under the “one hundred” program.}
Among the most precious Paperclip “cargo” landing in America was Hubertus Strughold, a doctor linked to Nazi medical experiments on humans.
Dr. Strughold had been the director of the Institute for Aviation Medicine in Berlin, a civilian research center under contract with the German Air Force (Luftwaffe). His boss was Reich Marshal Hermann Goering, who was later convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death. Goering beat the noose with a cyanide capsule. Dr. Strughold was neither a Nazi nor a Luftwaffe officer, as some have stated. He resisted the pressure to become either, he claimed, to preserve his scientific objectivity.
In reality, Dr. Strughold was a closet Nazi who believed that the party had done much for Germany. He was also anti-Semitic, complaining that “Jews had crowded the medical schools and it had been nearly impossible for others to enter.”
War crimes investigators named Strughold, a specialist in high-altitude medicine, as one of ninety-five German doctors who attended an October 1942 conference in Nuremberg at the Deutscher Hof Hotel. The topic of the two-day meeting was “Winter Hardship and Distress at Sea.” Two of Dr. Strughold’s colleagues delivered papers based on their medical experiments on humans. The participating doctors discussed the lectures afterward.
The idea to experiment on humans belonged to Strughold’s associate, Dr. Sigmund Rascher. As Rascher explained to his boss, Heinrich Himmler, hypothermia and high-altitude experiments on animals furnished limited data. The best results came from primates, which were next to impossible to get under war conditions. How about a few humans? Would it bother you if some died?
Himmler gave him Dachau.
Rascher and his colleagues randomly selected as their primates: 1,000 Russians, 500 Poles, 200 Jews, and 50 Gypsies. They conducted three kinds of experiments at the camp: hypothermia, high-altitude, and saltwater. Dr. Rascher directed the first two, which turned out to be “astonishing acts of cruelty.” Rascher’s fellow doctors described him as a brute—ambitious, greedy, sadistic, and perverted.
The purpose of the hypothermia experiments was to answer the question: What is the best way to warm a German pilot downed in the icy waters of the North Sea or a soldier suffering from hypothermia on the eastern front? In one experiment, Rascher dressed victims in life vests and a flying uniform. He then submerged them in a wooden tank of ice water for three to five hours. Sometimes he allowed their brain stems to protrude above the water; sometimes he submerged them, which caused death within minutes. In another experiment, he forced victims to stand naked outside in 27–29 degree Fahrenheit temperatures for nine to fourteen hours.
“Victims screamed in pain as parts of their bodies froze,” the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal later reported.
Rascher monitored body temperatures at regular intervals, recorded the time it took for loss of consciousness and for death, and performed autopsies to collect data. He used two kinds of warming techniques for those who survived the ice tank and the winter weather: submersion in warm water and animal warming— sandwiching the victim between two naked Gypsy women who were “volunteers” from the Ravensbruck camp, where Hermine Braunsteiner worked for a time. Rascher duly recorded the progress and the times of the rewarming. As part of the experiment, he forced the subjects to have intercourse while he watched. One-third of the hypothermia victims died.
The purpose of the high-altitude experiments was to answer the question: How much atmospheric pressure can a German pilot withstand after ejecting from his airplane at high altitudes? The experiments took place in a round, airtight, low-pressure chamber that Rascher and Strughold codesigned. Dachau victims called it the Skyride Machine.
Dr. Rascher would lock the victims in the chamber, then manipulate the pressure inside to simulate atmospheric pressures at 35,000–66,000 feet. The lower number was somewhat safe. The higher number was certain death. Rascher designed four different experiments: slow parachute descent with oxygen, then without oxygen; free-fall descent with oxygen, then without. Rascher would carefully measure how long it took to lose consciousness, how long to die.
Death was not easy.
In an April 1942 report to Himmler, Dr. Rascher described the murder of a thirty-seven-year-old Jew who took a trip in the Skyride Machine—first with oxygen, then without it—at sixty thousand feet. At four minutes he began perspiring and wagging his head; at five minutes, he had cramps; at six to ten minutes, fast breathing and unconsciousness; at thirty minutes, death.
Death was painful.
“Some experiments gave men such pressure in their heads that they would go mad,” Rascher reported to Himmler. “They would tear at their hair and faces with their hands and scream in an effort to relieve the pressure on their eardrums.” After each experiment, Rascher and his assistants would open the chamber, haul out the victims, some of whom were still breathing, and dissect them for data. One-third of the high altitude victims were murdered.
Once Germany’s ultimate defeat became obvious, Himmler made sure that Rascher would never implicate him in the war crimes trials that were sure to come. Just weeks before the Seventh Army liberated Dachau, he ordered the SS to execute Rascher and, with a twist of irony, to shoot him inside the camp. They did.
U.S. Army Intelligence placed Dr. Strughold on the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects. Investigators wanted to question him. What did he know about the Dachau experiments? What was his relationship to Dr. Rascher and other Dachau doctors? Did he initiate the experiments? Did he help design experiment protocols? Was he privy to the results? If so, did he use the results in his work and writings?
The U.S. Air Force saw to it that Nuremberg investigators never got to interview Strughold. He was easy enough to find at the U.S. Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg, where he was directing a contingent of about two hundred German scientists, all working for America. Five of those scientists were already awaiting trial at Nuremberg for medical war crimes. All five had been screened and selected to work at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, but the air force screwed up. Nuremberg investigators nabbed the quintet before the military could erase their names from the Central Registry.
Dr. Strughold’s major task at the Aero Medical Center was to synthesize all data on high-altitude experiments, both animal and human, into a compendium on aviation medicine for use by the U.S. Air Force. An important part of that job was to integrate the Dachau experiment findings without revealing where the data came from. The Pentagon was not eager for Americans to know that while it was prosecuting Nazi doctors in Nuremberg for killing prisoners to get scientific data, it secretly was using the data.
Nuremberg prosecutors tried twenty-three German doctors and medical administrators during the “Doctors Trial” in December 1946. Missing from the list was Dr. Hubertus Strughold. On the list were all the Dachau-related scientists and administrators above and below him. Among them: Dr. Sigfried Ruff, who reported directly to Strughold; and Drs. Hans Romberg and Georg Weltz, who both reported to Ruff. During the Doctors Trial, these three along with other defendants suggested that Strughold not only knew about the Dachau experiments, but also received written and oral reports on the results. Since Strughold was not on trial, prosecutors did not dig deeper into his role in the experiments.
The doctors also testified that, as director of the Institute for Aviation Medicine, which sponsored the experiments, Strughold could have either objected to them on moral grounds or stopped them. But if he had done either, they hastened to add, his life and career would have been at the mercy of Goering and Himmler.
