Each day brought atrocious new information. “It sometimes seems as if the Nazis had taken special pains in making practically every nightmare come true,” Dr. Alexander later told his wife, comparing Reich medicine to something out of a dark German fairy tale. Whereas doctors who knew about the euthanasia program tended to be forthcoming with information—the program was “justified” by a German law kept secret from the general public—it struck Dr. Alexander that criminal human experiments by Luftwaffe doctors, like the freezing experiments Weltz was involved in, appeared to have been more skillfully concealed. If Dr. Alexander wanted to learn the facts about what Luftwaffe doctors had been up to during the war, he knew that he had to understand the bigger picture. And he also had to determine where else the crimes might have taken place. The best way to do this was to interview the man nearest the top, Dr. Hubertus Strughold. Strughold had directed the Aviation Medical Research Institute for the Luftwaffe for ten of the twelve years of Nazi Party rule. When Dr. Alexander learned that Dr. Strughold was in G?ttingen, in the British zone, he headed there.
En route to G?ttingen, Dr. Alexander had a fortuitous break. “A curious coincidence played into my hands,” he wrote. “On my way to G?ttingen… while having dinner in the Officers’ mess of the 433rd A. A. Bn. [Army Battalion] in camp Rennerod, Westerwald, I happened to meet another casual guest, an army chaplain, Lieutenant Bigelow. In the course of our conversation, Lt. Bigelow told me he was quite eager to get my ideas about rather cruel experiments on human beings, which had been performed at Dachau concentration camp. He had learned of them from a broadcast a few days earlier when ex-prisoners of Dachau had talked about these grim experiments over the Allied radio in Germany.” This was exactly the kind of lead Dr. Alexander was looking for, and he asked Lieutenant Bigelow to share with him anything else he remembered from the radio report.
Lieutenant Bigelow told Alexander that as a member of the clergy he had ministered to many war victims. He had heard frightful stories about what had gone on in the medical blocks at the concentration camps. But nothing compared to what he had heard in that radio report. Doctors at Dachau had frozen people to death, in tubs of ice-cold water, to see if they could be unfrozen and brought back to life. These experiments were apparently meant to simulate conditions that Luftwaffe pilots went through after they’d been shot down over the English Channel, Bigelow said. Dr. Alexander now had a solid new lead. To his mind, the experiments Bigelow was referring to sounded “strikingly similar to the animal experiments performed by Dr. Weltz and his group” at the Freising farm. Was the Luftwaffe involved in medical research at the concentration camps? Dr. Alexander asked the chaplain if he had caught any of the names of the doctors involved in the Dachau medical crimes. Bigelow said that he couldn’t recall but that he was certain he had heard that the Luftwaffe was involved. More determined than ever to investigate, Dr. Alexander continued on to G?ttingen to interview Dr. Hubertus Strughold.
At the Institute for Physiology in G?ttingen, Dr. Alexander located Strughold and arranged to interview him, getting straight to the point. Dr. Alexander told Dr. Strughold about the radio report claiming that freezing experiments had been conducted by the Luftwaffe at Dachau. Did Strughold, as the physician in charge of aviation medical research for the Luftwaffe, know about these criminal experiments at Dachau? Dr. Strughold said that he had learned of the experiments at a medical symposium he attended in Nuremberg in October 1942. The conference, called “Medical Problems of Sea Distress and Winter Distress,” took place at the Hotel Deutscher Hof and involved ninety Luftwaffe doctors. During that conference, Strughold said, a man named Dr. Sigmund Rascher presented findings that had been obtained from experiments performed on prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp. This was the same man “who had been mentioned over the allied radio the other day,” Strughold said. He called Rascher a fringe doctor whose only assistant at Dachau was his wife, Nini. Both Raschers were now dead.
Did Strughold approve of these experiments? Strughold told Dr. Alexander that “even though Dr. Rascher used criminals in his experiments, he [Strughold] still disapproved of such experiments in non-consenting volunteers on principle.” Dr. Strughold promised Dr. Alexander that within his institute in Berlin he had “always forbidden even the thought of such experiments… firstly on moral grounds and secondly on grounds of medical ethics.” Alexander asked Strughold if he knew of any other Luftwaffe doctors who had been involved in human experiments at Dachau. Strughold said, “Any experiments on humans that we have carried out were performed only on our own staff and on students interested in our subject on a strictly volunteer basis.” He did not reveal that a number of doctors on his staff had visited Dachau regularly and worked on research experiments there.