Operation Paperclip

by Annie Jacobsen

  The year before he died, there was a motion inside the Ford White House to award Wernher von Braun the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The idea almost passed until one of President Ford’s senior advisers, David Gergen, famously wrote, in a note passed to colleagues, “Sorry, but I can’t support the idea of giving [the] medal of freedom to [a] former Nazi whose V-2 was fired into over [sic] 3000 British and Belgian cities. He has given valuable service to the US since, but frankly he has gotten as good as he has given.” Von Braun was awarded the Medal of Science instead. He died on June 16, 1977. His tombstone, in Alexandria, Virginia, cites Psalm 19:1, invoking God, glory, heaven, and earth.

  It would be another eight years before the intrepid CNN reporter Linda Hunt became the first person to crack the pretense of Wernher von Braun. It took a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) record release to reveal Wernher von Braun’s Nazi past.

  Dr. Hubertus Strughold, though never as famous as Wernher von Braun, played an equally vital role in the U.S. space program—in the field of medicine. In November 1948, fifteen months after Strughold arrived at the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Air Force Base, he and Commandant Harry Armstrong hosted the first ever U.S. military panel discussion on biology in space. Strughold served as professional adviser to Armstrong at the SAM, and he oversaw the work of approximately thirty-four German colleagues under Operation Paperclip contracts there. Strughold’s broader vision, which he shared with Armstrong, was to create a space medicine program for the U.S. Air Force.

  In 1948 the notion of human space flight was still considered science fiction by most. But Strughold’s team had recently conducted a groundbreaking experiment with von Braun’s rocket team at White Sands, the results of which they desired to make public. On June 11, 1948, a nine-pound rhesus monkey named Albert was strapped into a harness inside the nose cone of a V-2 rocket and jettisoned into space. Albert’s pressurized space capsule, its harness and its cage, had been designed by Dr. Strughold and his team. The V-2 rocket carrying Albert traveled to an altitude of 39 miles. Albert died of suffocation during the six-minute flight, but for Dr. Strughold, the monkey’s voyage signified the momentous first step toward human space flight.

  Armstrong and Strughold’s biology in space panel was cosponsored by the air surgeon, the National Research Council, and the medical research laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Wright Lab. For the first time ever in America, space medicine was now being looked at as a legitimate military science. Two months later, in January 1949, Armstrong and Strughold decided it was time to seek funding for a new department inside the SAM dedicated solely to researching space medicine. For this, Armstrong later explained, “we needed much larger accommodations, more space and facilities and much more sophisticated research equipment.”

  Armstrong traveled to Washington, D.C., to sell the idea to Congress and to explain that he and Dr. Strughold needed between fifteen and twenty years’ lead time to do the necessary research to prepare humans for space travel. Congress approved Armstrong’s idea. “There were no wild headlines,” Armstrong later explained. The Department of Space Medicine at the SAM opened with little fanfare on February 9, 1949. “I appointed myself Director of the new aerospace laboratory… not Dr. Strughold since there were [sic] still some lingering enmity toward the Germans,” Armstrong told an air force historian in 1976. But just a few months after the department officially opened, Armstrong was transferred to the Pentagon to serve as surgeon general of the U.S. Air Force. The man he was replacing was his long-time mentor, Major General Malcolm Grow. Back in Texas, Dr. Strughold was promoted to the position of scientific director of the Department of Space Medicine at SAM.

  Strughold continued to oversee the professional activities of the Paperclip scientists. He also played an active role in further recruiting endeavors. In the fall of 1949, he traveled to Germany to try to facilitate the hiring of Dr. Siegfried Ruff, Strughold’s long-time colleague and one of the doctors tried—and acquitted—at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial. Siegfried Ruff was the Luftwaffe doctor who had overseen Rascher’s medical murder experiments at Dachau. Information about Ruff’s recruitment was leaked to journalist Drew Pearson, who allegedly threatened to tell the president if Dr. Ruff came to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip. Ruff’s contract never materialized.

  A second defendant acquitted at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial was able to secure a Paperclip contract with Dr. Strughold’s help. Konrad Schäfer, the “thirst and thirst quenching” expert who had “participated in the planning and execution of the saltwater experiments” at Dachau, arrived at the School of Aviation Medicine in August 1949. In Texas, Schäfer’s military research was supervised by Dr. Strughold and an air force captain named Seymour Schwartz. During Schäfer’s time at SAM, he worked in three departments: internal medicine, radiobiology and pharmacology. One of his research projects involved an effort to make Mississippi River water drinkable. Konrad Schäfer’s American supervisor found him inept. “The scientist [Schäfer] has been singularly unsuccessful in producing any finished work and has displayed very little real scientific acumen,” Captain Schwartz wrote. “The experience of this Headquarters indicates that this man is a most ineffective research worker and on the basis of his performance here his future worth to the U.S. Armed Forces is nil.”

  In a letter to the director of intelligence at U.S. Air Force headquarters in Washington, D.C., in March 1951, Captain Schwartz requested that Schäfer’s Paperclip contract be terminated and that he be sent back to Germany. The air force terminated Schäfer’s contract, but the German doctor refused to leave the United States. Thanks to expedited protocols put in place by the JIOA, Schäfer was already in possession of a valid U.S. immigration visa by the time it was determined that he was incompetent. He moved to New York City to work in the private sector.

  In the early 1950s, the School of Aviation Medicine and its Department of Space Medicine swiftly gained momentum as formidable medical research laboratories. The Journal of Aviation Medicine began publishing articles on space medicine, including ones written by Paperclip scientists and covering topics like weightlessness, urinating in zero gravity, and the effects of cosmic radiation on humans. There was also classified military research going on at the SAM, including experiments involving human test subjects. In January 1994, President Clinton created the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to investigate and report on the use of human beings in medical research related to Cold War atomic tests. The Advisory Committee found many of these experiments to be criminal and to be in violation of the Nuremberg Code, including studies conducted by German doctors with the SAM.

  Starting in 1951, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the Department of Defense conducted aboveground nuclear weapons tests in the Nevada desert, at a facility called the Nevada Proving Ground and later renamed the Nevada Test Site. The experiments were designed to determine how soldiers and airmen would perform on the nuclear battlefield. The AEC and the DoD agreed that subjecting soldiers to blast and radiation effects of various-sized atomic bombs was required to accurately prepare for a nuclear war.

  Colonel John E. Pickering was the director of medical research at the SAM in the early 1950s. In this capacity, Pickering oversaw the research of two German doctors working on a group of AEC studies involving “flashblindness”—the temporary or permanent blindness caused by looking at a nuclear weapon during detonation. According to testimony Colonel Pickering gave to the Advisory Committee in 1994, one set of flashblindness studies had been suggested by Dr. Strughold. Pickering said Strughold was interested in learning about permanent eye damage based on the fact that he himself had been partially blinded in one eye as a boy after watching a solar eclipse with a faulty viewing glass. “That’s the thing that gave us curiosity,” Pickering recalled of Strughold’s accident.

  Among the Paperclip scientists who carried out the initial flashblindness studies were Heinrich Rose and Konrad Büttner. Both men had been working for t
he U.S. government since the fall of 1945, when Dr. Strughold first recommended them for employment at the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg. And like so many of Strughold’s close Luftwaffe colleagues, Rose and Büttner had been Nazi ideologues during the war. Both men were long-term members of the Nazi Party and also members of the SA.

  For the first set of flashblindness studies, Rose and Büttner’s test subjects were large pigs. The two doctors calculated that the flash of a 20-kiloton atomic bomb could produce retinal burns as far as forty miles from ground zero. As the atomic tests progressed, the Atomic Energy Commission sought more specific data regarding humans. In the fall of 1951, for an atomic test series called Operation Buster-Jangle, soldier volunteers were asked to stare at a nuclear explosion from varying distances. Crew flying in C-54 aircraft approximately nine miles from ground zero were told to look out the windows of the airplane when the bomb went off. Some wore protective eye goggles while others did not. “No visual handicaps” were reported, according to Pickering. In the spring of 1952, for an atomic test series called Operation Tumbler-Snapper, a trailer was set up on the Nevada desert floor, with porthole-like windows at viewing range. Soldier volunteers were asked to sit in front of the windows and stare at the nuclear explosion. The distance from ground zero was also approximately nine miles, only this time the soldiers were at blast level. One of the volunteers in the viewing trailer was Colonel Pickering, who said that some of the human test subjects were given protective eye goggles to wear but others were asked to observe the fireball with the naked eye. Two soldiers had their eyeballs burned and the trailer tests were suspended.

  In the spring of 1953, for an atomic test series called Operation Upshot-Knothole, soldier volunteers were asked to perform duck-and-cover drills inside five-foot-deep trenches that had been dug into the desert floor several miles from ground zero. The men were specifically instructed not to look at the atomic blast. But curiosity got the better of at least one young officer, a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant identified in declassified records as “S.H.” Instead of facing away from the blast, the lieutenant looked over his left shoulder in the direction of the atomic bomb when it detonated with a force of 43 kilotons.

  “He didn’t wear his goggles and he looked,” Colonel Pickering told President Clinton’s Advisory Committee in 1994. Because light enters the eye through the cornea and is refracted when it hits the lens, Pickering explained, images are flipped upside down. As a result, the image of an inverted nuclear fireball was seared on the lieutenant’s retina “forever,” leaving what Pickering described as “probably one of the most beautiful images of a fireball you’d ever see in your life.” Pickering said that doctors at the SAM kept a photograph of the man’s eyeball for their collection. The Advisory Committee determined that the SAM continued its classified flashblindness studies until at least 1962 but that most of the records had been lost or destroyed.

  Dr. Strughold’s personal research efforts remained focused on space medicine. Monkey astronaut rocket tests at White Sands progressed. On June 19, 1949, a monkey named Albert II was blasted off into space. During that flight, Strughold and his team monitored Albert II’s vitals as the V-2 carried him past the Kármán line—the point at which outer space begins—and reached an altitude of 83 miles. Albert II died back on Earth, on impact, when his parachute failed to open. By 1952, Strughold had succeeded in convincing the air force to fund the construction of a sealed chamber, or capsule, to be used for space medicine research on humans. The cabin was designed by fellow Paperclip scientist Fritz Haber, brother of Heinz Haber, and completed in 1954. The sealed chamber was one hundred cubic square feet, with a single seat and an instrument panel, and was meant to duplicate the conditions that an astronaut would experience during a voyage to the moon. The first human test was conducted in March 1956, when an airman named D. F. Smith spent twenty-four hours inside the chamber, performing various tasks while being monitored by Strughold and his team. Approximately two years later, in February 1958, pilot Donald G. Farrell, a twenty-three-year-old native of the Bronx chosen from a pool of rigorously screened airmen, stepped into the chamber for seven consecutive days and nights. This time period, Strughold explained, was inspired by Jules Verne’s prediction of how long it would take for a spaceship to get to the moon. During the test, Strughold and Hans-Georg Clamann, Strughold’s former assistant during the Luftwaffe years, as well as two air force colleagues, monitored Donald Farrell’s vitals and his ability to perform tasks.

  The space capsule simulator test with airman Donald Farrell attracted all kinds of media attention. On the seventh and final day, Texas senator Lyndon B. Johnson stopped by the School of Aviation Medicine to personally escort Farrell out of the chamber and join him at a press conference. Dr. Strughold stood by Farrell’s side, as did General Otis Benson—the man who had tried, and failed, to find Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber a teaching position so he could remain in America. Benson singled out Strughold for his excellent work “in the name of medical science.”

  So excited was Lyndon Johnson by the event that he flew Dr. Strughold and his team to Washington, D.C., to attend a luncheon with seventy congressmen, the secretary of the air force, and a half-dozen four-star generals. Strughold later recalled the event: “After the soup, [Lyndon] Johnson asked me to give a five minute talk about the scope of space medicine and the meaning of the experiment.” Hubertus Strughold, like Wernher von Braun and Walter Dornberger, was now an accepted member of the U.S. military scientific elite.

  But there was a bump in the road. In May 1958, Time magazine featured a piece about Strughold, showering him with praise as America’s space medicine research pioneer. In response, the widely read Saturday Review published an editorial by Julian Bach Jr., a former war correspondent for the Army Talks series of pamphlets for GIs, and “the first American correspondent to report in the general press on medical experiments on human beings by Nazi doctors during World War II.” Bach’s editorial was called “Himmler the Scientist.” In it, the war correspondent reminded the public of the human experiments that the Nazi doctors had conducted on prisoners in concentration camps. “The German doctors carving them up were medical men of stature in many cases,” wrote Bach. “Only the fewest were quacks.” Bach correctly linked Strughold to the freezing experiments at Dachau, stating that, at minimum, he “had knowledge of them.” This was the first time the public had heard anything about Dr. Strughold having knowledge of the medical murder experiments, a fact he had previously been able to keep hidden.

  The article prompted an investigation at the federal level. Because Strughold had become a U.S. citizen two years prior, in 1956, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was now compelled to investigate. But after checking with the air force, the INS released a statement saying that Strughold had been “appropriately investigated” before becoming a U.S. citizen. The INS had not been shown Strughold’s OMGUS security report or his classified dossier. If it had been, INS would have learned that military intelligence had concluded that Strughold’s “successful career under Hitler would seem to indicate that he must be in full accord with Nazism.”

  In October 1958, the twenty-ninth meeting of the Aero Medical Association convened in San Antonio, Texas, for a daylong symposium, “Aviation Medicine on the Threshold of Space.” The group’s first international convention had taken place at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel twenty-one years before. Dr. Strughold and Harry Armstrong had both been in attendance. Here they were together again: Armstrong and Strughold were co-hosts of the event. General Dornberger delivered a speech. Eleven of the forty-seven scientists in attendance had been brought to America from Germany as part of Operation Paperclip. They were American citizens now.

  A prolific writer, Strughold authored papers and journals, sometimes more than a dozen in a year. He had contributed a piece about space cabins to the Collier’s magazine series. He created new, space-related nomenclature, including the words “bioastronautics,” “gravisphere,�
�� “ecosphere,” and “astrobiology.” He studied jet lag—how the body responds to flight—and wrote a book about his findings, Your Body Clock. In 1964, he was interviewed by the space writer and journalist Shirley Thomas for her eight-volume series Men of Space. Now, with nearly two decades of distance between himself and his Nazi past, and with so many accolades to his name, Strughold began to construct a fictional past for himself, one in which he had actually been an opponent of the Nazis.

  “I was against Hitler and his beliefs,” Strughold told Shirley Thomas. “I sometimes tried to hide myself because my life was in danger from the Nazis,” he said. This was, of course, absurd. Strughold was among the highest-ranking doctor-professors in the Luftwaffe.

  “Were you ever forced to join the Nazi Party?” Thomas asked.

  “It was tried,” Strughold said. “They tried it” but failed. Strughold told Thomas that the same went for the staff at his Aviation Medical Research Institute in Berlin. “Only the janitor and the man who took care of the animals” were members of the Nazi Party, Strughold lied.

  It was as if his close colleagues from the Nazi era—Doctors Siegfried Ruff, Konrad Schäfer, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, and Oskar Schröder—did not exist.

  People began to look harder into the past. On September 3, 1973, Simon Wiesenthal, a freelance Nazi hunter who had played a role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann, wrote to Dr. Adalbert Rückerl, director of the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, in Ludwigsburg, Germany.

  “I have information that Dr. Hubertus Strughold participated in experiments with human beings in Ravensbrück,” Wiesenthal wrote. “We don’t have the name in our archive. The information states that the experiments were in context of the German Air Force.”

  Dr. Adalbert Rückerl told Simon Wiesenthal that he would look into it. A few months later, Rückerl wrote back to Wiesenthal to say that a comprehensive investigation had been done and that the Central Office could not find any direct evidence of Strughold’s personal participation in the medical crimes. Rückerl provided Wiesenthal with a copy of the documents pertaining to the conference, “Medical Problems of Sea Distress and Winter Distress,” at the Hotel Deutscher Hof in Nuremberg in 1942, including the travel expenses that Strughold had submitted and the amount he was paid to attend. The Luftwaffe doctors in attendance had discussed the medical data of murdered people. But knowledge was not a crime, and there was no further action for the Central Office of the State Justice Administration to take, Rückerl said.