15. The Controversy Surrounding a Prestigious Award Named After an Evil Doctor
Since 1963, the Space Medicine Association has given out an annual Hubertus Strughold Award to top physicians or scientists for outstanding work in space medicine. That led to controversy when Strughold’s evil wartime activities became more widely known. His reputation took a serious hit when US Army intelligence reports from 1945 listing him as wanted for war crimes were declassified. A 1958 Justice Department investigation had exonerated him, while a second inquiry launched by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was abandoned in 1974. A third investigation was opened in 1983, but was abandoned when Strughold died in 1986.
During his lifetime, Strughold denied having ever participated in or even known of the Dachau concentration camp’s human experiments. For years, most doctors and scientists in Strughold’s field took him at his word, and he remained a revered figure. However, things grew increasingly awkward as more and more evidence kept emerging after Strughold’s death of his wartime medical atrocities. Not least of them were experiments conducted by his Institute on young children from a psychiatric asylum. That made the award bearing his name an increasingly controversial honor.
