The strange case of Konrad Sch?fer played a unique role in Operation Paperclip. Having invented the Sch?fer process to separate salt from seawater, Sch?fer was clearly aware that concentration camp prisoners were going to be used in the testing process. Sch?fer’s superior, Oskar Schr?der, 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 Sch?fer 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 Sch?fer 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 H?llenrainer, was located by Dr. Alexander and put on the witness stand. H?llenrainer did not recognize Konrad Sch?fer but he recognized one of his codefendants in the dock. H?llenrainer’s testimony proved to be one of the most dramatic events in the doctors’ trial.
It was June 27, 1947, and Karl H?llenrainer 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,” H?llenrainer said.
H?llenrainer’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, H?llenrainer 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, H?llenrainer 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 H?llenrainer’s liver in order to analyze it. Now, from the witness stand, H?llenrainer 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 H?llenrainer. “I would recognize him at once.”
H?llenrainer stared across the courtroom, his eyes focused sharply on one of the twenty-three defendants sitting in the dock, Dr. Wilhelm Beiglb?ck, 40, the Luftwaffe doctor in charge of the saltwater experiments. Beiglb?ck had deep crevices at each side of his mouth and five pronounced dueling scars running across his left cheek.
As H?llenrainer stared at Dr. Beiglb?ck, “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. H?llenrainer “was a little man and I watched him stand up,” she explains. The prosecutor asked H?llenrainer 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 H?llenrainer sprang into action. To Vivien Spitz’s eye, H?llenrainer 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 H?llenrainer clutched a dagger, Vivien Spitz recalls. “He was reaching for Dr. Beiglb?ck, 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 H?llenrainer’s way. Three American military police rushed forward and grabbed H?llenrainer. Vivien Spitz remembers how security “subdued” Karl H?llenrainer just before he reached Beiglb?ck, “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 H?llenrainer 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 H?llenrainer meekly replied.
“This is a court of justice,” roared Beals.
“Yes,” said H?llenrainer, trembling worse than before.
“And by your conduct in attempting to assault the defendant Beiglb?ck in the dock, you have committed a contempt of this court!”
Karl H?llenrainer 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,” H?llenrainer begged, pointing to the expressionless Dr. Beiglb?ck. “He has ruined my whole life!”