SYMHC Classics: Four Paperclippers

This 2021 episode talks about several specialists – most with some involvement with the Nazi party – who entered the U. S. and became citizens through Operation Paperclip. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:14Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 1:36Speaker 03

  Livrite, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.

• 2:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  Happy Saturday. Last Saturday, we re-released our episode on Operation Paperclip. Today's classic is our follow-up to that episode, which covered four people who were brought to the US under this program. This originally came out May 26, 2021.

• 2:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. Last time, we talked about Operation Paperclip, also known as Project Paperclip, which was the effort to bring German scientists, engineers, and other specialists to the United States after World War II. And this built on an earlier program that was called Operation Overcast, and that had given the same types of specialists short-term contracts to either work in Germany or to work in the United States under military supervision. But under Operation Paperclip, most of those specialists that were brought to the US actually got the opportunity to become US citizens. About 1,600 total specialists entered the

• 3:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  US through this program, and more than 90% of the ones who arrived between 1945 and 1952 went on to become US citizens. For the most part, they were recruiting relatively young folks. They were mostly under the age of 40 when they left Germany. And although most of them started out working for a branch of the military, about 10% were initially hired at the Department of Commerce. So as we talked about last time, but for a super quick recap, in case folks have skipped that episode, when this program was established, it was taken as a given that most of these people had at least some involvement with the Nazi Party. In the words of a Joint Intelligence

• 4:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  Objectives Agency report, "Such membership was due to exigencies which influenced the lives of every citizen of Germany at that time." But especially in the early years of the program, there were also a whole lot of assurances that the people who were being targeted for this were the "good Germans" and that they would all be pre-screened to confirm that they were not ardent Nazis.

• 4:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  So it's possible that many, or maybe even most of the people who came to the US through the program really did meet these criteria, but others definitely did not. And this was not just a matter of Nazis and war criminals managing to evade detection. The people and agencies who were involved with running this program intentionally obscured the most damning details from candidates' backgrounds, especially if their knowledge and expertise seemed particularly valuable. So my intent had been to talk about this program and then talk about some of the more well-known people who were part of it. It turned out that just talking about the program was a whole episode by itself.

• 5:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  So today, we are going to talk about a few of the most famous and infamous paperclippers, some of whom were connected to some truly horrific war crimes.

• 5:15Holly Frey?

  So probably the most famous of all of the Operation Paperclip specialists was Werner Von Braun. His thesis for his PhD in physics had involved rocket thrust engines, which came out of work that he did at Kummerstorff Army Proving Grounds under another future paperclipper, Officer Walter R. Dornberger. This work had been funded by the German Army.

• 5:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  Although Von Braun's rockets had potential as a weapon, his real interest was space. And in a lot of ways, he used the military promise of his work as a means to an end. At one point, he was quoted as saying, quote, "We felt no moral scruples about the possible future use of our brainchild. We were interested solely in exploring space. It was simply a question with us of how the golden cow could be milked most successfully."

• 6:06Holly Frey?

  By 1937, the German Army had outgrown the Kummerstorff facility and needed a more remote location to conduct rocket tests, so the team moved to Pinemunde on the coast of the Baltic Sea. Von Braun became the technical director at Peenemunde at the age of just 25. That same year, he also accepted an invitation to join the Nazi Party. Later, he also joined the Schutzstaffel, or SS, where he ultimately became a Sturmbahnführer, or major.

• 6:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  Von Braun and the team at Peenemunde developed the weapon that would become known as the V2, translated from German as the Vengeance Weapon 2, which was the first long-range ballistic missile. In 1943, the Allies bombed this facility, so all the weapons development and production operation there were moved underground, using an old mine to house a facility that became known as Mittelwerk.

• 7:03Holly Frey?

  People who were being imprisoned at the Mittelbau Dora concentration camp complex were forced to work in truly horrifying conditions, including digging out the tunnels by hand with nowhere to sleep and no hygiene facilities. Most of the people being held at Mittelbau Dora were political prisoners from multiple countries, especially the Soviet Union, Poland, and France. Jewish and Romani prisoners began to be deported to the camp after the spring and fall of 1944.

• 7:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  The use of enslaved labor at Mittelwerk continued after the facility was finished, with the prisoners building the weapons that were being produced there. According to Brian E. Krim, author of "Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State," more people died building V2 rockets than were actually killed through their use as a weapon. Between August of 1943 and April of 1945, at least 60,000 people were forced to work on these weapons, and at least 20,000 of them died of things like starvation, illness, executions, suicides, and just being worked to death.

• 8:13Holly Frey?

  Officials at the facility also carried out at least two mass hangings. One in particular was carried out in a very gruesome way, with the other prisoners forced to witness it. Some of the rockets had exploded on the launch pad, raising suspicions that someone was sabotaging them, and that mass hanging was meant to deter future sabotage.

• 8:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  Although many of the staff that had worked at Pinamunda were transferred to Mittelwerk and worked on site there, Werner von Braun actually worked elsewhere, but he did tour this facility at least once, and he knew about the terrible conditions and the use of enslaved labor there. At one point, he testified at the trial of three SS members who had worked at the Mittelbau Dora concentration camp complex, and he acknowledged the appalling conditions and the use of enslaved labor in that testimony.

• 9:06Holly Frey?

  In 1944, the Gestapo arrested von Braun and held him for about two weeks. Sources differ about exactly what prompted this arrest. In some accounts, he was being really disparaging about Germany's chances to win the war, and he was only released after Dornberger convinced the Gestapo that he was critical to missile production. This arrest sometimes comes up as evidence that von Braun wasn't a "real Nazi" and had only been involved in the Nazi Party and the SS out of self-preservation or even opportunistic motives, or because he had perhaps been coerced.

• 9:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  In the spring of 1945, as Germany was rapidly losing ground in the war, the Soviet Red Army was advancing toward von Braun's location. He and Dornberger both believed that the United States would see them as assets and that surrendering to the Americans would be really preferable to being captured by the Soviets. So they and many of their colleagues fled and went into hiding. Even though Hitler had ordered the destruction of anything that could be useful to the Allies, von Braun hid his research work, and he later went back and retrieved it.

• 10:14Holly Frey?

  On May 2, 1945, von Braun, Dornberger, and 126 principal engineers from Mittelwerk surrendered to an American GI. They had sent von Braun's younger brother Magnus to make contact with the Americans, both because he was the most familiar with the English language and because he knew how critical it was to keep the details of what was happening at Mittelwerk secret.

• 10:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  Joseph Stalin was not pleased with this at all. He reportedly said, quote, "This is absolutely intolerable. We defeated the Nazi armies. We occupied Berlin and Peenemunde, but the Americans got the rocket engineers. What could be more revolting and more inexcusable? How and why was this allowed to happen?"

• 11:00Holly Frey?

  Once Von Braun got to the US, he worked at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, where he helped American forces learn about and learn to use the V-2 rockets that he had developed. In 1947, when he was 35, he returned to Germany to marry Maria-Louise von Quizdrap, who was his 18-year-old second cousin. After his return, he went on to become director of the US Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama, where he helped develop the Redstone rocket, which was based on the V-2. The Redstone was a ballistic missile that could carry a nuclear payload.

• 11:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  Von Braun started formally proposing plans for space exploration around 1954, but the Army really wanted him to keep focusing on weapons development. He eventually got his wish, though. After NASA was established, he became director of the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. When Alan Shepard Jr. became the first American in space in 1961, the launch vehicle was a modified Redstone rocket, which Von Braun had helped to develop. He also led the team that developed the Saturn V rocket for the Apollo project.

• 12:08Holly Frey?

  In addition to being such a major part of the space program, Von Braun became a public face for space exploration. In 1955, he appeared on the magical World of Disney episodes Man in Space, Man and the Moon, and Mars and Beyond. He appeared in multiple other documentaries in the 1950s and 60s and was also a technical advisor for Disney. He wrote multiple books, and he was on the cover of Time magazine in 1958.

• 12:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  One of the reasons that there are still some question marks about Von Braun's motivations and decisions before and during World War II is that he died in 1977. At that point, most of the documents related to Operation Paperclip were still classified. That was also before the Office of Special Investigations opened its investigation into Von Braun's colleague, Arthur Rudolph, which we mentioned in the previous episode. He'll come up again later. The OSI actually hadn't even been established yet when Von Braun died.

• 13:08Holly Frey?

  While there had definitely been vocal critics of Project Paperclip for most of its existence, in 1977, there was still a general belief that ardent Nazis and war criminals had been kept out of the program. And Von Braun himself had critics as well. As one example, Tom Lehrer's satirical song, "Werner Von Braun," included such lyrics as, "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department," says Werner Von Braun. But in general, after his death, Von Braun was widely eulogized. President Jimmy Carter called him a man of bold vision and said, quote, "To millions of Americans, Werner Von Braun's name was inextricably linked to our exploration of

• 13:50Holly Frey?

  space and to the creative application of technology. Not just the people of our nation, but all the people of the world have profited from his work. We will continue to profit from his example."

• 14:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  Today, historians and biographers have argued that Von Braun was everything from an opportunist who joined the Nazis out of sheer necessity to an ardent war criminal who never faced justice. What's clearest is that he was definitely a member of the Nazi Party and of the SS, that he knew about the use of slave labor and the terrible conditions at Mittelberg, and that consequently, he was, at just a minimum, complicit in all of that. He was also present for at least one meeting in which Mittelberg's general director, George Rickett, planned out the acquisition of French prisoners of war to use as forced labor. He also developed a weapon that Germany deployed against Allies

• 14:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  of the United States, killing at least 5,000 people, but then he became a US citizen in 1955.

• 14:53Holly Frey?

  We just mentioned Arthur Rudolph, and since we only covered him briefly in the earlier episode, he is where we are going to pick up. But first, we are going to pause for a little sponsor break.

• 15:08Speaker 05

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• 15:10Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:38Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:51Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 16:02Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 17:58Speaker 03

  reinvented, based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  Live Right, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, "The Gales of November", a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book", writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. "The Gales of November", now in paperback.

• 18:39Holly Frey?

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• 19:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  Arthur Rudolph was born in Germany on November 9, 1906, and he and Werner von Braun later became colleagues at Pinamunde. After the Allies bombed Pinamunde, Rudolph became the operations director and the deputy production manager at the underground Mittelberg facility.

• 19:32Holly Frey?

  In the prior episode on Operation Paperclip, we talked about the criteria for determining who was a so-called ardent Nazi, because ardent Nazis were supposed to be kept out of the program. An ardent Nazi was generally defined as someone who had joined the Nazi Party before Hitler had declared himself Führer, who was a leader in the party or in one of its affiliated organizations, like the SS or the SA, who had been convicted in a post-war denazification court, or who had been accused or convicted of war crimes.

• 20:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  So Rudolph joined the Nazi Party, also known as the National Socialist German Workers' Party, and then abbreviated in German as NSDAP, in 1931. That was six years before Werner von Braun joined and three years before Hitler declared himself Führer. In the early 1930s, he had also been in the SA Reserve and in other Nazi-connected organizations.

• 20:33Holly Frey?

  When Rudolph was first screened for potential inclusion in Operation Paperclip, his interrogator made this notation, quote, "100% Nazi," that's in all caps, "dangerous type, security threat," exclamation points, "suggest internment." But in spite of that rather vehement initial assessment, when the Office of Military Government, United States, filed its report on Rudolph, it concluded that he was not an ardent Nazi.

• 21:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  When Rudolph was interrogated as part of this process, he gave his reasons for joining the Nazi Party this way. Quote, "Until 1930, I sympathized with the Social Democratic Party and voted for it and was a member of a social democratic union. After 1930, the economical situation became so serious that it appeared to me to be headed for a catastrophe. I really became unemployed in 1932." The great amount of unemployment caused the expansion of the National Socialist and Communistic Parties. Frightened that the latter would become the government, I joined the NSDAP, a legally regulated society, to help. I believed in the preservation of the Western culture.

• 21:46Holly Frey?

  The US Army okayed a slightly edited version of this statement to release to the public, which ended, quote, "During the last few years, political developments became more and more serious, but I could not foresee this result when I entered the party."

• 22:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  Rudolph was one of the first German specialists to enter the US under Operation Paperclip. He arrived in 1945, and his wife and his daughter followed him later. Like Werner von Braun, he started out working for the Ordnance Department of the Research and Development Division under the Department of the Army. At various points, the FBI investigated him as part of his applications for security clearance and his application to work at NASA. In the reports from these investigations, he's generally described as an excellent production engineer, personally liked by his colleagues, conscientious, honest, trustworthy, and not a potential threat to national security.

• 22:43Holly Frey?

  However, during an investigation in 1953, someone reported that he had been a loyal member of the NSDAP and was, quote, "the type of person who would not stop at anything if it might further his ambitions." He had a reputation of being a person who, in his enthusiasm for the Nazi regime, could be dangerous to a fellow employee who did not guard his language. That person that gave that statement, whose name is redacted from the FBI file that's available on the web, later walked that statement back and said that they didn't mean to imply that Rudolph was an ardent Nazi, but that he was ambitious and would do whatever it took to achieve his goals.

• 23:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  So Rudolph became a US citizen on November 11, 1954. His work at NASA included being one of the primary architects of the Saturn V rocket. He retired from NASA in 1969, and from there, he became a consultant. He had received NASA's Distinguished Service Award, which is the agency's highest honor, as well as other awards.

• 23:48Holly Frey?

  As we discussed in the previous episode, the Office of Special Investigations started an investigation into Rudolph after Eli Rosenbaum found references to him in a couple of books he picked up at a bookstore in 1980. This investigation found that officials in both the US and West Germany had described Rudolph as a war criminal. Rudolph was also questioned in 1947 as officials were preparing to try 19 people who were suspected of war crimes at the Dora Nordhausen complex. During that questioning, Rudolph said he had attended the public mass hanging that we described earlier. As operations director at Mittelwerk, he had also personally received reports about how many prisoners were available to work,

• 24:33Holly Frey?

  how many had recently arrived, and how many had died or were too ill to work. His office was also right next to where the public hanging took place.

• 24:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  Rudolph maintained his innocence in all of this. But at the same time, according to transcripts of OSI interviews, he confirmed that he knew that prisoners were dying at the facility. There was also a clear paper trail connecting him to the use of enslaved labor and prisoner abuses at Mittelwerk. He ultimately agreed to renounce his US citizenship and return to Germany rather than face a trial for all of this. At the time, he was 77.

• 25:11Holly Frey?

  The West German government wasn't really pleased about this since US officials took this step without informing them ahead of time. West German authorities started their own investigation. But by that point, the only thing that was still within the statute of limitations was murder, and there wasn't enough evidence to try Rudolph on that specific charge.

• 25:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  Rudolph spent most of the rest of his life trying to clear his name and to return to North America, even though he had agreed to leave. After US officials denied his request to have his citizenship restored, he tried to enter Canada, but was denied there as well. During his hearing with Canadian authorities, Canadian lawyers produced a memo that he had written describing the use of slave labor at another facility in an admiring way and requesting such a setup for his own project. A Canadian court ruled that he had, quote, "called for, made use of, and directed" the enslaved laborers at Mittelwerk. Rudolph never returned to North America, and he died in 1996.

• 26:13Holly Frey?

  Some of the documentation and statements related to Arthur Rudolph's work in Nazi Germany came to light as part of an investigation into one of his and Von Braun's colleagues, George Rikhi, Director General at Mittelwerk. Rikhi's background was a lot like Rudolph's. He had joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and went to work for the Reich Ministry for Armament and Munitions.

• 26:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  Rikhi had become an expert in underground construction. He helped design the underground B2 factory at Mittelwerk and Hitler's underground bunker, as well as other facilities. To be very clear, though, that underground Mittelwerk facility had virtually no ventilation and no plumbing. People used oil barrels as toilets, and for most of the facility's operation, the prisoners were sleeping on the ground. So we're not saying that this design was good or humane, but underground construction like this had become his specialty.

• 27:09Holly Frey?

  He specialized in being horrible. While Rudolph had been aware of how much forced labor was available for use at the facility and had received reports on how many people had died, Rikhi was the person who directly oversaw that labor. He coordinated with the SS to essentially rent people from camps. At Mittelwerk, the rate the SS charged was 2 to 3 Reichsmarks per person per day.

• 27:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  But, as was the case with Von Braun and Rudolph, Rikhi's work on the B2 program made him an attractive candidate for Operation Paperclip, even though by his party membership status alone, he fit the definition of an ardent Nazi. Like Rudolph, he had joined the party way before Hitler had come to power. He arrived in the US in 1945, though, and started working for the US Strategic Bombing Survey and the US Army Air Forces.

• 28:06Holly Frey?

  However, in the summer of 1946, Rickhi and paper clipper Albert Patton started a black market operation at Wright Field, where about 140 of the 200-plus paper clippers in the US were then working. Aircraft engineer Hermann Nelson seems to have gotten into a personal dispute with them. One night, when Rickhi and Patton were playing a late-night poker game in their housing facility, which was known as Hilltop, Nelson got frustrated with their noisiness and told them to keep it down. Patton and Rickhi refused, and Rickhi made an offensive joke that alluded to Nazi atrocities against Jewish people.

• 28:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  In response, Nelson filed a complaint with Colonel Donald L. Putt, saying that Patton was an ardent Nazi and an SA member, and that Rickhi had orchestrated the mass hanging at Mittelwerk that was meant to deter sabotage. Putt doesn't seem to have taken any action on this, but Nelson also vented his frustrations in a letter to a friend in New York, and that caught the eye of the censors who were reading the paper clipper's mail.

• 29:09Holly Frey?

  This sparked an investigation, during which it became clear that many paper clippers were willing to cover up one another's involvement in Nazi activities and war crimes. At around the same time, investigators in Germany found Rickhi's name on an employee contact list at Mittelwerk. An investigator in Germany also spotted Rickhi's name in an article about his application for US citizenship.

• 29:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  So all of this came together, and Rickhi was indicted and returned to Germany to stand trial at the US-led war crimes trials that were held at the site of the Dachau concentration camp. These were separate from the international trials that were held at Nuremberg. When Rickhi was indicted, he had just signed a new five-year contract to work with the army.

• 29:56Holly Frey?

  Rickhi became one of 19 defendants in the Dora Nordhausen trial that was held at Dachau. Of those 19, Rickhi was the only one who had worked at the Mittelwerk facility rather than at the concentration camps themselves. But the evidence that was presented at his trial was contradictory. Although some witnesses connected him to war crimes at the facility, there were other researchers, including Werner von Braun, who submitted affidavits in his defense. There wasn't clear written documentation to connect Rickhi to war crimes carried out at the facility. Rick Hai was one of four people who were acquitted, and the Army then classified the records from the trial.

• 30:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  We will talk about one more paper clipper after another quick sponsor break.

• 30:46Speaker 03

  Okay, Chicken Nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped, and they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old Chicken Nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new Chicken Nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better Chicken Nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself. This new Chicken Nugget, reinvented,

• 31:31Speaker 03

  based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken, and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.

• 31:43Speaker 03

  Livrite, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, "The Gales of November: A Chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 Shipwreck." "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. "The Gales of November, now in paperback."

• 32:11Speaker 03

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• 32:24Holly Frey?

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• 34:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  So far, everyone we've talked about in this episode was connected to the Middleburg Weapons Factory. They had kind of interconnected careers with one another in Germany. And while there were a lot of rocket scientists and engineers from that facility who became part of Operation Paperclip, there were also specialists from lots and lots of other fields, including medicine, chemistry, chemical and biological warfare, aircraft design, architecture, and electronics. So we're going to end this episode with one of those.

• 34:45Holly Frey?

  Huberta Strughold has been nicknamed the father of space medicine. He actually coined the terms space medicine and astrobiology. After World War II, Strughold started out working for the US in Germany, and then he moved to Texas as part of Operation Paperclip. He became a US citizen in 1956.

• 35:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  After joining NASA, Strughold developed a space cabin simulator, as well as the space suits that the first astronauts wore. He was the first professor of space medicine at the world's first Department of Space Medicine, which was established at the Air Force School of Aviation Medicine. Strughold was a true trailblazer in his field. And for a time, there were also a lot of awards and honors and buildings and things like that named after him because of his just truly enormous contributions to this.

• 35:35Holly Frey?

  In terms of his work in Nazi Germany, for 10 of the 12 years that Hitler was in power, he was the director of the Aviation Medical Research Institute for the Reich Air Ministry. This was one of several research institutes in Germany that were working at the intersection of medicine and flight. After the start of World War II, these institutes became part of the Luftwaffe, and at that point, Strughold became an officer.

• 36:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  Strughold was one of the very few paperclippers who never joined the Nazi party. And there is some evidence that he was anti-Nazi or politically neutral. However, by the end of the war, he was also on the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects, or the Crowcast List. We mentioned that list in the previous episode. This was a giant compilation of suspected war criminals. It was a multi-volume list containing the names of about 60,000 people. Some were known to have committed war crimes. Some were suspected. Some weren't really suspected. They were wanted for questioning or as witnesses. And as we discussed last time, this list could be all over the place

• 36:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  in terms of whose name was on it and how that name got there and how much substantiation there was for whatever had led them to be included.

• 36:53Holly Frey?

  While Strughold was director of the Aviation Medical Research Institute, Luftwaffe doctors and members of the SS were carrying out experiments on human beings. And some of these experiments were related to Strughold's field of work. Many German pilots who had been shot down over the English Channel during the Battle of Britain in 1940 had survived the initial crash but died of hypothermia before they could be pulled from the water. So the Luftwaffe wanted to figure out the body's limits and whether it was possible to resuscitate people who had died of exposure to cold. They did this by plunging both animals and people into icy water until they died and then trying to revive them.

• 37:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  Other experiments that Luftwaffe doctors conducted on human subjects included using hypoxia chambers to simulate exposure to extreme altitude and forcing people to ingest seawater. Most of these experiments were carried out at the Dachau concentration camp. Some of them were fatal experiments also, and many of the people who had carried these experiments out had either been killed or died by suicide by the end of the war, but a lot of those who were still living ultimately faced trial at Nuremberg. Strughold actually submitted affidavits in some of these trials and his name came up in questioning at various points, but he was not put on trial himself.

• 38:15Holly Frey?

  Strughold definitely knew about at least some of this research, particularly the freezing experiments. He attended a conference in 1942 where the researchers talked about their results and he commented on their work after that presentation. When asked about it later, he stressed that the experiments had been done on criminals, but also said that he generally didn't approve of work that was conducted on non-consenting human subjects. He said he didn't allow such experiments at the institute, although by that point, the institute was part of the Luftwaffe and the Luftwaffe was carrying out such experiments.

• 38:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  However, there are a lot of unanswered questions about exactly how much Strughold knew about this research, when he knew about it, whether it was in his power to stop it, and whether he helped cover up its existence or the involvement of his colleagues. In some early interrogations, he and other researchers generally penned all these human experiments on Dr. Sigmund Rascher, who had been involved in the hypoxia and hypothermia experiments. Rascher and his wife had both been executed by order of Heinrich Himmler in 1945. Strughold described Rascher as, quote, "fringe," and he and others described

• 39:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  these experiments sort of as the work of one deranged, clearly unethical man.

• 39:40Holly Frey?

  But it became clear that Rascher didn't do this work alone, and that many other Luftwaffe doctors had been directly involved. Many of the experiments had been approved by Heinrich Himmler or by high-ranking Luftwaffe officers, and they had been supervised by Luftwaffe doctors and by people who worked at other German research institutes, including the Institute for Aviation Medicine in Munich. Some of the people who ran these experiments had also been close working colleagues with Huberta Strughold, including co-authoring papers with him.

• 40:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  But at the same time, that's pretty circumstantial. Enough people connected to Strughold knew about or were directly involved in these experiments that it seems like he should have known the details of what was going on beyond just hearing other researchers talk about it at that one conference in 1942. But we don't know whether he actually did or whether he took any action based on that knowledge.

• 40:39Holly Frey?

  Strughold was investigated in connection to this several times. The first was under Operation Paperclip, but at this point, it's obviously hard to trust that the reports created for Operation Paperclip were thorough or complete. The second was in 1958 after a magazine article alleged that Strughold had done research on human subjects. That investigation was dropped after the Air Force released a statement that he had already been investigated.

• 41:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1973, the INS opened an investigation into 35 suspected war criminals, and Strughold was one of them. But the INS eventually closed that case due to a lack of evidence. After this, Strughold maintained that he had already been cleared of all suspicion before entering the United States. Then the OSI opened another investigation in 1983, but Strughold died in 1986. So at that point, that investigation was closed.

• 41:38Holly Frey?

  One experiment that Strughold was more clearly connected to involved exposing children with epilepsy to simulated high altitudes to see if it was possible to induce seizures in susceptible people. That experiment took place in 1943 at the institute that Strughold was running. It doesn't seem like any of the children were seriously harmed, but the experiment also didn't conform to the institute's ethical guidelines. This came to light in 1993, so years after Strughold's death.

• 42:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  Regardless of what his true level of involvement was in Nazi experiments onto human beings, these allegations and the investigations really affected Strughold's reputation. Most of the honors and awards that used to be named after him have since been renamed or retired. Portraits of him at academic and medical institutions have mostly been removed or covered up. Even though his influence on space medicine was really comparable to Werner von Braun's influence on space exploration, the amount of public information and laudatory write-ups on the two men just do not compare. You can go look for stuff on Werner von Braun, read about it all day.

• 42:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's a lot harder to find information on Hubert Strughold. He still has his staunch defenders, though, who point out that there's just no solid evidence directly connecting him to some of these experiments. They point out various flaws in people who have tried to make those connections, some of which have conflated two different German research institutes into one thing when they really weren't.

• 43:17Holly Frey?

  So that is where we're going to wrap up today. But to be clear, this episode is, of course, not remotely comprehensive. As we noted at the top, there were about 1,600 specialists brought into the US under Operation Paperclip. Annie Jacobson's book, Operation Paperclip, which was one of the sources for these two episodes, focuses on just 21 of them. So even though that is much more comprehensive, it's still just a tiny portion of the total. And like this episode, it's not really focused on researchers who may have really fit the descriptions that Operation Paperclip was using to describe the specialists it was recruiting. I, I, every time we look at these, and really any, you know, post-World War II

• 43:59Holly Frey?

  discussions of, of the people who had been part of that conflict and involved with things like this, I'm always surprised when I have those moments of like, huh, that person was still alive the year I got married. Like I,

• 44:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 44:12Holly Frey?

  It places it so deeply in my own lifetime that I, I have to remind myself that like, this was not as long ago as we think of often.

• 44:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right, right. Well, and then in addition to that, um, one of the things that like just kept continually, uh, striking me as I was working on this and the earlier episode, is that after World War II, there was this whole effort to just de-Nazified Germany and to remove Nazis from positions of power and to try to place people into positions of power who didn't have Nazi sympathies or connections to the Nazi party. But then there was this whole effort in the United States that was like, well, we'll take them though, and give them US citizenship, which is a little weird considering the work that the United States was doing in Germany. Um, we also said in the previous episode that the

• 45:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  United States was not the only person that was exploiting the, uh, the knowledge and talents of all these German specialists. But for the most part, other countries were doing that on a more short-term basis, often actually in Germany, not bringing people into their own countries and then allowing them to become citizens.

• 45:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 45:49Tracy V. Wilson?

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