Four Paperclippers

Under Operation Paperclip, about 1,600 specialists – most with some involvement with the Nazi party – entered the U.S., and many became citizens. Today, we’re looking at four of these specialists, who were nicknamed Paperclippers.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Last time,
we talked about Operation paper Clip, also known as Project

(00:22):
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
to work in the United States under military supervision. But

(00:44):
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 nine of
the ones who arrived between and nineteen fifty two went
on to become US citizens. For the most part, they

(01:05):
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, but for a
super quick week recap in case folks have skipped that episode.

(01:26):
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, and the words of a
Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency report quote, such membership was due
to exigencies which influenced the lives of every citizen of
Germany at that time, but especially in the early years

(01:48):
of the program. There were also a whole lot of
assurances that the people who were being targeted for this
were the 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 US through the program
really did meet these criteria, but others definitely did not.

(02:12):
And this was not just a matter of Nazis and
war criminals managing to evade detection. The people and agencies
who were involved with running this program intentionally obscured the
most damning details from candidates backgrounds, especially if their knowledge
and expertise seemed particularly valuable. So my intent had been

(02:32):
to talk about this program and then talk about some
of the more well known people who were part of it.
It turned out to that 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

(02:54):
of all of the Operation paper Clips specialists was Vernavon bron.
His thesis for his p h d. In physics had
involved rocket thrust engines, which came out of work that
he did at Kumersdorff Army proving grounds under another future
paper clipper officer, Walter R. Dornburger. This work had been
funded by the German Army. Although Van Brown's rockets had

(03:17):
potential as a weapon, his real interest was space, and
in a lot of ways he used the military promise
of his work as 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

(03:37):
was simply a question with us of how the golden
cow could be milked most successfully. By seven, the German
Army had outgrown the Kumer's store facility and needed a
more remote location to conduct rocket tests, so the team
moved to Pinomunda on the coast of the Baltic Sea.
Von Braun became the technical director at Penamunda at the

(03:58):
age of just twenty five five. That same year, he
also accepted an invitation to join the Nazi Party. Later,
he also joined the shot Staffe or s S, where
he ultimately became a stern Bunfeur or Major. Von Brown
and the team at Penamunda developed the weapon that would
become known as the V two translated from German as

(04:20):
the Vengeance Weapon to which was the first long range
ballistic missile in The Allies bombed this facility, so all
the weapons development and production operation there were moved underground
using an old mind house, a facility that became known
as Mittelberg. People who were being imprisoned at the middlebow

(04:42):
Dora concentration camp complex were forced to work in truly
horrifying conditions, including digging out the tunnels by hand, with
nowhere to sleep and no hygiene facilities. Most of the
people being held at middlebau Dora were political prisoners from
multiple countries as actually the Soviet Union, Poland and France,

(05:03):
Jewish and Romany prisoners began to be deported to the
camp after the spring and fall of nineteen forty four.
The use of enslaved labor at Middle Ark 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

(05:23):
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 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

(05:49):
worked to death. 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 launchpad, raising suspicions that someone was sabotaging them,
and that mass hanging was meant to deter future sabotage.

(06:12):
Although many of the staff that had worked at Panomunda
were transferred to Middle Kan worked on site there. Werner
von Brown actually worked elsewhere, but he did tour 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

(06:33):
had worked at the Middle Baldra concentration camp complex, and
he acknowledged the appalling conditions and the use of enslaved
labor in that testimony. In ur the Gestapo arrested von
Brown and held him for about two weeks. Sources differ
about exactly what prompted this arrest. In some accounts, he

(06:53):
was being really disparaging about Germany's chances to win the war,
and he was only released after Dornburger convinced the Gestapo
that he was critical to missile production. This arrest sometimes
comes up as evidence that von Brown wasn't a quote
real Nazi and had only been involved in the Nazi
Party in the s s out of self preservation or
even opportunistic motives, or because he had perhaps been coerced.

(07:18):
In the spring of ninety five, as Germany was rapidly
losing ground in the war, the Soviet Red Army was
advancing towards Von Brown's location. He and Dornburger both 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

(07:39):
their colleagues 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,
ninety five, Von Brown, Dornburger, and one d twenty six
principal engineers from Middlewek surrendered to an American gi They

(08:02):
had sent von Braun'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 happening
at Middlewark secret. Joseph Stalin was not pleased with this
at all. He reportedly said, quote, this is absolutely intolerable.

(08:23):
We defeated the Nazi armies, we occupied Berlin and Pinomunda,
but the Americans got the rocket engineers. What could be
more revolting and more excusable? How and why was this
allowed to happen? Once von Braun got to the US,
he worked at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico,
where he helped American forces learn about and learned to

(08:45):
use the V two rockets that he had developed. In
ninety seven, when he was thirty five, he returned to
Germany to marry Maria Louise von quiz Drop, who was
his eighteen year old second cousin. After his return, he
went on to become director of the WES Army Ballistic
Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama, where he helped develop the
Redstone rocket, which was based on the V two. The

(09:08):
Redstone was a ballistic missile that could carry a nuclear payload.
Von Brown started formally proposing plans for space exploration around
nineteen fifty four, but the Army really wanted him to
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 Allen Shepard Jr.

(09:31):
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
that developed the Saturn five rocket for the Apollo project.
In addition to being such a major part of the
space program, John Brown became a public face for space exploration.

(09:53):
In nineteen fifty five, he appeared on the Magical World
of Disney episodes Man in Space, Man and the Move,
and Mars and Beyond. He appeared in multiple other documentaries
in the nineteen fifties and sixties, and was also a
technical advisor for Disney. He wrote multiple books, and he
was on the cover of Time magazine in nineteen fifty eight.

(10:14):
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
paper Clip were still classified. That was also before the
Office of Special Investigations opened its investigation into Von Brown's

(10:35):
colleague Arthur Rudolph, which we mentioned in the previous episode.
He'll come up again later. The os I 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

(10:56):
had been kept out of the program, and Von Brown
himself had critics as well. As one example, Tom Layer's
satirical song Verne von Brown included such lyrics as once
the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department, says Verne von Brown. But in general,
after his death, von Brown was widely eulogized. President Jimmy

(11:18):
Carter called him a man of bold vision and said,
quote to millions of Americans, Verne von Brown's name was
inextricably linked to our exploration of space into 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.

(11:41):
Historians and biographers have argued that von Brown was everything
from an opportunist who joined the 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 s s that he
knew about the use of slave labor and the terrible

(12:01):
conditions at Middleburg, and that consequently he was at just
a minimum complicit in all of that. He was also
present for at least one meeting in which middle Works
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

(12:24):
United States, killing at least five thousand people. But then
he became a US citizen in nineteen fifty five. 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 born

(12:49):
in Germany on November nine, six, and he and Werner
von Brown later became colleagues that Peanomunda. After the Allies
bombed Peanomunda, Rudolph became the operations director and the deputy
production manager at the underground Middlework facility. In the prior
episode on Operation paper Clip, we talked about the criteria

(13:10):
for determining who was a 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 fur,
who was a leader in the party or in one
of its affiliated organizations like the s S or the Essay,

(13:32):
who had been convicted in a post war d notification court,
or who had been 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 n s d A p in one. That was

(13:53):
six years before Werner von Brown joined and three years
before Hitler declared himself purer 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 paper Clip, his interrogator made this
notation quote Nazi. That's in all caps dangerous type security

(14:20):
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 Rudolph was interrogated
as part of this process, he gave his reasons for

(14:41):
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 nine two. The great amount of

(15:02):
unemployment caused the expansion of the National Socialist and Communistic parties.
Frightened that the latter would become the government, I joined
the n s d AP legally regulated society to help.
I believed in the preservation of the Western culture. The
U S Army okayed a slightly edited version of this

(15:23):
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. Rudolph was one of the first German specialists
to enter the US under Operation paper Clip. He arrived
in ninety and his wife and his daughter followed him. Later,

(15:45):
like Verner von Brown. He started out working for the
Ordinance Department of the Research and Development Division under the
Department of the Army. At various points the FBI investigated
him as part of his applications for security clearance and
his application to work at NASA, and the reports from
these investigations, he's generally described as an excellent production engineer,

(16:08):
personally liked by his colleagues, conscientious, honest, trustworthy, and not
a potential threat to national security. However, during an investigation
in nineteen fifty three, someone reported that he had been
a loyal member of the n s d a P
and was quote the type of person who would not
stop at anything if it might further his ambitions. He

(16:32):
had a reputation of being a person who, in his
enthusiasm for the Nazi regime could be dangerous to a
fellow employee who did 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 walk that
statement back and said that they didn't mean to imply

(16:52):
that Rudolph was an ardent Nazi, but that he was
ambitious and would do whatever it took to achieve his goals.
So Rudolph became 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

(17:13):
became a consultant. He had received NASA's Distinguished Service Award,
which is the agency's highest honor, as well as other awards.
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

(17:36):
found that officials in both the US and West Germany
had described Rudolph as a war criminal. Rudolph was also
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.

(17:59):
As Upper Rations director at Middle Werk. He had also
personally received reports about how many prisoners were available to work,
how 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

(18:20):
same time, according to transcripts of os I interviews, he
confirmed that he knew that prisoners were dying at the facility.
There was also a clear paper trail connecting him to
the use of enslaved labor and prisoner abuses at middle Work.
He ultimately agreed to renounce his US citizenship and returned
to Germany rather than face a trial for all of this.

(18:42):
At the time he was seventy seven. The West German
government wasn't really pleased about this, since US officials took
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

(19:03):
on that specific charge. 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

(19:24):
lawyers produced a memo 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. Like.
Canadian court ruled that he had quote called for, made
use of, and directed the enslaved laborers at middle Work.
Rudolph never returned to North America, and he died in

(19:47):
Some 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 rick Hi, Director General at middle Work. Rick Hi's
background was a lot like Rudolph's. He had joined the
Nazi Party in one and went to work for the
Reich Ministry for Armament and Munitions. Rickie had become an

(20:11):
expert in underground construction. He helped design the underground be
two factory at middle Work and Hitler's underground Bunker, as
well as other facilities. To be very clear, though, that
underground Middlework facility had virtually no ventilation and no plumbing.
People used oil barrels as toilets, and for most of

(20:31):
the facility's 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. He
specialized in being horrible um. While Rudolph had been aware
of how much forced labor was available for use at
the facility and had received reports on how many people

(20:54):
had died, rick Hi was the person who directly oversaw
that labor. He coordinated with the s S to essentially
rent people from camps at middle work. The rate the
SS charged was two to three Reichs Marks per person
per day. But as was the case with von Brown
and Rudolph, Rick Eye's work on the V two program

(21:15):
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 like Rudolph, he had
joined the party way before Hitler had come to power.
He arrived in the US in nive though him started
working for the U S Strategic Bombing Survey and the

(21:37):
U S Army Air Forces. However, In the summer of
nineteen forty six, rick High and paper clipper Albert Patton
started a black market operation at right Field, where about
one hundred forty of the two hundred plus paper clippers
in the US were then working. Aircraft engineer Herman Nelson
seems to have gotten into a personal dispute with them.

(22:00):
One night, when rick Hi and Patton were playing a
late night poker game in their housing facility, which was
known as Hilltop, Nelson got frustrated with their noisiness and
told them to keep it down. Patten and rick Hi refused,
and rick Hi made an offensive joke that alluded to
Nazi atrocities against Jewish people. In response, Nelson filed a
complaint with Colonel Donald L. Putt, saying that Patton was

(22:23):
an ardent Nazi and an Essay member, and that rick
I had orchestrated the mass hanging at middle Work that
was meant to deter sabotage. But doesn't seem to have
taken any action on this. But Nelson also vented his
frustrations in a letter to a friend in New York,
and that caught the eye of the sensors who were
reading the paper clippers mail. This sparked an investigation during

(22:45):
which it became clear that many paper clippers were willing
to cover up one another's involvement in Nazi activities and
war crimes. And around the same time, investigators in Germany
found rick Hi's name on an employee contact list at Middlevierk.
An investigator in Germany also spotted Rickey's name in an
article about his application for US citizenship. So all of

(23:08):
this came together, and rick Eye 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 international trials
that were held at Nuremberg. When rick Eye was indicted,
he had just signed a new five year contract to

(23:28):
work with the army. Rickhi became one of nineteen defendants
in the Dora Nordhausen trial that was held at Dachau.
Of those nineteen, rick Hi was the only one who
had worked at the Middle Vark facility rather than at
the concentration camps themselves. But the evidence that was presented
at his trial was contradictory. Although some witnesses connected him

(23:50):
to war crimes, at the facility. There were other researchers,
including Verna 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. Rick Hi was one
of four people who were acquitted, and the Army then
classified the records from the trial. We will talk about

(24:13):
one more paper Clipper after another quick sponsor break. So far,
everyone we've talked about in this episode was connected to
the Middle k weapons factory. They had kind of interconnected
careers with one another in Germany, and while there were

(24:35):
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 one of those. HUBERTA.

(24:57):
Strugghold has been nicknamed the father of space medicine. He
actually coined the term space medicine and astrobiology after World
War Two. Strugghold 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, Strugghold developed a space cabin

(25:19):
simulator as well as the space suits at the First
Astronauts War. 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. Strugghold
was a true trailblazer in his field, and for a
time there were also a lot of awards and honors

(25:40):
and buildings and things like that named after him because
of his just trually 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 institutes in

(26:00):
Germany that we're working at the intersection of medicine and flight.
After the start of World War Two, these institutes became
part of the Luftwaffe and at that point Struggold became
an officer. Strugghold was one of the very few paper
clippers who never joined the Nazi Party, and there is
some evidence that he was anti Nazi or politically neutral. However,

(26:24):
by the end of the war he was also on
the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects or
the pro CAST List. We mentioned that list in the
previous episode. This was a giant compilation of suspected war criminals.
It was a multi volume list containing the names of
about sixty thousand people. Some were known to have committed

(26:45):
war crimes, some were suspected, some weren't really suspected. They
were wanted for questioning or 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. While
Strugghold was director of the Aviation Medical Research Institute LUFTWAFFA,

(27:09):
doctors and members of the s S were carrying out
experiments on human beings, and some of these experiments were
related to Strugghold'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,
but died of hypothermia before they could be pulled from
the water, so the Luftwaffa wanted to figure out the

(27:32):
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. Other experiments
that Luftwaffa doctors conducted on human subjects included using hypoxia
chambers to simulate exposure to extreme altitude and forcing people

(27:56):
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 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.

(28:19):
Struggold actually submitted affidavits and some of these trials, and
his name came up and questioning at various points, but
he was not put on trial himself. Struggle definitely knew
about at least some of this research, particularly the freezing
experiments he attended a conference in ninety two where the
researchers talked about their results, and he commented on their

(28:40):
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 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

(29:01):
Luftwaffe was carrying out such experiments. However, there are a
lot of unanswered questions about exactly how much Strugghold knew
about this research, when he knew about it, whether it
wasn't his power to stop it, and whether he helped
cover up its existence or the involvement of his colleagues,

(29:22):
and some early interrogations, He and other researchers generally penned
all these human experiments on Dr. Sigmund Rasher, who had
been involved in the hypoxia and hypothermia experiments. Rasher and
his wife had both been executed by order of Heinrich
Himmler in struggled described Rasher as quote fringe, and he

(29:45):
and others described these experiments sort of as the work
of one deranged, clearly unethical man. But it became clear
that Roscher 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 Himler or by high
ranking LUFTWAFFA officers, and they had been supervised by LUFTWAFFA

(30:08):
doctors and by people who worked at other German research institutes,
including the Institute for Aviation Medicine in Munich. Some of
the people who ran these experiments had also been close
working colleagues with hubert As Strugghold, including co authoring papers
with him. But at the same time, that's pretty circumstantial

(30:29):
enough people connected to strugg Hold 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 two but we don't know whether he
actually did or whether he took any action based on

(30:50):
that knowledge. Struggled was investigated in connection to this several times.
The first was under Operation paper Clip, but at this
point it's obvious 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 Strugghold had done research on human subjects. That investigation

(31:14):
was dropped after the Air Force released a statement that
he had already been investigated. In nineteen seventy three, the
i n S opened an investigation into thirty five suspected
war criminals, and Strugghold was one of them, but the
I n S eventually closed that case due to a
lack of evidence. After this, Strugghold maintained that he had

(31:34):
already been cleared of all suspicion before entering the United States.
Then the os I opened another investigation in nine three,
but Strugghold died in six so at that point that
investigation was closed. One experiment that Strugghold was more clearly
connected to involved exposing children with epilepsy to simulated high

(31:57):
altitudes to see if it was possible to induced seizures
insusceptible people. That experiment took place in nineteen forty three
at the institute that Strugghold 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 so years after Strugghold's death. Regardless

(32:22):
of what his true level of involvement was and Nazi
experiments onto human beings, these allegations and the investigations really
affected Strokehold's reputation. Most of the honors and awards that
used to be named after him have since been renamed
or retired. Portraits of him at academic and medical institutions

(32:42):
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, 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

(33:04):
harder to find information on hupartist struggled. He still has
his staunch defenders, though, who point out that there's just
no solid evidence directly connecting him to some of these experiments. UM.
They point out various flaws and people who have tried
to make those connections UM, some of which have like
conflated two different German research institutes into one thing when

(33:27):
they really weren't. So that is where we're going to
ramp up today. But to be clear, this episode is
of course not remotely comprehensive. As we noted at the top,
there were about six D 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

(33:48):
that is 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 I every time we look
at these and really any um, you know, post World

(34:09):
War two discussions of of 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 it places it so deeply in my own
lifetime that I I have to remind myself that like

(34:30):
this was not as long ago as we think of
often right right well. And then in addition to that, UM,
one of the things that like just kept continually uh
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 denazified Germany and to remove

(34:52):
Nazis from positions of power and to try to place
people into 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

(35:13):
States was doing in Germany. UM. We also said in
the previous episode that the United States was not the
only person that was exploiting the knowledge and talents of
all these German specialists, but for the most part, other
countries we're doing that on a more short term basis,
often actually in Germany, not bringing people into their own
countries and then allowing them to make up citizens Do

(35:34):
you have a listener mail that hopefully involves less horrific
things I do. It's from Caitlin and it is. It
followed our are behind the scenes episode where we talked
about Mother Goose, Rhymes and the Nelson Pill trial, and
we talked about how much we we both Holly, you

(35:54):
and I would would just throw ourselves on the ground
during Ring around the Rosy. Um, and how when I
was a child, I love to swing on the swing.
But when I tried to do it when I was
about thirty, I was like, this is a terrible experience.
How did I love this as a child? Um? So
Caitlin sent some insight. Caitlin says, Hi, Holly and Tracy.

(36:15):
In this week's behind the Scenes episode on Mother Goose
and the Nelson Pill trial, Holly mentioned that she used
to love the all fall down part of Ring around
the Rosy as a child, and now it sounds awful. First,
I agree. Second, there's a fun developmental reason why little
kids like to fling themselves around. We have a body
system called appropriate reception, which basically lets your brain figure

(36:38):
out where you are in space and in relation to
things around you. Like other body systems, it takes time
to develop. Little kids are still developing their appropriate exception
sense and greatly benefit from activities that let them calibrate
like a Nintendo we mote. The same thing applies to swings,
getting picked up and carried in odd positions, and the

(36:58):
general shenanigans of childhood. I thought you might enjoy that tidbit.
Signed a former preschool teacher, A K. A. Caitlin, Thank
you so much for this email, Caitlin. I know about
prop reception because I have studied it out anatomy and physiology.
I didn't really make the connection that, like like all

(37:18):
these other systems of your body, it's not really developed
when you're little and spinning and spinning around until you
fall down, for example. But that makes total sense, and
I'm glad to now know it and that it's not
just that somehow I got old and couldn't swing on
a swing anymore. I mean I definitely got old and

(37:39):
can't fall down anymore at will. Um. Yeah. The other
thing that got me in recent years was skipping. Oh yeah,
I mean I used to love to skip when I
was a Kid's skip for days. And then I was
doing a running training program where like there were certain
intervals where you would skip for a period of time,

(38:01):
and I remember being excited like, oh I love skipping,
and by the end, I was like, oh dear me,
this is not. Nope, this isn't I'm gonna skip half
the time, and then it was like a quarter of
the time, and then it was like, I'm just gonna
walk during this. I'm gonna do us skip. I want
to walk with a bouncy step. Um. We've talked before

(38:22):
about our our indoor exercise attempts UM in the Land
of of COVID pandemic and UM. One of the things
that I do is I play Ring Fit Adventure on
the Nintendo Switch and it has a quiet mode, which
I think is really aimed for like folks who live

(38:43):
in apartments who don't want to jog in place above
their downstairs neighbor's heads. Um. But I shall turn that
on immediately to do less pounding on my knees and
other joints. So anyway, thank you again, Caitlin for that note.
I really just delighted learning that new fact about developmental
anatomy and physiology. If you would like to write to

(39:08):
us about this or any other podcast, we're at History
Podcast at I heart radio dot com, and we're all
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(39:32):
production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
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