Experiments in Death

IT was mid-afternoon, March 16, 1946, when the guests arrived at the old Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Heidelberg, Germany. Hundreds of Americans had been invited to the open house at the new AAF Aero Medical Center set up to exploit German aviation medicine. The center's commander, Air Corps Colonel Robert Benford, greeted guests at the door and sent them to the large library that had been transformed into a cheerful cocktail lounge decorated with brightly colored flowers. A bartender recruited from a local hotel kept the liquor flowing throughout the afternoon.1

The party provided an opportunity for the guests to meet more than a hundred German scientists working at the AAF Center under Paperclip. Benford and other AAF officers had recruited some of Germany's best-known specialists in aviation medicine. Many Americans at the party already knew Hubertus Strughold, who was in charge of the German staff. During the war, Strughold headed the Luftwaffe Institute for Aviation Medicine in Berlin under Oskar Schroeder, chief of the Luftwaffe's Medical Service. The German staff at the AAF Center included Strughold's former wartime subordinates at the institute, Konrad Schaefer, Otto Gauer, and Hans Clamann.2

As part of the festivities, guests toured the AAF Center to get firsthand information about the more interesting projects underway. Thousands of captured German documents and copies of the scientists' published and unpublished research were being translated into English for later publication in AAF monographs.³

Konrad Schaefer's study, "Thirst and Thirst Quenching in Emergency Situations at Sea," was part of this project. Schaefer had worked at Strughold's institute on problems of how to make seawater relatively safe to drink. The Luftwaffeand now the AAF-considered this research an important step toward saving the lives of downed fliers with no water available to them except seawater.⁴

Other Paperclip scientists had conducted aeromedical experiments using the scientific equipment housed at the AAF Center. One was the well-known high-altitude specialist Siegfried Ruff-who works today as a consultant for Lufthansa German Airlines in West Germany. He was wartime head of aeromedicine at the German Experimental Institute for Aviation, the DVL (Deutsche Versuchsanstalt fuer Luftfahrt). Ruff and Strughold coauthored several articles and a book on aviation medicine.⁵

Ruff recalled his work under Paperclip at the AAF Center. "I worked on ejector seats," Ruff said in an interview. "We tested how much humans can stand." He and Gauer conducted experiments to test the body's ability to withstand sudden thrust accelerations simulating a flyer's experience when catapulted from an aircraft after an accident or ramming.6

Another Paperclip recruit, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, worked on high-altitude experiments with Ruff at the AAF Center. Becker-Freyseng was formerly head of the Department for Aviation Medicine under Schroeder and worked afternoons at Strughold's institute. Under Paperclip he and Ruff conducted seventy experiments ^r with a German low-pressure chamber to study ways to prevent the bends. They put volunteer test subjects into a chamber and simulated an altitude of 39,260 feet to determine whether the bends were less painful when the body was in a prone position or sitting up.7

But a dark side of the Germans' work was kept secret from the guests at the party. Both Schaefer and Becker-Freyseng knew far more about seawater's effects on the human body than was stated in the published version of Schaefer's study. And men had been driven insane and died due to lack of oxygen when they ascended to simulated extreme high altitudes in the pressure chamber.

Karl Hoellenrainer was an innocent victim of gruesome seawater experiments at Dachau. The scars on his back where his liver had been punctured and his ruined health from being forced to drink putrid yellow seawater told the story of what was missing from Schaefer's study. SS chief

Himmler had tried to eliminate gypsies from Nazi Germany. As a result Hoellenrainer was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz. He was only there a month, but that was long enough for the Nazis to kill his child, his sister, and both of her children, and throw their bodies into the smoldering furnaces at Birkenau. Then he was loaded onto a train bound for Buchenwald to be imprisoned until the SS decided his and other gypsies' fate.⁸

As Hoellenrainer sat waiting, Schaefer, Becker-Freyseng, and others held a conference at the German Air Ministry to discuss problems of fliers whose planes crashed at sea, forcing them to live on seawater. In 1944 the Luftwaffe's Medical Service had only two methods for making seawater potable. Schaefer's method was relatively safe but required substantial amounts of silver, which was in limited supply. The second method, called Berkatit, was a substance that changed the taste of seawater but did not remove the salt.⁹

During the conference, Becker-Freyseng reported that clinical experiments had not yet been conducted under sufficiently realistic conditions of sea distress. He and Schaefer were convinced that if a man took Berkatit his health would be damaged within six days and after twelve days it would kill him. Several meetings were held to plan the experiments, including one at Strughold's institute that Clamann also attended. The group agreed that a new set of experiments should be conducted using concentration camp prisoners, since experiments with Berkatit probably would result in deaths.10

Becker-Freyseng wrote a letter to SS chief Himmler, signed by Schroeder, asking for "40 healthy test subjects" and permission to conduct the experiments at Dachau. A particularly nauseating Nazi discussion ensued among SS officials over whether to use Jews or "asocial gypsy half-breeds." One SS man objected to gypsies because they were "of somewhat different racial composition" than Aryan Germans. Himmler finally arranged to transfer gypsies to Dachau for the experiments.11

Hoellenrainer got the word when the SS summoned him and forty other gypsies to the camp yard and said they were being transferred to a work detail at Dachau. When they arrived, however, they were sent to a hospital ward, stripped, and X-rayed. Wilhelm Beiglboeck, a Luftwaffe doctor in charge of the experiments, told them their fate. When one gypsy protested, Beiglboeck pulled out a gun and said, "If you are not quiet, and want to rebel, I will shoot you on the spot."12

The prisoners were fed cookies, rusks, and brown sugar during the first week of the experiments and then were starved. Over the next month they were forced to drink plain seawater or water that was treated in either the Schaefer or the Berkatit method. Those who refused to drink the putrid water, which made them violently ill, were tied up and force-fed with long tubes stuffed down their throats.'³

"The people were crazy from thirst and hunger, we were so hungry-but the doctor had no pity on us," said Hoellenrainer. "Then one gypsy . . . ate a little piece of bread once, or drank some water.

The doctor from the Luftwaffe got very angry and mad. He took the gypsy and tied him to a bed post and sealed his mouth."14

A number of victims suffered heart seizures and went into comas; others were seriously wounded when Beiglboeck took a long, sharp instrument and punctured their livers to drain the saltwater along with blood. When it was over, Hoellenrainer could barely walk, but he was still assigned to a work detail in another camp. The bodies of his dead companions were covered with sheets and carried across the camp yard to be burned in the crematories.15

The story behind the pressure chamber experiments involved Dachau prisoners who met an equally grim fate. Many victims died from being sent to high altitudes without oxygen, and others were driven mad from the horrifying experience. The idea for the experiments originated in 1941,

when Sigmund Rascher attended a course in aviation medicine at the German air force headquarters in Munich. He told Himmler that he was disappointed to learn that no tests at extremely high altitudes had ever been made using human subjects, "as such experiments are very dangerous and nobody volunteers for them." Rascher asked the SS to make "two or three professional criminals"

available to him for experiments that he boldly predicted would kill the participants. Himmler

ap-proved his using 200 Dachau inmates whose "crimes" were being Jews, Russian prisoners of war, or members of the Polish Resistance.16

Ruff and his subordinate at the DVL, Hans Romberg, agreed to help Rascher conduct the experiments. They held several planning meetings, including one at Dachau, where the SS commandant took them on a guided tour of the camp's experimental facilities. Ruff's low-pressure chamber was used for the experiments, but to hide DVL's collaboration the chamber was not delivered directly to the camp. DVL employees took the chamber to Munich, where they were met by SS drivers, who delivered it to the final destination.17

During the experiments victims were locked inside the windowed airtight chamber, with the pressure altered to simulate atmospheric conditions of altitudes up to 68,000 feet. According to one of Rascher's assistants, "Some experiments gave men such pressure in their heads that they would go mad and pull out their hair in an effort to relieve such pressure. They would tear their heads and faces with their fingernails. . . . They would beat the walls with their hands and head and scream in an effort to relieve pressure on their eardrums."18

Nearly eighty men died when they were kept at high altitudes without oxygen for up to thirty minutes. Others were dragged out of the chamber and held under water until they drowned.

Rascher cut open their skulls, chest cavities, and abdomens underwater to determine the amount of air embolism in the vessels of their brains.19

Those who lived through the experiments were driven insane. One of the victims, a former Jewish delicatessen clerk, was used as a guinea pig in an experiment to simulate what would happen to a flier parachuting out of an airplane at high altitudes without an oxygen mask. The experiment was described in detail in a report signed by Ruff, Rascher, and Romberg. The victim was locked inside the chamber, given an oxygen mask, and raised to a simulated altitude of 47,000

feet. According to the report, when the mask was removed, Ruff reported that the victim "yells loudly" and "gives the impression of someone who is completely out of his mind." As the poor man huddled in the corner of the chamber, doubled over with convulsions and gasping for air, his tormentors cold-bloodedly filmed the experiment to make a faithful record of his agony.20

The U.S. military still viewed Ruff and Becker-Freyseng as valuable assets, despite their connection to these crimes. They were even employed under Paperclip to continue the same type of research that had resulted in the murder of Dachau prisoners! By June 1946 AAF headquarters in Washington was flooded with requests to bring Ruff and the others to America. Brigadier General Norris Harbold asked for Paperclip contracts for Ruff and Becker-Freyseng.21

At the same time, an Army war crimes unit also was interested in these men. Investigators sifted through SS chief Himmler's files and found the records of the experirnents. The scientists' names were placed on Army war crimes wanted lists. On September 16 Army CIC agents arrived at the AAF Center with a handful of arrest warrants. Colonel Benford recalled that when the CIC agents arrived,

"some of my people were on their list," but he still believes that the charges against them were

"nothing serious." Ruff, Schaefer, Becker-Freyseng, Schroeder, and Theodor Benzinger were arrested and taken to a Nuremberg prison.22

Benzinger claims his arrest was a "set up" by Strughold to take the heat off Strughold's own questionable wartime activities. When he arrived at Nuremberg he was interrogated but not charged.

His interrogators were interested in who had been present, besides Benzinger, at two meetings with high-ranking Nazis in which the experiments were openly discussed. Benzinger, former head of the Department of Aviation at the Luftwaffe institute in Rechlin, had attended one meeting in which film of high-altitude experiments was shown in the office of the secretary of the German Air Ministry. He also had attended a conference where Dachau cold experiments were discussed in detail, including information that concentration camp prisoners had died during the experiments. Benzinger's interrogators never mentioned Strughold or a dozen other Paperclip scientists who also had attended the conference, even though Strughold's subordinates, Schaefer and Clamann, had presented research papers at the conference.23

Benzinger said he and his colleagues had conducted explosive decompression experiments on

themselves at his institute during the war. They were trying to find out what happens when the pressurized cabin in an aircraft fails. During one experiment Benzinger was sitting in a chamber across from a Junkers factory engineer. "I did not panic when the explosion came, [but] this man . . . fell right into my lap," Benzinger said. "After a few minutes he came to and he was all right." But one colleague died during the experiments. Benzinger said he was away from the institute at the time, flying a spy mission over England to photograph an aluminum factory near Oxford. Benzinger was released after spending a month in the Nuremberg prison. He was brought to the United States by the Navy and worked under Paperclip contract at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.24

Eight days after Becker-Freyseng's arrest, Nuremberg investigator Herbert Meyer questioned him at length about Strughold's role in the Dachau experiments. Strughold had been directly subordinate to Erich Hippke, chief of the Luftwaffe's Medical Service, and then to Schroeder when he replaced Hippke later in the war. Both men had signed orders that authorized experiments in the camps.

Becker-Freyseng was intimately familiar with the three men's activities; he had been an assistant in Schroeder's office and also worked afternoons at Strughold's institute. He told the investigator that Strughold had advised Hippke and Schroeder on research matters, especially regarding high-altitude testing; that Strughold had known about the experiments; and that he had received copies of Freyseng's reports and those submitted by Ruff and Schaefer. Meyer then repeatedly asked Becker-Freyseng whether Strughold had had the authority to stop the experiments:²⁵

"If Dr. Strughold did not agree with a specific experiment, could he interrupt it?" Meyer asked Becker-Freyseng.

"I would assume, yes," Becker-Freyseng replied. "Did he have the power at his disposal?"

"Of course, he was the director of the Institute. He could do what he wanted there."

"If he had not agreed with the work of the doctors, could he have sent for them and said:

`You must stop that or go to another Institute.' "

"Yes. That is, he would have had to report to his superiors, because it was a military institution."

"As director of the Institute he could distribute and stop work?"

"Yes."26

Strughold was not arrested, interrogated, or even called as a witness at the trial, despite the derogatory information against him. It was a glaring example of how far the U.S. military went to protect him. His wartime superior, close associates, and a subordinate all were tried at Nuremberg, while Strughold blithely continued business as usual at the AAF Center.

The trial, known as the "Medical Case," was the first of twelve war crimes trials conducted by the U.S. government at Nuremberg. A tribunal of American judges presided over the trial. The case involved a long, grisly list of experiments and other medical crimes, such as experiments with bone transplant techniques, sterilization with X rays, and deliberate infection with malaria and typhoid.

On December 6, 1946, the chief of counsel for war crimes, Brigadier General Telford Taylor, stood before a podium in the makeshift courtroom crowded with spectators and delivered the prosecution's opening statement. He spoke of nameless victims who numbered in the millions and of those who still did not believe the crimes had occurred: "For them it is far more important that these incredible events be established by clear and public proof, so that no one can ever doubt that they were fact and not fable; and that this Court, as the agent of the United States and as the voice of humanity, stamp these acts, and the ideas which engendered them, as barbarous and criminal."27

To Taylor's right, twenty-three defendants sat in the dock accused of crimes committed under the guise of scientific research. Both Schroeder and Becker-Freyseng were charged with personal responsibility for high-altitude, freezing, sulfanilamide, seawater, epidemic jaundice, and typhus

experiments. Schaefer was charged with participation in seawater experiments. Ruff and his associate, Romberg, were charged with being criminally implicated in the high-altitude experiments.

Beiglboeck, also a defendant, was charged with conducting seawater experiments. All were accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity that included the murder of innocent civilians on political, racial, or religious grounds.28

Taylor pointed out that the defendants were not ignorant people. All but three were physicians.

They had been department chiefs, members of German research institutes, or high officials of the Luftwaffe, Wehrmacht, or SS medical services. "Yet these defendants, all of whom were exception-ally qualified to form a moral and professional judgment in this respect, are responsible for wholesale murder and unspeakably cruel tortures," said Taylor.29

Nineteen German defense attorneys prepared for the battle. Four represented more than one defendant. They were paid by the U.S. government and received cheap meals, free cigarettes, and other benefits. Even former Nazis were allowed to act as defense counsel. Thirteen of these lawyers had been Nazi party members; one had been in the SS.30

There was no disposition for some of that group to worry about scruples when it came to their clients' defense. Beiglboeck's attorney submitted evidence in court that he knew had been altered by his client. Names of experimental subjects had been erased from clinical charts of the seawater experiments in an effort to stop prosecutors from locating survivors and using them as prosecution witnesses. Beiglboeck also admitted having erased information about how critically ill a prisoner had become as a result of the experiments. He and his attorney "were in agreement at all times" that the charts should be submitted in court only after derogatory information had been removed.³1

Each of the defendants had an excuse for his behavior. They had merely carried out orders and their experiments were no different from those conducted by scientists in Allied counuies. No one was a criminal. Becker-Freyseng said the experiments benefited society. Schaefer had only attended

Each of the defendants had an excuse for his behavior. They had merely carried out orders and their experiments were no different from those conducted by scientists in Allied counuies. No one was a criminal. Becker-Freyseng said the experiments benefited society. Schaefer had only attended