17. This Evil Researcher Went From a Prestigious Rockefeller Fellowship to Conducting Horrific Human Experiments for the Nazis
Prominent German medical researcher Hubertus Strughold (1898 – 1986) served as the Luftwaffe’s chief aeromedical researcher from 1935 until the end of World War II. After earning a medical degree in the 1920s, Strughold got into the emerging field of aviation medicine. He won a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and traveled to the United States in 1928, where he conducted aviation medicine research at the University of Chicago and Case Western University. Upon his return to Germany, he became a professor at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin.
In 1935, Strughold was hired by the Nazis as director of the Research Institution For Aviation Medicine, a think tank sponsored by Herman Goering’s Ministry of Aviation. Strughold’s institution conducted pioneering research on the physical effects of supersonic flight, and high altitudes. When World War II began in 1939, the Institution was absorbed into the Luftwaffe, and Strughold was commissioned as an officer, eventually becoming a colonel. During the war, he conducted horrific human experiments on prisoners that got many of his test subjects killed. Those activities were swept under the rug, however, and he was brought to the US under the aegis of Operation Paperclip.