Operation Paperclip

by Annie Jacobsen

  Inside the JIOA, reactions were mixed, particularly among advisory board members. The assistant secretary of the interior was skeptical as to how Commerce could guarantee to keep old Nazis out of the program. The War Department did not like the idea of having to bring the families to America. Army Intelligence felt Green’s proposal had validity from an economic perspective. If Commerce got involved in the German scientist program, the army would not necessarily have to shoulder so much of the financial burden. The State Department continued to voice objections, saying that regardless of who footed the bill, visas were not going to be granted to former enemies of the state without thorough and individual investigations. The Nazi scientist program was a temporary military program, State said. Nothing more.

  John C. Green had an alternative plan. Instead of arguing his case further to the JIOA advisory board, he appealed to his boss, Henry Wallace. In turn, Henry Wallace wrote directly to President Truman, requesting that the president support the German science program. Science would help create those sixty million jobs, Wallace said, and nothing had a higher national priority in peacetime than American jobs. It was “wise and logical” to bring to America “scientists of outstanding attainments who can make a positive contribution to our scientific and industrial efforts,” Wallace wrote to President Truman on December 4, 1945. The knowledge these men possessed, Wallace said, “if added to our own would advance the frontiers of scientific knowledge for national benefit.” To illustrate his point, Wallace used one of the most benign scientists in all of Germany, a concrete and road construction expert named Dr. O. Graff, who had helped design the autobahn. “If you agree that the importance of a selected few (approximately 50 in number) would be an asset to our economy, I suggest you declare that this to be U.S. policy,” Wallace urged the president.

  For Colonel Donald Putt at Wright Field and the military intelligence members of the JIOA, Henry Wallace’s endorsement of the program was like a shot in the arm. Before Wallace’s letter to the president, Samuel Klaus of the State Department had suggested that the public would be outraged by the program once they found out about it. It could not stay secret forever, nor was it meant to. Klaus had said that bringing Hitler’s former scientists to America for weapons research and development gave the impression that the army and the navy were willing to make deals with the devil for national security gains. Henry Wallace’s economically minded endorsement changed all that. It gave the German scientists program an air of democracy, offering counterbalance to what could be perceived as an aggressive military program.

  Henry Wallace had been staunchly anti-Nazi during the war. Preceding Truman in the vice presidency, Wallace had publicly called Hitler a “supreme devil operating through a human form.” In another famous speech, he had likened Hitler to Satan seven times. That Henry Wallace was encouraging President Truman to endorse the German scientist program in the name of economic prosperity gave Operation Overcast a future. Henry Wallace was exactly what the JIOA had been waiting for.

  On November 4, 1945, a headline in the Washington Post caught the nation’s attention: “Army Uncovers Lurid Nazi ‘Science’ of Freezing Men.” The article, written by reporter George Connery, was a major news scoop. In an effort to garner support for subsequent military trials in Nuremberg, the War Department had leaked to Connery the secret CIOS report written by war crimes investigator Dr. Leo Alexander. The report chronicled the freezing experiments conducted at Dachau inside Experimental Cell Block Five. That human beings had been tortured to death by German physicians in the name of medical science was both horrifying and incomprehensible to most Americans. The Post article revealed that the only man believed to have survived the freezing experiments had been located by Dr. Leo Alexander. Most of the other victims—the so-called Untermenschen whom the Nazi doctors had experimented on—died in the process or were killed. It was likely that this sole surviving victim, a Catholic priest, would provide witness testimony in the Nuremberg courts. Americans were rapt.

  Kept secret from the public was an astonishing hypocrisy. Less than 150 miles from the Nuremberg courtroom, several of the physicians who had participated in, and many others who were accessory to, these criminal medical experiments were now being employed by the U.S. Army at the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center, the classified research facility in Heidelberg. This laboratory, dreamed up by Colonel Harry Armstrong and Major General Malcolm Grow at a meeting in France in the spring of 1945, would remain one of the best-kept secrets of Operation Paperclip for decades to come. Here, starting on September 20, 1945, fifty-eight doctors handpicked by Dr. Strughold had been working on medical research projects begun for the Third Reich. Some of the data the Nazi doctors were using in their new Army research had been obtained in experiments in which test subjects had been murdered.

  For Grow and Armstrong, the plan was to have these Luftwaffe doctors reconfigure the results of their war work in Heidelberg under army supervision. The follow-on plan was for these doctors to come to the United States under Paperclip contracts. Because conducting military research inside Germany was a violation of Allied Control Council Law 25 of the Potsdam Accord, the Aero Medical Center’s classified nature shielded the Nazi doctors from chance exposure.

  The codirectors of the secret research facility, Colonel Harry Armstrong and Dr. Hubertus Strughold, were alike in many ways, so much so that some saw the two men as mirror images of one another. The growing success of the Aero Medical Center would prove to be a launching point for each man’s meteoric postwar career. Armstrong would eventually be promoted to U.S. surgeon general of the air force. Strughold would become the father of U.S. space medicine.

  Harry Armstrong, born in 1899, entered into the U.S. military when horses were still being ridden into battle. During World War I Armstrong learned how to drive a six-mule ambulance and decided to become a doctor. After receiving his medical degree from the University of Louisville, he opened a private practice in Minneapolis. He might have become a country doctor, but he was preoccupied by airplanes and dirigibles. Appointed first lieutenant in the Medical Corps Reserve, Armstrong entered the School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Field, in San Antonio, Texas, in 1924. In 1925 he decided to specialize in a field of medicine few had ever heard of, and soon he would become a flight surgeon. He had never flown in an airplane before.

  It was a master sergeant named Erwin H. Nickles who inspired Armstrong to make his first parachute jump. In a lecture that took place in a parachute hangar, Nickles presented the idea that one day entire troops of infantrymen just might jump out of airplanes into combat situations as a group. After the class was over, Armstrong got in a long conversation with Nickles. “He told me that he was puzzled by the fact that people who he supervised in practice jumps almost invariably failed to follow his instruction which was to count ten after leaving the airplane before pulling the rip cord,” Armstrong explained. He said that Nickles feared jumpers would “black out or get into a panic and pull the rip cord too quickly.” When Nickles “hinted that he would be very happy if some doctor would make a jump to see if they could solve his problem,” Armstrong’s mind was made up. “I decided I would make a practice jump and delay my opening as long as possible.”

  A few weeks later Armstrong was standing in the cockpit of a biplane, wearing a flying suit and a gabardine helmet and getting ready to jump. “I had a feeling of panic,” Armstrong explained, but he hurled himself out of the aircraft anyway. As he fell through the air he kept his eyes closed and paid attention to what his body felt like as he descended. The feeling of panic disappeared, he later recalled. He did not lose consciousness or black out. Armstrong allowed himself to free-fall for approximately twelve hundred feet before he finally pulled the ripcord. His parachute opened and he floated the last one thousand feet to earth, where he landed in a grassy Texas field. Harry Armstrong had set a U.S. Army record. He was the first flight surgeon to make a free fall from an aircraft.

  Armstrong finished school and returned
to Minnesota, but with an insatiable love of flying. On March 21, 1930, he closed his practice in Minneapolis and joined the army for good. His life as one of the most important figures in the history of American aviation and aerospace medicine had begun.

  When Armstrong arrived with his family at Wright Field, in 1934, the world was enamored with airplanes, which were not yet associated with war but with peacetime progress and the spirit of adventure. Jimmy Doolittle set a transcontinental record flying from California to New Jersey in eleven hours, sixteen minutes. Wiley Post and Harold Gatty circled the globe in eight days. At Wright Field, the primary task of the flight surgeon was determining who was physically fit to fly in the airplanes of the day. Armstrong was a man with a vision and he was also a soldier. He envisioned a future where wars would be fought in the air. The Army Air Corps’ most advanced fighter aircraft was a biplane with a speed of around 200 miles per hour and a flight ceiling of 18,000 feet. Armstrong’s work centered around resolving problems related to oxygen deprivation and exposure to cold.

  One day Armstrong spotted a trapdoor in the floor of his office inside Building 16 at Wright Field. He opened the door, saw a staircase, and climbed down. He found himself in a basement filled with old machinery and drafting tables. An unusual-looking chamber, like something out of a novel by Jules Verne, caught his eye. It was shaped like a globe, made of iron, and had windows like submarine portholes. This was the army’s first and only low-pressure chamber, built decades earlier for its World War I flight surgeon school. The school, located in Mineola, Long Island, had closed down after the war and the chamber had wound up here, at Wright Field.

  Armstrong got an idea. Next door to his office, Army Air Forces engineers were designing airplanes that could fly faster, higher, and farther than ever before. Armstrong wanted to begin research and development on the medical effects that flying these new airplanes would have on pilots. He wrote a letter to the engineering division at Wright Field requesting permission. The letter was forwarded to Washington. In no time, Armstrong was appointed director of the Physiological Research Unit (later called the Aero Medical Research Laboratory and other variations on the name) at Wright Field.

  His lab took off. Shop mechanics built test chambers from old airplane parts. He hired a scientist from Harvard, a PhD named John “Bill” Heim. Using volunteer test subjects, Heim and Armstrong gathered data on how the body responds to speed, lower oxygen levels, and decompression sickness and extreme temperatures. But it was an experiment on himself, with a rabbit on his lap, for which Armstrong became legendary.

  He had been wondering what really happened to the human body above 10,000 feet. Why, and at what specific height, would a man die? Armstrong climbed into the low-pressure chamber with the rabbit on his lap. His technician adjusted the pressure to simulate high altitude. Armstrong’s chest began to tighten and his joints hurt. When he rubbed his hands, he felt tiny bubbles along his tendons, ones that he could move around under his skin. He surmised that these were nitrogen bubbles forming in his blood and tissues, and that death at high altitude was caused by blood clotting. Armstrong indicated to the technician that he should simulate an even higher altitude inside the chamber. He was wearing an oxygen mask, but the rabbit on his lap was not. Soon the rabbit would be dead. As the lab technician raised the pressure, the rabbit convulsed and died. When Armstrong got out of the chamber, he dissected the rabbit and found nitrogen bubbles, proving that his hypothesis was correct.

  Armstrong’s discovery gave way to a major milestone in aviation medicine. Working with Heim on more tests, he inserted a viewing tube into the artery of a test animal. The two men took data on what happens to a mammal’s body at forty thousand, fifty thousand, and finally sixty-five thousand feet. They were the first to witness that body fluids boil at sixty-three thousand feet. This point would become known as the Armstrong line. This is the altitude beyond which humans cannot survive without a pressure suit.

  In 1937, Captain Harry Armstrong was considered one of America’s aviation medicine pioneers. On October 2 of that year he attended the Aero Medical Association’s first international convention, which took place in the Astor Gallery of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. There, he and Heim reported the results of their recent studies at Wright Field. One of the doctors most interested in these studies was the Luftwaffe physician representing Germany, Dr. Hubertus Strughold. The two men, Armstrong and Strughold, were pioneers in the same field. “We hit it off immediately,” remembered Harry Armstrong decades later. That fortuitous meeting would profoundly shape Strughold’s post-Nazi career.

  Some men claim to be shaped by a single event. For Hubertus Strughold, it was watching Halley’s Comet streak across the sky from his backyard tree house in Westtünnen, Germany, in 1910. Forever after, said Strughold, he became preoccupied with what lies above. That same year, a second event shaped the rest of his life. Strughold watched a solar eclipse through a viewing glass and nearly went blind. The lens wasn’t as dark as he thought it was and he burned the retina of his right eye, causing permanent damage. “When I looked at somebody with the right eye, at his nose, he had no nose.… When I looked at somebody at the street, at a distance of about a hundred meters at somebody’s head [with the right eye], he did not have any head. It was always clear with both eyes,” Strughold later explained. Hubertus Strughold had learned the hard way that experiments using one’s own body could be dangerous. Still, as a young man, he pursued auto-experimentation with vigor and imagination. In college he studied physics, anatomy, and zoology, but it was physiology that interested him most, the functions of living organisms and their parts.

  At the University of Würzburg Strughold taught the world’s first college course on the effects high altitude had on the human body. His experimental test data came from himself. On weekends he flew hot air balloons, recording everything from vision to ear pressure to muscle effects. Inside the flying balloon, Professor Strughold recorded how his body responded to rapid acceleration and descent, which in turn made him curious to know how he would feel during radical banking turns. For that he needed an airplane. Strughold found the perfect mentor in a World War I flying ace by the name of Robert Ritter von Greim.

  Von Greim was a legend. Renowned for his fearlessness in battle, in World War I he had recorded twenty-eight kills. In the 1920s and 1930s he was considered one of the top pilots in Germany and performed a variety of flight-related jobs, including exhibition dogfights against fellow World War I flying ace Ernst Udet. When Adolf Hitler needed a pilot to fly him from Munich to Berlin for the Kapp Putsch coup attempt in 1920, he chose Robert Ritter von Greim for the job. In 1926, von Greim was hired by Chiang Kai-shek to set up the Chinese air force in Canton, China. Returning to Germany, von Greim opened a flight school, located at the top of a mountain in Galgenberg, two miles from where Hubertus Strughold taught aviation medicine to college students.

  Strughold hired von Greim to teach him how to fly, paying him six marks per lesson. The two men became fast friends. In Robert Ritter von Greim, Hubertus Strughold found a brilliant match—another man willing to push pilot performance to the edge of unconsciousness. The men would strap themselves into harnesses in von Greim’s open cockpit airplane and fly loops and rolls in the skies over Galgenberg. Strughold kept track of their physiological reactions to extreme flight, seeking answers to questions. Can a man draw a straight line while flying upside down? Can a pilot mark a bull’s-eye on a piece of paper immediately after a barrel roll? With how little oxygen could a man legibly write his name? How far up can a man fly before his vision fades? Von Greim was challenged by Strughold’s strange requests, and he was willing to fly faster and higher as his new young physician friend recorded data on von Greim’s pilot performance and physical capabilities in the air. Strughold knew his tests were original and hoped they would attract interest from the United States. In 1928 his wish came true when he received a prestigious fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation. Strughold packed his bags, boarded th
e SS Dresden, and headed to New York.

  Hubertus Strughold took to America like a fish to water, he later explained. As a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at the University of Chicago, he was at the center of the music scene in the roaring twenties. Listening to jazz music was his favorite pastime after flying. In Chicago he attended vaudeville shows, parties, and dances and became fluent in English. He loved to drink and almost always smoked. His thick German accent distinguished him from everyone else around and made most people remember him. His first scientific paper in English was on oxygen deficiency and how to revive a heart using electric shock. For research he used dogs as test subjects, importing them from Canada at a time when experimenting on dogs from the United States was illegal. Strughold attended conferences in Boston and visited the laboratories at Harvard, at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and at Columbia University in New York. And he met and became friendly with American aviation medicine pioneers like Harry Armstrong.

  The Rockefeller fellowship lasted only a year. Back in Germany, Strughold and von Greim took up where they left off. Von Greim was now flying a double-decker Udet Flamingo aircraft, an aerobatic sports biplane made of wood. To determine how many g-forces a man could take before his eyeballs suffered damage, the two men would climb high in the air, then dive down toward the ground until one of them blacked out.

  Von Greim’s longtime friend and colleague Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. In secret, von Greim was called upon by Hermann Göring to rebuild the German Air Force, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Through his personal friendship with von Greim, Strughold ingratiated himself into this inner circle of Nazi power. In 1935 he was offered a job that would shape the rest of his life. As director of the Aviation Medical Research Institute of the Reich Air Ministry in Berlin, he was now in the uppermost echelon of Luftwaffe medical research. The lab, located in the suburb of Charlottenburg, featured a state-of-the-art low-pressure chamber and a ten-foot centrifuge in which test subjects could be exposed to varying degrees of gravitational pull. The chamber could take both apes and humans to between fifteen and twenty Gs.