It was another seven months before the Justice Department made public that Arthur Rudolph had renounced his citizenship so as to avoid facing a war crimes trial. When asked to comment, Eli Rosenbaum said that Arthur Rudolph had contributed to “the death of thousands of slave laborers.” But Rosenbaum also said that it was Rudolph’s “almost unbelievable callousness and disregard [for] human life” that surprised him most. The story became front-page news around the world.
Some individuals affiliated with NASA and other rocket-related government programs remained staunch supporters of Arthur Rudolph, calling the Justice Department’s actions against him a “witchhunt.” One of Rudolph’s leading proponents, Hugh McInnish, an engineer with the U.S. Army Strategic Defense Command, helped promote the idea that Rudolph, Dornberger, and von Braun had all confronted members of the SS during the war and had tried to get better working conditions for the slave laborers. “Their defenders’ assertions must be regarded with the greatest skepticism, especially as there is not a single document to back them up,” says Michael J. Neufeld. “There is little doubt in my mind that Rudolph was deeply implicated.” The Rudolph exposé triggered keen interest in how it was that Arthur Rudolph came to America in the first place. This was a turning point in Operation Paperclip’s secret history.
There is a broad misconception in America that there exists some kind of automatic declassification system that requires the government to reveal its secret programs after thirty or fifty years. In reality, the most damaging programs often remain classified for as long as they can be kept secret. The Freedom of Information Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, allows for the full or partial disclosure of some documents, but a request must be initiated by an individual or a group and is by no means a guarantee that information will be obtained. After the Arthur Rudolph story broke, journalist Linda Hunt began reporting on Operation Paperclip for CNN and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She filed FOIA requests with the different military organizations and intelligence agencies involved and received varied responses. “I obtained six thousand Edgewood Arsenal documents in 1987 but it took more than a year, two attorneys and a threatened lawsuit to get the records [released],” says Hunt. When she arrived at the Washington National Records Center in the late 1980s to inspect the documents, she was told that Edgewood’s own historian had checked out seven of the boxes and that another twelve were missing. The army later agreed to look for the missing records and sent her a bill for $239,680 in so-called search fees (the equivalent of $500,000 in 2013). Eventually Linda Hunt was granted access to the documents, and in the early 1990s she published a book that unveiled many of Operation Paperclip’s seemingly impenetrable secrets. It was now no longer possible for the government to uphold the myth that Paperclip was a program peopled solely by benign German scientists, nominal Nazis, and moral men.
As if pushing back against the Office of Special Investigations, just a few months after Arthur Rudolph was expelled from the United States, the Texas Senate passed a resolution declaring that June 15 was Dr. Hubertus Strughold Day. Then Ohio State University’s medical college unveiled a portrait of Strughold on its mural of medical heroes. But the attempts by one organization to perpetrate a false myth can serve as a great motivator for another organization, and to this end the World Jewish Congress discovered and released information on Dr. Strughold that army intelligence had managed to keep classified for nearly fifty years. The New York Times verified that Dr. Strughold had been listed as among those being sought on the 1945 Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects, or CROWCASS, list. Strughold’s portrait was removed from the Ohio State mural, where he appeared, ironically, alongside Hippocrates.
Citizens who were offended by the Strughold library at the Brooks Air Force Base asked the air force when Strughold’s name was going to be removed from the U.S. government building. Library spokesman Larry Farlow told the Associated Press that there were no plans to remove the name from the Strughold Aeromedical Library. But growing pressure from the public forced the air force to reconsider its position. In 1995 General Ronald R. Fogleman, chief of staff of the Department of the Air Force, issued a terse statement stating that after reviewing Nazi-era documents, “the evidence of Dr. Strughold’s wartime activities is sufficient to cause concern about retaining his name in an honored place on the library.” The sign was removed from the building’s exterior brick walls, and the Strughold bronze portrait was taken down. The permanence of the honor had come to an end. Strughold died the following year, at the age of eighty-eight. The Justice Department had been preparing a Nazi war criminal case against Strughold in his final years.