It was a precarious time for doctors who had previously worked for the Reich. With the Nuremberg trial under way, the international press had its attention focused on war crimes. German doctors were looked at with suspicion. Articles about Nazi doctors, including the November 1945 piece in the Washington Post about the “science” of freezing humans, put a spotlight on German medicine. Many doctors fled the country to South America through escape routes called ratlines. Others tried to blend in by offering their services in displaced-persons camps. Some killed themselves. Maximilian de Crinis, chief of the psychiatric department at the University Charité in Berlin, swallowed a cyanide capsule in the last days of the war. Ernst-Robert Grawitz, physician for the SS and president of the German Red Cross, killed himself and his family, including his young children, by detonating a small bomb inside his house outside Berlin. The Reich Health Leader, Leonardo Conti, hanged himself in his cell at Nuremberg. Ernst Holzl?hner, the senior doctor at the University of Berlin who conducted the freezing experiments at Dachau with Sigmund Rascher, committed suicide in June 1945 after being interrogated by British investigators.
The list of suicides was long, but the number of German doctors believed to have been involved in war crimes was even longer. The U.S. war crimes office for the chief counsel wrote up a list of doctors involved in medical research that resulted in “mercy killings,” a euphemism used by the Reich for its medical murder programs. The list was classified with a strict caveat that access to it remain “restricted for 80 years from the date of creation.” This meant that, by the time the world would know who was on this list, it would be the year 2025, and everyone named would be dead.
A copy of the list was given to the commander of the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center, Robert J. Benford. Five doctors working at the center starting in the fall of 1945 were on the list: Theodor Benzinger, Siegfried Ruff, Konrad Sch?fer, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, and Oskar Schr?der. Instead of firing these physicians suspected of heinous war crimes, the center kept the doctors in its employ and the list was classified. The list remained secret from the public until 2012, when the Department of Defense (DoD) agreed to declassify it for this book.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Total War of Apocalyptic Proportions
By the end of January 1946, 160 Nazi scientists had been secreted into America. The single largest group was comprised of the 115 rocket specialists at Fort Bliss, Texas, led by Wernher von Braun. The men resided in a two-story barracks on the Fort Bliss reservation and worked in a laboratory that was formerly the William Beaumont General Hospital. They ate in a mess hall shared with Native American Indians, which only enhanced von Braun’s perception that he was living life inside an adventure novel. “It is such a romantic Karl May affair,” von Braun wrote in a letter to his parents in Germany. Karl May was a German novelist famous for his cowboy and Indian westerns. Soon, von Braun would begin writing a novel of his own, in the science fiction genre, about space travel to Mars.
Von Braun loved the desert landscape, the cactus, the vast gypsum dune fields, and the long drives in open army jeeps. Rocket work was not perfect, but it progressed. “Frankly we were disappointed with what we found in this country during our first year or so,” von Braun later recalled. “At Peenemünde, we’d been coddled. Here they were counting pennies,” he said of the U.S. Army. V-2 launchings would take place about eighty miles away, on the White Sands Proving Ground, and getting there meant a long and beautiful ride. An army bus took scientists around the Franklin Mountains, through El Paso, and along the Rio Grande to Las Cruces. Next came the rugged journey over the San Andreas pass and into the Tularosa Basin, where the army’s proving grounds began. Twelve to fifteen Germans were sent at a time to White Sands, where they lived in barracks alongside men from the General Electric Company and a technical army unit. The actual rocket firings took place inside a single forty-foot-deep pit, with the Germans watching the launches from a massive but rudimentary concrete blockhouse nearby. When the first V-2 was launched, in April 1946, it climbed to three miles. Although one of the fins fell off, von Braun felt inspired to draft a memo to Robert Oppenheimer, director of Los Alamos, proposing the idea of merging his missile with the atomic bomb. The memo turned into a proposal, “Use of Atomic Warheads in Projected Missiles,” submitted to the army. In it, von Braun discussed building a rocket that could carry a two-thousand-plus-pound nuclear payload a distance of one thousand miles.
Two personal changes in von Braun were afoot. The first was that he joined an Evangelical Christian church and became “born again,” something he rarely discussed in public. The second was that he decided to marry his first cousin, Maria von Quistorp, the daughter of his mother’s brother, Alexander von Quistorp. Von Braun was nearly twice her age—she had just turned eighteen in the summer of 1946—and she lived in Germany. From Texas, von Braun began making plans to bring his future bride to the United States.