Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

by Annie Jacobsen

Most disturbing to Alexander were a group of photographs showing what happened in the course of the experiments as healthy young men—classified by the Nazis as Untermenschen—were strapped into a harness inside the low-pressure chamber and subjected to explosive decompression. These photographs, astonishing in their sadism, were essentially before, during, and after pictures of murder in the name of medicine. Other photographs among the Himmler papers documented the freezing experiments as they were being conducted at Dachau. Rascher’s experiments were by no means the solo act of one depraved man. There were photographs of yet another of Dr. Strughold’s Luftwaffe colleagues, Dr. Ernst Holzlöhner, holding prisoners down in tubs of icy water while their body temperatures were recorded as they died. It is believed that Rascher’s wife, Nini, took the photographs.