In a classified CIOS report, Dr. Alexander expressed doubts about the veracity of Dr. Strughold’s earlier testimony from their first interview in G?ttingen. The Dachau experiments were joint endeavors by the Luftwaffe and the SS, and, despite Strughold’s denials, several aviation doctors on his staff, including individuals who reported to directly to him, were named in the Himmler papers. “Strughold at least must have been familiar with the parts played by his friend and co-worker Ruff,” Dr. Alexander wrote. In his report, he advised SHAEF that, while he could not yet say if Dr. Strughold was directly involved in the death experiments, clearly Reich medical crimes “were still being covered up by” him.
On June 20, Alexander headed back to Munich to confront Dr. Weltz. Instead, he found a colleague of Weltz’s, a Dr. Lutz, who broke down and confessed that he’d been aware of the human experiments, but that they’d been conducted by his team members, not him. Lutz claimed to have been offered the “human job,” by Weltz, but declined to accept, on grounds that he was “too soft.”
Before confronting Strughold, Dr. Alexander first returned to Dachau to locate eyewitnesses. There, he found three former prisoners who offered testimony. John Bauduin, Oscar H?usermann, and Dr. Paul Hussarek had managed to stay alive at the concentration camp by working as orderlies for the SS. After Dachau was liberated, the three men chose to stay behind so as to help investigators piece together medical crimes. They formed a group, calling it the Committee for the Investigation of SS Medical Crimes. From them, Dr. Alexander learned that the experiments had been conducted on Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and Catholic priests in the secret, freestanding barracks called Experimental Cell Block Five. “In general, the death of prisoners transferred to Block 5 was expected within 2–3 days,” testified John Bauduin. The second witness, Dr. Hussarek, a Czech scholar sent to Dachau for committing “literary crimes,” told Dr. Alexander that “only a few experimental subjects survived the low pressure experiments. Most were killed.” All three men agreed that only one individual was known to have survived the experiments, a Polish priest named Leo Michalowski.
Father Michalowski’s testimony provided a critical missing link in the medical murder experiments and how they were so skillfully concealed. Luftwaffe reports used the words “guinea pigs,” “large pigs,” and “adult pigs” as code words for their human subjects. In one of Weltz’s papers confiscated by Dr. Alexander, entitled “Alcohol and Rewarming,” Weltz wrote that “shipwreck experiments had been [simulated] in large pigs.” The pigs were placed in tubs of water with blocks of ice and given alcohol to see if a rewarming effect occurred. The results, wrote Weltz, showed that “alcohol in pigs does not increase or accelerate the loss of warmth.” In sworn testimony, Father Michalowski described what had been done to him at Dachau: “I was taken to room No. 4 on Block 5.… I was dropped in the water in which ice blocks were floating. I was conscious for one hour… then given some rum.” In Weltz’s paper the word “large pig” really meant “Catholic priest.”
On June 22, Dr. Alexander returned to the Heidelberg Document Center to locate more information with the help of Hugh Iltis. Armed with new details and key words culled from survivor testimony, Dr. Alexander found what Dr. Rascher had called his “experiment reports.” These charts, Alexander noted, were a scientific chronicle of medical murder. Rascher had also had bigger plans. He was working with the SS to have the aviation medicine experiments relocated from Dachau to Auschwitz. “Auschwitz is in every way more suitable for such a large serial experiment than Dachau because it is colder there and the greater extent of open country within the camp would make the experiments less conspicuous,” Rascher wrote. Dr. Alexander also learned about a grotesque “motion picture of the record of the experiments” that had been shown at a private screening at the Air Ministry, at the behest of Himmler. The Luftwaffe doctor overseeing this event was yet another close colleague of Dr. Strughold’s, a physiologist and government official named Dr. Theodor Benzinger. Dr. Alexander was unable to locate Benzinger but noted the name in his report. He then returned to G?ttingen to interview Strughold a second time to see if he could confirm that Strughold had been lying to him.
In G?ttingen, things had changed. Investigators working on scientific intelligence projects for the U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) and the Royal Air Force (RAF) had interviewed many of the Luftwaffe doctors, including Dr. Strughold. Their conclusions were remarkably different from Dr. Alexander’s. None of the RAF or AAF officers had traveled to the Document Center in Heidelberg to read the Himmler files. Instead, their reports were meant to serve and support Armstrong and Grow’s secret, new research lab.