Gäbler Genealogie

http://www.gaebler.info/ahnen/ach.pdf

Carlo Henze, born in Naples, attended elementary school and Gymnasium in Bern and went on to study medicine at the Universities of Munich, Vienna and Innsbruck. He received his M.D. degree from the University of Innsbruck in 1933. He joined Sandoz Ltd., Basel, in 1938, and, as an Austrian citizen to avoid being drafted into the German Army, was transferred the following year to the company’s U.S. subsidiary, then located in New York City.

During World War II, Dr. Henze served as a Captain in the U.S. Army Medical Corps for four and a half years. He initially served in the Preventative Medicine Division, Office of the Surgeon General, Washington, D.C. and later was appointed a member of the ALSOS Mission, a highly secret operation to uncover information on Germany’s war-time developments in nuclear and biological warfare. For his role in the mission he was awarded the Legion of Merit.

Rejoining Sandoz Pharmaceutical Division in 1945, Dr. Henze served for a number of years as Manager of the Sales and Promotion Departments. Subsequently, as Medical Director and General Manager, he also assumed responsibility for Professional Relations and Research. Dr. Henze was elected a vice President of the division in 1952 and a Senior Vice President in 1963, an office he held until his appointment as President of the Sandoz Foundation in 1966. The Company-sponsored foundation provides financial support and grants in the areas of health, education, general welfare and related philanthropies.

Christopher Henze: "We buried the ashes of the two brothers, Carlo and Robby, and my mother together under oak trees in the very rustic cemetery at Cambria, California. As a Tirolean and mountaineer, my father hated city life, while Carlo lived in and loved New York City! The cemetery is unlike any other I have ever seen. Almost hippy, sort of do-it-yourself, not at all manicured. Deer wander in and out and eat the flowers; so only plants they don't like, like lavender, survive. Wind chimes hang from some branches. A little boy's grave has a rusting toy firetruck on it. Other graves are bordered with sea shells. Another child has Disney statues - Snow White, Bambi, etc. When the wind blows in the right direction, you can hear the surf. It's the right place.)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsos_Mission

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Carlo Henze - How Carlo got his Italian name

"The Italian version of my name Carlo was suggested by the registrar at the Naples town hall, where all newborns had to be indexed for birth certificate purposes. He seemed to feel that Carlo sounded better than Carl and, on second thought, my parents agreed with him. I have since been called everything from Carlos to Charles to Carl (written with a C or K) but like the Italian version best."

CARLO’S WAR
By Christopher Henze, March 2010/2012

Following my mother’s death last December, I sorted through masses of family letters, which revealed information previously unknown to me. My father and his brother, my Uncle Carlo, left Austria just before the Anschluss, but my grandparents remained in Austria throughout the war. Grandpa was a professor of biochemistry at the University of Innsbruck. He lost his job and his pension because he would not allow Nazi uniforms in his classroom.

As I understand it, Carlo enlisted in the U.S. Army and was digging or cleaning latrines as a private during training when a sergeant came up to him and said we see you’re a medical doctor specializing in pharmacology, and a native German speaker. Stop digging. He was immediately promoted to Captain!

Assigned in 1944 - 45 to a secret mission code-named “ALSOS,” Carlo wrote as often as three times a day to his wife from his base in Paris or from “somewhere in Germany” near the front as the Allies advanced toward Berlin. He was awarded the Legion of Merit for his military service.

His draft citation (more explicit than the actual citation, which is watered down) reads:

“As a medical intelligence officer attached to the ALSOS mission, Captain Carlo Henze was engaged in the collection of information regarding a secret German research program, which was of major concern to the Allied forces. The imagination, skill and ingenuity of Captain Henze made possible the successful completion of a program of investigation which brought to light the complete information regarding this German project and its possible relationship to the comparable Japanese program. Through his daring and acceptance of risks beyond the call of duty, Captain Henze directed and participated in the location and seizure of the secret German records of the project, thus revealing the full details of the German research program.”

Alsos is the Greek word for “grove,” a coded wink to General Leslie R. Groves, the military director of the Manhattan Project to develop the A bomb. The Allies were anxious to know how far along the Germans were with their own atomic project, as well as with developments in chemical and biological weapons (Carlo’s assigned area). Long before Saddam Hussein, the U.S. was worried about weapons of mass destruction. It turned out the Germans were not doing much at all in A-bomb development or in chemical and biological weapons. (The secret records referred to in the draft citation were found hidden in a convent.) Hitler was placing all his bets on rocketry, where the Germans were far advanced, as the Londoners learned all too well. That’s why we and the Russians were so anxious to get hold of people like Von Braun after the war.

Some of the intelligence gathered through interrogation of German scientists and medical personnel was undramatic, but nevertheless interesting: Allied soldiers had been suffering a lot from “trench foot,” especially in the mountainous region of Northern Italy. We learned from the Germans not only the importance of better socks and boots, but also the use of a “buddy system,” whereby soldiers were paired, with each partner responsible for looking after the other’s feet! The Norwegians taught us the use of netted underclothing for warmth (air pockets), which they in turn had learned from fishermen who covered themselves with their nets to keep warm. We also learned that Luftwaffe crews made massive use of amphetamines on long flights. (And that undernourished Japanese troops were heavy consumers of vitamins in the Pacific war.)

It was weird and moving to read this material 66 years later - about events that took place when I was two to three years old and that I didn’t know much about until now. I always did feel that Carlo’s war experience, including the reunion with his parents outside Innsbruck in May 1945 on Mother’s Day, was a high point of his life.* (Even in his retirement home he slept with his helmet on a chair next to his bed!) That’s why I put his military rank and WW II service (along with an edelweiss) on his grave marker.

As an important footnote, I was struck by Uncle Carlo’s compassion for the innocent victims of the war. He wrote that by all means the guilty should be punished, but he strongly opposed the concept of collective guilt of whole peoples. He also opposed the U.S. policy of strict non-fraternization with German and Austrian civilians, which, he felt, only reinforced the Nazi propaganda stereotype of Americans as barbarians. In fact, by my reckoning, he contravened that policy by making a surprise visit to his parents, with whom he had had no contact for several years and not seen for six years.

During the war when my parents first settled in Pasadena, California, where I was born and raised, they became friendly with the neighbor lady. One day she came over excitedly to show my parents a letter from her son who was in the Army Air Corps (precursor of the U.S. Air Force). He had just flown a bombing raid over the Stefansbrücke on the Brenner Pass road from Innsbruck to Italy. The inn at the bridge was the last known address of my grandparents! My parents had the grace not to say anything, but I can imagine their emotions. My grandparents survived the war. As a little boy, I could not understand all the fuss over those two old people when they stepped off the Super Chief train at the Pasadena station. I was much more interested in what had happened to Abraham Lincoln penny I had put on the track!

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*Carlo’s parents, Martin and Claire Henze, had moved to an inn at the Stefansbrücke on the Brenner road because their apartment was next to the Innsbruck train station, an Allied bombing target. Carlo appeared at the inn in his American captain’s uniform and asked the innkeeper if Professor Henze still lived there, identifying himself as the professor’s son. The innkeeper said, “Yes, but Professor Henze always takes a nap after lunch. I think it would be too much of a shock to wake him with this news. Why don’t you go into the garden and have a beer? I’ll bring him to you when he wakes up.” Thinking about the poignancy of that reunion brings tears to my eyes.

Carlo's planned second rendezvous with his parents was aborted. His driver sent their Jeep off an icy road, and Carlo was hospitalized. You can see his sliced ear and the scar on his forehead in the photo of him as a mature man.

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ALSOS

Wikipedia: In June 1939, German physicist Werner Heisenberg bought a summer home for his family in Urfeld <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urfeld_am_Walchensee>, in southern Germany. He also traveled to the United States in June and July, visiting Samuel Abraham Goudsmit <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Abraham_Goudsmit>, at the University of Michigan <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Michigan> in Ann Arbor <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Arbor,_Michigan>. However, Heisenberg refused an invitation to emigrate to the United States. He did not see Goudsmit again until six years later, when Goudsmit was the chief scientific advisor to the American Operation Alsos <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Alsos> at the close of World War II <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II>. Ironically, Heisenberg was arrested under Operation Alsos and detained in England under Operation Epsilon <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Epsilon>. Heisenberg was the biggest "catch" of the Alsos team.

From Christopher Henze: "Heisenberg was the biggest 'catch' of the Alsos team. When he was (willingly) taken into custody in Urfeldt, he asked that he be treated 'forcibly' and be publicly ordered to leave the village in American custody. He was worried about his future and the welfare of the family he had to leave behind. He did not want the villagers to think he was cooperating voluntarily with the Alsos team. Later, regarding his arrest, he said, 'I did not mind it. They did it very nicely.'"

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Sandoz

The Swiss pharmaceutical company, Sandoz, was merged with Novartis in 1996. Dr. Hofmann discovered the hallucinogenic powers of LSD accidentally when he absorbed some of the substance through his fingertip and began hallucinating!

Wikipedia: The psychedelic <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic> effects of lysergic acid diethylamide <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysergic_acid_diethylamide> (LSD) were discovered at the Sandoz laboratories in 1943 by Arthur Stoll <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Stoll> and Albert Hofmann <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hofmann> (patent by Stoll and Hofmann in USA on Mar. 23, 1948 <http://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/lsdpatent.html>). Sandoz began clinical trials and marketed the substance, from 1947 through the mid 1960s, under the nameDelysid as a psychiatric <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychiatry> drug, thought useful for treating a wide variety of mental ailments <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_disorder>, ranging from alcoholism <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholism> to sexual deviancy <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_deviancy>. Sandoz suggested in its marketing literature that psychiatrists take LSD themselves,[19] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novartis> to gain a better subjective understanding of the schizophrenic <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia> experience, and many did exactly that and so did other scientific researchers. For several years, the psychedelic drugs also were called "psychotomimetic <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychotomimetic>" because they were thought to mimicpsychosis <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosis>. Later research caused this term to be abandoned, as neuroscientists gained a better understanding of psychoses, including schizophrenia. Research on LSD peaked in the 1950s and early 1960s. Sandoz withdrew the drug from the market in the mid-1960s. The drug became a cultural novelty of the 1960s after psychologist Timothy Leary <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary> at Harvard University <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University> began to promulgate its use for recreational and spiritual experiences among the general public.