The perceived importance of having Wagner’s expertise in the fight against Japan was illuminated by a dramatic event unfolding in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, just as he and his team arrived. On May 15, 1945, a Nazi submarine, identified in a New York Times headline as “the Japan-bound U-234,” surrendered itself to the USS Sutton in the waters five hundred miles off Cape Race, Newfoundland. Inside the submarine, which was en route to Japan, was a cache of Nazi wonder weapons, “said to contain what few aviation secrets may be left,” as well as “other war-weapon plans and pieces of equipment.” One of the wonder weapons on board was Dr. Wagner’s Hs 293 glider bomb, meant for use against the U.S. Navy in the Pacific. Additionally, there were drawings and plans for the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 rocket, experimental equipment for stealth technology on submarines, an entire Me 262 fighter aircraft, and ten lead-lined canisters containing 1,200 pounds of uranium oxide—a basic material used in making an atomic bomb. The specifics of the weapons cache were not made public, but the notion that the Nazis had sold the secrets of some of their most prized wonder weapons to their Axis partner Japan was alarming. The scenario was made even more forbidding by the fact that also on board the U-234 was a top Reich scientist whose job it was to teach Japanese scientists how to copy and manufacture these Nazi wonder weapons for themselves.
The scientist in the submarine was Dr. Heinz Schlicke, director of Naval Test Fields at Kiel. To the public he was only identified as a German “technician.” In fact, Dr. Schlicke was one of the most qualified Nazi scientists in the field of electronic warfare. His areas of expertise included radio-location techniques, camouflage, jamming and counterjamming, remote control, and infrared. The navy took Dr. Schlicke prisoner of war and brought him to the Army Intelligence Center at Fort Meade, in Maryland.
As for Dr. Wagner, the navy felt it needed to keep him happy so that his work would continue to bear scientific fruit. To soften the reality of his being a prisoner, his incarceration was called “voluntary detention.” Wagner and his assistants required a classified but comfortable place to work, the navy noted in an intelligence report, ideally in “an ivory tower or a gilded cage where life would be pleasant, the guards courteous, the locks thick but not too obvious.” The navy found what it was looking for in Hempstead House, a great stone castle on Sands Point, on the North Shore of Long Island, that was formerly the home of Daniel and Florence Guggenheim. The 160-acre estate had been donated by the Guggenheims to the navy for use as a training center. With its three stories, forty rooms, and sweeping view of the sea, the navy decided it was an ideal location. Hempstead House was given the code name the Special Devices Center, and Dr. Wagner and his assistants got to work.
There were more problems afloat in Washington, this time coming from the FBI. If Nazi scientists were going to work for the U.S. military, the Department of Justice said it needed to perform background checks. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI looked into Dr. Wagner’s past, based on information collected by army intelligence in Europe, and learned that Dr. Wagner had “once belonged to the German SS,” the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party run by Himmler. This meant that Wagner was an ardent Nazi. If he had stayed in Germany, as a former SS member and per the laws of the occupying forces, he would have been arrested and subject to a denazification trial. But the FBI was made aware of how badly the navy needed Wagner, and they labeled him “an opportunist who is interested only in science.” The FBI’s bigger concern, read an intelligence report, was how much Dr. Wagner had been drinking lately. The FBI did not consider Wagner to be a “drunkard” but blamed his near-nightly intoxication on the recent death of his wife.
The scientist in the submarine, Dr. Heinz Schlicke, became a prisoner at Fort Meade, where it did not take long for the U.S. Navy to learn how “eminently qualified” he was. Soon, Schlicke was giving classified lectures on technology he had developed during the war. The first was called “A General Review of Measures Planned by the German Admiralty in the Electronic Field in Order to Revive U-Boat Warfare.” The navy wanted to hire Schlicke immediately, but State Department regulations got in the way. Schlicke was already in military custody in the United States as a prisoner of war. He would have to be repatriated back to Germany before he could be given a contract to work in the United States, according to the State Department. The saga of the U-234 and its passenger made one thing clear: If the War Department was going to start hiring German scientists on a regular basis, it needed to create a committee to deal with the intricacies of each specific case. Finally, on May 28, 1945, Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson weighed in on the classified subject of hiring Nazi scientists for U.S. military research.
Patterson wrote to the chief of staff to the president, Admiral William D. Leahy. “I strongly favor doing everything possible to utilize fully in the prosecution of the war against Japan all information that can be obtained from Germany or any other source,” Patterson wrote. He also expressed concern. “These men are enemies and it must be assumed they are capable of sabotaging our war effort. Bringing them to this country raises delicate questions, including the strong resentment of the American public, who might misunderstand the purpose of bringing them here and the treatment accorded them.” Patterson believed that the way to avoid foreseeable problems with the State Department, which handled visa approvals, was to involve the State Department in decision making now. Until a new committee was formed to deal specifically with Nazi scientists, Patterson suggested that the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC) be in charge.
Patterson’s letter to the president’s chief of staff, which was not shared with President Truman, prompted a meeting at the Pentagon by the War Department General Staff. The group agreed on a temporary policy. Contracts would be given to a limited number of German scientists “provided they were not known or alleged war criminals.” The scientists were to be placed in protective military custody in the United States, and they were to be returned to Germany as quickly as possible after their classified weapons work was complete.
A cable was sent to General Eisenhower, at SHAEF headquarters in Versailles, fulfilling his two-week-old request to be advised on longer-term policy. But what had been decided in Washington, D.C., had very little impact on the reality of what was going on in the European Theater with scientists who had spent years serving Adolf Hitler.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Hitler’s Doctors
During the war, physicians with the U.S. Army Air Forces heard rumors about cutting-edge research being developed by the Reich’s aviation doctors. The Luftwaffe was highly secretive about this research, and its aviation doctors did not regularly publish their work in medical journals. When they did, usually in a Nazi Party–sponsored journal like Aviation Medicine (Luftfahrtmedizin), the U.S. Army Air Forces would circumvent copyright law, translate the work into English, and republish it for their own flight surgeons to study. Areas in which the Nazis were known to be breaking new ground were air-sea rescue programs, high-altitude studies, and decompression sickness studies. In other words, Nazi doctors were supposedly leading the world’s research in how pilots performed in extreme cold, extreme altitude, and at extreme speeds.
At war’s end, there were two American military officers who were particularly interested in capturing the secrets of Nazi-sponsored aviation research. They were Major General Malcolm Grow, surgeon general of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe, and Lieutenant Colonel Harry Armstrong, chief surgeon of the Eighth Air Force. Both men were physicians, flight surgeons, and aviation medicine pioneers.
Before the war, Grow and Armstrong had cofounded the aviation medicine laboratory at Wright Field, where together they initiated many of the major medical advances that had kept U.S. airmen alive during the air war. At Wright Field, Armstrong perfected a pilot-friendly oxygen mask and conducted groundbreaking studies in pilot physiology associated with high-altitude flight. Grow developed the original flier’s flak vest—a twenty-two-pound armored jacket that could protect airmen against an
tiaircraft fire. Now, with the war over, Grow and Armstrong saw unprecedented opportunity in seizing everything the Nazis had been working on in aviation research so as to incorporate that knowledge into U.S. Army Air Force’s understanding.
According to an interview with Armstrong decades later, a plan was hatched during a meeting between himself and General Grow at the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe headquarters, in Saint-Germain, France. The two men knew that many of the Luftwaffe’s medical research institutions had been located in Berlin, and the plan was for Colonel Armstrong to go there and track down as many Luftwaffe doctors as he could find with the goal of enticing them to come to work for the U.S. Army Air Forces. As surgeon general, Grow could see to it that Armstrong was placed in the U.S-occupied zone in Berlin, as chief surgeon with the Army Air Forces contingent there. This would give Armstrong access to a city divided into U.S. and Russian zones. General Grow would return to Army Air Forces headquarters in Washington, D.C., where he would lobby superiors to authorize and pay for a new research laboratory exploiting what the Nazi doctors had been working on during the war. With the plan set in motion, Armstrong set out for Berlin.
The search proved difficult at first. It appeared as if every Luftwaffe doctor had fled Berlin. Armstrong had a list of 115 individuals he hoped to find. At the top of that list was one of the Reich’s most important aviation doctors, a German physiologist named Dr. Hubertus Strughold. Armstrong had a past personal connection with Dr. Strughold.
“The roots of that story go back to about 1934,” Armstrong explained in a U.S. Air Force oral history interview after the war, when both men were attending the annual convention of the Aero Medical Association, in Washington, D.C. The two men had much in common and “became quite good friends.” Both were pioneers in pilot physiology and had conducted groundbreaking high-altitude experiments on themselves. “We had some common bonds in the sense that he and I were almost exactly the same age, he and I were both publishing a book on aviation medicine that particular year, and he held exactly the same assignment in Germany that I held in the United States,” Armstrong explained. The two physicians met a second time, in 1937, at an international medical conference at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City. This was before the outbreak of war, Nazi Germany was not yet seen as an international pariah, and Dr. Strughold represented Germany at the conference. The two physicians had even more in common in 1937. Armstrong was director of the Aero Medical Research Laboratory at Wright Field, and Strughold was director of the Aviation Medical Research Institute of the Reich Air Ministry in Berlin. Their jobs were almost identical. Now, at war’s end, the two men had not seen one another in eight years, but Strughold had maintained the same high-ranking position for the duration of the war. If anyone knew the secrets of Luftwaffe medical research, Dr. Hubertus Strughold did. In Berlin, Harry Armstrong became determined to find him.
One of the first places Armstrong visited was Strughold’s former office at the Aviation Medical Research Institute, located in the fancy Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg. He was looking for leads. But the once-grand German military medical academy, with its formerly manicured lawns and groomed parks, had been bombed and was abandoned. Strughold’s office was empty. Armstrong continued his journey across Berlin, visiting universities that Strughold was known to be affiliated with. Every doctor or professor he interviewed gave a similar answer: They claimed to have no idea where Dr. Strughold and his large staff of Luftwaffe doctors had gone.
At the University of Berlin, Armstrong finally caught a break when he came across a respiratory specialist named Ulrich Luft, teaching a physiology class to a small group of students inside a wrecked classroom. Luft was unusual-looking, with a shock of red hair. He was tall, polite, and spoke perfect English, which he had learned from his Scottish mother. Ulrich Luft told Harry Armstrong that the Russians had taken everything from his university laboratory, including the faucets and sinks, and that he, Luft, was earning money in a local clinic treating war refugees suffering from typhoid fever. Armstrong saw opportunity in Luft’s predicament and confided in him, explaining that he was trying to locate German aviation doctors in order to hire them for U.S. Army–sponsored research. Armstrong said that, in particular, he was trying to find one man, Dr. Hubertus Strughold. Anyone who could help him would be paid. Dr. Luft told Armstrong that Strughold had been his former boss.
According to Luft, Strughold had dismissed his entire staff at the Aviation Medical Research Institute in the last month of the war. Luft told Armstrong that Strughold and several of his closest colleagues had gone to the University of Göttingen. They were still there now, working inside a research lab under British control. Armstrong thanked Luft and headed to Göttingen to find Strughold. Whatever the British were paying him, Armstrong figured he would be able to lure Strughold away because of their strong personal connection. There was also a great deal of money to be made pending the authorization of the new research laboratory. Armstrong and Grow’s plan meant hiring more than fifty Luftwaffe doctors. There was a lot of work to be had, not just for Strughold but for many of his colleagues as well.
A great drama was now set in motion owing to the fact that there was a second army officer also looking for Dr. Hubertus Strughold—a medical war crimes investigator and physician named Major Leopold Alexander. Dr. Strughold’s name had been placed on an army intelligence list of suspected war criminals with the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects, or CROWCASS. Major Alexander was on a mission to locate him.
It is not known if Armstrong was aware of the allegations against Strughold and chose to ignore them or if he was in the dark as to Strughold’s having been placed on the CROWCASS list. But as Armstrong forged ahead with plans to hire Dr. Strughold and to make him a partner in the U.S. Army Air Forces laboratory, he did so in direct violation of the policy that had just been set by the War Department. German scientists could be hired for U.S. military contract work “provided they were not known or alleged war criminals.” The CROWCASS allegations against Dr. Strughold were serious. They included capital war crimes.
The CROWCASS list came out of the immediate aftermath of the German surrender, when public pressure to prosecute Nazis accused of war crimes had reached fever pitch. On May 7, 1945, Life magazine published a story on the liberation of Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and other death camps, complete with graphic photographs. This was some of the first documentary evidence presented to the public. When confronted by these ghastly images, people all over the world expressed their outrage at the scale of atrocity that had been committed by the Nazis. Death camps, slave labor camps, the systematic extermination of entire groups of people—this defied the rules of war. The idea of having a war crimes trial appealed to the general public as a means of holding individual Nazis accountable for the wickedness of their crimes.
The group responsible for investigating war crimes was the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), located in London and founded by the Allies in 1942 (it was originally called the United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes). The War Crimes Commission was not responsible for hunting down the criminals; that job was delegated to SHAEF. The War Crimes Commission had three committees: Committee I dealt with lists, Committee II coordinated enforcement issues with SHAEF, and Committee III gave advice on legal points. The commission and its committees worked in concert with CROWCASS, also located in Paris, which was responsible for gathering and maintaining information about suspected war criminals.
After the fighting stopped, SHAEF sent war crimes investigators into the field to locate German doctors with the purpose of interrogating them. One of these investigators was Major Leopold Alexander, a Boston-based psychiatrist and neurologist and a physician with the U.S. Army. Dr. Alexander had been tending to wounded war veterans at a military hospital in England when he learned about his new assignment, just two weeks after the end of the war. With this undertaking, his whole life would change, as would his understanding of wha
t it meant to be a doctor and what it meant to be an American.
Dr. Alexander would unwittingly become one of the most important figures in the Nuremberg doctors’ trial. And he would inadvertently become a central player in one of the most dramatic events in the history of Operation Paperclip. That would take another seven years. For now, at war’s end, Dr. Alexander accepted his orders from SHAEF, boarded a military transport airplane in England, and headed for Germany to begin war crimes investigative work. His first stop was the Dachau concentration camp. Dr. Alexander did not yet know that it was inside Dachau, in the secret barracks called Experimental Cell Block Five, that Luftwaffe doctors had conducted some of the most barbaric and criminal medical experiments of the war.
On May 23, 1945, Dr. Alexander, 39, was seated inside an American military transport airplane flying into Munich when, approximately fifteen miles north of the airport, his plane circled low and he saw the liberated Dachau concentration camp for the first time. “Surviving inmates were waving and cheering at the plane and you could see that two American field hospitals were set up on the camp grounds,” Alexander wrote in his journal late at night. American aircraft brought fresh corned beef, potato salad, and real coffee by the ton to the newly liberated prisoners, many of whom were still too weak to leave the camp. The airplanes also brought doctors and nurses with the American Red Cross and the U.S. Army Typhus Commission and also, on occasion, a medical war crimes investigator like Dr. Alexander. The Dachau concentration camp was the first stop on a long list of Reich medical facilities and institutions that Dr. Alexander was scheduled to visit, locations where medical crimes were suspected of having taken place. With him, Dr. Alexander carried SHAEF instructions that granted him “full powers to investigate everything of interest” and also gave him the authority to “remove documents, equipment, or personnel as deemed necessary.”