Operation Paperclip

by Annie Jacobsen

  The job required time, commitment, and most of all dedication. The Reich needed the Luftwaffe to help conquer all of Europe. This was why Strughold had packed his bags and moved to Berlin. He would report directly to Erich Hippke, chief of the Luftwaffe’s medical corps, who reported to Hermann Göring. This was a vertical career move for Strughold. He’d gone from a university teaching post to the top of the Reich’s aviation medicine chain of command. The Reich had vast resources and a desire to conduct groundbreaking experiments for the benefit of its pilots. There were risks but with risks came rewards. For Strughold, the reward was monumental. For ten years he enjoyed a career as one of the most powerful physicians working for the Third Reich.

  In Berlin, Strughold treated his expansive new laboratory as a haven for risk takers. Colleagues, including officials from the Nazi Party and the SS, would stop by to marvel over his work with the low-pressure chamber and the centrifuge. Experiments were almost always in progress. Strughold’s medical assistants were forever allowing themselves to be hooked up to these odd-looking contraptions with pipes, valves, and hoses projecting from all sides. Assistants, one with and one without an oxygen mask, would allow themselves to be locked inside the low-pressure chamber in order to determine how high up a man could go before becoming unconscious. During one experiment, two officials with the Reich Air Ministry were on hand to observe. The man without the oxygen mask began to lose consciousness. First his eyes closed, then his head fell to his chest. The second man inside the chamber, wearing a mask, administered first aid. It did not take long for the man to quickly recover.

  “Our studies are all very risky,” Strughold told the Nazi Party officials. “They require great ability on the part of the assistants and great responsibility. If the man did not get oxygen… he might be dead in five minutes.”

  As the Luftwaffe prepared its pilots for war, Strughold continued to use his staff as test subjects. He also experimented on himself. He was said to have “ridden the centrifuge” for a full two minutes, simulating what it would be like to experience fifteen times the force of gravity while flying an airplane.

  After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the war spread into areas of extreme climates, from Norway to North Africa to the Russian front. These new combat theaters created urgent new medical problems for the Reich, most notably for foot soldiers but also for the Luftwaffe. As the war progressed and the Luftwaffe unveiled one new airplane after the next, the pilot physiology challenges grew. By 1940 new engine systems were being developed, including turbo and jet engines, with countless pilot parameters to explore, including the effects of speed, lower oxygen levels, decompression sickness, and extreme temperatures on the body. A web of institutions sprang up across Germany and its newly conquered lands, all financed by the deep pockets of the Reich Research Council, and including Strughold’s Aviation Medical Research Institute in Berlin. The institute worked hand in hand with two Luftwaffe facilities close by, and Strughold developed strong relationships with the director of each institute: Dr. Theodor Benzinger, of the Experimental Station of the Air Force Research Center at Rechlin, and Dr. Siegfried Ruff, of the German Experimental Station for Aviation Medicine, Aero Medical division, in Berlin.

  This is why, after the war, when Strughold was asked by Colonel Armstrong to be the codirector of the classified AAF Aero Medical facility in Heidelberg, Strughold asked Benzinger and Ruff to come along. He put each man in charge of one of the four areas of aviation research at the new facility. They trusted one another. They all had the same secrets to protect.

  Dr. Theodor Benzinger was tall, thin as a rail, 5′11″ and just 138 pounds. He had dark blue eyes, sharp, angular features, and kept his black hair slicked back, with a pencil part. Born in 1905, Benzinger was described, in his army intelligence dossier, as “an old school Prussian, willful, self-serving and willing to get what he wants by any means.” At Heidelberg he was put in charge of a department that developed oxygen equipment for airplanes. Benzinger was a committed Nazi and had been from the earliest days of National Socialism. He joined the Nazi Party the year Hitler took power, in 1933. He was also a member of the SA, holding the position of medical sergeant major. He and his wife, Ilse Benzinger, were members of the NSV, the Nazi Party’s so-called social welfare organization, which was overseen by Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Ilse was active in NSV-sponsored programs like Mother and Child, whereby unwed German mothers could birth Aryan children on bucolic baby farms.

  In 1934, the twenty-nine-year-old Dr. Benzinger was made department chief of the Experimental Station of the Air Force Research Center. Like Harry Armstrong, Benzinger predicted that pilots would fly high-altitude missions to sixty thousand feet sometime in the near future. In service of this idea Benzinger and his staff at Rechlin researched high-altitude durability and explosive decompression. They took great risks experimenting on themselves. On one occasion, one of Benzinger’s technicians died as a result of complications from oxygen deprivation experienced inside a low-pressure chamber. In addition to researching aviation medicine, Benzinger became a pilot and served as a colonel in the Luftwaffe. He flew reconnaissance and combat missions over the British Isles. In 1939, showing “bravery before the enemy” Benzinger was awarded the Iron Cross, Class I and Class II.

  In Heidelberg, at the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center, Strughold put Dr. Siegfried Ruff in charge of work involving the effect g-forces have on human beings. This was work that Ruff had begun at the test center in Rechlin with Dr. Benzinger during the war. Ruff did not have the same striking looks as his colleague, Dr. Benzinger. Ruff’s smiling, professorial posture made it hard to imagine he had spent so much time supervising medical experiments inside the Dachau concentration camp, including Rascher’s murderous high-altitude studies in Experimental Cell Block Five. Like Benzinger, Ruff was an avowed and dedicated Nazi. He joined the party in 1938. The facility Dr. Ruff was in charge of for the Third Reich was located just ten miles across town from the institute that Dr. Strughold oversaw. As the directors of the two most important Luftwaffe medical facilities in Berlin, Ruff and Strughold collaborated closely on a number of projects during the war.

  Ruff and Strughold coauthored several papers together and coedited Aviation Medicine (Luftfahrtmedizin). One of the articles they cowrote so fascinated the U.S. Army Air Corps that in 1942 intelligence officers had it translated and circulated among flight surgeons at Wright Field. The two men also coauthored a book called the Compendium on Aviation Medicine, which served as a kind of handbook for Luftwaffe flight surgeons and included articles on explosive decompression and oxygen deficiency. At Heidelberg, Dr. Ruff was in charge of this work again, only now it was paid for by the U.S. Army.

  Working directly under Dr. Ruff at the Aero Medical Center was Dr. Konrad Schäfer, listed in declassified documents as also researching the effects of g-forces on the body. This was not Schäfer’s primary area of expertise. His wartime research work, which had been supported by both the Nazi Party’s Reich Research Council and the Luftwaffe, was the pathology of thirst. Schäfer was a tall man, slightly overweight with a receding hairline and thick-lensed glasses that made him appear slightly cross-eyed. Unlike most of his colleagues, Schäfer avoided joining the Nazi Party, which he later said cost him jobs. In 1941 he was drafted and sent to a Luftwaffe air base at Frankfurt on the Oder. When his talents as a chemist came to light—he’d worked as chief physiological chemist for the firm Schering AG—Schäfer was transferred to Berlin and given an assignment in Luftwaffe sea emergencies. “This included research on various methods to render seawater potable,” Schäfer later explained under oath.

  Sea emergencies were an area of great concern. As the man in charge of aviation medical research for the Luftwaffe, Dr. Strughold had solutions to sea emergencies high on his priority list. During the air war, every pilot knew that drinking ocean water destroyed the kidneys and brought death faster than suffering indomitable thirst. But German pilots shot down over the sea an
d awaiting rescue were known to break down and drink seawater anyway. The Luftwaffe announced a contest. Any doctor or chemist who could develop a method to separate the salt from seawater would be greatly rewarded. Konrad Schäfer, one of Strughold’s protégés in Berlin, aimed to solve that conundrum. Schäfer worked “in co-operation with IG Farben to create Wolfen, a mixture from barium and silver zeolith,” he later explained, which he synthesized into “a tablet named Wolfatit [which] was developed to separate the salt in a residue.” The results produced drinkable water, which was a remarkable achievement. Schäfer had succeeded where so many other doctors and chemists had failed.

  Dr. Oskar Schröder, head of the Luftwaffe Medical Corps, was thrilled. Konrad Schäfer had “developed a process which actually precipitated the salts from the sea water,” Schröder later testified. But another group of Luftwaffe doctors were already backing a different process, called the Berka method, which was bad news for the Schäfer process. “It was thought by the Chief of the Luftwaffe Medical Service to be too bulky and expensive,” Schröder explained.

  A second contest was proposed; this one to see which desalination method was superior. The effectiveness of both the Schäfer process and the Berka method would be tested on the Untermenschen at Dachau. A Luftwaffe physician named Hermann Becker-Freyseng was assigned to assist Dr. Schäfer, and to coauthor with him a paper documenting the results of the contest. The senior doctor advising Becker-Freyseng and Schäfer in their work was Dr. Siegfried Ruff. The resultant paper, called “Thirst and Thirst Quenching in Emergency Situations at Sea,” described saltwater medical experiments conducted on prisoners inside Experimental Cell Block Five.

  Dr. Hermann Becker-Freyseng had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1938. His specialty was oxygen poisoning in the human body. An odd-looking man, Becker-Freyseng’s unusually large ears gave the appearance of handles on either side of his head. During the war Becker-Freyseng served as chief of the Department for Aviation Medicine and Medical Services in the Luftwaffe, another branch under an umbrella of medical facilities and laboratories overseen by Dr. Strughold. Becker-Freyseng was held in great esteem by his colleagues, many of whom, under interrogation, described him as “heroic” for the masochistic extremes he was willing to go in auto-experimentation. Becker-Freyseng conducted over one hundred experiments on himself, many of which rendered him unconscious. At least one took him to the brink of death. The story repeated most often about Becker-Freyseng was of a self-experiment he did in a chamber, also with a rabbit. Determined to learn how much oxygen would poison a man, Becker-Freyseng went into a low-pressure chamber with a rabbit with the goal of staying inside for three days. A few hours shy of his goal, Becker-Freyseng began to show symptoms of paralysis. “The rabbit died, Becker-Freyseng recuperated,” Strughold later explained under oath. That was all during the war. Now Ruff, Benzinger, Schäfer, Schröder, and Becker-Freyseng, with the approval of Strughold and Armstrong, continued their work on secret aviation medical projects initially conceived for Hitler’s war machine.

  The Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg was a squat, brick, two-story facility facing the Neckar River. Only a few months prior it had been the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research, a bastion of Nazi science where chemists and physicists worked on projects for the Reich’s war machine. At its front entrance, the Reich’s flag came down and the U.S. flag went up. Photographs of Hitler were pulled from the walls and replaced by framed photographs of Army Air Forces generals in military pose. Most of the furniture stayed the same. In the dining room German waiters in white servers’ coats provided table service at mealtimes. A single 5″ x 8″ requisition receipt, dated September 14, 1945, made the transition official: “This property is needed by U.S. Forces, and the requisition is in proportion to the resources of the country.” The mission statement of the project, classified Top Secret, was succinct: “the exploitation of certain uncompleted German aviation medical research projects.” Dr. Strughold was put in charge of hiring doctors, “all of whom are considered authorities in a particular field of medicine.”

  Across the American zone of Germany, entire laboratories were dismantled and reassembled here at the secret facility in Heidelberg. More than twenty tons of medical research equipment was salvaged from the Tempelhof Airport, in Berlin, including a “huge human centrifuge… and a low pressure chamber the length of two, ordinary Pullman cars.” There was equipment here that American physicians had never seen before: esoteric items including a Nagel Anomaloscope, a Zeiss-made interferometer, an Engelking-Hartung adaptometer, a Schmidt-Haensch photometer, and a precision-built Siemens electron microscope—with which to study night vision, blood circulation, g-forces, and the bends. Even the low-pressure chamber from Georg Weltz’s research facility at Freising, near the Munich dairy farm, was brought to Heidelberg. This was the laboratory where Dr. Leo Alexander had experienced his revelation that Nazi doctors had been freezing people to death.

  It was a precarious time for doctors who had previously worked for the Reich. With the Nuremberg trial under way, the international press had its attention focused on war crimes. German doctors were looked at with suspicion. Articles about Nazi doctors, including the November 1945 piece in the Washington Post about the “science” of freezing humans, put a spotlight on German medicine. Many doctors fled the country to South America through escape routes called ratlines. Others tried to blend in by offering their services in displaced-persons camps. Some killed themselves. Maximilian de Crinis, chief of the psychiatric department at the University Charité in Berlin, swallowed a cyanide capsule in the last days of the war. Ernst-Robert Grawitz, physician for the SS and president of the German Red Cross, killed himself and his family, including his young children, by detonating a small bomb inside his house outside Berlin. The Reich Health Leader, Leonardo Conti, hanged himself in his cell at Nuremberg. Ernst Holzlöhner, the senior doctor at the University of Berlin who conducted the freezing experiments at Dachau with Sigmund Rascher, committed suicide in June 1945 after being interrogated by British investigators.

  The list of suicides was long, but the number of German doctors believed to have been involved in war crimes was even longer. The U.S. war crimes office for the chief counsel wrote up a list of doctors involved in medical research that resulted in “mercy killings,” a euphemism used by the Reich for its medical murder programs. The list was classified with a strict caveat that access to it remain “restricted for 80 years from the date of creation.” This meant that, by the time the world would know who was on this list, it would be the year 2025, and everyone named would be dead.

  A copy of the list was given to the commander of the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center, Robert J. Benford. Five doctors working at the center starting in the fall of 1945 were on the list: Theodor Benzinger, Siegfried Ruff, Konrad Schäfer, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, and Oskar Schröder. Instead of firing these physicians suspected of heinous war crimes, the center kept the doctors in its employ and the list was classified. The list remained secret from the public until 2012, when the Department of Defense (DoD) agreed to declassify it for this book.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Total War of Apocalyptic Proportions

  By the end of January 1946, 160 Nazi scientists had been secreted into America. The single largest group was comprised of the 115 rocket specialists at Fort Bliss, Texas, led by Wernher von Braun. The men resided in a two-story barracks on the Fort Bliss reservation and worked in a laboratory that was formerly the William Beaumont General Hospital. They ate in a mess hall shared with Native American Indians, which only enhanced von Braun’s perception that he was living life inside an adventure novel. “It is such a romantic Karl May affair,” von Braun wrote in a letter to his parents in Germany. Karl May was a German novelist famous for his cowboy and Indian westerns. Soon, von Braun would begin writing a novel of his own, in the science fiction genre, about space travel to Mars.

  Von Braun loved the desert landscape, the cactus, the va
st gypsum dune fields, and the long drives in open army jeeps. Rocket work was not perfect, but it progressed. “Frankly we were disappointed with what we found in this country during our first year or so,” von Braun later recalled. “At Peenemünde, we’d been coddled. Here they were counting pennies,” he said of the U.S. Army. V-2 launchings would take place about eighty miles away, on the White Sands Proving Ground, and getting there meant a long and beautiful ride. An army bus took scientists around the Franklin Mountains, through El Paso, and along the Rio Grande to Las Cruces. Next came the rugged journey over the San Andreas pass and into the Tularosa Basin, where the army’s proving grounds began. Twelve to fifteen Germans were sent at a time to White Sands, where they lived in barracks alongside men from the General Electric Company and a technical army unit. The actual rocket firings took place inside a single forty-foot-deep pit, with the Germans watching the launches from a massive but rudimentary concrete blockhouse nearby. When the first V-2 was launched, in April 1946, it climbed to three miles. Although one of the fins fell off, von Braun felt inspired to draft a memo to Robert Oppenheimer, director of Los Alamos, proposing the idea of merging his missile with the atomic bomb. The memo turned into a proposal, “Use of Atomic Warheads in Projected Missiles,” submitted to the army. In it, von Braun discussed building a rocket that could carry a two-thousand-plus-pound nuclear payload a distance of one thousand miles.

  Two personal changes in von Braun were afoot. The first was that he joined an Evangelical Christian church and became “born again,” something he rarely discussed in public. The second was that he decided to marry his first cousin, Maria von Quistorp, the daughter of his mother’s brother, Alexander von Quistorp. Von Braun was nearly twice her age—she had just turned eighteen in the summer of 1946—and she lived in Germany. From Texas, von Braun began making plans to bring his future bride to the United States.