Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Thus began “the biggest, longest-running operation involving Nazis in our country’s history.” The air force got the biggest slice of the pie for its missile, space, and jet fighter program. The navy came in second.

Worried that other countries, especially the Soviet Union, would hire or kidnap valuable scientists, the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC)—the predecessor of the National Security Council—approved an expanded scientist plan in May l 946, eleven months after the war ended. In one of a series of top secret reports, SWNCC recommended that the United States bring up to one thousand German and Nazi scientists to America to work for the military as well as private industry, and to teach and conduct research in U.S. universities. SWNCC called the expanded program Operation Paperclip.

“It is the policy of the Government to exploit selected German and Austrian specialists in the United States, and thereby deny to the nations other than Great Britain access to these specialists,” SWNCC ruled in May 1946, one year after the war in Europe ended. “This policy does not limit in any way, but rather supplements the existing procedure under which the War and Navy Departments are bringing German specialists to the United States.”

In formulating that policy, SWNCC expressed a concern that the American public might suspect that Operation Paperclip condoned the use of Nazis war criminals. To forestall criticism and perhaps outrage, the committee ruled that any German or Austrian scientist who fell into CIC’s “automatic arrest category” (major offender) be barred from the program.

As a result, the Operation Paperclip recommendation that SWNCC sent to President Truman for his approval in August l 946 contained a tough anti-Nazi clause. “The War Department,” the top secret recommendation said, “should be responsible for…excluding from the program persons with Nazi or militarist records.” The mandate not only looked good on paper, it also provided plausible deniability to the White House and the Department of State in case Americans ever learned that their government was secretly employing Nazi war criminals.

In approving the SWNCC Paperclip recommendation, President Truman was either naïve or duplicitous. The U.S. military establishment had no intention of excluding Nazi war criminals from the program. And to make sure that they could be employed, SWNCC created three giant loopholes. First, it gave the U.S. European military command the authority to remove the name of any Nazi or Nazi collaborator from the major offender category, rendering the exclusion clause impotent. Next, SWNCC declined to bar from Operation Paperclip the use of Nazi scientists in the offender and lesser offender categories. Finally, SWNCC gave the military’s ever resourceful Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency the final say over which scientists would be welcomed to America and which ones would be barred.

In effect, the Truman anti-Nazi policy was no policy at all. It was merely window dressing. If the military wanted a scientist who was a suspected Nazi war criminal, it had plenty of room to wiggle around the law. As a result, an estimated 80 percent of the scientists brought to the United States by the military to be employed by the military were former Nazis and SS officers. Among them were “some of the world’s vilest war criminals.”

Besides the U.S. Air Force and Navy, universities like Yale, Michigan State, Wisconsin, Oregon State, Chicago, and Ohio State were among the winners. As were companies like Boeing, RAND, Lockheed, Dow Chemical, Raytheon, GE, Northrop, Westinghouse, and RCA.

Even Congress got into the spoils race. Tucked inside its CIA Act of 1949 was a provision that slid through the Capitol as smoothly as a puck on ice. The bill authorized the INS to grant permanent residency for up to one hundred individuals and their families per year in the interest of national security and intelligence gathering, and “without regard to their admissibility”—code for Nazis scientists and high-ranking military officers. The act further authorized the CIA to hire three of these individuals annually, even specifying their salary range. The act had no accountability provision for the “one hundred” program, making it a secret Nazi carte blanche.{Citing national security, the CIA rejected my FOIA request for the names of the scientists and intelligence specialists it brought into the country under the “one hundred” program.}

Among the most precious Paperclip “cargo” landing in America was Hubertus Strughold, a doctor linked to Nazi medical experiments on humans.

Dr. Strughold had been the director of the Institute for Aviation Medicine in Berlin, a civilian research center under contract with the German Air Force (Luftwaffe). His boss was Reich Marshal Hermann Goering, who was later convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death. Goering beat the noose with a cyanide capsule. Dr. Strughold was neither a Nazi nor a Luftwaffe officer, as some have stated. He resisted the pressure to become either, he claimed, to preserve his scientific objectivity.

In reality, Dr. Strughold was a closet Nazi who believed that the party had done much for Germany. He was also anti-Semitic, complaining that “Jews had crowded the medical schools and it had been nearly impossible for others to enter.”

War crimes investigators named Strughold, a specialist in high-altitude medicine, as one of ninety-five German doctors who attended an October 1942 conference in Nuremberg at the Deutscher Hof Hotel. The topic of the two-day meeting was “Winter Hardship and Distress at Sea.” Two of Dr. Strughold’s colleagues delivered papers based on their medical experiments on humans. The participating doctors discussed the lectures afterward.

The idea to experiment on humans belonged to Strughold’s associate, Dr. Sigmund Rascher. As Rascher explained to his boss, Heinrich Himmler, hypothermia and high-altitude experiments on animals furnished limited data. The best results came from primates, which were next to impossible to get under war conditions. How about a few humans? Would it bother you if some died?

Himmler gave him Dachau.

Rascher and his colleagues randomly selected as their primates: 1,000 Russians, 500 Poles, 200 Jews, and 50 Gypsies. They conducted three kinds of experiments at the camp: hypothermia, high-altitude, and saltwater. Dr. Rascher directed the first two, which turned out to be “astonishing acts of cruelty.” Rascher’s fellow doctors described him as a brute—ambitious, greedy, sadistic, and perverted.

The purpose of the hypothermia experiments was to answer the question: What is the best way to warm a German pilot downed in the icy waters of the North Sea or a soldier suffering from hypothermia on the eastern front? In one experiment, Rascher dressed victims in life vests and a flying uniform. He then submerged them in a wooden tank of ice water for three to five hours. Sometimes he allowed their brain stems to protrude above the water; sometimes he submerged them, which caused death within minutes. In another experiment, he forced victims to stand naked outside in 27–29 degree Fahrenheit temperatures for nine to fourteen hours.

“Victims screamed in pain as parts of their bodies froze,” the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal later reported.

Rascher monitored body temperatures at regular intervals, recorded the time it took for loss of consciousness and for death, and performed autopsies to collect data. He used two kinds of warming techniques for those who survived the ice tank and the winter weather: submersion in warm water and animal warming—sandwiching the victim between two naked Gypsy women who were “volunteers” from the Ravensbrück camp, where Hermine Braunsteiner worked for a time. Rascher duly recorded the progress and the times of the rewarming. As part of the experiment, he forced the subjects to have intercourse while he watched. One-third of the hypothermia victims died.