Operation Paperclip

by Annie Jacobsen

  Fate and circumstance had prepared him for the job. Like Samuel Goudsmit, the scientific director of Operation Alsos, Dr. Alexander had a unique background that qualified him to investigate German doctors and had also made things personal. A Jew, he had once been a rising star among Germany’s medical elite. In 1933, Germany’s race laws forbade the twenty-eight-year-old physician from practicing medicine any longer. Devastated, he left the country and wound up in America. Now, thirteen years later, he was back on German soil. His former existence here seemed like a lifetime ago.

  From as far back as he could remember, Leopold Alexander longed to be a doctor, like his father, Gustav. “One of the strongest unconscious motives for becoming a physician was the strong bond of identification with my father,” he once said, explaining the pull toward medicine. Gustav Alexander was an ear, nose, and throat doctor in turn-of-the-century Vienna, a distinguished scholar who published more than eighty scientific papers before Leopold was born. His mother, Gisela, was the first woman awarded a PhD in philosophy from the University of Vienna, the oldest university in the German-speaking world. From a young age Leopold led a charmed life. The Alexanders were sophisticated, wealthy professionals who lived in intellectual-bohemian splendor in a huge house with live peacocks on the lawns. Sigmund Freud was a frequent guest, as was the composer Gustav Mahler. By the time Leopold was fifteen, he was allowed to accompany his father on weekend hospital rounds. The father-son bond grew deep. On weekends they would walk through Vienna’s parks or museums, always engaged in lively conversation about history, anthropology, and medicine, as Dr. Alexander later recalled.

  In 1929, Leopold Alexander graduated from the University of Vienna Medical School and became a doctor, specializing in the evolution and pathology of the brain. For almost every aspiring physician in Europe at the time, the goal was to study medicine in Germany, and in 1932 Dr. Alexander was invited to enroll at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin. There he first rubbed elbows with Germany’s leading medical doctors, including Karl Kleist, the distinguished professor of brain pathology who would become his mentor. Alexander focused his studies on brain disorders and began fieldwork on patients with schizophrenia. Life was full of promise.

  Tragedy struck in two cruel blows. In 1932, Gustav Alexander was killed by a former mental patient—murdered in cold blood on the streets of Vienna by a man who, ten years earlier, had been hospitalized and declared insane. The second tragedy occurred in January of 1933, when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. National Socialism was on the rise. For every Jew in Germany, life was about to change inexorably. Fortune blessed Dr. Alexander. On January 20, 1933, just days before Hitler took power, the ambitious physician prepared to decamp to rural China to study mental illness. “I have accepted an invitation to go for half a year to Beijing Union Medical College in Beijing (China) as an honorary lecturer in neurology and psychiatry,” Dr. Alexander wrote to his professors at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, promising to return to Germany by October 1, 1933. It was a promise he was never to fulfill.

  Within two months of Hitler’s taking power, the Nazis initiated a nationwide boycott of Jewish doctors, lawyers, and business professionals. This was followed, in April 1933, by the Reich’s Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. It was now illegal for non-Aryans to work as civil servants, a ban that included every university teaching position throughout Germany. In Frankfurt, where Dr. Alexander had lived, sixty-nine Jewish professors were fired. The news of Germany’s radical transformation reached Dr. Alexander in China. The Alexander family lawyer, Maximilian Friedmann, wrote him a letter warning against return. “The prospects in Germany are most unfavorable,” Friedmann said. An uncle, Robert Alexander, was even more candid about what was happening in Nazi Germany when he wrote to Dr. Alexander to say that the nation had “succumbed to the swastika.” A Jewish colleague and friend, a neurologist named Arnold Merzbach, also penned a letter to Dr. Alexander in despair, telling him that all of their Jewish colleagues in Frankfurt had been dismissed from their university posts. “Our very existences are falling apart,” Merzbach wrote. “We are all without hope.”

  For months, Dr. Alexander lived in denial. He clung to the fantasy that Nazi laws would not apply to him, and he vowed to return once his fellowship ended. In China, Dr. Alexander was in charge of the neurological departments of several field hospitals, where he tended to soldiers with head injuries received on the battlefield. Ignoring the Nazi mandate that now barred Jews from working as doctors or professors, he wrote a letter to Professor Kleist, his mentor in Germany, saying how much he looked forward to returning home. Kleist wrote back to say that his return to Germany was “totally impossible.… You as a Jew [since] you have not served as a soldier in the First World War, can not be state employed.” In closing, Kleist wrote, “Have no false hopes.” The letter may have saved Dr. Alexander’s life.

  Untethered in China, Alexander was now a nomad, a man without a home to return to. With remarkable ambition and fortitude, he pressed on. As his father had done before him, he wrote and published scientific papers; his were on mental illness, which made him a viable candidate for a fellowship in America. Fortune again favored him when, in the fall of 1933, he learned that he had been awarded a position at a state mental hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, fifty miles outside Boston. Dr. Alexander boarded an American steamship called President Jackson and set sail for America by way of Japan. Out at sea, a strange event occurred. It happened in the middle of the long journey, when his ship was more than a thousand miles from land. A series of violent storms struck, sending passengers inside for days until finally the weather cleared. On the first clear day, Dr. Alexander ventured outside to play shuffleboard. Gazing out across the wide sea, he spotted an enormous single wave traveling with great speed and force, bearing down on his tiny steamship. There was no escape from what he quickly recognized as a tidal wave. Before Dr. Alexander could run back inside the ship, the President Jackson was lifted up by this great wave. “The ship traveled up the steep slope very slowly, further and further, until we finally reached the top,” he wrote to his brother, Theo. And then, with the ship balancing precariously at the top of the wave, he described the terrifying feeling that followed. “Suddenly there was nothing behind it… nothing but a steep descent.” The ship began to free-fall, “its nose plunged deep into the water.… The impact was harsh, water splashed to all sides, and things fell to this side and that in the kitchen and common rooms.” The ship regained its balance, almost effortlessly, and steamed on. “The whole thing happened so unbelievably fast,” Alexander wrote. “When it was over, I said to myself now I understand the meaning of the saying, ‘the ocean opens up before you and swallows you whole.’ ”

  It did not take long for Dr. Alexander to thrive in America. He was a supremely hard worker. On average he slept five hours a night. Working as a doctor at a New England mental institution was endlessly fascinating to him. He once told a reporter that what interested him most was determining what made men tick. Only a few months after his arrival in New England, he was promoted to a full-time position in the neuropsychiatric ward at Boston State Hospital. While performing hospital rounds in 1934, he met a social worker named Phyllis Harrington. They fell in love and married. By 1938 they had two children, a boy and a girl. A prolific writer, Dr. Alexander published fifty scientific papers. By the end of the decade he’d been hired to teach at Harvard Medical School. He was a U.S. citizen now. Journalists wrote newspaper articles about the “doctor from Vienna,” citing his outstanding accomplishments in the field of mental illness. He had a new home; he had been accepted as one of Boston’s medical elite.

  In December 1941 America went to war. Dr. Alexander joined the fight and was sent to the Sixty-fifth General Hospital in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and then to an army hospital in England. For the duration of the war, Dr. Alexander helped wounded soldiers recover from shell shock. He also collected data on flight fa
tigue. After the Germans surrendered, he expected to be sent home. Instead he received his unprecedented order from SHAEF. He was to go to Germany and investigate allegations of Nazi medical crimes. In doing so, he would come face-to-face with former professors, mentors, and fellow students. It was his job to figure out who might be guilty and who was not.

  Dr. Alexander’s first trip to Dachau did not produce any significant leads despite rumors that barbaric medical experiments had gone on there. On June 5, 1945, he traveled the twelve miles to Munich to visit the Luftwaffe’s Institute for Aviation Medicine. This research facility was headed by a radiologist named Georg August Weltz, still working despite Germany’s collapse. On paper Weltz was a man of repute. He was gentle-looking, fifty-six years old with a shock of white hair and a wrinkled, sun-tanned face. In their first interview Weltz told Alexander he had worked as a military doctor his entire life, beginning as a Balloon Corps physician in World War I.

  Dr. Alexander had a SHAEF dossier on Weltz that revealed Weltz had joined the Nazi Party in 1937, after which he had moved quickly up the Reich’s medical chain of command. By 1941 he reported directly to the air marshal of the Luftwaffe, Erhard Milch, who reported to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. By war’s end, there were only a few men with more medical authority on Luftwaffe issues than Georg August Weltz—one of them being Dr. Hubertus Strughold.

  In their first interview, Weltz told Dr. Alexander that it had been his job to conduct a variety of research on methods of saving Luftwaffe pilots’ lives. Weltz cited what happened to Luftwaffe pilots in 1940 during the Battle of Britain. Many had been shot down over the English Channel by the British Royal Air Force and had bailed out of their crashing airplanes and initially survived. The fatalities, Weltz explained, often occurred hours later, usually from hypothermia. The bodies of many Luftwaffe pilots had been rescued from the icy waters of the channel just minutes after they had frozen to death. The Luftwaffe wanted to know if, through medical research, doctors could learn how to “unfreeze a man,” to bring him back to life. Dr. Weltz told Dr. Alexander that he and his team of researchers had performed groundbreaking research in this area. Weltz declared that they had in fact made a “startling and useful discovery.” The results, said Weltz, were simply “astounding.”

  Dr. Alexander asked, “What kind of results?”

  Weltz hesitated to provide details but promised that the U.S. Army would be very interested in the knowledge he possessed. Weltz asked Dr. Alexander if a deal could be made. Weltz said that he was interested in securing a grant with the Rockefeller Foundation. Dr. Alexander explained that he had no authority with any private-sector foundation and that, before anything else, he needed Weltz to tell him about this so-called “astounding” discovery.

  Weltz said he and his team had solved an age-old riddle: Can a man who has frozen to death be brought back to life? The answer, Weltz confided, was yes. He had proof. He and his team had solved this medical conundrum through a radical rewarming technique they’d invented. Alexander asked Weltz to be more specific. Weltz said success was dependent upon precise body temperature and duration of rewarming in direct proportion to a man’s weight. He was not at liberty to provide data just yet, but the method his team had developed was so effective that the Luftwaffe air-sea rescue service had employed this very technique during the war. The experiments, said Weltz, had been conducted on large animals. Cows, horses, and “adult pigs.”

  Dr. Alexander was in Germany to investigate Nazi medical war crimes. He got straight to the point and asked Weltz whether human beings had ever been used in these Luftwaffe experiments.

  “Weltz explicitly stated that no such [human experiments] had been done by him and that he did not know of any such work having been done,” Dr. Alexander wrote in his classified report. But the way in which Weltz responded made Dr. Alexander deeply suspicious of him.

  Dr. Alexander was in a conundrum. Should he have Weltz arrested? Or was it best to try to learn more? “I still felt it wiser for the purposes of this investigation not to resort to coercive measures such as an arrest,” Alexander explained. He asked Weltz to take him to the laboratory where these experiments on large animals were performed.

  Weltz claimed that because of heavy bomb damage in Munich the Luftwaffe’s test facility for its rewarming techniques had been moved out to a dairy farm in the rural village of Weihenstephan. Alexander and Weltz drove there together in an army jeep. An inspection of the farm revealed a state-of-the-art low-pressure chamber concealed in a barn. This, Weltz explained, was where Luftwaffe pilots learned performance limits under medical supervision. Also called a high-altitude chamber, the apparatus allowed aviation doctors to simulate the effects of high altitude on the body. But the rewarming facilities were nowhere to be seen. Where were they? Dr. Alexander asked.

  Weltz hesitated and then explained. They’d been moved, Weltz said—this time to an estate near Freising, at a government-owned experimental agricultural station. Dr. Alexander insisted on seeing the Freising facility, and the two men got back into the army jeep and drove on. In Freising, Alexander was shown yet another impressive medical research facility, also hidden in a barn, complete with a library and X-ray facilities, all meticulously preserved. But the laboratory was clearly designed to handle experiments on small animals, mice and guinea pigs, not larger animals like cows, horses, and adult pigs. There were records, drawings, and charts of the freezing experiments—all carefully preserved. But, again, they chronicled experiments on small animals, mostly mice. Where had the large animal experiments taken place? Weltz took Alexander to the rear of the barn, behind a stable and into a separate shed located far in the back of the property. There Weltz pointed to two dirty wooden tubs, both cracked.

  It was an extraordinary moment, Dr. Alexander would later testify, horrifying in its clarity. Neither of the tubs could possibly fit a submerged cow, horse, or large pig. What these tubs “could fit was a human being,” Dr. Alexander said.

  The grim reality of Dr. Weltz’s Luftwaffe research became painfully clear. “I came away from all these interviews with the distinct conviction that experimental studies on human beings, either by members of this group themselves, or by other workers well known to and affiliated [with] the members of this group, had been performed but were being concealed,” Dr. Alexander wrote. Without an admission of guilt, he had only suspicion. To make an arrest, he needed evidence. He thanked Dr. Weltz for his assistance and told him that he would be returning sometime in the future for a follow-up visit.

  Dr. Alexander had been on German soil for two weeks, and the deviance of Nazi science overwhelmed him. In a letter to his wife, Phyllis, he described what had become of German science under Nazi rule. “German science presents a grim spectacle,” he wrote. “Grim for many reasons. First it became incompetent and then it was drawn into the maelstrom of depravity of which this country reeks—the smell of the concentration camps, the smell of violent death, torture and suffering.” German doctors were not practicing science, Alexander said, but “really depraved pseudoscientific criminality.” In addition to investigating crimes committed in the name of aviation medical research, Dr. Alexander was the lead investigator looking at crimes committed in the name of neuropsychiatry and neuropathology. In this capacity, he came face-to-face with the odious and core Nazi belief that had informed the practice of medicine under Hitler’s rule. Not only were all people not created equal in the eyes of the Third Reich, but some people were actually not humans at all. According to Nazi ideology, Untermenschen—subhumans, as they were called, a designation that included Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Poles, Slavs, Russian prisoners of war, the handicapped, the mentally ill, and others—were no different from white mice or lab rabbits whose bodies could thereby be experimented on to advance the Reich’s medical goals. “The sub-human is a biological creature, crafted by nature,” according to Heinrich Himmler, “which has hands, legs, eyes, and mouth, even the semblance of a brain. Nevertheless, this terrible creature is onl
y a partial human being.… Not all of those who appear human are in fact so.” German citizens were asked to believe this pseudo-science; millions did not protest. German scientists and physicians used this racial policy to justify torturous medical experiments resulting in maiming and death. In the case of the handicapped and the mentally ill, the Untermenschen theory was used by German doctors and technicians to justify genocide.

  As a war crimes investigator, Dr. Alexander was one of the first American servicemen to learn that the Reich had first sterilized and then euthanized nearly its entire population of mentally ill persons, including tens of thousands of children, under the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring. All across southern Germany, one German physician after the next admitted to Dr. Alexander his knowledge of the child euthanasia program. This included Dr. Alexander’s own mentor and former professor, the neurologist Karl Kleist. During an interview in Frankfurt, Kleist confessed to Dr. Alexander that he had known of the policy of euthanasia, and he handed over military psychiatric reports that allowed him to circumvent personal responsibility and claim he was just following orders. Kleist was not arrested, but a few days later he was removed from his teaching job. The former teacher and student never spoke again, and it remains a mystery if Dr. Alexander requested that Kleist be fired. Within a few years Kleist’s name would appear on a secret Paperclip recruiting list. It is not known if he came to the United States.

  Each day brought atrocious new information. “It sometimes seems as if the Nazis had taken special pains in making practically every nightmare come true,” Dr. Alexander later told his wife, comparing Reich medicine to something out of a dark German fairy tale. Whereas doctors who knew about the euthanasia program tended to be forthcoming with information—the program was “justified” by a German law kept secret from the general public—it struck Dr. Alexander that criminal human experiments by Luftwaffe doctors, like the freezing experiments Weltz was involved in, appeared to have been more skillfully concealed. If Dr. Alexander wanted to learn the facts about what Luftwaffe doctors had been up to during the war, he knew that he had to understand the bigger picture. And he also had to determine where else the crimes might have taken place. The best way to do this was to interview the man nearest the top, Dr. Hubertus Strughold. Strughold had directed the Aviation Medical Research Institute for the Luftwaffe for ten of the twelve years of Nazi Party rule. When Dr. Alexander learned that Dr. Strughold was in Göttingen, in the British zone, he headed there.