In 1934, the twenty-nine-year-old Dr. Benzinger was made department chief of the Experimental Station of the Air Force Research Center. Like Harry Armstrong, Benzinger predicted that pilots would fly high-altitude missions to sixty thousand feet sometime in the near future. In service of this idea Benzinger and his staff at Rechlin researched high-altitude durability and explosive decompression. They took great risks experimenting on themselves. On one occasion, one of Benzinger’s technicians died as a result of complications from oxygen deprivation experienced inside a low-pressure chamber. In addition to researching aviation medicine, Benzinger became a pilot and served as a colonel in the Luftwaffe. He flew reconnaissance and combat missions over the British Isles. In 1939, showing “bravery before the enemy” Benzinger was awarded the Iron Cross, Class I and Class II.
In Heidelberg, at the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center, Strughold put Dr. Siegfried Ruff in charge of work involving the effect g-forces have on human beings. This was work that Ruff had begun at the test center in Rechlin with Dr. Benzinger during the war. Ruff did not have the same striking looks as his colleague, Dr. Benzinger. Ruff’s smiling, professorial posture made it hard to imagine he had spent so much time supervising medical experiments inside the Dachau concentration camp, including Rascher’s murderous high-altitude studies in Experimental Cell Block Five. Like Benzinger, Ruff was an avowed and dedicated Nazi. He joined the party in 1938. The facility Dr. Ruff was in charge of for the Third Reich was located just ten miles across town from the institute that Dr. Strughold oversaw. As the directors of the two most important Luftwaffe medical facilities in Berlin, Ruff and Strughold collaborated closely on a number of projects during the war.
Ruff and Strughold coauthored several papers together and coedited Aviation Medicine (Luftfahrtmedizin). One of the articles they cowrote so fascinated the U.S. Army Air Corps that in 1942 intelligence officers had it translated and circulated among flight surgeons at Wright Field. The two men also coauthored a book called the Compendium on Aviation Medicine, which served as a kind of handbook for Luftwaffe flight surgeons and included articles on explosive decompression and oxygen deficiency. At Heidelberg, Dr. Ruff was in charge of this work again, only now it was paid for by the U.S. Army.
Working directly under Dr. Ruff at the Aero Medical Center was Dr. Konrad Sch?fer, listed in declassified documents as also researching the effects of g-forces on the body. This was not Sch?fer’s primary area of expertise. His wartime research work, which had been supported by both the Nazi Party’s Reich Research Council and the Luftwaffe, was the pathology of thirst. Sch?fer was a tall man, slightly overweight with a receding hairline and thick-lensed glasses that made him appear slightly cross-eyed. Unlike most of his colleagues, Sch?fer avoided joining the Nazi Party, which he later said cost him jobs. In 1941 he was drafted and sent to a Luftwaffe air base at Frankfurt on the Oder. When his talents as a chemist came to light—he’d worked as chief physiological chemist for the firm Schering AG—Sch?fer was transferred to Berlin and given an assignment in Luftwaffe sea emergencies. “This included research on various methods to render seawater potable,” Sch?fer later explained under oath.
Sea emergencies were an area of great concern. As the man in charge of aviation medical research for the Luftwaffe, Dr. Strughold had solutions to sea emergencies high on his priority list. During the air war, every pilot knew that drinking ocean water destroyed the kidneys and brought death faster than suffering indomitable thirst. But German pilots shot down over the sea and awaiting rescue were known to break down and drink seawater anyway. The Luftwaffe announced a contest. Any doctor or chemist who could develop a method to separate the salt from seawater would be greatly rewarded. Konrad Sch?fer, one of Strughold’s protégés in Berlin, aimed to solve that conundrum. Sch?fer worked “in co-operation with IG Farben to create Wolfen, a mixture from barium and silver zeolith,” he later explained, which he synthesized into “a tablet named Wolfatit [which] was developed to separate the salt in a residue.” The results produced drinkable water, which was a remarkable achievement. Sch?fer had succeeded where so many other doctors and chemists had failed.
Dr. Oskar Schr?der, head of the Luftwaffe Medical Corps, was thrilled. Konrad Sch?fer had “developed a process which actually precipitated the salts from the sea water,” Schr?der later testified. But another group of Luftwaffe doctors were already backing a different process, called the Berka method, which was bad news for the Sch?fer process. “It was thought by the Chief of the Luftwaffe Medical Service to be too bulky and expensive,” Schr?der explained.