The following week, inside the prison complex at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, there was a strange occurrence involving Dr. Benzinger. In Benzinger’s pretrial investigation he admitted being aware of the fact that medical experiments were taking place at concentration camps and that nonconsenting test subjects had been murdered in the process. Benzinger also admitted that he had attended the October 1942 conference in Nuremberg, “Medical Problems of Sea Distress and Winter Distress,” where data from murdered people was openly discussed among ninety Luftwaffe doctors. During Benzinger’s Nuremberg incarceration, prosecutors revealed to him that they had a new detail regarding his accessory to medical crimes, namely, the “motion picture of the record of the [medical murder] experiments” that had been shown at a private screening at the Air Ministry. Benzinger did not deny that he had been one of a select group of doctors invited by Himmler to attend this film screening; nor did he deny that he was one of nine persons chosen by Himmler to host the event. Benzinger was part of an elite inner circle of Luftwaffe doctors favored by the Reichsführer-SS, he conceded, but that was not a crime. But prosecutors also had a document that suggested Benzinger was far more implicated in the crimes than he let on. “After the showing of the film, most of the spectators withdrew and a small group of doctors remained behind [including] Benzinger. They asked Rascher… for a verbal report on the experiments,” the document read. Benzinger insisted that all he did was listen. That there was no evidence of his having participated in any of the medical murders and that there were no documents and no eyewitnesses that could prove otherwise.
On October 12, 1946, Dr. Theodor Benzinger was announced as a defendant in the forthcoming doctors’ trial. And then, just eleven days later, on October 23, 1946, Benzinger was released from the Nuremberg prison without further explanation. He was returned directly to the custody of the Army Air Forces, as stated in his declassified Nuremberg prisoner file. After spending a little over a month in the Nuremberg jail, Benzinger was back in Heidelberg continuing his U.S. Army research work. There was no explanation as to why Benzinger was dropped from the list of defendants in the upcoming doctors’ trial. It would take decades for an important clue to be revealed, by Nuremberg trial expert and medical history professor Paul Weindling. As it turned out, in the fall of 1946, Benzinger had recently completed a paper on pilot physiology concerning stratospheric, or extremely high-altitude, aircraft. “The US [Army] Air Forces, Wright Field circulated his report on this topic in October 1946—just weeks after his detention and release” from the prison complex at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, Weindling explains. The suggestion is that perhaps someone in the Army Air Forces felt Benzinger’s expertise was more in the “national interest” than was trying him for war crimes. One of the Nuremberg prosecutors, a Boston attorney named Alexander G. Hardy, was outraged when he learned of Benzinger’s release and insisted that the “interrogations were sloppy.”
Back at the AAF Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg, the arrests of the five doctors on war crimes charges had everyone on edge. The classified programs taking place there began to quietly wind down. While Doctors Ruff, Sch?fer, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, and Schr?der faced judgment at Nuremberg, thirty-four of the doctors remaining at the center prepared for shipment to the United States under Operation Paperclip. One of the first doctors in the group to head to America for work, in February 1947, was Dr. Theodor Benzinger.
At Nuremberg, while the doctors from Heidelberg remained incarcerated in one wing of the prison awaiting trial, preparations of another kind were also going on. The trial of the major war criminals was over. On the morning of October 1, the judges took turns reading the verdicts: nineteen convictions and three acquittals of the twenty-two accused major war criminals (one, Bormann, in absentia). That same afternoon, the tribunal pronounced what sentences would be imposed: twelve death sentences, three life sentences, and four lengthy prison terms. Albert Speer, the only defendant who pled guilty, was sentenced to twenty years.
The doctors from Heidelberg were housed in a separate wing of the prison where pretrial interviews would continue for another two months. Also in custody inside the prison complex at the Palace of Justice was Dr. Otto Ambros. Ambros would be tried in a subsequent trial, Case VI or the Farben trial, which was scheduled to begin in the summer of 1947.
As commandant of the facility, Colonel Burton Andrus was in charge of all prisoners, including those who were soon to be hanged. The condemned had roughly two weeks to live. Andrus described the surreal atmosphere of the last days at Nuremberg for the Nazis who had been sentenced to death. Ribbentrop, Kaltenbrunner, Frank, and Seyss-Inquart took communion and made a last confession to Father O’Conner, the Nuremberg priest. G?ring bequeathed his shaving brush and razor to the prison barber. Streicher penned six letters. Ribbentrop read a book. Keitel requested that a German folk song be played on the organ as he was hanged. “On the night of 14th October, I made arrangements for the tightest security to be put around the prison,” Colonel Andrus recalled. “I wanted the condemned men to know only at the very last minute that their time had come to be hanged.”