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

by Annie Jacobsen

Post article revealed that the only man believed to have survived the freezing experiments had been located by Dr. Leo Alexander. Most of the other victims—the so-called Untermenschen whom the Nazi doctors had experimented on—died in the process or were killed. It was likely that this sole surviving victim, a Catholic priest, would provide witness testimony in the Nuremberg courts. Americans were rapt. Kept secret from the public was an astonishing hypocrisy. Less than 150 miles from the Nuremberg courtroom, several of the physicians who had participated in, and many others who were accessory to, these criminal medical experiments were now being employed by the U.S. Army at the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center, the classified research facility in Heidelberg. This laboratory, dreamed up by Colonel Harry Armstrong and Major General Malcolm Grow at a meeting in France in the spring of 1945, would remain one of the best-kept secrets of Operation Paperclip for decades to come. Here, starting on September 20, 1945, fifty-eight doctors handpicked by Dr. Strughold had been working on medical research projects begun for the Third Reich. Some of the data the Nazi doctors were using in their new Army research had been obtained in experiments in which test subjects had been murdered.