Despite the precautions, two individuals from the program at Fort Bliss were exposed by an angry public as “real Nazis”: Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Axster. Herbert Axster, a former lieutenant colonel in the Wehrmacht, had been a Nazi Party member since 1940. He was not a scientist but rather a patent lawyer and an accountant. At Peenemünde he worked as General Dornberger’s chief of staff. His wife, Ilse Axster, was a leader of NS-Frauenschaft, a Nazi Party organization for women. During a routine investigation of the Axsters conducted for their visa applications, neighbors in Germany told army intelligence officers that Mrs. Axster was a particularly sadistic Nazi. On the Axsters’ estate, the neighbors said, the couple kept forty “political prisoners,” Russians and Poles, whom they used as slave laborers. The neighbors said Mrs. Axster was known to use a horsewhip on her servants. This information was first passed on to Rabbi Stephen Wise of the American Jewish Congress and then to the press. “These scientists and their families are supposed to have been ‘screened,’ Wise wrote to the War Department. “The Axsters prove that this ‘screening’ is a farce and the War Department ‘screeners’ are entirely incapable of performing this task.” The Department of Justice withdrew Herbert Axster’s application for legal immigration, but the Axsters were not sent home. Eventually they left Fort Bliss and Herbert Axster opened a law firm in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The War Department cabled USFET demanding an explanation as to how the Axsters got through the screening process. A classified cable was sent back, stating that a few “ardent Nazis” may have slipped into the program based on “unavailability of records” immediately after the war.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Strange Judgment
The doctors’ trial was the first of twelve subsequent war crimes trials at Nuremberg wherein the U.S. government prosecuted individuals in specific professions—including industrialists, lawyers, and generals—who had served the Third Reich. The first trial, called the trial of the major war criminals, was prosecuted by the four Allied powers. When it ended, in October 1946, tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States had escalated to the degree that cooperation between the two nations was no longer possible. The subsequent twelve trials took place at the Palace of Justice, as the others had, but with only American judges and prosecutors. The twenty-three defendants in the doctors’ trial were charged with murder, torture, conspiracy, and atrocity in the name of medical science. “Mere punishment of the defendants,” said Brigadier General Telford Taylor in his opening statement, “can never redress the terrible injuries which the Nazis visited on these unfortunate peoples.” But General Taylor reminded the tribunal and the world that one of the central purposes of the trial was to establish a record of proof of the crimes, “so that no one can ever doubt that they were fact and not fable; and that this court, as agent of the United States and as the voice of humanity, stamps these acts, and the ideas which engendered them, as barbarous and criminal.”
Dr. Leopold Alexander, the Viennese-born American psychiatrist who had first learned of the Luftwaffe freezing experiments, helped General Taylor write his opening speech. Dr. Alexander’s official title was expert consultant to the secretary of war, but in layman’s terms he was the most influential person involved in the doctors’ trial after Telford Taylor. Dr. Alexander worked tirelessly to supply information and answers for the prosecution team as they prepared to go to trial. He conducted hundreds of hours of pretrial interrogations with the defendants and interviewed scores of witnesses and victims. He was able to converse in both German and English and he took extensive notes in both languages. Throughout the trial Dr. Alexander delivered presentations of evidence and cross-examined witnesses. When the trial was over he would be given credit for writing the Nuremberg Code.
Of the twenty-three defendants, no one outside a small group of American medical military elite had any idea that four of the accused had already worked for the U.S. Army under Paperclip. This fact would remain secret for forty years. Neither Siegfried Ruff, nor Konrad Sch?fer, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, nor Oskar Schr?der mentioned this damning fact during the trial.
Siegfried Ruff was one of the few physicians who admitted he’d overseen the medical murders at Dachau but said he did not perform any of the experiments himself. In his defense, he said he didn’t believe that what he did was wrong. “It was understood that concentration camp inmates who had been condemned to death would be used in the experiments, and as compensation they were to have their sentences commuted to life in prison,” Ruff told the judges. “Personally, I would not consider these experiments as immoral especially in war time.” This line of defense, that extraordinary times called for extraordinary measures, was also used by Schr?der and Becker-Freyseng.