RAF Wing Commander R. H. Winfield wrote in his report, “Strughold was the mainspring of German Aviation Medical Research” and had a large staff of colleagues, including Dr. Siegfried Ruff, who all appeared to have “suffered tremendously from their isolation during the war years.” Winfield, having no idea that Dr. Ruff had been the person in charge of overseeing Rascher’s work at Dachau, stated that his “interrogations [of Ruff] revealed very little information not already known to the Allies.” Winfield saw Dr. Strughold as a patrician figure, “considerably disturbed about the welfare of his staff who, unable to evacuate Berlin, were now threatened by the Russians.”
Representing the U.S. Army Air Forces was Colonel W. R. Lovelace, an expert in high-altitude escape and parachute studies. The following decade, Lovelace would become famous as the physician for NASA’s Cold War–era Project Mercury astronauts. For his confidential CIOS report, entitled “Research in Aviation Medicine for the German Air Force,” Lovelace interviewed Dr. Strughold and many of his colleagues, including the freezing expert, Georg Weltz. Like Winfield, Lovelace was in the dark about the medical murder experiments going on inside the concentration camps. He saw Weltz’s research as benign and dedicated five pages of his CIOS report to praising his studies on “rapid rewarming of the cooled animal.” Lovelace was particularly impressed by the fact that Weltz had frozen a “guinea pig” to death and was still able to record a heartbeat after death. “[T]he heartbeat may continue for some time if the animal is left in the cold,” Lovelace wrote in summation of Weltz’s findings.
Unlike Dr. Alexander, Colonel Lovelace was able to interview Strughold and Ruff’s colleague Dr. Theodor Benzinger, the high-altitude specialist who ran the Reich’s Experimental Station of the Air Force Research Center, Rechlin, located north of Berlin. This was the same Dr. Benzinger who had overseen for Himmler the film screening at the Reich Air Ministry, in Berlin, of Dachau prisoners being murdered in medical experiments. And while Dr. Alexander had this information, Colonel Lovelace had no idea. Lovelace was particularly interested in Benzinger’s work involving “high altitude parachute escapes,” for which Benzinger had gathered much data and produced “studies in reversible and irreversible deaths.” Benzinger told Lovelace that he performed his studies on rabbits.
Finally, Lovelace interviewed Dr. Konrad Sch?fer, a chemist and physiologist whose wartime efforts to render salt water drinkable made him famous in Luftwaffe circles. With high praise from RAF and AAF officers, Doctors Ruff, Benzinger, and Sch?fer were now each being considered for leading positions at the new research lab.
It was the end of June 1945, and Dr. Alexander’s allotted time in the field as a war crimes investigator had drawn to a close. He was ordered back to London, where he would type up seven classified CIOS reports totaling more than fifteen hundred pages. Two weeks after Alexander left Germany, the chief of the Division of Aviation Medicine for the Army Air Forces, Detlev Bronk, and an AAF expert on the psychological and physiological stresses of flying named Howard Burchell, arrived in Germany to evaluate progress on the new research laboratory envisioned by Armstrong and Grow. Bronk and Burchell interviewed many of the same doctors and determined that they were all good candidates for the AAF center. Unlike Wing Commander Winfield and Colonel Lovelace, Bronk and Burchell had been made aware of some of the controversy surrounding Strughold and his Luftwaffe colleagues. In a joint report, they explained, “[N]o effort was made to assess [the doctors’] political and ethical viewpoints, or their responsibility for war crimes.” They also concluded, “Strughold was not always quite honest in presenting the true significance of the work which he supported.” But Bronk and Burchell stated that it was their position that army intelligence was better qualified to determine who was inadmissible “for political reasons” and who could be hired. As it turned out, military intelligence objected to hiring Dr. Benzinger and Dr. Ruff, on the grounds that both men had been hard-core Nazi ideologues. But in the following month, army intelligence determined that the doctors’ work at Heidelberg would be “short term,” and both men were cleared for U.S. Army employment.
A deal was made between the U.S. Army Air Forces and Dr. Strughold. He would serve with Armstrong as cochairman of a Top Secret research center that the AAF was quietly setting up at the former Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Heidelberg, and to be called the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center. No one outside a small group could know about this controversial project because, per JCS 1076, no foreign power was permitted to carry out military research of any kind in Germany, including in medicine.
Dr. Strughold handpicked fifty-eight Luftwaffe doctors for the research program, including Dr. Siegfried Ruff, Dr. Theodor Benzinger, and Dr. Konrad Sch?fer—the first Nazi doctors to be hired by the U.S. Army Air Forces. In Munich, Dr. Georg Weltz was arrested and sent to an internment facility for processing. From there, he would be sent to the prison complex in Nuremberg to await trial.
In less than two years, many of the Nazi doctors chosen by Dr. Strughold would quietly begin their secret journeys to the United States.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Black, White, and Gray