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18 May 2006 |
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http://www.abqtrib.com/albq/nw_local/article/0,2564,ALBQ_... |
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Sometimes, a person's past actions overwhelm any other accomplishment in life. The New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo took that lesson to heart this week by removing a member from its International Space Hall of Fame. In 1978, the museum, which is a division of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, honored Hubertus Strughold for his work developing the space suit, space capsule and his contributions to space medicine, said Cathy Harper, a spokeswoman. But Strughold gave up his right to be on any hall of fame in the 1940s, when he directed a program that experimented on, tortured and killed Jews and gypsies at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany as the Nazi director of medical research for aviation, said Susan Seligman, regional director of the New Mexico Anti-Defamation League. The league uncovered records of Strughold's past and presented them to the museum's commission in January. Last week, the commission voted to remove Strughold, who died in 1987, from the hall. His name was taken off a plaque next to the front door on Tuesday and will be removed from other spots throughout the museum by the end of the week, Harper said. "We're very pleased that they came to a decision to remove someone's name from the hall of fame that may not have been deserving of such an honor," Harper said. Strughold, who was referred to as the "father of space medicine," directed a group that participated in experiments where prisoners were frozen to near death and re-warmed to see how quickly they would recover, according to the league's documents. One source in the documents said about 200 people were either tortured to death by freezing or murdered if they survived, Seligman said. "What was in the (museum's) computer were all of his scientific contributions, which were many, but there was nothing about his Nazi past," Seligman said. Strughold's name was removed from the Brooks Air Force Base Aero-Medical Library in 1995 and his picture was removed from a mural on the history of medicine at Ohio State University in 1993, Seligman said. Last fall, a visitor to the New Mexico space history museum noticed Strughold on the hall of fame and brought it to the Anti-Defamation League's attention, Seligman said. The museum's commission has created a task force to investigate a future exhibit about how the United States used Nazi scientists during the Cold War to beat the Russians in the space race, Harper said. Some Nazis avoided war crimes trials by helping the United States. That sort of exhibit would benefit visitors more than simply removing a name, because it would let people understand the space program's darker history, Seligman said. "It was the race to space, it was communism, it was the Cold War," Seligman said. "We're very excited about the fact that the commission has assigned a task force to create an educational component." Werner Gellert, 79, a Holocaust survivor and founder of the Holocaust and Intolerance Museum in Albuquerque, is happy to see Strughold's name removed from the hall. If the documents are correct, Gellert said, then "he should never have been on the hall of fame list - absolutely, categorically, no." Gellert was born in 1926 and had barely cracked his teens when his family tried to flee Germany's Nazi regime. "It was an existence from one day to the next," Gellert said. "You were not permitted as a child to defend yourself. You were not permitted to play with German, or what was called Aryan, children." His father was taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp after "Crystal Night," Nov. 9-10, 1938, when windows at Jewish shops were shattered and Jewish men were arrested throughout Germany. He was glad his father didn't end up at Dachau. "At that time, if you ended up in Dachau there was a chance for being killed," Gellert said. "Dachau was the first concentration camp where Hitler rounded up people he knew were against him. It was a very bad place." His father was released from Buchenwald in 1939, which is when the family fled. Turned away by Switzerland and Italy, the family ended up in a Japanese internment camp in China, where they remained until the end of World War II. The Japanese camp wasn't ideal, but "there were no gas chambers," Gellert said. "People were not out-right killed. The major problem we had was health, food." In a year when the president of Iran has declared that the Holocaust never happened, educating the public about the events at that time is critical, Seligman said. "The next generations coming up don't know much about the Holocaust," she said. "Any chance to educate them about the horrors is essential."
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