Operation Paperclip

by Annie Jacobsen

  En route to Göttingen, Dr. Alexander had a fortuitous break. “A curious coincidence played into my hands,” he wrote. “On my way to Göttingen… while having dinner in the Officers’ mess of the 433rd A. A. Bn. [Army Battalion] in camp Rennerod, Westerwald, I happened to meet another casual guest, an army chaplain, Lieutenant Bigelow. In the course of our conversation, Lt. Bigelow told me he was quite eager to get my ideas about rather cruel experiments on human beings, which had been performed at Dachau concentration camp. He had learned of them from a broadcast a few days earlier when ex-prisoners of Dachau had talked about these grim experiments over the Allied radio in Germany.” This was exactly the kind of lead Dr. Alexander was looking for, and he asked Lieutenant Bigelow to share with him anything else he remembered from the radio report.

  Lieutenant Bigelow told Alexander that as a member of the clergy he had ministered to many war victims. He had heard frightful stories about what had gone on in the medical blocks at the concentration camps. But nothing compared to what he had heard in that radio report. Doctors at Dachau had frozen people to death, in tubs of ice-cold water, to see if they could be unfrozen and brought back to life. These experiments were apparently meant to simulate conditions that Luftwaffe pilots went through after they’d been shot down over the English Channel, Bigelow said. Dr. Alexander now had a solid new lead. To his mind, the experiments Bigelow was referring to sounded “strikingly similar to the animal experiments performed by Dr. Weltz and his group” at the Freising farm. Was the Luftwaffe involved in medical research at the concentration camps? Dr. Alexander asked the chaplain if he had caught any of the names of the doctors involved in the Dachau medical crimes. Bigelow said that he couldn’t recall but that he was certain he had heard that the Luftwaffe was involved. More determined than ever to investigate, Dr. Alexander continued on to Göttingen to interview Dr. Hubertus Strughold.

  At the Institute for Physiology in Göttingen, Dr. Alexander located Strughold and arranged to interview him, getting straight to the point. Dr. Alexander told Dr. Strughold about the radio report claiming that freezing experiments had been conducted by the Luftwaffe at Dachau. Did Strughold, as the physician in charge of aviation medical research for the Luftwaffe, know about these criminal experiments at Dachau? Dr. Strughold said that he had learned of the experiments at a medical symposium he attended in Nuremberg in October 1942. The conference, called “Medical Problems of Sea Distress and Winter Distress,” took place at the Hotel Deutscher Hof and involved ninety Luftwaffe doctors. During that conference, Strughold said, a man named Dr. Sigmund Rascher presented findings that had been obtained from experiments performed on prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp. This was the same man “who had been mentioned over the allied radio the other day,” Strughold said. He called Rascher a fringe doctor whose only assistant at Dachau was his wife, Nini. Both Raschers were now dead.

  Did Strughold approve of these experiments? Strughold told Dr. Alexander that “even though Dr. Rascher used criminals in his experiments, he [Strughold] still disapproved of such experiments in non-consenting volunteers on principle.” Dr. Strughold promised Dr. Alexander that within his institute in Berlin he had “always forbidden even the thought of such experiments… firstly on moral grounds and secondly on grounds of medical ethics.” Alexander asked Strughold if he knew of any other Luftwaffe doctors who had been involved in human experiments at Dachau. Strughold said, “Any experiments on humans that we have carried out were performed only on our own staff and on students interested in our subject on a strictly volunteer basis.” He did not reveal that a number of doctors on his staff had visited Dachau regularly and worked on research experiments there.

  Also in Göttingen, Dr. Alexander interviewed several other doctors who had worked for Strughold, asking each of them specific questions about human experiments. Each doctor told a strikingly similar story. Dr. Sigmund Rascher was to blame for everything that went on at Dachau and now Rascher was dead. But one man, a physiologist named Dr. Friedrich Hermann Rein, let an important clue slip. Dr. Rascher had been an SS man, Rein said. This information gave Dr. Alexander a significant new piece of the puzzle he did not have before, namely, that the SS was also involved in the concentration camp freezing experiments. This was a revelation.

  The day after this disclosure, Dr. Alexander received further extraordinary, related news. “I learned that the entire contents of Himmler’s secret cave in Hallein, Germany [sic], containing a vast amount of miscellaneous specially secret S.S. records, had recently been discovered and taken” to the Seventh Army Document Center in Heidelberg. This huge trove of papers had been discovered by soldiers hidden away in yet another cave. The papers had been stamped with the unmistakable logo of the SS, and they bore Himmler’s personal annotations, drawn in the margins in the green pencil he liked to use. Dr. Alexander set out for the Document Center to see what he could glean from the files. These papers would turn out to be among the war’s most incriminating discoveries in a single document find.

  In Heidelberg, Himmler’s documents were being inventoried and sorted out when Dr. Alexander first arrived. One of the men tasked to the job was Hugh Iltis, the son of a Czech doctor, who, with his family, fled Europe in advance of the genocide. Iltis was a nineteen-year-old American soldier fighting on the front lines in France during the last months of the war when, he recalls, “a car showed up and an officer leapt out and pointed at me, then shouted ‘You, come with me!’ ” Iltis climbed into the car and sped away from the battlefield with the officer. Someone had learned that Hugh Iltis was a fluent German speaker (and perhaps that his father was a leading geneticist and anti-Nazi). Iltis was needed in Paris to translate captured Nazi documents, and the work kept on coming. Now, six months later, here he was in Heidelberg documenting atrocities for the War Crimes Commission. His discovery of the Himmler papers—it was Iltis who identified how important they were—would also become the most important collection of documents on Nazi human experimentation to be presented at the doctors’ trial.

  Alexander told Iltis what it was that he was looking for: documents written by Dr. Sigmund Rascher that involved experiments on humans. Together, the two men broke the original seals on the innocuously named Case No. 707-Medical Experiments, papers that turned out to include years of correspondence between Rascher and Himmler.

  “The idea to start the experiments with human beings in Dachau was obviously Dr. Rascher’s,” Alexander explained in his classified scientific intelligence report. But as Alexander learned from the papers, Rascher was far from the only Luftwaffe doctor involved. Nor were the human experiments limited to freezing experiments. Even more damning, Dr. Alexander learned that one of Dr. Strughold’s closest colleagues and his coauthor, a physiologist named Dr. Siegfried Ruff, was in charge of overseeing Rascher’s human experiments at Dachau. This was stunning news. “Dr. Ruff, and his assistant Dr. Romberg, joined forces [with Rascher] and arrived in Dachau with a low pressure chamber which they supplied,” Alexander wrote in his report. This low-pressure chamber was used for a second set of deadly experiments involving high-altitude studies. Sitting inside the Seventh Army Documentation Center reading the Himmler papers, Dr. Alexander realized that Dr. Strughold had lied to him when he had said that the only Luftwaffe doctor involved in the Dachau experiments had been the “fringe doctor” Rascher. In fact, Strughold’s friend and colleague Dr. Ruff was deeply implicated.

  Most disturbing to Alexander were a group of photographs showing what happened in the course of the experiments as healthy young men—classified by the Nazis as Untermenschen—were strapped into a harness inside the low-pressure chamber and subjected to explosive decompression. These photographs, astonishing in their sadism, were essentially before, during, and after pictures of murder in the name of medicine. Other photographs among the Himmler papers documented the freezing experiments as they were being conducted at Dachau. Rascher’s experiments were by no means the solo act of one depraved man. There were photographs of y
et another of Dr. Strughold’s Luftwaffe colleagues, Dr. Ernst Holzlöhner, holding prisoners down in tubs of icy water while their body temperatures were recorded as they died. It is believed that Rascher’s wife, Nini, took the photographs.

  In a classified CIOS report, Dr. Alexander expressed doubts about the veracity of Dr. Strughold’s earlier testimony from their first interview in Göttingen. The Dachau experiments were joint endeavors by the Luftwaffe and the SS, and, despite Strughold’s denials, several aviation doctors on his staff, including individuals who reported to directly to him, were named in the Himmler papers. “Strughold at least must have been familiar with the parts played by his friend and co-worker Ruff,” Dr. Alexander wrote. In his report, he advised SHAEF that, while he could not yet say if Dr. Strughold was directly involved in the death experiments, clearly Reich medical crimes “were still being covered up by” him.

  On June 20, Alexander headed back to Munich to confront Dr. Weltz. Instead, he found a colleague of Weltz’s, a Dr. Lutz, who broke down and confessed that he’d been aware of the human experiments, but that they’d been conducted by his team members, not him. Lutz claimed to have been offered the “human job,” by Weltz, but declined to accept, on grounds that he was “too soft.”

  Before confronting Strughold, Dr. Alexander first returned to Dachau to locate eyewitnesses. There, he found three former prisoners who offered testimony. John Bauduin, Oscar Häusermann, and Dr. Paul Hussarek had managed to stay alive at the concentration camp by working as orderlies for the SS. After Dachau was liberated, the three men chose to stay behind so as to help investigators piece together medical crimes. They formed a group, calling it the Committee for the Investigation of SS Medical Crimes. From them, Dr. Alexander learned that the experiments had been conducted on Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and Catholic priests in the secret, freestanding barracks called Experimental Cell Block Five. “In general, the death of prisoners transferred to Block 5 was expected within 2–3 days,” testified John Bauduin. The second witness, Dr. Hussarek, a Czech scholar sent to Dachau for committing “literary crimes,” told Dr. Alexander that “only a few experimental subjects survived the low pressure experiments. Most were killed.” All three men agreed that only one individual was known to have survived the experiments, a Polish priest named Leo Michalowski.

  Father Michalowski’s testimony provided a critical missing link in the medical murder experiments and how they were so skillfully concealed. Luftwaffe reports used the words “guinea pigs,” “large pigs,” and “adult pigs” as code words for their human subjects. In one of Weltz’s papers confiscated by Dr. Alexander, entitled “Alcohol and Rewarming,” Weltz wrote that “shipwreck experiments had been [simulated] in large pigs.” The pigs were placed in tubs of water with blocks of ice and given alcohol to see if a rewarming effect occurred. The results, wrote Weltz, showed that “alcohol in pigs does not increase or accelerate the loss of warmth.” In sworn testimony, Father Michalowski described what had been done to him at Dachau: “I was taken to room No. 4 on Block 5.… I was dropped in the water in which ice blocks were floating. I was conscious for one hour… then given some rum.” In Weltz’s paper the word “large pig” really meant “Catholic priest.”

  On June 22, Dr. Alexander returned to the Heidelberg Document Center to locate more information with the help of Hugh Iltis. Armed with new details and key words culled from survivor testimony, Dr. Alexander found what Dr. Rascher had called his “experiment reports.” These charts, Alexander noted, were a scientific chronicle of medical murder. Rascher had also had bigger plans. He was working with the SS to have the aviation medicine experiments relocated from Dachau to Auschwitz. “Auschwitz is in every way more suitable for such a large serial experiment than Dachau because it is colder there and the greater extent of open country within the camp would make the experiments less conspicuous,” Rascher wrote. Dr. Alexander also learned about a grotesque “motion picture of the record of the experiments” that had been shown at a private screening at the Air Ministry, at the behest of Himmler. The Luftwaffe doctor overseeing this event was yet another close colleague of Dr. Strughold’s, a physiologist and government official named Dr. Theodor Benzinger. Dr. Alexander was unable to locate Benzinger but noted the name in his report. He then returned to Göttingen to interview Strughold a second time to see if he could confirm that Strughold had been lying to him.

  In Göttingen, things had changed. Investigators working on scientific intelligence projects for the U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) and the Royal Air Force (RAF) had interviewed many of the Luftwaffe doctors, including Dr. Strughold. Their conclusions were remarkably different from Dr. Alexander’s. None of the RAF or AAF officers had traveled to the Document Center in Heidelberg to read the Himmler files. Instead, their reports were meant to serve and support Armstrong and Grow’s secret, new research lab.

  RAF Wing Commander R. H. Winfield wrote in his report, “Strughold was the mainspring of German Aviation Medical Research” and had a large staff of colleagues, including Dr. Siegfried Ruff, who all appeared to have “suffered tremendously from their isolation during the war years.” Winfield, having no idea that Dr. Ruff had been the person in charge of overseeing Rascher’s work at Dachau, stated that his “interrogations [of Ruff] revealed very little information not already known to the Allies.” Winfield saw Dr. Strughold as a patrician figure, “considerably disturbed about the welfare of his staff who, unable to evacuate Berlin, were now threatened by the Russians.”

  Representing the U.S. Army Air Forces was Colonel W. R. Lovelace, an expert in high-altitude escape and parachute studies. The following decade, Lovelace would become famous as the physician for NASA’s Cold War–era Project Mercury astronauts. For his confidential CIOS report, entitled “Research in Aviation Medicine for the German Air Force,” Lovelace interviewed Dr. Strughold and many of his colleagues, including the freezing expert, Georg Weltz. Like Winfield, Lovelace was in the dark about the medical murder experiments going on inside the concentration camps. He saw Weltz’s research as benign and dedicated five pages of his CIOS report to praising his studies on “rapid rewarming of the cooled animal.” Lovelace was particularly impressed by the fact that Weltz had frozen a “guinea pig” to death and was still able to record a heartbeat after death. “[T]he heartbeat may continue for some time if the animal is left in the cold,” Lovelace wrote in summation of Weltz’s findings.

  Unlike Dr. Alexander, Colonel Lovelace was able to interview Strughold and Ruff’s colleague Dr. Theodor Benzinger, the high-altitude specialist who ran the Reich’s Experimental Station of the Air Force Research Center, Rechlin, located north of Berlin. This was the same Dr. Benzinger who had overseen for Himmler the film screening at the Reich Air Ministry, in Berlin, of Dachau prisoners being murdered in medical experiments. And while Dr. Alexander had this information, Colonel Lovelace had no idea. Lovelace was particularly interested in Benzinger’s work involving “high altitude parachute escapes,” for which Benzinger had gathered much data and produced “studies in reversible and irreversible deaths.” Benzinger told Lovelace that he performed his studies on rabbits.

  Finally, Lovelace interviewed Dr. Konrad Schäfer, a chemist and physiologist whose wartime efforts to render salt water drinkable made him famous in Luftwaffe circles. With high praise from RAF and AAF officers, Doctors Ruff, Benzinger, and Schäfer were now each being considered for leading positions at the new research lab.

  It was the end of June 1945, and Dr. Alexander’s allotted time in the field as a war crimes investigator had drawn to a close. He was ordered back to London, where he would type up seven classified CIOS reports totaling more than fifteen hundred pages. Two weeks after Alexander left Germany, the chief of the Division of Aviation Medicine for the Army Air Forces, Detlev Bronk, and an AAF expert on the psychological and physiological stresses of flying named Howard Burchell, arrived in Germany to evaluate progress on the new research laboratory envisioned by Armstrong and Grow. Bronk and Burchell interviewe
d many of the same doctors and determined that they were all good candidates for the AAF center. Unlike Wing Commander Winfield and Colonel Lovelace, Bronk and Burchell had been made aware of some of the controversy surrounding Strughold and his Luftwaffe colleagues. In a joint report, they explained, “[N]o effort was made to assess [the doctors’] political and ethical viewpoints, or their responsibility for war crimes.” They also concluded, “Strughold was not always quite honest in presenting the true significance of the work which he supported.” But Bronk and Burchell stated that it was their position that army intelligence was better qualified to determine who was inadmissible “for political reasons” and who could be hired. As it turned out, military intelligence objected to hiring Dr. Benzinger and Dr. Ruff, on the grounds that both men had been hard-core Nazi ideologues. But in the following month, army intelligence determined that the doctors’ work at Heidelberg would be “short term,” and both men were cleared for U.S. Army employment.

  A deal was made between the U.S. Army Air Forces and Dr. Strughold. He would serve with Armstrong as cochairman of a Top Secret research center that the AAF was quietly setting up at the former Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Heidelberg, and to be called the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center. No one outside a small group could know about this controversial project because, per JCS 1076, no foreign power was permitted to carry out military research of any kind in Germany, including in medicine.