To report this book, I filed dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, some of which were honored, many of which were denied, and most of which are still pending. I came across oblique references, circa 1945, regarding a supposed list of Nazi doctors whom the Office of U.S. Chief of Counsel, U.S. Army, sought for involvement in “mercy killings,” or medical murder crimes. FOIA requests for the list turned up nothing. Then, at the Harvard Medical Library, I found a collection of papers that once belonged to Colonel Robert J. Benford, the first commander of Operation Paperclip’s aviation medicine research program at the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg. Benford, with Dr. Strughold, oversaw the work of the fifty-eight Nazi doctors at the center; both Benford and Strughold worked under Colonel Harry Armstrong. In Benford’s papers I came across a file labeled “List of Personnel Involved in Medical Research and Mercy Killings,” but the access to the file was “Restricted Until 2015.” The Harvard Medical Library informed me that the Department of Defense had classified the list and that only the DoD had the authority to declassify it. Harvard filed a FOIA request on my behalf, and the “mercy killings” list was declassified and released to me.
Included on this list, which had been in Colonel Benford’s possession, were seven Nazi doctors hired under Operation Paperclip: Theodor Benzinger, Kurt Blome, Konrad Sch?fer, Walter Schreiber, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, Siegfried Ruff, and Oskar Schr?der. The fact became instantly clear: U.S. Army intelligence knew all along that these doctors were implicated in murder yet chose to classify the list and hire the doctors for Operation Paperclip. Blome, Sch?fer, Becker-Freyseng, Ruff, and Schr?der were all tried at Nuremberg. Schreiber’s public outing in 1951 and his subsequent banishment from America are now on record. Dr. Theodor Benzinger seems to have slipped away from accountability.
From his New York Times obituary in 1999, the world learned that Dr. Theodor Benzinger, 94, invented the ear thermometer, a nominal contribution to the medical world. As for the military world, Benzinger’s research work for the navy was destroyed or remains classified as of 2013. Wernher von Braun, Arthur Rudolph, Kurt Debus, and Hubertus Strughold led the American effort to get man to the moon. The question remains, despite a man’s contribution to a nation or a people, how do we interpret a fundamental wrong? Is the American government at fault equally for fostering myths about its Paperclip scientists—for encouraging them to whitewash their past so that their scientific acumen could be exploited for U.S. weapons-related work? When, for a nation, should the end justify the means? These are questions that can only be answered separately, by individuals. But as facts emerge and history is clarified, the answers become more suitably informed.
In addition to the ear thermometer, Theodor Benzinger left the world with the Planck-Benzinger equation, fine-tuning the second law of thermodynamics, which states that nothing lasts. Benzinger’s lifelong scientific pursuit was studying entropy—the idea that chaos rules the world and, like ice melting in a warm room, order leads to disorder.
I prefer Gerhard Maschkowski’s take on what matters and what lasts. Maschkowski was the Jewish teenager fortuitously spared the gas chamber at Auschwitz because he was of use to IG Farben as a slave laborer at their Buna factory. I was interviewing Maschkowski one spring afternoon in 2012 when I asked him the question, “What matters, what lasts?” He chuckled and smiled. He pushed back the sleeve on his shirt and showed me his blue-ink Auschwitz tattoo. “This lasts,” he said. “But it is also a record of [the] truth.”
Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber was the surgeon general of the Third Reich. “The most sinister crime in which Schreiber is involved is the introduction of intravenous lethal phenol injections,” explained war crimes investigator Dr. Leopold Alexander, “as a quick and convenient means of executing troublemakers.” Paperclip contracts: U.S. Army, Camp King, Germany; U.S. Air Force, Texas. (NARA)
Dr. Kurt Blome was Hitler’s biological weapons maker and the deputy surgeon general of the Third Reich. He had nearly completed a bubonic plague weapon when the Red Army captured his research institute in Poland. Paperclip contract: U.S. Army, Camp King, Germany. (NARA)