Operation Paperclip

by Annie Jacobsen

  The strange case of Konrad Schäfer played a unique role in Operation Paperclip. Having invented the Schäfer process to separate salt from seawater, Schäfer was clearly aware that concentration camp prisoners were going to be used in the testing process. Schäfer’s superior, Oskar Schröder, chief of medical services for the Luftwaffe, confirmed this under oath, “In May 1944, in order to discuss what further steps should be taken, Becker-Freyseng and Schäfer attended [a] meeting as representatives of my office. As a result of the meeting it was decided to conduct further experiments on human beings being supplied by the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler.” It was Becker-Freyseng who drew up the letter, which was sent to Himmler, requesting more prisoners to conduct experiments on. But Schäfer said he never actually went to Dachau and no evidence placing him there survived the war. As for eyewitness testimony, all but one of the saltwater experiment victims had been killed. The sole survivor, Karl Höllenrainer, was located by Dr. Alexander and put on the witness stand. Höllenrainer did not recognize Konrad Schäfer but he recognized one of his codefendants in the dock. Höllenrainer’s testimony proved to be one of the most dramatic events in the doctors’ trial.

  It was June 27, 1947, and Karl Höllenrainer stood trembling in the hushed courtroom. Small in stature, dark-haired, and nervous, he was a broken man.

  “Now, witness,” asked U.S. Prosecutor Alexander G. Hardy, “for what reason were you arrested by the Gestapo on May 29, 1944?”

  “Because I am a Gypsy of mixed blood,” Höllenrainer said.

  Höllenrainer’s crime was that he had fallen in love with and married a German girl, a violation of the infamous Nuremberg law that prohibited a non-Aryan from marrying or having sexual relations with a German citizen. After being arrested, Höllenrainer was sent to three different concentration camps, first Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, and finally Dachau, where he was selected to take part in the seawater experiments being performed by Luftwaffe.

  At Dachau, Höllenrainer was deprived of food, forced to drink chemically processed seawater, and then monitored for signs of liver failure and madness. One experiment among the many stood out in his memory. Without using anesthesia, a Luftwaffe doctor had removed a piece of Karl Höllenrainer’s liver in order to analyze it. Now, from the witness stand, Höllenrainer was asked to identify the Nazi doctor who’d performed this liver puncture on him.

  “Do you think you would be able to recognize that doctor if you saw him today?” Prosecutor Hardy asked.

  “Yes,” said Höllenrainer. “I would recognize him at once.”

  Höllenrainer stared across the courtroom, his eyes focused sharply on one of the twenty-three defendants sitting in the dock, Dr. Wilhelm Beiglböck, 40, the Luftwaffe doctor in charge of the saltwater experiments. Beiglböck had deep crevices at each side of his mouth and five pronounced dueling scars running across his left cheek.

  As Höllenrainer stared at Dr. Beiglböck, “everyone in the courtroom waited tensely,” recalls Vivien Spitz, a young American court reporter whose job it was to take down the testimony. Spitz sat in front of the judges, within clear view of the witnesses and defendants. Höllenrainer “was a little man and I watched him stand up,” she explains. The prosecutor asked Höllenrainer to proceed to the defendants’ dock to identify the doctor who’d removed a piece of his liver without anesthesia.

  “He paused for just a moment,” Vivien Spitz remembers, “with his eyes seeming to be fixed on a doctor in the second row of the prisoners’ dock. Then, in a [flash] he was gone from the witness stand!”

  Karl Höllenrainer sprang into action. To Vivien Spitz’s eye, Höllenrainer seemed to leap over the German defense counsels’ tables and “appeared to be almost flying through the air toward the prisoners’ dock.” In his right hand, stretched up high in the air, Karl Höllenrainer clutched a dagger, Vivien Spitz recalls. “He was reaching for Dr. Beiglböck, the consulting physician to the German Air Force.”

  There was shock in the courtroom. Confusion and mayhem. The Nazis’ defense attorneys scrambled to get out of Höllenrainer’s way. Three American military police rushed forward and grabbed Höllenrainer. Vivien Spitz remembers how security “subdued” Karl Höllenrainer just before he reached Beiglböck, “preventing him from delivering his own brand of justice.”

  It took minutes for order to be restored in the courtroom. The military police set Karl Höllenrainer before Presiding Judge Walter Beals, who was furious. Seventy years old, overworked and in failing health, Judge Beals clung to the idea that his primary role at Nuremberg was to educate the German people in the ways of American democracy and due process.

  “Witness!” thundered the judge. “You were summoned before this Tribunal as a witness to give evidence.”

  “Yes,” Karl Höllenrainer meekly replied.

  “This is a court of justice,” roared Beals.

  “Yes,” said Höllenrainer, trembling worse than before.

  “And by your conduct in attempting to assault the defendant Beiglböck in the dock, you have committed a contempt of this court!”

  Karl Höllenrainer pleaded with the judge. “Your Honor, please excuse my conduct. I am very upset—”

  The judge interrupted and asked if the witness had anything else to say in extenuation of his conduct.

  “Your Honor, please excuse me. I am so worked up. That man is a murderer,” Höllenrainer begged, pointing to the expressionless Dr. Beiglböck. “He has ruined my whole life!”

  The judge told Höllenrainer that his statement did not make his conduct forgivable. That he had insulted the court. That it was the judgment of the tribunal that he be confined in the Nuremberg prison for a period of ninety days, as punishment for insulting due process.

  Karl Höllenrainer spoke in a tidy, pleading voice. The power and conviction that had allowed him to almost fly across the courtroom with the intent of stabbing Dr. Beiglböck with his dagger was gone. Now Höllenrainer was on the edge of tears. “Would the Tribunal please forgive me?” Höllenrainer asked. “I am married and I have a small son.” He pointed at Dr. Beiglböck. “This man is a murderer. He gave me salt water and he performed a liver puncture on me. I am still under medical treatment.” Karl Höllenrainer pleaded for mercy from Judge Beals. “Please, do not send me to prison.”

  The judge saw no room for clemency. Instead, Beals asked a guard to remove Karl Höllenrainer from the courtroom, referring to him as a “prisoner” now.

  “My heart broke,” Vivien Spitz recalls. All she could do was lower her head. She was a professional court reporter and it was inappropriate for anyone to see that she was crying. Sixty years later, when recollecting the incident, she still wondered why Judge Beals did what he did. “It was impossible to be dispassionate.… Why ninety days? Why not one or two days—just to make a point? After all the torture the witness had suffered it seemed to me to be an outrageous elevation of process over substance.”

  Karl Höllenrainer was removed from the courtroom. He was led down a long, secure corridor and into the prison complex, the same location where Dr. Beiglböck and all of the other Nazi war criminals were being held. It had been Dr. Alexander who had made the decision to put Karl Höllenrainer on the witness stand, and in his journal he wrote about how conflicted he felt about his decision. Dr. Alexander had spoken with Höllenrainer ten days before he testified against Beiglböck and was aware how upset Höllenrainer was, noting in a report how his hands shook. Karl Höllenrainer shared with Dr. Alexander that he suffered from a “tremendous feeling of inner rage” whenever he thought about what had happened to him at the Dachau concentration camp. Höllenrainer felt powerless, he said. He could close his eyes and “see the doctor in front of him who… had ruined his life and killed three of his friends.” Dr. Alexander knew how powerful Höllenrainer’s testimony would be. He was the only known victim of the saltwater experiments to have survived. Witness testimony was powerful, as his proved to be.

  The thought of him being confined in a prison with the very
doctors who had tortured him was unacceptable to Dr. Alexander, and that night he went to Judge Beals to advocate on Höllenrainer’s behalf. The judge showed clemency and released him, on bail, into Alexander’s custody. Four days later, on July 1, 1947, Karl Höllenrainer was allowed to continue his testimony. He rose to the occasion and provided harrowing details about what dying of thirst does to a man. He described how his friends “foamed at the mouth.” How “they had fits of raving madness” before succumbing to an agonizing death.

  One of the Nazi doctors’ defense lawyers, Herr Steinbauer, was given an opportunity to cross-examine Karl Höllenrainer. Steinbauer accused Höllenrainer of lying.

  “How can there be foam on a mouth which is completely dried out?” Steinbauer asked.

  Höllenrainer said he was telling the truth.

  “Listen, Herr Höllenrainer,” Steinbauer said, “don’t be evasive as Gypsies usually are. Give me a clear answer as a witness under oath.”

  Höllenrainer attempted to answer.

  “You Gypsies stick together, don’t you?” Steinbauer interrupted.

  The exchange could have served as a metaphor for the whole trial. Through the eyes of a Nazi it was and always would be the Übermenschen versus the Untermenschen. It was why General Taylor’s opening remarks sent such a powerful message. It wasn’t just the acts of the Nazi doctors that were “barbarous and criminal” but the very ideas that had engendered such acts.

  Late at night, Dr. Alexander wrote a private letter to General Telford Taylor stating how he felt about the Nazi doctors on trial. “I feel that all of the accused today, Schaefer, Becker-Freyseng and Beiglböck, would admit that this problem [seawater drinkability] could have been solved in one afternoon with a piece of jelly [and] a salt solution.” Instead, Dr. Alexander wrote, “All of these men on the dock slaughtered for gain of scientific renown [and] personal advancement. They were like Tantalus, a mythical, ambitious ruler who slew his own child for reward.”

  In a letter to his wife, Dr. Alexander penned a fascinating reveal: “Dr. Beiglböck from Vienna, turns out to have been in the same class with me during our final year at medical school,” before the war. The way Dr. Alexander remembered it, Beiglböck was caught cheating and had to leave the school. “He does not recognize me,” Dr. Alexander told his wife, “but I regularly recognize him.” Two men whose professional lives had begun so similarly had taken such radically diffent paths.

  There was another dramatic turning point in the doctors’ trial, and that involved the case of Dr. Kurt Blome. Blome was admittedly the director of biological weapons research for the Reich, which was not in itself a crime. But there were scores of documents in which Blome discussed the need to conduct experiments on human beings so as to further plague research at the Bacteriological Institute in Posen, where he was in charge. Blome’s defense, some of which he argued himself, was that he intended to experiment on humans but that he never actually performed the experiments. Intent, said Blome, was not a crime. The prosecution had been unable to find any witnesses to testify against Blome, and Blome used this fact in his defense. There was the testimony of Major General Walter Schreiber against Blome from the first Nuremberg trial, but the Soviets had refused to let Dr. Alexander interview Dr. Schreiber himself, so the veracity of his testimony was never independently verified. The prosecution presented many documents in which Blome discussed with Himmler his plans to experiment on humans. But there were no documents showing Blome’s actual guilt. There was another element of Blome’s defense that the prosecution was completely unprepared for, and that was Dr. Blome’s wife, Bettina, a physician and bestselling author. Frau Blome meticulously researched experiments that were conducted by the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during the war. This included malaria experiments on Terre Haute federal prison inmates. She also uncovered Dr. Walter Reed’s famous nineteenth-century yellow fever research for the U.S. Army, in which volunteer human test subjects had died. The defense counsel, Robert Servatius, picked up on this theme of U.S. Army human experimentation where Blome’s wife left off.

  Servatius had located a Life magazine article, published in June of 1945, that described how OSRD conducted experiments on eight hundred U.S. prisoners during the war. Servatius read the entire article, word for word, in the courtroom. None of the American judges was familiar with the article, nor were most members of the prosecution, and its presentation in court clearly caught the Americans off guard. Because the article specifically discussed U.S. Army wartime experiments on prisoners, it was incredibly damaging for the prosecution. “Prison life is ideal for controlled laboratory work with humans,” Servatius read, quoting American doctors who had been interviewed by Life reporters. The idea that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, and that both nations had used human test subjects during war, was unsettling. It pushed the core Nazi concept of the Untermenschen to the side. The Nuremberg prosecutors were left looking like hypocrites.

  On August 6, 1947, the verdicts were read. Seven defendants were given death sentences, and nine were given prison sentences of between ten years and life, including Beiglböck (fifteen years), Becker-Freyseng (twenty years), and Schröder (life). Seven Nazi doctors were acquitted, including Blome, Schäfer, Ruff, and Weltz. Of Blome’s acquittal, the Nuremberg judges noted, “It may well be that defendant Blome was preparing to experiment on human beings in connection with bacteriological warfare, but the record fails to disclose that fact, or that he ever actually conducted the experiments.”

  Konrad Schäfer returned to work at the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg where he assumed Dr. Strughold’s former position as chief of staff. Strughold had already set sail for America as part of Operation Paperclip and was now in Texas, serving as “professional advisor” to Colonel Armstrong, the commandant of the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Field. Armstrong had set up a new aeromedical research laboratory there and was in the process of bringing dozens of Hitler’s former doctors to Texas to conduct medical research. Hubertus Strughold’s job description also included “overall supervision of the professional activities of the German and Austrian scientists [to be] employed by the School.” Meanwhile, the FBI was having difficulty getting approval for Strughold’s visa application for immigration into the United States. The Bureau had conducted a special inquiry into Dr. Strughold back in Germany. “One informant, who had known the subject,” investigators learned, said that Strughold “had expressed the opinion that the Nazi party had done a great deal for Germany. He [Strughold] said that prior to Nazism, the Jews had crowded the medical schools and it had been nearly impossible for others to enroll.” To counterbalance this derogatory depiction of Strughold, Dr. Konrad Schäfer was asked to write a letter of recommendation for his former boss. In a sworn statement written just a few weeks after Schäfer was acquitted at Nuremberg, Schäfer praised Dr. Strughold for his “ethical principles” while conducting research work. “I also know that he strictly refused to take part [in] or permit scientific research work which was damaging to human health,” Schäfer wrote. The following year, Dr. Konrad Schäfer would be on a boat headed for America, an Operation Paperclip contract in hand.

  As for Dr. Blome, he was seen as a highly desirable recruit for Operation Paperclip. Blome allegedly knew more about bubonic plague research than anyone else in the world. But, given his former position in Hitler’s inner circle, coupled with the fact that Blome had worn the Golden Party Badge, bringing him to America as part of Operation Paperclip remained too difficult for the U.S. Army to justify. But as the Cold War gained momentum and intense suspicion of the Soviets increased, even someone like Kurt Blome would eventually be deemed eligible for Operation Paperclip.

  PART IV

  “Only the commander understands the importance of certain things, and he alone conquers and surmounts all difficulties. An army is nothing without the head.”

  —Napoleon

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Chemical Me
nace

  It had been nearly a year since State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee Paper No. 275/5 authorized JIOA to import one thousand Nazi scientists from Germany so as to deny them to the Russians. For the JIOA, things were not happening nearly fast enough. The number of Operation Paperclip scientists who had come to America in this time frame had nearly doubled, from 175 in March 1946 to 344 in February 1947, but none of these scientists had been granted visas yet. JIOA officials perceived State Department official Samuel Klaus to be the man most responsible for the holdup. On February 27, 1947, Klaus was called into a meeting in the Pentagon with his military counterparts. There, JIOA director Colonel Thomas Ford told Klaus that he had a list of German scientists already in the United States whose visas needed to be expedited. He asked Samuel Klaus to sign a waiver that would allow JIOA to begin this process.

  Klaus refused to rubber-stamp anything. “I told him that of course I could do no such thing and that certification presupposed that the Department should have an opportunity to pass judgment of some kind before affixing the signature,” he wrote in a State Department memo. Colonel Ford reminded Klaus of the language in a recent JIOA directive dated September 3, 1946. According to the directive, the Department of State was to “accept as final the investigation and security reports prepared by JIOA, for insuring final clearance of individuals concerned.” Klaus told Ford that he would not sign a document that was essentially a blanket waiver of anything—that he would have to see the list of scientists first.

  Ford told Klaus that the list was classified and that he did not have the clearance to see it. Klaus still refused to sign off on it. “Ford stated in various ways that if I did not accept the paper on behalf of the State Department he would give the information to several senators who would take care of the Department,” Klaus wrote of Ford’s threat. Colonel Ford accused him of standing in the way of “national interest.”