Still, as of 2013, the Space Medicine Association in America continues to bestow its prestigious Hubertus Strughold Award to a scientist or specialist for outstanding contribution to aviation medicine. It has done so every year since 1963. On December 1, 2012, the Wall Street Journal ran a page-one story about Dr. Strughold, presenting revelatory new information about his criminal activities during the war. German historian Prof. Hans-Walter Schmuhl had been researching another subject when he came across evidence that showed that Dr. Strughold had allowed epileptic children to be experimented on inside the high-altitude chamber at Strughold’s Aviation Medical Research Institute of the Reich Air Ministry in Berlin. Rabbits had been put to the test first and had died. Next, Reich medical researchers wanted to see what would happen to young children with epilepsy subjected to those same conditions. Strughold authorized the potentially lethal tests on the children. “The head of the Institute is responsible,” says Schmuhl; “using this expensive equipment, the head of an institute had to have been informed about the use.” When the German Society for Air and Space Medicine learned about Schmuhl’s discovery, they eliminated their prestigious Strughold Award, which had been given annually in Germany since the mid-1970s.
In America, the Wall Street Journal article renewed debate as to why the Space Medicine Association had not yet eliminated its Hubertus Strughold Award. Dr. Mark Campbell, a former president of the Space Medicine Association, insists the award will not go away. Campbell blames the Internet for maligning what he sees as Dr. Strughold’s good character. “I was a member of a committee investigating Dr. Strughold to see if his name should be removed from the Space Medicine Association Strughold Award,” says Campbell. “I was amazed to find that the facts that were uncovered were so different from the claims being made on the Internet.” But most of Dr. Campbell’s colleagues disagree. “Why defend him?” asks Dr. Stephen Véronneau, a research medical officer at the FAA’s Civil Aerospace Medical Institute in Oklahoma City, and a member of the Space Medicine Association. “I can’t find another example in the world of [an institution] honoring Dr. Strughold except my own association.”
The National Space Club Florida Committee, one of three committees of the National Space Club in Washington, D.C., gives out a similarly prestigious space-related award called the Dr. Kurt H. Debus Award. This annual award is named in honor of Operation Paperclip’s Kurt Debus, who became the first director of the Kennedy Space Center. Kurt Debus is the scientist who, during the war, was an enthusiastic member of the SS, wore the SS uniform to work, and turned a colleague over to the Gestapo for making anti-Nazi remarks and failing to give Debus the Nazi salute. Under Operation Paperclip, Kurt Debus worked on missiles for the army and for NASA for a total of twenty-eight years—many of which he spent alongside Arthur Rudolph and Wernher von Braun. Kurt Debus retired in 1974. In 2013, after the Strughold award debate resurfaced, I interviewed Steve Griffin, the National Space Club chairman, to determine why the organization continues to give out an award that is named after someone who was once an avowed and active Nazi.
“Simple as it is, Kurt Debus is an honored American,” Griffin says. I read to Griffin information from Kurt Debus’s OMGUS security report. “It is a simple matter,” Griffin told me. “Kurt Debus was the first director of the Kennedy Space Center.”
Unlike the Strughold award, which was created in 1963 when Strughold’s foreign scientist case file was still classified, the Dr. Kurt H. Debus Award was first bestowed in 1990, after Debus’s OMGUS security report had been declassified and the revelation that he was an active member of Heinrich Himmler’s SS had been revealed. “It is not my purview to decide if we have an award or what it is called,” Griffin says. But Griffin conceded that he has been on the board of the National Space Club since the Debus award’s inception, so technically it is, and always has been, within his purview. Like so many of those involved in Operation Paperclip decades ago, Griffin looks past Debus’s former commitment to Nazi Party ideology. He only sees the scientist.
“What do you say when people ask you about Kurt Debus’s Nazi past?” I asked. “Not a single person has asked me this question in [twenty-three] years,” Griffin said.