Dr. Strughold’s personal research efforts remained focused on space medicine. Monkey astronaut rocket tests at White Sands progressed. On June 19, 1949, a monkey named Albert II was blasted off into space. During that flight, Strughold and his team monitored Albert II’s vitals as the V-2 carried him past the Kármán line—the point at which outer space begins—and reached an altitude of 83 miles. Albert II died back on Earth, on impact, when his parachute failed to open. By 1952, Strughold had succeeded in convincing the air force to fund the construction of a sealed chamber, or capsule, to be used for space medicine research on humans. The cabin was designed by fellow Paperclip scientist Fritz Haber, brother of Heinz Haber, and completed in 1954. The sealed chamber was one hundred cubic square feet, with a single seat and an instrument panel, and was meant to duplicate the conditions that an astronaut would experience during a voyage to the moon. The first human test was conducted in March 1956, when an airman named D. F. Smith spent twenty-four hours inside the chamber, performing various tasks while being monitored by Strughold and his team. Approximately two years later, in February 1958, pilot Donald G. Farrell, a twenty-three-year-old native of the Bronx chosen from a pool of rigorously screened airmen, stepped into the chamber for seven consecutive days and nights. This time period, Strughold explained, was inspired by Jules Verne’s prediction of how long it would take for a spaceship to get to the moon. During the test, Strughold and Hans-Georg Clamann, Strughold’s former assistant during the Luftwaffe years, as well as two air force colleagues, monitored Donald Farrell’s vitals and his ability to perform tasks.
The space capsule simulator test with airman Donald Farrell attracted all kinds of media attention. On the seventh and final day, Texas senator Lyndon B. Johnson stopped by the School of Aviation Medicine to personally escort Farrell out of the chamber and join him at a press conference. Dr. Strughold stood by Farrell’s side, as did General Otis Benson—the man who had tried, and failed, to find Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber a teaching position so he could remain in America. Benson singled out Strughold for his excellent work “in the name of medical science.”
So excited was Lyndon Johnson by the event that he flew Dr. Strughold and his team to Washington, D.C., to attend a luncheon with seventy congressmen, the secretary of the air force, and a half-dozen four-star generals. Strughold later recalled the event: “After the soup, [Lyndon] Johnson asked me to give a five minute talk about the scope of space medicine and the meaning of the experiment.” Hubertus Strughold, like Wernher von Braun and Walter Dornberger, was now an accepted member of the U.S. military scientific elite.
But there was a bump in the road. In May 1958, Time magazine featured a piece about Strughold, showering him with praise as America’s space medicine research pioneer. In response, the widely read Saturday Review published an editorial by Julian Bach Jr., a former war correspondent for the Army Talks series of pamphlets for GIs, and “the first American correspondent to report in the general press on medical experiments on human beings by Nazi doctors during World War II.” Bach’s editorial was called “Himmler the Scientist.” In it, the war correspondent reminded the public of the human experiments that the Nazi doctors had conducted on prisoners in concentration camps. “The German doctors carving them up were medical men of stature in many cases,” wrote Bach. “Only the fewest were quacks.” Bach correctly linked Strughold to the freezing experiments at Dachau, stating that, at minimum, he “had knowledge of them.” This was the first time the public had heard anything about Dr. Strughold having knowledge of the medical murder experiments, a fact he had previously been able to keep hidden.
The article prompted an investigation at the federal level. Because Strughold had become a U.S. citizen two years prior, in 1956, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was now compelled to investigate. But after checking with the air force, the INS released a statement saying that Strughold had been “appropriately investigated” before becoming a U.S. citizen. The INS had not been shown Strughold’s OMGUS security report or his classified dossier. If it had been, INS would have learned that military intelligence had concluded that Strughold’s “successful career under Hitler would seem to indicate that he must be in full accord with Nazism.”
In October 1958, the twenty-ninth meeting of the Aero Medical Association convened in San Antonio, Texas, for a daylong symposium, “Aviation Medicine on the Threshold of Space.” The group’s first international convention had taken place at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel twenty-one years before. Dr. Strughold and Harry Armstrong had both been in attendance. Here they were together again: Armstrong and Strughold were co-hosts of the event. General Dornberger delivered a speech. Eleven of the forty-seven scientists in attendance had been brought to America from Germany as part of Operation Paperclip. They were American citizens now.
A prolific writer, Strughold authored papers and journals, sometimes more than a dozen in a year. He had contributed a piece about space cabins to the Collier’s magazine series. He created new, space-related nomenclature, including the words “bioastronautics,” “gravisphere,” “ecosphere,” and “astrobiology.” He studied jet lag—how the body responds to flight—and wrote a book about his findings, Your Body Clock. In 1964, he was interviewed by the space writer and journalist Shirley Thomas for her eight-volume series Men of Space. Now, with nearly two decades of distance between himself and his Nazi past, and with so many accolades to his name, Strughold began to construct a fictional past for himself, one in which he had actually been an opponent of the Nazis.
“I was against Hitler and his beliefs,” Strughold told Shirley Thomas. “I sometimes tried to hide myself because my life was in danger from the Nazis,” he said. This was, of course, absurd. Strughold was among the highest-ranking doctor-professors in the Luftwaffe.
“Were you ever forced to join the Nazi Party?” Thomas asked.