Now more than ever Strughold felt the need to promote the fiction that he was anti-Nazi. In an air force oral history interview that took place two days after Blumenthal’s piece ran in the New York Times, Strughold told interviewer James C. Hasdorff that during the war he constantly feared for his life. He said that he had been written up on Hitler’s “so-called enemy list.” Strughold insisted that at one point, shortly after the attempted assassination of Hitler by Count Claus von Stauffenberg, in July 1944, he, Strughold, had to go into hiding because he was receiving death threats—that he went from farmhouse to farmhouse until it was finally “safe to return to Berlin.” This was an absurd distortion of reality. In the months after the Stauffenberg incident, in the winter of 1945, Hubertus Strughold had been promoted to full colonel in the Luftwaffe reserves.
Three years passed. The spotlight moved away. In a ceremony on January 19, 1977, a bronze plaque bearing a portrait of Dr. Hubertus Strughold was unveiled in San Antonio, Texas, in the foyer at the Aeromedical Library at the School of Aerospace Medicine. The library, which was the largest medical library in the U.S. Air Force, was being dedicated to Dr. Hubertus Strughold, the Father of Space Medicine. The air force promised that Strughold’s bronze plaque “will be permanently displayed in the foyer of the library.” But permanence is impossible to predict. Only time tells what lasts.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Legacy
In the 1960s, what Operation Paperclip left behind in the country it recruited from reveals contradictory truths about the program’s legacy. A watershed event occurred in 1963 when the West German courts opened the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. This was the first large-scale public trial of Holocaust perpetrators to take place inside Germany. There had been one Auschwitz trial previously, in Cracow, Poland, in 1947, in which a number of camp functionaries were tried, including Auschwitz commandant Rudolf H?ss, who was sentenced to death and hanged. But before the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, which ran through 1965, Germany had not conducted any major war crimes trials of its own. The Nuremberg trials, of course, were presided over by the Allied forces. At the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, 360 witnesses from 19 countries, including 211 Auschwitz survivors, would confront the accused. The judges hearing the case were all Germans.
Throughout the 1950s, Germany’s political and legal elite had opposed holding these kinds of trials for a variety of reasons, but mostly because it would likely generate additional trials. Just as it behooved U.S. military intelligence to keep the details of Operation Paperclip a secret, so it went for many German jurists. Thousand of their fellow citizens had committed heinous crimes during the war and were now living perfectly normal and sometimes very productive lives.
But in 1963, with the trial under way, for the first time since 1945 people in Germany were openly talking about gas chambers, death camps, and the Holocaust. “The trial was triggered by a letter I received,” recalled Hermann Langbein, the secretary of the International Auschwitz Committee. “It was mailed to me by an Auschwitz survivor. A German [named] R?gner.” At Auschwitz, where both Langbein and R?gner had been prisoners, the SS guards had made R?gner a kapo—someone who supervised slave laborers. “He was a kapo in an electrical detail,” explained Langbein, “a decent kapo. There were some decent kapos there [at Auschwitz].”
In R?gner’s letter to Langbein he wrote, “I know where Boger is.”
Boger was a loaded name to anyone who had survived Auschwitz. Survivors knew Boger as the Tiger of Auschwitz. Wilhelm Boger was a man of indisputable evil. Witnesses watched him murder children on the train ramps with his own hands. In R?gner’s letter to Langbein, he said that he’d filed murder charges against Boger with the German authorities in Stuttgart. In the spring of 1958, in his capacity as the secretary of the International Auschwitz Committee, Hermann Langbein followed up on R?gner’s tip and discovered that Boger was working as an accountant in a town outside Stuttgart. There, the Tiger of Auschwitz lived with his wife and children as a family man. “Bringing the man to justice was one long obstacle course,” said Hermann Langbein. But finally, after several months of delays, Boger was arrested.