June 27, 2026 • 36 mins
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.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Last Saturday, we re released our episode on
Operation paper Clip. Today's Classic is our follow up to
that episode, which covered four people who were brought to
the US under this program.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
This originally came out May twenty six, twenty twenty one.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Last time we.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Talked about Operation paper Clip, also known as Project paper Clip,
which was the effort to bring German scientists, engineers, and
other specialists to the United States after World War Two.
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
(00:59):
to in the United States under military supervision. But under
Operation paper Clip, most of those specialists that were brought
to the US actually got the opportunity to become US citizens.
About one thousand, six hundred total specialists entered the US
through this program, and more than ninety percent of the
ones who arrived between nineteen forty five and nineteen fifty
(01:21):
two went on to become US citizens. For the most part,
they were recruiting relatively young folks. They were mostly under
the age of forty when they left Germany, and although
most of them started out working for a branch of
the military, about ten percent were initially hired at the
Department of Commerce. So, as we talked about last time,
(01:41):
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 Objectives Agency report quote, such
membership would due to exigencies which influenced the lives of
(02:03):
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 they quote, good Germans, and that
they would all be pre screened to confirm that they
were not ardent Nazis. So it's possible that many or
maybe even most of the people who came to the
(02:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
To evade detection.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
The people and agencies who were involved with running this
program intentionally obscured the most damning details from candidate's 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.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Part of it.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
It turned out just talking about the program was a
whole episode by itself. So today we are going to
talk about a few of the most famous and infamous
paper clippers, some of whom were connected to some truly
horrific war crimes. So probably the most famous of all
of the Operation paper Clips specialists was Werner von Braun.
His thesis for his PhD in physics had involved rocket
(03:21):
thrust engines, which came out of work that he did
at Kumersdorf Army proving grounds under another future paper clipper officer,
Walter R. Dornberger. This work had been funded by the
German Army. Although von Brown'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
(03:44):
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 brain child. We were
interested solely in exploring space. It was simply a question
with us of how the golden cow could be milked
most successfully. By nineteen thirty seven, the German Army had
(04:05):
outgrown the coomber Storf facility and needed a more remote
location to conduct rocket tests, so the team moved to
Pinamunda on the coast of the Baltic Sea. Von Braun
became the technical director at Pinamunda at the age of
just twenty five. That same year, he also accepted an
invitation to join the Nazi Party. Later he also joined
(04:27):
the Schutzstaffel or SS, where he ultimately became a Sternbanfur
or Major. Von Brown and the team at Pinamunda developed
the weapon that would become known as the V two
translated from German as the Vengeance Weapon two, which was
the first long range ballistic missile. In nineteen forty three,
(04:47):
the Allies bombed this facility, so all the weapons development
and production operation there were moved underground, using an old
mind to house a facility that became known as Mittelwerk,
who were being imprisoned at the middlbau Dora concentration camp
complex were forced to work in truly horrifying conditions, including
(05:08):
digging out the tunnels by hand, with nowhere to sleep
and no hygiene facilities. Most of the people being held
at Middlebow Dohra were political prisoners from multiple countries, especially
the Soviet Union, Poland and France. Jewish and Romany prisoners
began to be deported to the camp after the spring
and fall of nineteen forty four. The use of enslaved
(05:31):
labor at Middlewk 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
paper Clip in the National Security State, more people died
building V two rockets than were actually killed through their
use as a weapon. Between August of nineteen forty three
(05:54):
and April of nineteen forty five, at least sixty thousand
people were forced to work on these weapons, and at
least twenty thousand of them died of things like starvation, illness, executions, suicides,
and just being worked to death.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
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. Although many of
(06:33):
the staff that had worked at Pinamunda were transferred to
Middlverk and worked on site there, Werner von Brown actually
worked elsewhere, but he did tour.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
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 Middle Bawdora concentration camp complex,
and he acknowledged the appalling conditions and the use of
enslaved labor in that testimony. In nineteen forty four, the
(07:04):
Gestapo arrested von Brown 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 Brown wasn't
(07:26):
a quote real Nazi and had only been involved in
the Nazi Party in the ess out of self preservation
or even opportunistic motives, or because he had perhaps been coerced.
In the spring of nineteen forty five, as Germany was
rapidly losing ground in the war, the Soviet Red Army
was advancing toward von Brown's location. He and Dornberger both
(07:49):
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 college fled and went into hiding. Even though
Hitler had ordered the destruction of anything that could be
useful to the Allies, von Brown hid his research work,
and he later went back and retrieved it. On May second,
(08:12):
nineteen forty five, Von Brown, Dornberger, and one hundred twenty
six principal engineers from MIDDELVK surrendered to an American gi
They had sent von Broun'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
(08:33):
happening at middlelvk's secret. 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 Pinamunda,
but the Americans got the rocket engineers. What could be
more revolting and more inexcusable? How and why was this
(08:55):
allowed to happen. Once von Braun got to the US,
he worked at White Sands pre Ground in New Mexico,
where he helped American forces learn about and learned to
use the V two rockets that he had developed. In
nineteen forty seven, when he was thirty five, he returned
to Germany to marry Maria Luise von Quisdrop, who was
his eighteen year old second cousin. After his return, he
(09:18):
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 vtwo. The Redstone
was a ballistic missile that could carry a nuclear payload.
Van Brown started formally proposing plans for space exploration around
nineteen fifty four, but the Army really wanted him to
(09:39):
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
Junior became the first American in space in nineteen sixty one,
the launch vehicle was a modified Redstone rocket, which von
Brown had helped to develop. He also led the team
(10:01):
that developed the Saturn five rocket for the Apollo project.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
In addition to being such a major part of the
space program, von Brown became a public face for space exploration.
In nineteen fifty five, 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 nineteen fifties and sixties, and was also a
(10:26):
technical advisor for Disney. He wrote multiple books, and he
was on the cover of Time magazine in nineteen fifty eight.
One of the reasons that there are still some question
marks about von Brown's motivations and decisions before and during
World War Two is that he died in nineteen seventy seven.
At that point, most of the documents related to Operation
(10:47):
Paperclip were still classified. That was also before the Office
of Special Investigations opened its investigation into Von Brown's colleague
Arthur Rudolph, which we mentioned in the previous episode. He'll
come up again later.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
The OSI actually hadn't even been established yet when Von
Brown died. While there had definitely been vocal critics of
Project paper Clip for most of its existence, in nineteen
seventy seven, there was still a general belief that ardent
Nazis and war criminals had been kept out of the program,
and Von Brown himself had critics as well. As one example,
(11:22):
Tom Larr's satirical song Verner von Brown included such lyrics
as once the rockets are up, who cares where they
come down? That's not my department, says Vernervon Brown. But
in general, after his death, Von Brown was widely eulogized.
President Jimmy Carter called him a man of bold vision
and said, quote two millions of Americans, Verner von Brown's
(11:44):
name was inextricably linked to our exploration of 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 today. Historians and biographers have argued that
von Brown was everything from an opportunist to join the
(12:06):
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 Middleverk, and that consequently he was
at just a minimum complicit in all of that. He
(12:28):
was also present for at least one meeting in which
Middleverk's general director, George Rickey, planned out the acquisition of
French prisoners of war to use this forced labor. He
also developed a weapon that Germany deployed against allies of
the United States, killing at least five thousand people. But
then he became a US citizen in nineteen fifty five.
(12:50):
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. Arthur Rudolph was
(13:11):
born in Germany on November ninth, nineteen oh six, and
he and Berner von Brown later became colleagues at Pina Munda.
After the Allies bombed Pina Munda, Rudolph became the operations
director and the deputy production manager at the underground middle
work facility. In the prior episode on Operation paper Clip,
we talked about the criteria for determining who was a
(13:34):
so called ardent Nazi, because ardent Nazis were supposed to
be kept out of the program, and ardent Nazi was
generally defined as someone who had joined the Nazi Party
before Hitler had declared himself fewer, who was a leader
in the party or in one of its affiliated organizations
like the SS or the Essay, who had been convicted
(13:55):
in a postwar d notification court, or who had been
a accused or convicted of war crimes. So Rudolph joined
the Nazi Party also known as the National Socialist German
Workers Party and then abbreviated in German as NSDAP in
nineteen thirty one. That was six years before Werner von
(14:17):
Brown joined and three years before Hitler declared himself Bureer
in the early nineteen thirties, He had also been in
the Essay Reserve and in other Nazi connected organizations. When
Rudolph was first screened for potential inclusion in Operation Paperclip,
his interrogator made this notation quote one hundred percent Nazi.
(14:39):
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. When rudol jo Off was interrogated as part
(15:01):
of this process, he gave his reasons for joining the
Nazi Party this way quote. Until nineteen thirty, I sympathized
with the Social Democratic Party and voted for it, and
was a member of a Social Democratic Union. After nineteen
thirty the economical situation became so serious that it appeared
to me to be headed for a catastrophe. I really
became unemployed in nineteen thirty two. The great amount of
(15:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Rudolph was one of the first German specialists to enter
the US under Operation paper Clip. He arrived in nineteen
forty five, and his wife and his daughter followed him later.
Like Werner von Brown, 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
(16:18):
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. However, during an investigation
(16:41):
in nineteen fifty three, 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 danger to a fellow employee who did
(17:01):
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. So Rudolph became
(17:23):
a US citizen on November eleventh, nineteen fifty four. His
work at NASA included being one of the primary architects
of the Saturn five rocket. He retired from NASA in
nineteen sixty nine, 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.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
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 nineteen eighty. This investigation
found that officials in both the US and West Germany
had described Rudolph as a war criminal. Rudolf was also
(18:05):
questioned in nineteen forty seven as officials were preparing to
try nineteen 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 Middelvk. He had also personally received
reports about how many prisoners were available to work, how
(18:29):
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. 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
(18:50):
also a clear pay per trail connecting him to the
use of enslaved labor and prisoner abuses at Middelverk. He
ultimately agreed to renounce his US citizen liasonship and return
to Germany rather than face a trial for all of this.
At the time he was seventy seven, the West German
government wasn't really pleased about this, since US officials took
(19:11):
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 statue of limitations
was murder, and there wasn't enough evidence to try Rudolph
on that specific charge.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
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
(19:47):
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 Middleverk. Rudolf never returned to
North America, and he died in nineteen ninety six. Some
(20:09):
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 Brown's colleagues, George Rickhai,
Director General at MIDDELVK. Rickai's background was a lot like Rudolph's.
He had joined the Nazi Party in nineteen thirty one
and went to work for the Reich Ministry for Armament
(20:31):
and Munitions. Rickkai had become an expert in underground construction.
He helped design the underground V two factory at Middlverk
and Hitler's underground Bunker, as well as other facilities. To
be very clear, though, that underground middle work facility had
virtually no ventilation and no plumbing. People used oil barrels
(20:51):
as toilets, and for most of the facilities 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.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
He specialized in being horrible. While Rudolf 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, Rickhai was the person who directly oversaw that labor.
He coordinated with the SS to essentially rent people from
camps at Middelverk. The rate the SS charged was two
(21:28):
to three Reichs Marks per person per day.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
But as was the case with von Brown and Rudolph,
Rickai's work on the V two program made him an
attractive candidate for Operation paper Clip, even though by his
party membership status alone he fit the definition of an
ardent Nazi. Like Rudolf, he had joined the party way
before Hitler had come to power. He arrived in the
(21:54):
US in nineteen forty five, though, and started working for
the US Strategic Bombing Survey and the US Art Army
Air Forces. However, in the summer of nineteen forty six,
Rickhai and paper clipper Albert Patten started a black market
operation at wright Field, where about one hundred forty of
the two hundred plus paper clippers in the US were
(22:15):
then working. Aircraft engineer Herman Nelson seems to have gotten
into a personal dispute with them. One night, when Rickai
and Patten were playing a late night poker game in
their housing facility, which was known as Hilltop, Nilsen got
frustrated with their noisiness and told them to keep it down.
Patten and Rickai refused, and Rickhai made an offensive joke
(22:36):
that alluded to Nazi atrocities against Jewish people. In response,
Nelson filed a complaint with Colonel Donald L. Putt, saying
that Patten was an ardent Nazi and an Essay member,
and that Ricky had orchestrated the mass hanging at Middelverk
that was meant to deter sabotage. Putt doesn't seem to
have taken any action on this, but Nelson also vented
(22:58):
his frustrations in a letter to a friend in New
York and that caught the eye of the censors who
were reading the paper Clippers mail. 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 rick Heai's name on an employee contact list
(23:21):
at Middelwerk. An investigator in Germany also spotted rick Heai's
name in an article about his application for US citizenship.
So all of this came together and Ricky 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
(23:42):
international trials that were held at Nuremberg. When Ricky was indicted,
he had just signed a new five year contract to
work with the Army.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Rickhai became one of nineteen defendants in the Dora Nordhausen
trial that was held at Dachau. Of those nineteen, Rickai
was the only one who had worked at the Middle
Verk 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,
(24:14):
there were other researchers, including Vernon von Brown, who submitted
affidavits in his defense, there wasn't clear written documentation to
connect Ricki to war crimes carried out at the facility.
Rickai was one of four people who were acquitted, and
the Army then classified the records from the trial.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
We will talk about one more paper clipper after another
quick sponsor break. So far, everyone we've talked about in
this episode was connected to the Middleverirk weapons factory. They
had kind of interconnected careers with one another in Germany.
(24:57):
And while there were a lot of rocket scientists and
engineers from that facility who became part of Operation paper Clip,
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
(25:18):
one of those. Hubertas 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 paper Clip. He became a
US citizen in nineteen fifty six. After joining NASA, Strughold
(25:41):
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
(26:02):
awards and honors and buildings and things like that named
after him because of his just truly enormous contributions to this.
In terms of his work in Nazi Germany, for ten
of the twelve 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
(26:23):
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. Strughold was one of the
very few paper clippers who never joined the Nazi Party,
and there is some evidence that he was anti Nazi
(26:44):
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 crocust List. We mentioned that
list in the previous episode. This was a giant compilation
of suspect did war criminals. It was a multi volume
list containing the names of about sixty thousand people. Some
(27:07):
were known to have committed war crimes, some were suspected.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Some weren't really suspected. They were wanted for questioning or.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
As witnesses, and as we discussed last time, this list
could be all over the place 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.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
While Strughold was director of the Aviation Medical Research Institute, Luftwaffa,
doctors and members of the SS were carrying out experiments
on human beings, and some of these experiments were related
to Struggold's field of work. Many German pilots who had
been shot down over the English Channel during the Battle
of Britain in nineteen forty had survived the initial crash
(27:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
Other experiments that Luftfaffa 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
(28:31):
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. Struggold 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.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Struggle definitely knew about at least some of this research,
particularly the freezing experiments. He attended a conference in nineteen
forty two 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
(29:12):
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. However,
there are a lot of unanswered questions about exactly how
(29:33):
much Strugghold 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, and some early interrogations, he and other
researchers generally penned all these human experiments on doctor Sigmund Rascher,
(29:54):
who had been involved in the hypoxia and hypothermia experiments.
Rasher and his wife had both been executed by order
of Heinrich Himmler in nineteen forty five. Strugghold described Rascher
as quote fringe, and he and others described these experiments
sort of as the work of one deranged, clearly unethical man.
(30:15):
But it became clear that Rascher didn't do this work
alone and that many other Luftwaffa doctors had been directly involved.
Many of the experiments had been approved by Heinrich Himmler
or by high ranking Luftwaffa officers, and they had been
supervised by Luftwaffa doctors and by people who worked at
other German research institutes, including the Institute for Aviation Medicine
(30:38):
in Munich. Some of the people who ran these experiments.
Had also been close working colleagues with Hubert as Strughold,
including co authoring papers with him.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
But at the same time, that's pretty circumstantial enough people
connected to Strugghold 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
nineteen forty two, but we don't know whether he actually
(31:11):
did or whether he took any action based on that knowledge.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Struggold was investigated in connection to this several times. The
first was under Operation paper Clip, but at this point
it's obviously hard to trust that the reports created for
Operation paper Clip were thorough or complete. The second was
in nineteen fifty eight after a magazine article alleged that
Strughold had done research on human subjects. That investigation was
(31:37):
dropped after the Air Force released a statement that he
had already been investigated.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
In nineteen seventy three, THENS opened an investigation into thirty
five suspected war criminals, and Strugghold was one of them,
but the ions 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 nineteen eighty three,
(32:06):
but Strugghold died in nineteen eighty six, so at that
point that investigation was closed. 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
(32:27):
nineteen forty three 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 nineteen ninety three, so years
after Strughold's death. Regardless of what his true level of
involvement was in Nazi experiments onto human beings, these allegations
(32:53):
and the investigations really affected Strughold's reputation. Most of the
honors and awards that used to be named after him
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 Brown's influence on space exploration,
(33:17):
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 Brown, read about it
all day. It's a lot harder to find information on
h purchased Strughold. He still has his staunch defenders, though,
who point out that there's just no solid evidence directly
(33:37):
connecting him to some of these experiments. They point out
various flaws and people who have tried to make those connections,
some of which have like conflated two different German research
institutes into one thing when they really weren't.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
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 sixteen hundred specialists brought into the US under Operation
paper Clip. Annie Jacobson's book Operation paper Clip, which was
one of the sources for these two episodes, focuses on
just twenty one of them. So even though that is
(34:12):
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 paper Clip was using to describe the specialists it
was recruiting. I every time we look at these and
really any you know, post World War two discussions of
(34:35):
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 G. Yeah,
it places it so deeply in my own lifetime that
I have to remind myself that like, this was not
as long ago as we think of often.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Right right well. And then in addition to that, at
one of the things that just kept continually striking me
as I was working on this and the earlier episode
is that after World War Two, there was this whole
effort to just denazify Germany and to remove Nazis from
positions of power and to try to place people into
(35:20):
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. We also said in the previous
episode that the United States was not the only person
(35:42):
that was exploiting 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. Thanks so much for
(36:03):
joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send
us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. Last Saturday, we re released our episode on
Operation paper Clip. Today's Classic is our follow up to
that episode, which covered four people who were brought to
the US under this program.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
This originally came out May twenty six, twenty twenty one.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Last time we.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Talked about Operation paper Clip, also known as Project paper Clip,
which was the effort to bring German scientists, engineers, and
other specialists to the United States after World War Two.
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
(00:59):
to in the United States under military supervision. But under
Operation paper Clip, most of those specialists that were brought
to the US actually got the opportunity to become US citizens.
About one thousand, six hundred total specialists entered the US
through this program, and more than ninety percent of the
ones who arrived between nineteen forty five and nineteen fifty
(01:21):
two went on to become US citizens. For the most part,
they were recruiting relatively young folks. They were mostly under
the age of forty when they left Germany, and although
most of them started out working for a branch of
the military, about ten percent were initially hired at the
Department of Commerce. So, as we talked about last time,
(01:41):
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 Objectives Agency report quote, such
membership would due to exigencies which influenced the lives of
(02:03):
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 they quote, good Germans, and that
they would all be pre screened to confirm that they
were not ardent Nazis. So it's possible that many or
maybe even most of the people who came to the
(02:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
To evade detection.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
The people and agencies who were involved with running this
program intentionally obscured the most damning details from candidate's 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.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Part of it.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
It turned out just talking about the program was a
whole episode by itself. So today we are going to
talk about a few of the most famous and infamous
paper clippers, some of whom were connected to some truly
horrific war crimes. So probably the most famous of all
of the Operation paper Clips specialists was Werner von Braun.
His thesis for his PhD in physics had involved rocket
(03:21):
thrust engines, which came out of work that he did
at Kumersdorf Army proving grounds under another future paper clipper officer,
Walter R. Dornberger. This work had been funded by the
German Army. Although von Brown'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
(03:44):
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 brain child. We were
interested solely in exploring space. It was simply a question
with us of how the golden cow could be milked
most successfully. By nineteen thirty seven, the German Army had
(04:05):
outgrown the coomber Storf facility and needed a more remote
location to conduct rocket tests, so the team moved to
Pinamunda on the coast of the Baltic Sea. Von Braun
became the technical director at Pinamunda at the age of
just twenty five. That same year, he also accepted an
invitation to join the Nazi Party. Later he also joined
(04:27):
the Schutzstaffel or SS, where he ultimately became a Sternbanfur
or Major. Von Brown and the team at Pinamunda developed
the weapon that would become known as the V two
translated from German as the Vengeance Weapon two, which was
the first long range ballistic missile. In nineteen forty three,
(04:47):
the Allies bombed this facility, so all the weapons development
and production operation there were moved underground, using an old
mind to house a facility that became known as Mittelwerk,
who were being imprisoned at the middlbau Dora concentration camp
complex were forced to work in truly horrifying conditions, including
(05:08):
digging out the tunnels by hand, with nowhere to sleep
and no hygiene facilities. Most of the people being held
at Middlebow Dohra were political prisoners from multiple countries, especially
the Soviet Union, Poland and France. Jewish and Romany prisoners
began to be deported to the camp after the spring
and fall of nineteen forty four. The use of enslaved
(05:31):
labor at Middlewk 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
paper Clip in the National Security State, more people died
building V two rockets than were actually killed through their
use as a weapon. Between August of nineteen forty three
(05:54):
and April of nineteen forty five, at least sixty thousand
people were forced to work on these weapons, and at
least twenty thousand of them died of things like starvation, illness, executions, suicides,
and just being worked to death.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
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. Although many of
(06:33):
the staff that had worked at Pinamunda were transferred to
Middlverk and worked on site there, Werner von Brown actually
worked elsewhere, but he did tour.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
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 Middle Bawdora concentration camp complex,
and he acknowledged the appalling conditions and the use of
enslaved labor in that testimony. In nineteen forty four, the
(07:04):
Gestapo arrested von Brown 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 Brown wasn't
(07:26):
a quote real Nazi and had only been involved in
the Nazi Party in the ess out of self preservation
or even opportunistic motives, or because he had perhaps been coerced.
In the spring of nineteen forty five, as Germany was
rapidly losing ground in the war, the Soviet Red Army
was advancing toward von Brown's location. He and Dornberger both
(07:49):
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 college fled and went into hiding. Even though
Hitler had ordered the destruction of anything that could be
useful to the Allies, von Brown hid his research work,
and he later went back and retrieved it. On May second,
(08:12):
nineteen forty five, Von Brown, Dornberger, and one hundred twenty
six principal engineers from MIDDELVK surrendered to an American gi
They had sent von Broun'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
(08:33):
happening at middlelvk's secret. 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 Pinamunda,
but the Americans got the rocket engineers. What could be
more revolting and more inexcusable? How and why was this
(08:55):
allowed to happen. Once von Braun got to the US,
he worked at White Sands pre Ground in New Mexico,
where he helped American forces learn about and learned to
use the V two rockets that he had developed. In
nineteen forty seven, when he was thirty five, he returned
to Germany to marry Maria Luise von Quisdrop, who was
his eighteen year old second cousin. After his return, he
(09:18):
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 vtwo. The Redstone
was a ballistic missile that could carry a nuclear payload.
Van Brown started formally proposing plans for space exploration around
nineteen fifty four, but the Army really wanted him to
(09:39):
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
Junior became the first American in space in nineteen sixty one,
the launch vehicle was a modified Redstone rocket, which von
Brown had helped to develop. He also led the team
(10:01):
that developed the Saturn five rocket for the Apollo project.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
In addition to being such a major part of the
space program, von Brown became a public face for space exploration.
In nineteen fifty five, 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 nineteen fifties and sixties, and was also a
(10:26):
technical advisor for Disney. He wrote multiple books, and he
was on the cover of Time magazine in nineteen fifty eight.
One of the reasons that there are still some question
marks about von Brown's motivations and decisions before and during
World War Two is that he died in nineteen seventy seven.
At that point, most of the documents related to Operation
(10:47):
Paperclip were still classified. That was also before the Office
of Special Investigations opened its investigation into Von Brown's colleague
Arthur Rudolph, which we mentioned in the previous episode. He'll
come up again later.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
The OSI actually hadn't even been established yet when Von
Brown died. While there had definitely been vocal critics of
Project paper Clip for most of its existence, in nineteen
seventy seven, there was still a general belief that ardent
Nazis and war criminals had been kept out of the program,
and Von Brown himself had critics as well. As one example,
(11:22):
Tom Larr's satirical song Verner von Brown included such lyrics
as once the rockets are up, who cares where they
come down? That's not my department, says Vernervon Brown. But
in general, after his death, Von Brown was widely eulogized.
President Jimmy Carter called him a man of bold vision
and said, quote two millions of Americans, Verner von Brown's
(11:44):
name was inextricably linked to our exploration of 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 today. Historians and biographers have argued that
von Brown was everything from an opportunist to join the
(12:06):
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 Middleverk, and that consequently he was
at just a minimum complicit in all of that. He
(12:28):
was also present for at least one meeting in which
Middleverk's general director, George Rickey, planned out the acquisition of
French prisoners of war to use this forced labor. He
also developed a weapon that Germany deployed against allies of
the United States, killing at least five thousand people. But
then he became a US citizen in nineteen fifty five.
(12:50):
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. Arthur Rudolph was
(13:11):
born in Germany on November ninth, nineteen oh six, and
he and Berner von Brown later became colleagues at Pina Munda.
After the Allies bombed Pina Munda, Rudolph became the operations
director and the deputy production manager at the underground middle
work facility. In the prior episode on Operation paper Clip,
we talked about the criteria for determining who was a
(13:34):
so called ardent Nazi, because ardent Nazis were supposed to
be kept out of the program, and ardent Nazi was
generally defined as someone who had joined the Nazi Party
before Hitler had declared himself fewer, who was a leader
in the party or in one of its affiliated organizations
like the SS or the Essay, who had been convicted
(13:55):
in a postwar d notification court, or who had been
a accused or convicted of war crimes. So Rudolph joined
the Nazi Party also known as the National Socialist German
Workers Party and then abbreviated in German as NSDAP in
nineteen thirty one. That was six years before Werner von
(14:17):
Brown joined and three years before Hitler declared himself Bureer
in the early nineteen thirties, He had also been in
the Essay Reserve and in other Nazi connected organizations. When
Rudolph was first screened for potential inclusion in Operation Paperclip,
his interrogator made this notation quote one hundred percent Nazi.
(14:39):
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. When rudol jo Off was interrogated as part
(15:01):
of this process, he gave his reasons for joining the
Nazi Party this way quote. Until nineteen thirty, I sympathized
with the Social Democratic Party and voted for it, and
was a member of a Social Democratic Union. After nineteen
thirty the economical situation became so serious that it appeared
to me to be headed for a catastrophe. I really
became unemployed in nineteen thirty two. The great amount of
(15:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Rudolph was one of the first German specialists to enter
the US under Operation paper Clip. He arrived in nineteen
forty five, and his wife and his daughter followed him later.
Like Werner von Brown, 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
(16:18):
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. However, during an investigation
(16:41):
in nineteen fifty three, 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 danger to a fellow employee who did
(17:01):
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. So Rudolph became
(17:23):
a US citizen on November eleventh, nineteen fifty four. His
work at NASA included being one of the primary architects
of the Saturn five rocket. He retired from NASA in
nineteen sixty nine, 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.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
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 nineteen eighty. This investigation
found that officials in both the US and West Germany
had described Rudolph as a war criminal. Rudolf was also
(18:05):
questioned in nineteen forty seven as officials were preparing to
try nineteen 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 Middelvk. He had also personally received
reports about how many prisoners were available to work, how
(18:29):
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. 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
(18:50):
also a clear pay per trail connecting him to the
use of enslaved labor and prisoner abuses at Middelverk. He
ultimately agreed to renounce his US citizen liasonship and return
to Germany rather than face a trial for all of this.
At the time he was seventy seven, the West German
government wasn't really pleased about this, since US officials took
(19:11):
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 statue of limitations
was murder, and there wasn't enough evidence to try Rudolph
on that specific charge.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
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
(19:47):
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 Middleverk. Rudolf never returned to
North America, and he died in nineteen ninety six. Some
(20:09):
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 Brown's colleagues, George Rickhai,
Director General at MIDDELVK. Rickai's background was a lot like Rudolph's.
He had joined the Nazi Party in nineteen thirty one
and went to work for the Reich Ministry for Armament
(20:31):
and Munitions. Rickkai had become an expert in underground construction.
He helped design the underground V two factory at Middlverk
and Hitler's underground Bunker, as well as other facilities. To
be very clear, though, that underground middle work facility had
virtually no ventilation and no plumbing. People used oil barrels
(20:51):
as toilets, and for most of the facilities 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.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
He specialized in being horrible. While Rudolf 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, Rickhai was the person who directly oversaw that labor.
He coordinated with the SS to essentially rent people from
camps at Middelverk. The rate the SS charged was two
(21:28):
to three Reichs Marks per person per day.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
But as was the case with von Brown and Rudolph,
Rickai's work on the V two program made him an
attractive candidate for Operation paper Clip, even though by his
party membership status alone he fit the definition of an
ardent Nazi. Like Rudolf, he had joined the party way
before Hitler had come to power. He arrived in the
(21:54):
US in nineteen forty five, though, and started working for
the US Strategic Bombing Survey and the US Art Army
Air Forces. However, in the summer of nineteen forty six,
Rickhai and paper clipper Albert Patten started a black market
operation at wright Field, where about one hundred forty of
the two hundred plus paper clippers in the US were
(22:15):
then working. Aircraft engineer Herman Nelson seems to have gotten
into a personal dispute with them. One night, when Rickai
and Patten were playing a late night poker game in
their housing facility, which was known as Hilltop, Nilsen got
frustrated with their noisiness and told them to keep it down.
Patten and Rickai refused, and Rickhai made an offensive joke
(22:36):
that alluded to Nazi atrocities against Jewish people. In response,
Nelson filed a complaint with Colonel Donald L. Putt, saying
that Patten was an ardent Nazi and an Essay member,
and that Ricky had orchestrated the mass hanging at Middelverk
that was meant to deter sabotage. Putt doesn't seem to
have taken any action on this, but Nelson also vented
(22:58):
his frustrations in a letter to a friend in New
York and that caught the eye of the censors who
were reading the paper Clippers mail. 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 rick Heai's name on an employee contact list
(23:21):
at Middelwerk. An investigator in Germany also spotted rick Heai's
name in an article about his application for US citizenship.
So all of this came together and Ricky 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
(23:42):
international trials that were held at Nuremberg. When Ricky was indicted,
he had just signed a new five year contract to
work with the Army.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Rickhai became one of nineteen defendants in the Dora Nordhausen
trial that was held at Dachau. Of those nineteen, Rickai
was the only one who had worked at the Middle
Verk 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,
(24:14):
there were other researchers, including Vernon von Brown, who submitted
affidavits in his defense, there wasn't clear written documentation to
connect Ricki to war crimes carried out at the facility.
Rickai was one of four people who were acquitted, and
the Army then classified the records from the trial.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
We will talk about one more paper clipper after another
quick sponsor break. So far, everyone we've talked about in
this episode was connected to the Middleverirk weapons factory. They
had kind of interconnected careers with one another in Germany.
(24:57):
And while there were a lot of rocket scientists and
engineers from that facility who became part of Operation paper Clip,
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
(25:18):
one of those. Hubertas 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 paper Clip. He became a
US citizen in nineteen fifty six. After joining NASA, Strughold
(25:41):
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
(26:02):
awards and honors and buildings and things like that named
after him because of his just truly enormous contributions to this.
In terms of his work in Nazi Germany, for ten
of the twelve 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
(26:23):
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. Strughold was one of the
very few paper clippers who never joined the Nazi Party,
and there is some evidence that he was anti Nazi
(26:44):
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 crocust List. We mentioned that
list in the previous episode. This was a giant compilation
of suspect did war criminals. It was a multi volume
list containing the names of about sixty thousand people. Some
(27:07):
were known to have committed war crimes, some were suspected.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Some weren't really suspected. They were wanted for questioning or.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
As witnesses, and as we discussed last time, this list
could be all over the place 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.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
While Strughold was director of the Aviation Medical Research Institute, Luftwaffa,
doctors and members of the SS were carrying out experiments
on human beings, and some of these experiments were related
to Struggold's field of work. Many German pilots who had
been shot down over the English Channel during the Battle
of Britain in nineteen forty had survived the initial crash
(27:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
Other experiments that Luftfaffa 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
(28:31):
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. Struggold 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.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Struggle definitely knew about at least some of this research,
particularly the freezing experiments. He attended a conference in nineteen
forty two 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
(29:12):
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. However,
there are a lot of unanswered questions about exactly how
(29:33):
much Strugghold 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, and some early interrogations, he and other
researchers generally penned all these human experiments on doctor Sigmund Rascher,
(29:54):
who had been involved in the hypoxia and hypothermia experiments.
Rasher and his wife had both been executed by order
of Heinrich Himmler in nineteen forty five. Strugghold described Rascher
as quote fringe, and he and others described these experiments
sort of as the work of one deranged, clearly unethical man.
(30:15):
But it became clear that Rascher didn't do this work
alone and that many other Luftwaffa doctors had been directly involved.
Many of the experiments had been approved by Heinrich Himmler
or by high ranking Luftwaffa officers, and they had been
supervised by Luftwaffa doctors and by people who worked at
other German research institutes, including the Institute for Aviation Medicine
(30:38):
in Munich. Some of the people who ran these experiments.
Had also been close working colleagues with Hubert as Strughold,
including co authoring papers with him.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
But at the same time, that's pretty circumstantial enough people
connected to Strugghold 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
nineteen forty two, but we don't know whether he actually
(31:11):
did or whether he took any action based on that knowledge.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Struggold was investigated in connection to this several times. The
first was under Operation paper Clip, but at this point
it's obviously hard to trust that the reports created for
Operation paper Clip were thorough or complete. The second was
in nineteen fifty eight after a magazine article alleged that
Strughold had done research on human subjects. That investigation was
(31:37):
dropped after the Air Force released a statement that he
had already been investigated.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
In nineteen seventy three, THENS opened an investigation into thirty
five suspected war criminals, and Strugghold was one of them,
but the ions 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 nineteen eighty three,
(32:06):
but Strugghold died in nineteen eighty six, so at that
point that investigation was closed. 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
(32:27):
nineteen forty three 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 nineteen ninety three, so years
after Strughold's death. Regardless of what his true level of
involvement was in Nazi experiments onto human beings, these allegations
(32:53):
and the investigations really affected Strughold's reputation. Most of the
honors and awards that used to be named after him
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 Brown's influence on space exploration,
(33:17):
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 Brown, read about it
all day. It's a lot harder to find information on
h purchased Strughold. He still has his staunch defenders, though,
who point out that there's just no solid evidence directly
(33:37):
connecting him to some of these experiments. They point out
various flaws and people who have tried to make those connections,
some of which have like conflated two different German research
institutes into one thing when they really weren't.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
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 sixteen hundred specialists brought into the US under Operation
paper Clip. Annie Jacobson's book Operation paper Clip, which was
one of the sources for these two episodes, focuses on
just twenty one of them. So even though that is
(34:12):
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 paper Clip was using to describe the specialists it
was recruiting. I every time we look at these and
really any you know, post World War two discussions of
(34:35):
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 G. Yeah,
it places it so deeply in my own lifetime that
I have to remind myself that like, this was not
as long ago as we think of often.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Right right well. And then in addition to that, at
one of the things that just kept continually striking me
as I was working on this and the earlier episode
is that after World War Two, there was this whole
effort to just denazify Germany and to remove Nazis from
positions of power and to try to place people into
(35:20):
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. We also said in the previous
episode that the United States was not the only person
(35:42):
that was exploiting 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. Thanks so much for
(36:03):
joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send
us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
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Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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