Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

The purpose of the high-altitude experiments was to answer the question: How much atmospheric pressure can a German pilot withstand after ejecting from his airplane at high altitudes? The experiments took place in a round, airtight, low-pressure chamber that Rascher and Strughold codesigned. Dachau victims called it the Skyride Machine.

Dr. Rascher would lock the victims in the chamber, then manipulate the pressure inside to simulate atmospheric pressures at 35,000–66,000 feet. The lower number was somewhat safe. The higher number was certain death. Rascher designed four different experiments: slow parachute descent with oxygen, then without oxygen; free-fall descent with oxygen, then without. Rascher would carefully measure how long it took to lose consciousness, how long to die.

Death was not easy.

In an April 1942 report to Himmler, Dr. Rascher described the murder of a thirty-seven-year-old Jew who took a trip in the Skyride Machine—first with oxygen, then without it—at sixty thousand feet. At four minutes he began perspiring and wagging his head; at five minutes, he had cramps; at six to ten minutes, fast breathing and unconsciousness; at thirty minutes, death.

Death was painful.

“Some experiments gave men such pressure in their heads that they would go mad,” Rascher reported to Himmler. “They would tear at their hair and faces with their hands and scream in an effort to relieve the pressure on their eardrums.” After each experiment, Rascher and his assistants would open the chamber, haul out the victims, some of whom were still breathing, and dissect them for data. One-third of the high altitude victims were murdered.

Once Germany’s ultimate defeat became obvious, Himmler made sure that Rascher would never implicate him in the war crimes trials that were sure to come. Just weeks before the Seventh Army liberated Dachau, he ordered the SS to execute Rascher and, with a twist of irony, to shoot him inside the camp. They did.

U.S. Army Intelligence placed Dr. Strughold on the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects. Investigators wanted to question him. What did he know about the Dachau experiments? What was his relationship to Dr. Rascher and other Dachau doctors? Did he initiate the experiments? Did he help design experiment protocols? Was he privy to the results? If so, did he use the results in his work and writings?

The U.S. Air Force saw to it that Nuremberg investigators never got to interview Strughold. He was easy enough to find at the U.S. Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg, where he was directing a contingent of about two hundred German scientists, all working for America. Five of those scientists were already awaiting trial at Nuremberg for medical war crimes. All five had been screened and selected to work at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, but the air force screwed up. Nuremberg investigators nabbed the quintet before the military could erase their names from the Central Registry.

Dr. Strughold’s major task at the Aero Medical Center was to synthesize all data on high-altitude experiments, both animal and human, into a compendium on aviation medicine for use by the U.S. Air Force. An important part of that job was to integrate the Dachau experiment findings without revealing where the data came from. The Pentagon was not eager for Americans to know that while it was prosecuting Nazi doctors in Nuremberg for killing prisoners to get scientific data, it secretly was using the data.

Nuremberg prosecutors tried twenty-three German doctors and medical administrators during the “Doctors Trial” in December 1946. Missing from the list was Dr. Hubertus Strughold. On the list were all the Dachau-related scientists and administrators above and below him. Among them: Dr. Sigfried Ruff, who reported directly to Strughold; and Drs. Hans Romberg and Georg Weltz, who both reported to Ruff. During the Doctors Trial, these three along with other defendants suggested that Strughold not only knew about the Dachau experiments, but also received written and oral reports on the results. Since Strughold was not on trial, prosecutors did not dig deeper into his role in the experiments.

The doctors also testified that, as director of the Institute for Aviation Medicine, which sponsored the experiments, Strughold could have either objected to them on moral grounds or stopped them. But if he had done either, they hastened to add, his life and career would have been at the mercy of Goering and Himmler.

In the end, it was Heinrich Himmler and the U.S. Air Force who saved the necks of Ruff, Romberg, and Weltz. Only three people could have definitely implicated them in medical crimes at Dachau: Himmler, who committed suicide before he could be questioned; Rausch, whom Himmler executed; and Strughold, whom the air force was shielding. As a result, the Nuremberg panel acquitted all three doctors, on the grounds of reasonable doubt. It was, the panel said, a close call. In the end, sixteen of the twenty-three doctors/administrators were found guilty. Seven of those were sentenced to death.

The air force immediately put Ruff, Romberg, and Weltz back on the U.S. payroll. It had special plans for its war treasure, Dr. Strughold. Worried that the Soviets might kidnap him, the air force forged Strughold’s way into the United States in 1947 on the first wave of Paperclip scientists to hit the shores of America.

The air force sent Dr. Strughold to Randolph Field, Texas, where he created the first ever American department of space medicine, earning him the title “Father of Space Medicine.” Strugi, as his friends called him, went on to pioneer the next generation of low-pressure chambers, space simulators, and pressure suits, all of which helped put Neil Armstrong on the moon.

As a result of his groundbreaking research, Dr. Strughold was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame. The Daughters of the American Revolution awarded him the Americanism Medal. The Aerospace Medical Association created the “Hubertus Strughold Award.” The Texas State Senate declared a “Dr. Hubertus Strughold Day.” And Ohio State University included his portrait in a mural of medical heroes alongside Hippocrates and Marie Curie. The university removed Strughold’s portrait from the group after he died.

In 1958, eleven years after Strughold entered the United States, the INS received a complaint about him and checked his background. It began by asking the air force if it had any “derogatory information” on its famous employee. The air force said no, Dr. Strughold had been “appropriately investigated.” Case closed.

When Strughold’s name appeared on the published Karbach list in 1974, Texas congressman Henry Gonzalez was upset. Anxious not to see a famous son of Texas smeared by reckless war crimes innuendo, Gonzalez complained to the INS. The congressman said his constituent had told him he first heard about Nazi medical experiments on humans after the war. So what was the flap all about?

INS commissioner General Chapman reassured Gonzalez: “Our inquiries [about Dr. Strughold] were terminated…. We consider the matter closed.” For its part, the Justice Department opened an investigation into Strughold’s wartime activity, but it didn’t find enough clear and convincing evidence to charge him. Dr. Hubertus Strughold died a free man in San Antonio in 1978 under a cloud of suspicion and with a slightly tarnished name.

Dr. Strughold’s alleged complicity in the medical experiments on Dachau prisoners, as terrible as they were, was a “minor” war crime compared to the role other Paperclip scientists played in a secret SS camp hidden in a remote mountain valley and code-named Dora.

Greek for “gift.”

Bivouacked just inside the western border of Germany, U.S. Army Private John Galione smelled death. The stench came from somewhere up ahead, from the east. It was an odor the 104th Infantry Timberwolf—a veteran of the battle for Remagen Bridge—had smelled many times before. Galione had heard rumors about Soviet soldiers finding concentration camps filled with corpses and the walking dead as they pushed across Poland toward Berlin. He had a hunch that if he followed the stench, it would lead him to such a camp. The problem was—the smell was coming from territory still held by the German army.