Also in G?ttingen, Dr. Alexander interviewed several other doctors who had worked for Strughold, asking each of them specific questions about human experiments. Each doctor told a strikingly similar story. Dr. Sigmund Rascher was to blame for everything that went on at Dachau and now Rascher was dead. But one man, a physiologist named Dr. Friedrich Hermann Rein, let an important clue slip. Dr. Rascher had been an SS man, Rein said. This information gave Dr. Alexander a significant new piece of the puzzle he did not have before, namely, that the SS was also involved in the concentration camp freezing experiments. This was a revelation.
The day after this disclosure, Dr. Alexander received further extraordinary, related news. “I learned that the entire contents of Himmler’s secret cave in Hallein, Germany [sic], containing a vast amount of miscellaneous specially secret S.S. records, had recently been discovered and taken” to the Seventh Army Document Center in Heidelberg. This huge trove of papers had been discovered by soldiers hidden away in yet another cave. The papers had been stamped with the unmistakable logo of the SS, and they bore Himmler’s personal annotations, drawn in the margins in the green pencil he liked to use. Dr. Alexander set out for the Document Center to see what he could glean from the files. These papers would turn out to be among the war’s most incriminating discoveries in a single document find.
In Heidelberg, Himmler’s documents were being inventoried and sorted out when Dr. Alexander first arrived. One of the men tasked to the job was Hugh Iltis, the son of a Czech doctor, who, with his family, fled Europe in advance of the genocide. Iltis was a nineteen-year-old American soldier fighting on the front lines in France during the last months of the war when, he recalls, “a car showed up and an officer leapt out and pointed at me, then shouted ‘You, come with me!’ ” Iltis climbed into the car and sped away from the battlefield with the officer. Someone had learned that Hugh Iltis was a fluent German speaker (and perhaps that his father was a leading geneticist and anti-Nazi). Iltis was needed in Paris to translate captured Nazi documents, and the work kept on coming. Now, six months later, here he was in Heidelberg documenting atrocities for the War Crimes Commission. His discovery of the Himmler papers—it was Iltis who identified how important they were—would also become the most important collection of documents on Nazi human experimentation to be presented at the doctors’ trial.
Alexander told Iltis what it was that he was looking for: documents written by Dr. Sigmund Rascher that involved experiments on humans. Together, the two men broke the original seals on the innocuously named Case No. 707-Medical Experiments, papers that turned out to include years of correspondence between Rascher and Himmler.
“The idea to start the experiments with human beings in Dachau was obviously Dr. Rascher’s,” Alexander explained in his classified scientific intelligence report. But as Alexander learned from the papers, Rascher was far from the only Luftwaffe doctor involved. Nor were the human experiments limited to freezing experiments. Even more damning, Dr. Alexander learned that one of Dr. Strughold’s closest colleagues and his coauthor, a physiologist named Dr. Siegfried Ruff, was in charge of overseeing Rascher’s human experiments at Dachau. This was stunning news. “Dr. Ruff, and his assistant Dr. Romberg, joined forces [with Rascher] and arrived in Dachau with a low pressure chamber which they supplied,” Alexander wrote in his report. This low-pressure chamber was used for a second set of deadly experiments involving high-altitude studies. Sitting inside the Seventh Army Documentation Center reading the Himmler papers, Dr. Alexander realized that Dr. Strughold had lied to him when he had said that the only Luftwaffe doctor involved in the Dachau experiments had been the “fringe doctor” Rascher. In fact, Strughold’s friend and colleague Dr. Ruff was deeply implicated.
Most disturbing to Alexander were a group of photographs showing what happened in the course of the experiments as healthy young men—classified by the Nazis as Untermenschen—were strapped into a harness inside the low-pressure chamber and subjected to explosive decompression. These photographs, astonishing in their sadism, were essentially before, during, and after pictures of murder in the name of medicine. Other photographs among the Himmler papers documented the freezing experiments as they were being conducted at Dachau. Rascher’s experiments were by no means the solo act of one depraved man. There were photographs of yet another of Dr. Strughold’s Luftwaffe colleagues, Dr. Ernst Holzl?hner, holding prisoners down in tubs of icy water while their body temperatures were recorded as they died. It is believed that Rascher’s wife, Nini, took the photographs.