“It was tried,” Strughold said. “They tried it” but failed. Strughold told Thomas that the same went for the staff at his Aviation Medical Research Institute in Berlin. “Only the janitor and the man who took care of the animals” were members of the Nazi Party, Strughold lied.
It was as if his close colleagues from the Nazi era—Doctors Siegfried Ruff, Konrad Sch?fer, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, and Oskar Schr?der—did not exist.
People began to look harder into the past. On September 3, 1973, Simon Wiesenthal, a freelance Nazi hunter who had played a role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann, wrote to Dr. Adalbert Rückerl, director of the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, in Ludwigsburg, Germany.
“I have information that Dr. Hubertus Strughold participated in experiments with human beings in Ravensbrück,” Wiesenthal wrote. “We don’t have the name in our archive. The information states that the experiments were in context of the German Air Force.”
Dr. Adalbert Rückerl told Simon Wiesenthal that he would look into it. A few months later, Rückerl wrote back to Wiesenthal to say that a comprehensive investigation had been done and that the Central Office could not find any direct evidence of Strughold’s personal participation in the medical crimes. Rückerl provided Wiesenthal with a copy of the documents pertaining to the conference, “Medical Problems of Sea Distress and Winter Distress,” at the Hotel Deutscher Hof in Nuremberg in 1942, including the travel expenses that Strughold had submitted and the amount he was paid to attend. The Luftwaffe doctors in attendance had discussed the medical data of murdered people. But knowledge was not a crime, and there was no further action for the Central Office of the State Justice Administration to take, Rückerl said.
A few months later, toward the end of 1973, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service announced that it was investigating Strughold and thirty-four other long-dormant cases of Nazi war criminal suspects living in the United States. That Strughold’s name was on the list, which was published in the New York Times, came as a shock to him. Strughold rehearsed a succinct response for reporters, the same as von Braun had when allegations arose. “I was cleared before I came here, before I was hired,” Strughold said.
Leaders of Jewish groups sprang into action, and Charles R. Allen Jr., the former senior editor of The Nation, writing for Jewish Currents, presented evidence about Strughold’s knowledge of human experiments. Allen had acquired the first public copy of the proceedings of the Nuremberg medical conference at the Hotel Deutscher Hof in 1942, which included a list of those in attendance. On this list were five other Nazi doctors who had worked in America under Operation Paperclip—Major General Walter Schreiber, Konrad Sch?fer, Hans-Georg Clamann, Konrad Büttner, and Theodor Benzinger—but neither Charles R. Allen Jr. nor anyone else involved in the Strughold exposé appears to have recognized any of these names. Twenty years prior, Major General Walter Schreiber had been fired from the SAM and banished to Argentina, and Konrad Sch?fer had been fired from the SAM and moved to New York. But when this story broke in 1973, Hans-Georg Clamann, Konrad Büttner, and Theodor Benzinger had all been gainfully employed by the U.S. government for decades and were now living the American dream.
The cloud of suspicion hung over Strughold. Ralph Blumenthal wrote a follow-up article in the New York Times, in November of 1974, describing the freezing experiments in detail. “Victims were forced to remain naked outdoors or in tanks of ice water. Tests were made periodically as they were freezing to death… the victims suffered agonizing deaths, after which they were dissected for data.” INS director Leonard Chapman made inquiries with the U.S. Air Force and was told that there was “no derogatory information” on Strughold. The case was closed, yet again.