The job required time, commitment, and most of all dedication. The Reich needed the Luftwaffe to help conquer all of Europe. This was why Strughold had packed his bags and moved to Berlin. He would report directly to Erich Hippke, chief of the Luftwaffe’s medical corps, who reported to Hermann G?ring. This was a vertical career move for Strughold. He’d gone from a university teaching post to the top of the Reich’s aviation medicine chain of command. The Reich had vast resources and a desire to conduct groundbreaking experiments for the benefit of its pilots. There were risks but with risks came rewards. For Strughold, the reward was monumental. For ten years he enjoyed a career as one of the most powerful physicians working for the Third Reich.
In Berlin, Strughold treated his expansive new laboratory as a haven for risk takers. Colleagues, including officials from the Nazi Party and the SS, would stop by to marvel over his work with the low-pressure chamber and the centrifuge. Experiments were almost always in progress. Strughold’s medical assistants were forever allowing themselves to be hooked up to these odd-looking contraptions with pipes, valves, and hoses projecting from all sides. Assistants, one with and one without an oxygen mask, would allow themselves to be locked inside the low-pressure chamber in order to determine how high up a man could go before becoming unconscious. During one experiment, two officials with the Reich Air Ministry were on hand to observe. The man without the oxygen mask began to lose consciousness. First his eyes closed, then his head fell to his chest. The second man inside the chamber, wearing a mask, administered first aid. It did not take long for the man to quickly recover.
“Our studies are all very risky,” Strughold told the Nazi Party officials. “They require great ability on the part of the assistants and great responsibility. If the man did not get oxygen… he might be dead in five minutes.”
As the Luftwaffe prepared its pilots for war, Strughold continued to use his staff as test subjects. He also experimented on himself. He was said to have “ridden the centrifuge” for a full two minutes, simulating what it would be like to experience fifteen times the force of gravity while flying an airplane.
After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the war spread into areas of extreme climates, from Norway to North Africa to the Russian front. These new combat theaters created urgent new medical problems for the Reich, most notably for foot soldiers but also for the Luftwaffe. As the war progressed and the Luftwaffe unveiled one new airplane after the next, the pilot physiology challenges grew. By 1940 new engine systems were being developed, including turbo and jet engines, with countless pilot parameters to explore, including the effects of speed, lower oxygen levels, decompression sickness, and extreme temperatures on the body. A web of institutions sprang up across Germany and its newly conquered lands, all financed by the deep pockets of the Reich Research Council, and including Strughold’s Aviation Medical Research Institute in Berlin. The institute worked hand in hand with two Luftwaffe facilities close by, and Strughold developed strong relationships with the director of each institute: Dr. Theodor Benzinger, of the Experimental Station of the Air Force Research Center at Rechlin, and Dr. Siegfried Ruff, of the German Experimental Station for Aviation Medicine, Aero Medical division, in Berlin.
This is why, after the war, when Strughold was asked by Colonel Armstrong to be the codirector of the classified AAF Aero Medical facility in Heidelberg, Strughold asked Benzinger and Ruff to come along. He put each man in charge of one of the four areas of aviation research at the new facility. They trusted one another. They all had the same secrets to protect.
Dr. Theodor Benzinger was tall, thin as a rail, 5′11″ and just 138 pounds. He had dark blue eyes, sharp, angular features, and kept his black hair slicked back, with a pencil part. Born in 1905, Benzinger was described, in his army intelligence dossier, as “an old school Prussian, willful, self-serving and willing to get what he wants by any means.” At Heidelberg he was put in charge of a department that developed oxygen equipment for airplanes. Benzinger was a committed Nazi and had been from the earliest days of National Socialism. He joined the Nazi Party the year Hitler took power, in 1933. He was also a member of the SA, holding the position of medical sergeant major. He and his wife, Ilse Benzinger, were members of the NSV, the Nazi Party’s so-called social welfare organization, which was overseen by Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Ilse was active in NSV-sponsored programs like Mother and Child, whereby unwed German mothers could birth Aryan children on bucolic baby farms.