The search proved difficult at first. It appeared as if every Luftwaffe doctor had fled Berlin. Armstrong had a list of 115 individuals he hoped to find. At the top of that list was one of the Reich’s most important aviation doctors, a German physiologist named Dr. Hubertus Strughold. Armstrong had a past personal connection with Dr. Strughold.
“The roots of that story go back to about 1934,” Armstrong explained in a U.S. Air Force oral history interview after the war, when both men were attending the annual convention of the Aero Medical Association, in Washington, D.C. The two men had much in common and “became quite good friends.” Both were pioneers in pilot physiology and had conducted groundbreaking high-altitude experiments on themselves. “We had some common bonds in the sense that he and I were almost exactly the same age, he and I were both publishing a book on aviation medicine that particular year, and he held exactly the same assignment in Germany that I held in the United States,” Armstrong explained. The two physicians met a second time, in 1937, at an international medical conference at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City. This was before the outbreak of war, Nazi Germany was not yet seen as an international pariah, and Dr. Strughold represented Germany at the conference. The two physicians had even more in common in 1937. Armstrong was director of the Aero Medical Research Laboratory at Wright Field, and Strughold was director of the Aviation Medical Research Institute of the Reich Air Ministry in Berlin. Their jobs were almost identical. Now, at war’s end, the two men had not seen one another in eight years, but Strughold had maintained the same high-ranking position for the duration of the war. If anyone knew the secrets of Luftwaffe medical research, Dr. Hubertus Strughold did. In Berlin, Harry Armstrong became determined to find him.
One of the first places Armstrong visited was Strughold’s former office at the Aviation Medical Research Institute, located in the fancy Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg. He was looking for leads. But the once-grand German military medical academy, with its formerly manicured lawns and groomed parks, had been bombed and was abandoned. Strughold’s office was empty. Armstrong continued his journey across Berlin, visiting universities that Strughold was known to be affiliated with. Every doctor or professor he interviewed gave a similar answer: They claimed to have no idea where Dr. Strughold and his large staff of Luftwaffe doctors had gone.
At the University of Berlin, Armstrong finally caught a break when he came across a respiratory specialist named Ulrich Luft, teaching a physiology class to a small group of students inside a wrecked classroom. Luft was unusual-looking, with a shock of red hair. He was tall, polite, and spoke perfect English, which he had learned from his Scottish mother. Ulrich Luft told Harry Armstrong that the Russians had taken everything from his university laboratory, including the faucets and sinks, and that he, Luft, was earning money in a local clinic treating war refugees suffering from typhoid fever. Armstrong saw opportunity in Luft’s predicament and confided in him, explaining that he was trying to locate German aviation doctors in order to hire them for U.S. Army–sponsored research. Armstrong said that, in particular, he was trying to find one man, Dr. Hubertus Strughold. Anyone who could help him would be paid. Dr. Luft told Armstrong that Strughold had been his former boss.
According to Luft, Strughold had dismissed his entire staff at the Aviation Medical Research Institute in the last month of the war. Luft told Armstrong that Strughold and several of his closest colleagues had gone to the University of G?ttingen. They were still there now, working inside a research lab under British control. Armstrong thanked Luft and headed to G?ttingen to find Strughold. Whatever the British were paying him, Armstrong figured he would be able to lure Strughold away because of their strong personal connection. There was also a great deal of money to be made pending the authorization of the new research laboratory. Armstrong and Grow’s plan meant hiring more than fifty Luftwaffe doctors. There was a lot of work to be had, not just for Strughold but for many of his colleagues as well.
A great drama was now set in motion owing to the fact that there was a second army officer also looking for Dr. Hubertus Strughold—a medical war crimes investigator and physician named Major Leopold Alexander. Dr. Strughold’s name had been placed on an army intelligence list of suspected war criminals with the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects, or CROWCASS. Major Alexander was on a mission to locate him.
It is not known if Armstrong was aware of the allegations against Strughold and chose to ignore them or if he was in the dark as to Strughold’s having been placed on the CROWCASS list. But as Armstrong forged ahead with plans to hire Dr. Strughold and to make him a partner in the U.S. Army Air Forces laboratory, he did so in direct violation of the policy that had just been set by the War Department. German scientists could be hired for U.S. military contract work “provided they were not known or alleged war criminals.” The CROWCASS allegations against Dr. Strughold were serious. They included capital war crimes.