The Nazis Next Door (17 page)

After a round of awkward negotiations, NASA arranged for its star scientist to stay on American soil and give a deposition in New Orleans, not in West Germany. If they wanted to know what he had to say about Mittelwerk, the Germans would have to come to him.

Von Braun finally sat down with German prosecutors in early 1969. He stated with no sign of reservation or nervousness that he knew from the very start of production in 1943 that the SS at Mittelwerk was using thousands of slave laborers to build his famed missiles. He had visited the plant some fifteen times to inspect the factory, and his own brother worked there as an engineer, von Braun acknowledged. But he insisted he had never seen firsthand what he euphemistically called the “special treatment” of workers: prisoners being hanged. “I never saw a dead person
on my visit to Mittelwerk,” von Braun told the prosecutors calmly. “Nor did I see any abuse or anyone killed . . . I heard rumors that prisoners in the Dora camp were abused and that some in the tunnels were hanged for sabotage. I never saw that personally.” He wouldn’t have been surprised if the rumors were true, he said. The SS general who ran the camp was a reckless and brutally ambitious man, he said—but even so, von Braun did nothing about it. He had missiles to build.

He left the deposition with “a clear conscience,” he said afterward, and he was relieved that the whole matter seemed to disappear with practically no attention in America. Months later, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. Von Braun’s supporters in Alabama hoisted him on their shoulders in the street in celebration. His star shone brighter than ever. “In regards to the testimony,” he wrote later to his old friend, the Nazi general Walter Dornberger, “fortunately I have heard nothing more.”

Von Braun voiced few regrets. “The working conditions there were absolutely horrible. It was a pretty hellish environment,” he acknowledged. But he was stoic about his own responsibility. His overriding aim, in Germany as in America, was the pursuit of science, he said. It often seemed to be his
sole
aim. “We felt no moral scruples about the possible future abuse of our brain power,” he said in explaining how he first came to build rockets for the Germans. “We were interested solely in exploring outer space. It was simply a question of how the golden cow could be milked most successfully.”

Besides, he reflected, if he hadn’t built missiles for Hitler, someone else no doubt would have. “The same things would have happened at Pennemünde without me,” he said. “Do you think scientists should be blamed for wars?”

Dr. Strughold was, in many ways, von Braun’s opposite. The aviation doctor had none of von Braun’s Hollywood panache or charm. Von Braun could be lecturing on rocket science one day, then playing classical piano or scuba diving off the coast of Southern California the next. Strughold, with his white lab coat, bow tie, smoking pipe, and thinning white hair, was the picture of the bookish intellectual who seemed to crave little else but science. Where von Braun was a visionary with an almost cultlike following, Strughold was a tactician, slogging through his space research in San Antonio one test at a time.

But Strughold and von Braun, for all their personality differences, did share an astute ability to rewrite the past. Like von Braun, Strughold was portrayed unflinchingly by his admirers in America as a man advancing the cause of science; his ties to the Nazis were either minimalized or forgotten altogether. Typical was an official Air Force biography
in 1958, which declared: “Hubertus Strughold, M.D., survived the ruin of his nation in war, emigrated to another land, invented a new career for himself in a field of human endeavor as fresh as tomorrow, and became internationally renowned as the living sage of Space Medicine.”

When he came to America as part of Project Paperclip, Strughold, like the other German scientists, had to establish for the official record that he was not an “ardent” Nazi. He dutifully explained that while he had in fact been a member of an aviation group affiliated with the Nazi Party, it was not out of any political loyalty, but rather because it would have hurt his career otherwise. Interrogators suspected his ties went deeper: his “successful career under Hitler” in the German Luftwaffe, one American investigator wrote, suggested he was “in full accord with Nazism.” He was soon approved anyway, and in 1947, he began life anew as a top aviation medicine scientist at an air base in San Antonio. At the start of his stint, Strughold still had thoughts of returning to Europe in a few years. But after his first taste of Texas, he told friends, he liked America so much
that he decided to stay.

Strughold’s pioneering contributions to space medicine totaled thousands of pages in American military annals. He had, quite literally, written the book on space medicine: the first big project given to him in Texas was to compile the Nazis’ aviation research into a monumental two-volume review for his new bosses in America, a glowing account called
German Aviation Medicine in World War II
. In his editing of the research, Strughold took out the references in the original data on how the Nazis had actually conducted their aviation studies and reached their findings. It was deemed irrelevant; what mattered were the results, not how they were obtained.

It was a notable omission. Normally, Strughold was not shy about touting his hands-on approach to scientific experiment. He was never one to limit his work to banal theory; he believed in conducting as many real-life tests as he could to answer the riddles of flight and put them to use. Before the war, when he was a young doctor making his name, he wanted to test the effects of altitude on the senses, so he stuck himself in the rear end with an injection of novocaine and went up in a plane to see how it felt. Another time, he set sail in a hot-air balloon and ran a battery of tests of his own ability to conduct basic tasks at high altitude; the hot-air balloon got stuck in a tree, but he had his results, and a jubilant Strughold popped some champagne he had brought along to celebrate the occasion.

He knew few limits in his work. As a young researcher in Cleveland during a stint in the United States in the late 1920s, he wanted to conduct cardiac experiments on dogs in which he would shock and restart their hearts. The Humane Society blocked him
from using local dogs, so he brought in canines from Canada instead. Ethics weren’t going to stand in the way of an important experiment.

By 1958, Strughold had graduated from dogs to people. He wanted to use his flight simulator in San Antonio to see whether a human being could withstand the pressures of space conditions for a full week. Some colleagues were hesitant; without more data, they feared it was too risky for anyone to attempt, and they urged Strughold to use a dog for the experiment instead. Strughold, realizing the political potential of the moment, stood his ground. Sure enough, when his subject emerged triumphantly from the simulator after seven days, an admiring Senator Lyndon Johnson, then an important friend to aviation research, was there to shake hands with the doctor and the test pilot as newspaper photographers snapped their photos. “I doubt that Lyndon Johnson
would have been there to shake hands with a dog,” a vindicated Strughold quipped afterward.

“Struggie,” as he was known to friends, shared such stories freely with admiring military officers years later. But what of the war years? They made for a life-changing time when Strughold first established himself as a colonel in the German Luftwaffe and as director of a government-led research institute. But for all his prominence in Germany as a scientist, Strughold talked little about those days after he came to America. If Strughold discussed his time in Europe at all, it was inevitably to distance himself from Hitler.

“I had no affiliations with the Nazi Party,”
he told one military historian in the United States. “I have even had some Jewish friends.”

For more than a quarter century, Dr. Strughold’s place as the father of space medicine had been virtually unchallenged. Medical awards were named for him. His scientific writings filled libraries. Dozens of researchers in aviation medicine—American-born and German alike—answered to him as the chief scientist at the Air Force base in San Antonio. Even after officially retiring in 1968, he stayed on as a revered consultant to the space program and a beloved, grandfatherly figure at the air base. “One of the great minds of our time, perhaps of all times,” a local newspaper columnist in Texas called him.

Chuck Allen was getting ready to challenge all that. The journalist had known nothing about Dr. Strughold when Tony DeVito first broached his name at their off-the-record meeting that day in 1974. But with his appetite whetted, he now wanted to find out everything he could about the doctor. Allen checked a listing of “active” INS investigations into suspected Nazis. Just as DeVito had promised, he found “Strughold, Hubert.” Strughold, unlike von Braun, was not a household name, despite his prominence in the scientific world, and Allen had not identified him before now as anyone of particular significance in his own Nazi reporting. But DeVito had given him quite a rundown:
A leading space scientist
with the Air Force in Texas
. . .
They call him the father of space medicine
. . .
Came to U.S. after the war and became a citizen in ’56
. . .
A Nazi doctor in another life
. . .
Tied to human experiments at Dachau
. . .
Still working with NASA today
.

From what DeVito had described for him, Allen figured that Dr. Strughold certainly deserved a closer look. He knew instinctively that Strughold could prove much bigger than just a rank-and-file Nazi living quietly in America; bigger, certainly, than a Queens housewife from the notorious camp at Majdanek, and bigger than just about any other accused Nazi he had investigated over the years. Here was a man who, if his source was right, was brought to America by the military even after taking part in some of the Nazis’ worst medical atrocities. If the lead checked out, if he could corroborate what DeVito was telling him, Allen figured Dr. Strughold might just be the most important Nazi in America.

A quick search of medical journals and newspaper articles made clear that Dr. Strughold was every bit as important in the medical field as DeVito had made him out to be. He had earned all sorts of honors and awards, along with fancy-sounding titles with the U.S. military and the space program. It was clear, too, that he had worked for the German Luftwaffe during the war. But being in the Luftwaffe didn’t necessarily make Strughold another Dr. Mengele. Was there really a link to Nazi atrocities? Allen went looking in a place that had proven a fertile hunting ground for him before: the Nuremberg war crimes files.

The historic war crimes trials at Nuremberg included a special set of medical cases against twenty-three Nazi doctors and medical personnel accused of taking part in the Nazis’ experimentation on thousands of victims killed, maimed, or tortured. Himmler personally ordered a number of the most gruesome experiments, including a sadistic, sexually inspired test that involved placing a naked, unconscious, and nearly frozen man sandwiched between two naked female prisoners to see whether their body warmth would awaken him. The doctors were so proud of their work that they made a film to show to SS officials under Himmler.

The Brandt medical trial—named after Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Karl Brandt, one of the lead defendants—featured some of the most graphic testimony
of any of the Nuremberg trials. American prosecutors told of a deli worker who was put in a flight simulator to mimic the effects of a sudden drop from an altitude of forty-seven thousand feet. He suffered violent convulsions, intense pain, and “the impression of someone who is completely out of his mind.” The Germans wanted the altitude data to see how they could keep alive their own pilots under extreme flight conditions. Other experiments were designed to find the easiest ways to kill the elderly, the infirm, children, the mentally handicapped, and others. The doctors exposed test prisoners to yellow fever, typhus, cholera, and diphtheria. Sometimes the tests were conducted for no other reason than a morbid curiosity: 112 Jews were killed and defleshed, with their skeletons measured and sent to a museum in Strasbourg to be put on display in a collection. This was “no mere medical trial,” the American prosecutor, Brigadier General Telford Taylor, told the panel of judges at Nuremberg. Under the guise of medicine, the Nazi doctors had engaged in “wholesale murder and unspeakable torture,” he said, and had treated “their fellow men as less than beasts.”

Ultimately, fifteen of the medical defendants at Nuremberg were found guilty, with seven of them sentenced to death for their crimes. They were just following orders, many of the doctors insisted. “It is no shame to stand on this scaffold. I served my fatherland as others before me,” Brandt declared, moments before he was hanged in 1948.

From his postwar home at the military base in San Antonio, Hubertus Strughold followed the Nuremberg prosecutions with a personal interest. He had worked with virtually all of the doctors who were on trial—some as researchers working under him, some as colleagues who coauthored research papers with him, a few as his supervisors in the Luftwaffe. He held many in high regard. He even sent the Nuremberg judges letters in support of three of them. The chief medical officer for the Luftwaffe, who was ultimately convicted of medical atrocities at Nuremberg and sentenced to life in prison, was an “honorable, conscientious and self sacrificing” doctor,
Strughold wrote. One of his own medical researchers on trial, Strughold wrote, was a “very humane and socially minded” young man. The doctor who wrote up the results on the deli worker tortured at forty-seven thousand feet—and even filmed the spectacle—was “a scientist of extraordinary experimental talent and ingenuity,” Strughold wrote.

And what about Dr. Strughold himself? What was his role? He had been interrogated by the Nuremberg prosecutors while he was still in Germany after the war, and they suspected he had “covered up” his knowledge of the twisted experiments. But suddenly, without explanation, he was whisked away to Texas in 1947 as part of the exodus triggered by Project Paperclip. His “successful career under Hitler” was overlooked. He was given a spot as the top scientist in the medical aviation program in San Antonio. Strughold “was one of the first men
anyone thought about trying to bring over here at the end of the war,” one colonel said.