Working alongside the Nazi doctors in Heidelberg were dozens of army translators preparing English-language versions of the physicians’ reports. By September 1946 there were over a thousand pages of documents completed. Soon everything would be compiled into a two-volume monograph for the Army Air Forces entitled German Aviation Medicine, World War II.
Work progressed well for Strughold’s staff of doctors in Heidelberg until the institute was thrown into psychological chaos. On September 17, 1946, military security officers with the Counter Intelligence Corps, 303 Detachment, arrived at the center with five arrest warrants in hand. Doctors Theodor Benzinger, Siegfried Ruff, Konrad Sch?fer, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, and Oskar Schr?der were wanted by the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, for “War Crimes as suspect.” The men were arrested and taken to the prison complex at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, to the same wing where Dr. Blome was already incarcerated. If any of this were to come to light—that the U.S. Army Air Forces had been employing war crimes suspects and had them conducting military research at a facility inside Germany, expressly prohibited by Allied peace agreements—Harry Armstrong’s institute would be shut down, Operation Paperclip would be exposed, and the U.S. Army would have an international scandal on its hands.
The Nazi doctors’ trial was the first of the so-called subsequent trials to take place after the trial of the major war criminals at Nuremberg. It began on December 9, 1946. Unlike with the first trial, the twenty-three defendants at the doctors’ trial—twenty doctors and three SS bureaucrats—were virtually unknown figures in the eyes of the American public. What was known, from earlier press coverage, was that these proceedings would put lurid Nazi science on trial. In the words of chief prosecutor General Telford Taylor, Nazi doctors had become proficient in the “macabre science” of killing. Torturous medical experiments conducted on concentration camp prisoners included freezing experiments, high-altitude tests, mustard gas research, seawater drinkability tests, malaria research, mass sterilization, and euthanasia. The New York Times called the doctors’ crimes “beyond the pale of even the most perverted medicine” and cautioned that some details were difficult to report because they were impossible to comprehend. The New York Times cited one particularly grotesque example. Perfectly healthy people, “Jews and Slavs,” had been murdered at the request of SS physician Dr. August Hirt for a university skeleton collection of the Untermenschen. This was the same anatomist named by Dr. Eugen Haagen in papers discovered by Alsos officers in Strasbourg in November 1944. Hirt, an expert in dinosaur anatomy, had committed suicide before the trial. The defendants ran the gamut from “the dregs of the German medical profession” to doctors who had once been internationally esteemed, like Dr. Kurt Blome.
On October 12, 1946, the Stars and Stripes newspaper, which operated from inside the Pentagon, listed the individual names of the doctors charged—a list that included the five Luftwaffe doctors who had been arrested at the U.S. Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center: Theodor Benzinger, Siegfried Ruff, Konrad Sch?fer, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, and Oskar Schr?der. In a matter of weeks, these physicians had gone from being employed by the U.S. Army to being tried by the U.S. military for war crimes. The ultimate judicial punishment was on the line: Each doctor faced a possible death sentence.