A second contest was proposed; this one to see which desalination method was superior. The effectiveness of both the Sch?fer process and the Berka method would be tested on the Untermenschen at Dachau. A Luftwaffe physician named Hermann Becker-Freyseng was assigned to assist Dr. Sch?fer, and to coauthor with him a paper documenting the results of the contest. The senior doctor advising Becker-Freyseng and Sch?fer in their work was Dr. Siegfried Ruff. The resultant paper, called “Thirst and Thirst Quenching in Emergency Situations at Sea,” described saltwater medical experiments conducted on prisoners inside Experimental Cell Block Five.
Dr. Hermann Becker-Freyseng had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1938. His specialty was oxygen poisoning in the human body. An odd-looking man, Becker-Freyseng’s unusually large ears gave the appearance of handles on either side of his head. During the war Becker-Freyseng served as chief of the Department for Aviation Medicine and Medical Services in the Luftwaffe, another branch under an umbrella of medical facilities and laboratories overseen by Dr. Strughold. Becker-Freyseng was held in great esteem by his colleagues, many of whom, under interrogation, described him as “heroic” for the masochistic extremes he was willing to go in auto-experimentation. Becker-Freyseng conducted over one hundred experiments on himself, many of which rendered him unconscious. At least one took him to the brink of death. The story repeated most often about Becker-Freyseng was of a self-experiment he did in a chamber, also with a rabbit. Determined to learn how much oxygen would poison a man, Becker-Freyseng went into a low-pressure chamber with a rabbit with the goal of staying inside for three days. A few hours shy of his goal, Becker-Freyseng began to show symptoms of paralysis. “The rabbit died, Becker-Freyseng recuperated,” Strughold later explained under oath. That was all during the war. Now Ruff, Benzinger, Sch?fer, Schr?der, and Becker-Freyseng, with the approval of Strughold and Armstrong, continued their work on secret aviation medical projects initially conceived for Hitler’s war machine.
The Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg was a squat, brick, two-story facility facing the Neckar River. Only a few months prior it had been the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research, a bastion of Nazi science where chemists and physicists worked on projects for the Reich’s war machine. At its front entrance, the Reich’s flag came down and the U.S. flag went up. Photographs of Hitler were pulled from the walls and replaced by framed photographs of Army Air Forces generals in military pose. Most of the furniture stayed the same. In the dining room German waiters in white servers’ coats provided table service at mealtimes. A single 5″ x 8″ requisition receipt, dated September 14, 1945, made the transition official: “This property is needed by U.S. Forces, and the requisition is in proportion to the resources of the country.” The mission statement of the project, classified Top Secret, was succinct: “the exploitation of certain uncompleted German aviation medical research projects.” Dr. Strughold was put in charge of hiring doctors, “all of whom are considered authorities in a particular field of medicine.”
Across the American zone of Germany, entire laboratories were dismantled and reassembled here at the secret facility in Heidelberg. More than twenty tons of medical research equipment was salvaged from the Tempelhof Airport, in Berlin, including a “huge human centrifuge… and a low pressure chamber the length of two, ordinary Pullman cars.” There was equipment here that American physicians had never seen before: esoteric items including a Nagel Anomaloscope, a Zeiss-made interferometer, an Engelking-Hartung adaptometer, a Schmidt-Haensch photometer, and a precision-built Siemens electron microscope—with which to study night vision, blood circulation, g-forces, and the bends. Even the low-pressure chamber from Georg Weltz’s research facility at Freising, near the Munich dairy farm, was brought to Heidelberg. This was the laboratory where Dr. Leo Alexander had experienced his revelation that Nazi doctors had been freezing people to death.