US Use of Dachau Data and “Friendly” Nazi Doctors
Much has been talked about German scientists working on the US space programme in the 1950s and 1960s, but little of the German doctors who had worked in concentration and extermination camps such as Dachau, conducting “experiments” on live human beings in the name of medical progress.
There were 200 German medical doctors conducting these medical experiments. Most of these doctors were friends of the United States before the war, and despite their inhuman experiments, the U.S. attempted to rebuild a relationship with them after the war. The knowledge the Germans had accumulated at the expense of human life and suffering, was considered a “booty of war”, by the Americans and the Russians.The Americans tracked down Dr. Strughold, the aviation doctor who was in charge of the Dachau experiments. With full knowledge that the experiments were conducted on captive humans, the U.S. recruited the doctors to work for them. General Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his personal approval to exploit the work and research of the Nazis in the death camps.
Within weeks of Eisenhower’s order, many of these notorious doctors were working for the U.S. Army at Heidelberg. Army teams scoured Europe for scientific experimental apparatus such as pressure chambers, compressors, G-force machines, giant centrifuges, and electron microscopes. These doctors were wined and dined by the U.S. Army while most of Germany’s post-war citizens virtually starved.
The German doctors were brought to the U.S. and went to work for Project Paperclip. All these doctors had been insulated against war crime charges. The Nuremberg prosecutors were shocked that U.S. authorities were using the German doctors despite their criminal past. Under the leadership of Strughold, 34 scientists accepted contracts from Project Paperclip, and were moved to Randolph Air Force Base at San Antonio, Texas. The authorisation to hire these Nazi scientists came directly for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The top military brass stated that they wished to exploit these rare minds. Project Paperclip, ironically, would use Nazi doctors to develop methods of interrogating German prisoners of war.
As hostilities began to build after the war between the Americans and the Russians, the U.S. imported as many as 1000 former Nazi scientists.
In 1969, Americans landed on the moon, and two groups of scientist in the control centre shared the credit, the rocket team from Peenemunde, Germany, under the leadership of Werner von Braun, these men had perfected the V-2s which were built in the Nordhausen caves where 20,000 slave labourers from prison camp Dora had been worked to death. The second group were the space doctors, lead by 71-year-old Dr. Hubertus Strughold, whose work was pioneered in Experimental Block No. 5 of the Dachau concentration camp and the torture and death of hundreds of inmates. The torture chambers that was used to slowly kill the prisoners of the Nazis were the test beds for the apparatus that protected Neil Armstrong from harm, from lack of oxygen, and pressure, when he walked on the moon.
You will be able to read more about this in my forthcoming novel, “Right to Live”, the first ten chapters of which are available via this website.