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 Sch?fer, 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, Sch?fer’s military research was supervised by Dr. Strughold and an air force captain named Seymour Schwartz. During Sch?fer’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 Sch?fer’s American supervisor found him inept. “The scientist [Sch?fer] 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 Sch?fer’s Paperclip contract be terminated and that he be sent back to Germany. The air force terminated Sch?fer’s contract, but the German doctor refused to leave the United States. Thanks to expedited protocols put in place by the JIOA, Sch?fer 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.