A few months later, toward the end of 1973, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service announced that it was investigating Strughold and thirty-four other long-dormant cases of Nazi war criminal suspects living in the United States. That Strughold’s name was on the list, which was published in the New York Times, came as a shock to him. Strughold rehearsed a succinct response for reporters, the same as von Braun had when allegations arose. “I was cleared before I came here, before I was hired,” Strughold said.
Leaders of Jewish groups sprang into action, and Charles R. Allen Jr., the former senior editor of The Nation, writing for Jewish Currents, presented evidence about Strughold’s knowledge of human experiments. Allen had acquired the first public copy of the proceedings of the Nuremberg medical conference at the Hotel Deutscher Hof in 1942, which included a list of those in attendance. On this list were five other Nazi doctors who had worked in America under Operation Paperclip—Major General Walter Schreiber, Konrad Schäfer, Hans-Georg Clamann, Konrad Büttner, and Theodor Benzinger—but neither Charles R. Allen Jr. nor anyone else involved in the Strughold exposé appears to have recognized any of these names. Twenty years prior, Major General Walter Schreiber had been fired from the SAM and banished to Argentina, and Konrad Schäfer had been fired from the SAM and moved to New York. But when this story broke in 1973, Hans-Georg Clamann, Konrad Büttner, and Theodor Benzinger had all been gainfully employed by the U.S. government for decades and were now living the American dream.
The cloud of suspicion hung over Strughold. Ralph Blumenthal wrote a follow-up article in the New York Times, in November of 1974, describing the freezing experiments in detail. “Victims were forced to remain naked outdoors or in tanks of ice water. Tests were made periodically as they were freezing to death… the victims suffered agonizing deaths, after which they were dissected for data.” INS director Leonard Chapman made inquiries with the U.S. Air Force and was told that there was “no derogatory information” on Strughold. The case was closed, yet again.
Now more than ever Strughold felt the need to promote the fiction that he was anti-Nazi. In an air force oral history interview that took place two days after Blumenthal’s piece ran in the New York Times, Strughold told interviewer James C. Hasdorff that during the war he constantly feared for his life. He said that he had been written up on Hitler’s “so-called enemy list.” Strughold insisted that at one point, shortly after the attempted assassination of Hitler by Count Claus von Stauffenberg, in July 1944, he, Strughold, had to go into hiding because he was receiving death threats—that he went from farmhouse to farmhouse until it was finally “safe to return to Berlin.” This was an absurd distortion of reality. In the months after the Stauffenberg incident, in the winter of 1945, Hubertus Strughold had been promoted to full colonel in the Luftwaffe reserves.
Three years passed. The spotlight moved away. In a ceremony on January 19, 1977, a bronze plaque bearing a portrait of Dr. Hubertus Strughold was unveiled in San Antonio, Texas, in the foyer at the Aeromedical Library at the School of Aerospace Medicine. The library, which was the largest medical library in the U.S. Air Force, was being dedicated to Dr. Hubertus Strughold, the Father of Space Medicine. The air force promised that Strughold’s bronze plaque “will be permanently displayed in the foyer of the library.” But permanence is impossible to predict. Only time tells what lasts.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Legacy
In the 1960s, what Operation Paperclip left behind in the country it recruited from reveals contradictory truths about the program’s legacy. A watershed event occurred in 1963 when the West German courts opened the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. This was the first large-scale public trial of Holocaust perpetrators to take place inside Germany. There had been one Auschwitz trial previously, in Cracow, Poland, in 1947, in which a number of camp functionaries were tried, including Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, who was sentenced to death and hanged. But before the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, which ran through 1965, Germany had not conducted any major war crimes trials of its own. The Nuremberg trials, of course, were presided over by the Allied forces. At the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, 360 witnesses from 19 countries, including 211 Auschwitz survivors, would confront the accused. The judges hearing the case were all Germans.
Throughout the 1950s, Germany’s political and legal elite had opposed holding these kinds of trials for a variety of reasons, but mostly because it would likely generate additional trials. Just as it behooved U.S. military intelligence to keep the details of Operation Paperclip a secret, so it went for many German jurists. Thousand of their fellow citizens had committed heinous crimes during the war and were now living perfectly normal and sometimes very productive lives.
But in 1963, with the trial under way, for the first time since 1945 people in Germany were openly talking about gas chambers, death camps, and the Holocaust. “The trial was triggered by a letter I received,” recalled Hermann Langbein, the secretary of the International Auschwitz Committee. “It was mailed to me by an Auschwitz survivor. A German [named] Rögner.” At Auschwitz, where both Langbein and Rögner had been prisoners, the SS guards had made Rögner a kapo—someone who supervised slave laborers. “He was a kapo in an electrical detail,” explained Langbein, “a decent kapo. There were some decent kapos there [at Auschwitz].”
In Rögner’s letter to Langbein he wrote, “I know where Boger is.”
Boger was a loaded name to anyone who had survived Auschwitz. Survivors knew Boger as the Tiger of Auschwitz. Wilhelm Boger was a man of indisputable evil. Witnesses watched him murder children on the train ramps with his own hands. In Rögner’s letter to Langbein, he said that he’d filed murder charges against Boger with the German authorities in Stuttgart. In the spring of 1958, in his capacity as the secretary of the International Auschwitz Committee, Hermann Langbein followed up on Rögner’s tip and discovered that Boger was working as an accountant in a town outside Stuttgart. There, the Tiger of Auschwitz lived with his wife and children as a family man. “Bringing the man to justice was one long obstacle course,” said Hermann Langbein. But finally, after several months of delays, Boger was arrested.
There were twenty-two codefendants in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. With the exception of Richard Baer, the last commandant of Auschwitz, all of the former Auschwitz functionaries had been leading normal lives using their own names. Commandant Baer had been living as a groundskeeper on an estate near Hamburg under the alias Karl Neumann. Auschwitz adjunct Robert Mulka was working as a merchant in Hamburg; at the death camp, Mulka had served as Rudolph Höss’s right-hand man. Josef Klehr was living in Braunschweig, working at an auto body shop called Büssing & Sons; Klehr had been a medical orderly at Auschwitz and had killed thousands with lethal injections to the heart. Oswald Kaduk was living in Berlin working in a nursing home; at Auschwitz Kaduk beat people to death with his boot. SS pharmacist Dr. Victor Capesius was living in Göppingen, a wealthy pharmacy and beauty shop owner; at Auschwitz, Capesius had assisted the notorious Dr. Mengele in selecting individuals for medical experiments and had managed the death camp’s supply of Zyklon B. With the actions of all these men under scrutiny at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, Germany faced its past through the lens of its own jurists, not American judges. Many young Germans paid attention and began to wonder how so many war criminals could have gotten away with so many war crimes for so long.
More important to the Operation Paperclip legacy is that when Rögner filed his civil suit, he named another name: Dr. Otto Ambros. Ambros was listed as a criminal in Rögner’s complaint because he had been general manager of IG Farben’s Buna factory at Auschwitz. German prosecutors looked into the Ambros case and saw that Ambros had already been tried and convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg and that he had served two years and five and a half months in Landsberg Prison. They decided not to press charges against him a second time. In December 1963, however, Ambros was called to testify at the trial, which was held in the Römer, Frankfurt’s town hall. This brough
t Ambros into the limelight once again.
By 1964, Ambros had been a free man for thirteen years. He was an extremely wealthy, successful businessman. He socialized in Berlin among captains of industry and the professional elite. When the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial started, he was a board member of numerous major corporations in Germany, including AEG (Allgemeine Elekrizitats Gesellschaft), Germany’s General Electric; Hibernia Mining Company; and SKW (Süddeutsche Kalkstickstoff-Werke AG), a chemical company. On the witness stand at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, Ambros gave testimony that contradicted statements he had made during his own trial at Nuremberg in 1947. He also said that the conditions at the Auschwitz Buna factory had been “cozy,” and that the workers had enjoyed “good hospitality,” which many Auschwitz survivors found appalling in its offensiveness. While contradictory statements might have gone unnoticed by Frankfurt’s judges and jurors, there were a number of high-profile Israeli journalists in the courtroom who had become experts on the subject and caught Ambros’s lies. These journalists began at once to investigate Otto Ambros’s post-Nuremberg life. Here was a man who had been convicted of slavery and mass murder and had served very little time, considering the crimes. The Farben slaves at Auschwitz numbered sixty thousand, approximately thirty thousand of whom had been worked to death.
The journalists covering the trial were outraged by what they discovered. Otto Ambros now sat on the board of directors of numerous private corporations, but he was also on the board of directors of five companies that were owned by the Federal Republic of Germany. The exorbitant fees Ambros commanded in these positions were being paid by the German taxpayer. An Israeli female journalist, identified in Bundesarchiv documents only as “Frau Deutschkren,” became so incensed by the arrogance and hubris she saw in Otto Ambros’s postwar life that she wrote a letter to the state minister of finance, Ludger Westrick. That the Federal Republic of Germany was paying a “consulting fee” of 12,000 deutschmarks—about $120,000 in today’s dollars—to a convicted war criminal was shameful, Frau Deutschkren said. She demanded that Finance Minister Ludger Westrick meet with her. He agreed.
Frau Deutschkren could not have known that Otto Ambros and Finance Minister Ludger Westrick were business colleagues and apparently on very friendly terms, as state archive correspondence reveals. After the meeting, Westrick promised to look into the matter. Instead, he told Ambros what was going on. In an effort to hold on to his lucrative and prestigious positions on company boards, Ambros produced a summary of the allegations against himself and his Nuremberg codefendants, written by his attorney, a Mr. Duvall. Ambros asked Finance Minister Westrick to circulate this apologia around the various boards on his behalf. “As a short summary of our case [shows] you will clearly find out we are innocent,” Ambros explained, referring to charges of slavery and genocide that he and his Farben colleagues were convicted of at Nuremberg. “I and my colleagues are the victims of the Third Reich,” Ambros insisted. “The former government utilized the success of synthetic rubber which they used to make a profit. If there had been anything against me, then I would have never been released by the American military.” U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy had granted Ambros clemency under intense political pressure, a fact now being used by Ambros to suggest that he had been wrongly convicted at Nuremberg.
In a letter dated April 25, 1964, Ambros reminded Finance Minister Westrick that after he had been released from Landsberg Prison in 1951, “You helped me get back on the boards.” For this, Ambros said he was grateful. “I see it as an honor and a duty to [remain] there. I do this for pure altruistic reasons. I appreciate anything you can do.” In turn, Finance Minister Westrick wrote letters to the various boards on Ambros’s behalf. “Ambros was chosen for the board because of exceptional talent,” Westrick said. “In his field he is as wanted as Wernher von Braun. Everyone wants him. He can get a job anywhere he wants, anywhere in the world.”
The Israeli journalists refused to let up on Otto Ambros. They continued to write news stories about him, making it increasingly difficult for both the Federal Republic of Germany and the publicly traded companies on whose boards Ambros sat to maintain business associations with him. “Former War Criminal Found Refuge in Switzerland,” read a headline on June 6, 1964. The story detailed time that Ambros spent in the Swiss village of Pura. Ambros, furious, submitted a “statement of facts” to Labor Ministry state secretary, Ludwig Kattenstroth, in response. “I did not hide myself in Pura,” Ambros wrote. “It is my holiday home. And I have to say that when I bought the parcel there [in 1956] I informed the Swiss government by handing over the judgment at Nuremberg. I am only there for holidays… my children go there, and my friends. After consulting with my lawyer, I will never go back.” Then came the blaming. “The whole affair,” wrote Ambros, “has to be seen in the shadow of the Frankfurt trial. A certain faction of the press is trying to blame me.” The subtext was that “the Jews” were trying to blame him.
In late summer of 1964, AEG’s board members met and decided that they could no longer retain convicted war criminal Otto Ambros. Ambros then also quietly left at least two of the five taxpayer-funded consulting positions he held on Federal Republic of Germany boards.
In separate letters to Finance Minister Ludger Westrick and Deputy Finance Minister Dr. Dollinger, a new secret was revealed, though Ambros promised not to make public a piece of the information they shared. “Concerning the firms abroad where I am a permanent co-worker advisor,” Ambros wrote, “I won’t name them [publicly] because I don’t want to tip off any journalists who might cause trouble with my friends. You know about W. R. Grace in New York… and I hope I can stay with Hibernia Company. Concerning the firms in Israel,” Ambros wrote, “stating their names publicly would be very embarrassing because they are [run by] very public, well-respected persons in public positions that have actually been at my home and are aware of my position, how I behaved during the Reich, and they accept this.”
The “well-respected” public figures in Israel to whom Ambros referred have never been revealed. That Ambros also had worked for the American company W. R. Grace would take decades to come to light. When it did, in the early 1980s, the public would also learn that Otto Ambros worked as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Energy, formerly the Atomic Energy Commission, “to develop and operate a plant for the hydrogenation of coal in a scale of 4 million tons/year at the former IG Farben industrie.” That a convicted war criminal had been hired by the Department of Energy sparked indignation, and congressmen and journalists sought further details about Ambros’s U.S. government contract. In a statement to the press, the Department of Energy insisted that the paperwork had been lost.
The scandal was brought to the attention of President Ronald Reagan. Letters on White House stationery reveal that Deputy National Security Adviser James W. Nance briefed Reagan about how it was that the U.S. government could have hired Otto Ambros. Nance’s argument to the president was that many others hired him. “Dr. Ambros had contacts with numerous officials from Allied countries,” wrote Nance. “Dr. Ambros was a consultant to companies such as Distillers Limited of England; Pechiney, the French chemical giant; and Dow Europe of Switzerland. He was also the chairman of Knoll, a pharmaceutical subsidiary of the well known chemical corporation BASF.” President Reagan requested further information from the Department of Energy on its Ambros contract. Nance told the president, “The DOE and/or ERDA [The Energy Research and Development Administration] do not have records that would answer the questions you asked in the detail you requested. However, with Dr. Ambros’ involvement in the company shown and his special knowledge in hydrogenation of coal, we know there were productive contacts between Dr. Ambros and U.S. energy officials.” Even the president of the United States could not get complete information about an Operation Paperclip legacy.
In the midst of the scandal, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle telephoned Ambros at his home in Mannheim, Germany, and asked Ambros about his 1948 convict
ion at Nuremberg for mass murder and slavery.
“This happened a very long time ago,” Ambros told the reporter. “It involved Jews. We do not think about it anymore.”
The third act of Dr. Kurt Blome’s life contradicts the idea that the Soviets were desperately trying to hire Hitler’s former biological weapons maker. In February 1962, a group of Communist physicians from Karl Marx University, in Leipzig, East Germany, sent an open letter “to all the doctors and dentists living in Dortmund,” as well as many widely distributed newspapers “regarding the matter of the Dortmund physician, Dr. Kurt Blome.” The letter listed the war crimes Blome had been accused of at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial and stated that everyone in the town of Dortmund should “know who he is and what he did to the Jewish people.” The Leipzig doctors identified the doctor in Dortmund as “the Deputy Surgeon General of the Third Reich.” They wrote that Western German medical colleagues should distance themselves “from this man who dares to call himself a doctor.” Blome was contacted by the East German radio station, Radio Berlin International, for comment. He agreed, and an interview was arranged for February 22, 1962.