John C. Green had an alternative plan. Instead of arguing his case further to the JIOA advisory board, he appealed to his boss, Henry Wallace. In turn, Henry Wallace wrote directly to President Truman, requesting that the president support the German science program. Science would help create those sixty million jobs, Wallace said, and nothing had a higher national priority in peacetime than American jobs. It was “wise and logical” to bring to America “scientists of outstanding attainments who can make a positive contribution to our scientific and industrial efforts,” Wallace wrote to President Truman on December 4, 1945. The knowledge these men possessed, Wallace said, “if added to our own would advance the frontiers of scientific knowledge for national benefit.” To illustrate his point, Wallace used one of the most benign scientists in all of Germany, a concrete and road construction expert named Dr. O. Graff, who had helped design the autobahn. “If you agree that the importance of a selected few (approximately 50 in number) would be an asset to our economy, I suggest you declare that this to be U.S. policy,” Wallace urged the president.
For Colonel Donald Putt at Wright Field and the military intelligence members of the JIOA, Henry Wallace’s endorsement of the program was like a shot in the arm. Before Wallace’s letter to the president, Samuel Klaus of the State Department had suggested that the public would be outraged by the program once they found out about it. It could not stay secret forever, nor was it meant to. Klaus had said that bringing Hitler’s former scientists to America for weapons research and development gave the impression that the army and the navy were willing to make deals with the devil for national security gains. Henry Wallace’s economically minded endorsement changed all that. It gave the German scientists program an air of democracy, offering counterbalance to what could be perceived as an aggressive military program.
Henry Wallace had been staunchly anti-Nazi during the war. Preceding Truman in the vice presidency, Wallace had publicly called Hitler a “supreme devil operating through a human form.” In another famous speech, he had likened Hitler to Satan seven times. That Henry Wallace was encouraging President Truman to endorse the German scientist program in the name of economic prosperity gave Operation Overcast a future. Henry Wallace was exactly what the JIOA had been waiting for.
On November 4, 1945, a headline in the Washington Post caught the nation’s attention: “Army Uncovers Lurid Nazi ‘Science’ of Freezing Men.” The article, written by reporter George Connery, was a major news scoop. In an effort to garner support for subsequent military trials in Nuremberg, the War Department had leaked to Connery the secret CIOS report written by war crimes investigator Dr. Leo Alexander. The report chronicled the freezing experiments conducted at Dachau inside Experimental Cell Block Five. That human beings had been tortured to death by German physicians in the name of medical science was both horrifying and incomprehensible to most Americans. The Post article revealed that the only man believed to have survived the freezing experiments had been located by Dr. Leo Alexander. Most of the other victims—the so-called Untermenschen whom the Nazi doctors had experimented on—died in the process or were killed. It was likely that this sole surviving victim, a Catholic priest, would provide witness testimony in the Nuremberg courts. Americans were rapt.
Kept secret from the public was an astonishing hypocrisy. Less than 150 miles from the Nuremberg courtroom, several of the physicians who had participated in, and many others who were accessory to, these criminal medical experiments were now being employed by the U.S. Army at the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center, the classified research facility in Heidelberg. This laboratory, dreamed up by Colonel Harry Armstrong and Major General Malcolm Grow at a meeting in France in the spring of 1945, would remain one of the best-kept secrets of Operation Paperclip for decades to come. Here, starting on September 20, 1945, fifty-eight doctors handpicked by Dr. Strughold had been working on medical research projects begun for the Third Reich. Some of the data the Nazi doctors were using in their new Army research had been obtained in experiments in which test subjects had been murdered.
For Grow and Armstrong, the plan was to have these Luftwaffe doctors reconfigure the results of their war work in Heidelberg under army supervision. The follow-on plan was for these doctors to come to the United States under Paperclip contracts. Because conducting military research inside Germany was a violation of Allied Control Council Law 25 of the Potsdam Accord, the Aero Medical Center’s classified nature shielded the Nazi doctors from chance exposure.
The codirectors of the secret research facility, Colonel Harry Armstrong and Dr. Hubertus Strughold, were alike in many ways, so much so that some saw the two men as mirror images of one another. The growing success of the Aero Medical Center would prove to be a launching point for each man’s meteoric postwar career. Armstrong would eventually be promoted to U.S. surgeon general of the air force. Strughold would become the father of U.S. space medicine.