Patterson wrote to the chief of staff to the president, Admiral William D. Leahy. “I strongly favor doing everything possible to utilize fully in the prosecution of the war against Japan all information that can be obtained from Germany or any other source,” Patterson wrote. He also expressed concern. “These men are enemies and it must be assumed they are capable of sabotaging our war effort. Bringing them to this country raises delicate questions, including the strong resentment of the American public, who might misunderstand the purpose of bringing them here and the treatment accorded them.” Patterson believed that the way to avoid foreseeable problems with the State Department, which handled visa approvals, was to involve the State Department in decision making now. Until a new committee was formed to deal specifically with Nazi scientists, Patterson suggested that the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC) be in charge.
Patterson’s letter to the president’s chief of staff, which was not shared with President Truman, prompted a meeting at the Pentagon by the War Department General Staff. The group agreed on a temporary policy. Contracts would be given to a limited number of German scientists “provided they were not known or alleged war criminals.” The scientists were to be placed in protective military custody in the United States, and they were to be returned to Germany as quickly as possible after their classified weapons work was complete.
A cable was sent to General Eisenhower, at SHAEF headquarters in Versailles, fulfilling his two-week-old request to be advised on longer-term policy. But what had been decided in Washington, D.C., had very little impact on the reality of what was going on in the European Theater with scientists who had spent years serving Adolf Hitler.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Hitler’s Doctors
During the war, physicians with the U.S. Army Air Forces heard rumors about cutting-edge research being developed by the Reich’s aviation doctors. The Luftwaffe was highly secretive about this research, and its aviation doctors did not regularly publish their work in medical journals. When they did, usually in a Nazi Party–sponsored journal like Aviation Medicine (Luftfahrtmedizin), the U.S. Army Air Forces would circumvent copyright law, translate the work into English, and republish it for their own flight surgeons to study. Areas in which the Nazis were known to be breaking new ground were air-sea rescue programs, high-altitude studies, and decompression sickness studies. In other words, Nazi doctors were supposedly leading the world’s research in how pilots performed in extreme cold, extreme altitude, and at extreme speeds.
At war’s end, there were two American military officers who were particularly interested in capturing the secrets of Nazi-sponsored aviation research. They were Major General Malcolm Grow, surgeon general of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe, and Lieutenant Colonel Harry Armstrong, chief surgeon of the Eighth Air Force. Both men were physicians, flight surgeons, and aviation medicine pioneers.
Before the war, Grow and Armstrong had cofounded the aviation medicine laboratory at Wright Field, where together they initiated many of the major medical advances that had kept U.S. airmen alive during the air war. At Wright Field, Armstrong perfected a pilot-friendly oxygen mask and conducted groundbreaking studies in pilot physiology associated with high-altitude flight. Grow developed the original flier’s flak vest—a twenty-two-pound armored jacket that could protect airmen against antiaircraft fire. Now, with the war over, Grow and Armstrong saw unprecedented opportunity in seizing everything the Nazis had been working on in aviation research so as to incorporate that knowledge into U.S. Army Air Force’s understanding.
According to an interview with Armstrong decades later, a plan was hatched during a meeting between himself and General Grow at the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe headquarters, in Saint-Germain, France. The two men knew that many of the Luftwaffe’s medical research institutions had been located in Berlin, and the plan was for Colonel Armstrong to go there and track down as many Luftwaffe doctors as he could find with the goal of enticing them to come to work for the U.S. Army Air Forces. As surgeon general, Grow could see to it that Armstrong was placed in the U.S-occupied zone in Berlin, as chief surgeon with the Army Air Forces contingent there. This would give Armstrong access to a city divided into U.S. and Russian zones. General Grow would return to Army Air Forces headquarters in Washington, D.C., where he would lobby superiors to authorize and pay for a new research laboratory exploiting what the Nazi doctors had been working on during the war. With the plan set in motion, Armstrong set out for Berlin.