Secret Report of how U.S. helped ex-Nazis

[Douglas Caddy]

http://documents.nytimes.com/confidential-report-provides-new-evidence-of-notorious-nazi-cases

[Len Colby]

Did you actually take a look Doug? The report is actually about the DoJ's "Nazi-hunting operation". Though it has a chapter on "Alleged U.S. Support for Entry of Nazis into the United States" as the title indicates it downplays Operation Paperclip. Based on my skim that chapter does not contain many revelations.

Why is this in the JFK forum?

[Douglas Caddy]

Did you actually take a look Doug? The report is actually about the DoJ's "Nazi-hunting operation". Though it has a chapter on "Alleged U.S. Support for Entry of Nazis into the United States" as the title indicates it downplays Operation Paperclip. Based on my skim that chapter does not contain many revelations.

Why is this in the JFK forum?

The text of the report accompanied an article, which is reproduced below, that appeared originally on the front page of today's (Sunday) New York Times. Apparently the Times thought it was significantly important in its historical revelations not only to carry a lengthy article about it but to attach the text of the actual report. You have every right to your opinion as to its being newsworthy or not as do the editors of the New York Times who obviously differ with your assessment given the treatment they accorded the subject. I apologize if I offended you and forum readers by placing in the JFK topic. I did so because it was a report that was kept secret for four years by the Justice Department and my thought was that if this important secret document has finally seen the light of day, maybe we can have hope that secret government reports connected to JFK's assassination may at some point also see the light of day. I think that we can all agree that the government (especially the CIA) today is still sitting on reports and documents that would drastically change the accepted history of the JFK assassination were these to be released. As the article itself states: "The secrecy surrounding the Justice Department’s handling of the report could pose a political dilemma for President Obama because of his pledge to run the most transparent administration in history. Mr. Obama chose the Justice Department to coordinate the opening of government records."

Nazis Were Given Safe Haven in U.S., Report Says

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

The New York Times

November 14, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/us/14nazis.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=us

WASHINGTON A secret history of the United States governments Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a safe haven in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.

The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.

It describes the governments posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department officials drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the governments mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible.

The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Departments Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis.

Perhaps the reports most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agencys involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.

The Justice Department report, describing what it calls the governments collaboration with persecutors, says that O.S.I investigators learned that some of the Nazis were indeed knowingly granted entry to the United States, even though government officials were aware of their pasts. America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became in some small measure a safe haven for persecutors as well, it said.

The report also documents divisions within the government over the effort and the legal pitfalls in relying on testimony from Holocaust survivors that was decades old. The report also concluded that the number of Nazis who made it into the United States was almost certainly much smaller than 10,000, the figure widely cited by government officials.

The Justice Department has resisted making the report public since 2006. Under the threat of a lawsuit, it turned over a heavily redacted version last month to a private research group, the National Security Archive, but even then many of the most legally and diplomatically sensitive portions were omitted. A complete version was obtained by The New York Times.

The Justice Department said the report, the product of six years of work, was never formally completed and did not represent its official findings. It cited numerous factual errors and omissions, but declined to say what they were.

More than 300 Nazi persecutors have been deported, stripped of citizenship or blocked from entering the United States since the creation of the O.S.I., which was merged with another unit this year.

In chronicling the cases of Nazis who were aided by American intelligence officials, the report cites help that C.I.A. officials provided in 1954 to Otto Von Bolschwing, an associate of Adolf Eichmann who had helped develop the initial plans to purge Germany of the Jews and who later worked for the C.I.A. in the United States. In a chain of memos, C.I.A. officials debated what to do if Von Bolschwing were confronted about his past whether to deny any Nazi affiliation or explain it away on the basis of extenuating circumstances, the report said.

The Justice Department, after learning of Von Bolschwings Nazi ties, sought to deport him in 1981. He died that year at age 72.

The report also examines the case of Arthur L. Rudolph, a Nazi scientist who ran the Mittelwerk munitions factory. He was brought to the United States in 1945 for his rocket-making expertise under Operation Paperclip, an American program that recruited scientists who had worked in Nazi Germany. (Rudolph has been honored by NASA and is credited as the father of the Saturn V rocket.)

The report cites a 1949 memo from the Justice Departments No. 2 official urging immigration officers to let Rudolph back in the country after a stay in Mexico, saying that a failure to do so would be to the detriment of the national interest.

Justice Department investigators later found evidence that Rudolph was much more actively involved in exploiting slave laborers at Mittelwerk than he or American intelligence officials had acknowledged, the report says.

Some intelligence officials objected when the Justice Department sought to deport him in 1983, but the O.S.I. considered the deportation of someone of Rudolphs prominence as an affirmation of the depth of the governments commitment to the Nazi prosecution program, according to internal memos.

The Justice Department itself sometimes concealed what American officials knew about Nazis in this country, the report found.

In 1980, prosecutors filed a motion that misstated the facts in asserting that checks of C.I.A. and F.B.I. records revealed no information on the Nazi past of Tscherim Soobzokov, a former Waffen SS soldier. In fact, the report said, the Justice Department knew that Soobzokov had advised the C.I.A. of his SS connection after he arrived in the United States.

(After the case was dismissed, radical Jewish groups urged violence against Mr. Soobzokov, and he was killed in 1985 by a bomb at his home in Paterson, N.J. )

The secrecy surrounding the Justice Departments handling of the report could pose a political dilemma for President Obama because of his pledge to run the most transparent administration in history. Mr. Obama chose the Justice Department to coordinate the opening of government records.

The Nazi-hunting report was the brainchild of Mark Richard, a senior Justice Department lawyer. In 1999, he persuaded Attorney General Janet Reno to begin a detailed look at what he saw as a critical piece of history, and he assigned a career prosecutor, Judith Feigin, to the job. After Mr. Richard edited the final version in 2006, he urged senior officials to make it public but was rebuffed, colleagues said.

When Mr. Richard became ill with cancer, he told a gathering of friends and family that the reports publication was one of three things he hoped to see before he died, the colleagues said. He died in June 2009, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. spoke at his funeral.

I spoke to him the week before he died, and he was still trying to get it released, Ms. Feigin said. It broke his heart.

After Mr. Richards death, David Sobel, a Washington lawyer, and the National Security Archive sued for the reports release under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Justice Department initially fought the lawsuit, but finally gave Mr. Sobel a partial copy with more than 1,000 passages and references deleted based on exemptions for privacy and internal deliberations.

Laura Sweeney, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said the department is committed to transparency, and that redactions are made by experienced lawyers.

The full report disclosed that the Justice Department found a smoking gun in 1997 establishing with definitive proof that Switzerland had bought gold from the Nazis that had been taken from Jewish victims of the Holocaust. But these references are deleted, as are disputes between the Justice and State Departments over Switzerlands culpability in the months leading up to a major report on the issue.

Another section describes as a hideous failure a series of meetings in 2000 that United States officials held with Latvian officials to pressure them to pursue suspected Nazis. That passage is also deleted.

So too are references to macabre but little-known bits of history, including how a director of the O.S.I. kept a piece of scalp that was thought to belong to Dr. Mengele in his desk in hopes that it would help establish whether he was dead.

The chapter on Dr. Mengele, one of the most notorious Nazis to escape prosecution, details the O.S.I.s elaborate efforts in the mid-1980s to determine whether he had fled to the United States and might still be alive.

It describes how investigators used letters and diaries apparently written by Dr. Mengele in the 1970s, along with German dental records and Munich phone books, to follow his trail.

After the development of DNA tests, the piece of scalp, which had been turned over by the Brazilian authorities, proved to be a critical piece of evidence in establishing that Dr. Mengele had fled to Brazil and had died there in about 1979 without ever entering the United States, the report said. The edited report deletes references to Dr. Mengeles scalp on privacy grounds.

Even documents that have long been available to the public are omitted, including court decisions, Congressional testimony and front-page newspaper articles from the 1970s.

A chapter on the O.S.I.s most publicized failure the case against John Demjanjuk, a retired American autoworker who was mistakenly identified as Treblinkas Ivan the Terrible deletes dozens of details, including part of a 1993 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit that raised ethics accusations against Justice Department officials.

That section also omits a passage disclosing that Latvian émigrés sympathetic to Mr. Demjanjuk secretly arranged for the O.S.I.s trash to be delivered to them each day from 1985 to 1987. The émigrés rifled through the garbage to find classified documents that could help Mr. Demjanjuk, who is currently standing trial in Munich on separate war crimes charges.

Ms. Feigin said she was baffled by the Justice Departments attempt to keep a central part of its history secret for so long. Its an amazing story, she said, that needs to be told.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 14, 2010

An earlier version misspelled the given name of Adolf Eichmann as Adolph.

Edited November 15, 2010 by Douglas Caddy

[John Dolva]

Did you actually take a look Doug? The report is actually about the DoJ's "Nazi-hunting operation". Though it has a chapter on "Alleged U.S. Support for Entry of Nazis into the United States" as the title indicates it downplays Operation Paperclip. Based on my skim that chapter does not contain many revelations.

Why is this in the JFK forum?

Why do you think it shouldn't be?

[Len Colby]

Did you actually take a look Doug? The report is actually about the DoJ's "Nazi-hunting operation". Though it has a chapter on "Alleged U.S. Support for Entry of Nazis into the United States" as the title indicates it downplays Operation Paperclip. Based on my skim that chapter does not contain many revelations.

Why is this in the JFK forum?

The text of the report accompanied an article, which is reproduced below, that appeared originally on the front page of today's (Sunday) New York Times. Apparently the Times thought it was significantly important in its historical revelations not only to carry a lengthy article about it but to attach the text of the actual report. You have every right to your opinion as to its being newsworthy or not as do the editors of the New York Times who obviously differ with your assessment given the treatment they accorded the subject. I apologize if I offended you and forum readers by placing in the JFK topic. I did so because it was a report that was kept secret for four years by the Justice Department and my thought was that if this important secret document has finally seen the light of day, maybe we can have hope that secret government reports connected to JFK's assassination may at some point also see the light of day. I think that we can all agree that the government (especially the CIA) today is still sitting on reports and documents that would drastically change the accepted history of the JFK assassination were these to be released. As the article itself states: "The secrecy surrounding the Justice Department’s handling of the report could pose a political dilemma for President Obama because of his pledge to run the most transparent administration in history. Mr. Obama chose the Justice Department to coordinate the opening of government records."

Nazis Were Given ‘Safe Haven’ in U.S., Report Says

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

The New York Times

November 14, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/us/14nazis.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=us

WASHINGTON — A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.

OK I stand corrected. Thanks for that it was actually quite interesting.

I still think the connection to the assassination is strained, do we know for a fact that there are "secret government reports connected to JFK's assassination"?

[Len Colby]

Did you actually take a look Doug? The report is actually about the DoJ's "Nazi-hunting operation". Though it has a chapter on "Alleged U.S. Support for Entry of Nazis into the United States" as the title indicates it downplays Operation Paperclip. Based on my skim that chapter does not contain many revelations.

Why is this in the JFK forum?

Why do you think it shouldn't be?

Because it has nothing to do with JFK or his assassination.

[John Dolva]

Oh, ok.

[William Kelly]

http://documents.nyt...ious-nazi-cases

http://www.voltairen...icle167692.html

Operation Paperclip

CIA's Denial of Protecting Nazis is Blatant Lie (Part 1)

by Hank P. Albarelli Jr.*

Leaks or revelationsare often more compelling because of what they don't reveal. Through Operation Paperclip, the U.S. organized a monumental transfer of black technology by actively recruiting Nazi criminals for employment by U.S. intelligence. Author H. P. Albarelli dredges up the part that was omitted from the recently-outed official report: the U.S. pointedly chose fervent Nazi scientists with experience in chemical, biological and radioactive warfare to become the architects of the CIA's darkest military experiments involving human guinea pigs, as was the case in Nazi Germany.

On 11 November 1954, thirty-nine of the German-born scientists who entered the United States through Project Paperclip were sworn in as U.S. citizens. Military Intelligence "cleansed" the files of Nazi references. By 1955, more than 760 German scientists had been granted citizenship in the U.S. and given prominent positions in the American scientific community. Many had been longtime members of the Nazi party and the Gestapo, had conducted experiments on humans at concentration camps, had used slave labor, and had committed other war crimes. Marvin Washington Brooks had been terribly ill for nearly three months. A year prior in early-1952, he had been diagnosed with cancer and had been admitted as "a patient for treatment" to the University of Texas Medical School's M.D. Anderson Hospital. Brooks had served as an infantryman in the Army during World War II. He had received a Purple Heart for being wounded during the Battle of the Bulge. Not long after he was admitted to the M.D. Anderson Hospital, Brooks began to receive weekly treatment from a team of physicians led by an older doctor with a heavy German accent and three distinctive scars across his face. Brooks was told the treatment could significantly affect his cancer in positive ways. But Brooks had become increasingly ill, with constant vomiting, weight and hair loss, and patchy skin with large areas appearing as if severely sunburned. Within about six months of the weekly treatment, Brooks was in constant pain. He died the first month of 1955, two days before what would have turned 47 years old. Brooks was never informed that he was one of 263 cancer patients who were secretly being experimented upon with "whole body irradiation." Brooks, nor his wife or family, had ever been consulted about the experiments. Nor had Brooks, or anyone else, given the hospital permission to experiment on him. Nobody ever told Brooks, or anyone in his family, that the German physician who saw him weekly was Dr. Herbert Bruno Gerstner, a former Nazi doctor who had been secretly brought to the United States in 1949.

On November 17, 2010 the CIA's Director of Public Affairs, George Little, wrote a short letter to the editor of the New York Times. Little, on behalf of the agency, protested a just published Times article that detailed CIA "interactions with former Nazi officials in the early years of the post World War II era." Mr. Little wrote, "We would like to make clear that the agency at no time had a policy or a program to protect Nazi war criminals, or to help them escape justice for their actions during the war."

The article provoking the CIA's ire had appeared on the front page of the Times' Sunday, November 14 edition. Written by reporter Eric Lichtblau, it was entitled "Nazi's Were Given 'Safe Haven' in U.S., Report Says". The article focused on a 600-page "secret report" that had been produced by the U.S. Justice Department. The report, which Justice Department officials had suppressed from public release for years, details the American government's importation into the U.S., following the end of World War II, of countless numbers of Nazis.

Written in a dry, bureaucratic style, the report recounts a number of examples of well-known Nazis to whom both the CIA and Department of State had provided both shelter and employment to, including Adolph Eichman, Otto Von Bolschwing, Dr. Josef Mengele, and Arthur Rudolph. To the purposes of this article, it is important to underscore here that the long-concealed report makes no mention whatsoever of the many Nazi scientists who specialized in chemical, biological and radioactive warfare and who were secretly relocated in the United States between the years 1946 and 1958.

For many readers, especially those unfamiliar with Project Paperclip, the New York Times article was stunning news. For those who were knowledgeable of the Pentagon's and CIA's long-overlooked aggressive efforts at recruiting and utilizing Nazi scientists the article was mostly old news, but its publication along with its accusatory finger pointing at the intelligence agency was encouraging.

While the intent here is not to cast aspersions on Mr. Little who most likely has little knowledge about the subject in question, and was only issuing protestations at the behest of someone well above him, perhaps DCI Leon Panetta it is to take strong exception with the CIA's denial, and to offer ample evidence, taken from the agency's own files among other government resources, that the denial is blatantly erroneous.

"Operation Paperclip" transferred to the U.S. over 1,600 Nazi scientists, largely escaping the Nuremberg trials. Men who were classified as 'ardent Nazis' were chosen - just weeks after Hitler's defeat - to become 'respectable' U.S. citizens, some of whom are allegedly still working in places like Brookhaven labs, Cold Spring Harbor and Plum Island. Photo: Gen. Reinhard Gehlen (middle) and his SS united were hired, and swiftly became agents of the CIA when they revealed their massive records on the Soviet Union to the US. Genesis: Project Paperclip

Briefly, America's initial involvement with chasing down and recruiting Nazi scientists began near concurrently with the Nuremberg Trials. To repeat the words of Clarence G. Lasby, one of the very first historians to take serious note of Project Paperclip: "History is often improvisation; it was so with the evolution of Project Paperclip. The project came to life in the aspirations of those who looked upon the German wartime developments as 'technically sweet', to use the phrase with which Robert Oppenheimer described the excitement over the construction of an H-bomb."

Even before the war had ended, U.S. military, intelligence, and political leaders in Washington, D.C. wanted to do all that they could to capture and recruit Nazi scientists with coveted expertise, knowledge, and experience for employment by the United States government. With the war's end the race was on. Operation Paperclip was the title of the first such program operated by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to the CIA. Chief among the OSS objectives in capturing Nazi scientists was preventing the targeted individuals from falling into the hands of the Soviets or the U.K., both of which had launched their own programs to sweep up Nazis researchers. Over the past half-century the label "Paperclip" has come to encompass many other U.S. lead programs, many sharing the same broad objectives as Project Paperclip, operated at the same time, and administered by the Army, Navy, Air Force, State Department, and CIA. Without doubt the specter of Project Paperclip has strongly permeated the American psyche, especially through the sub-text of the entertainment industry. Apt examples are: both the book and the recently released film Shutter Island; the classic films Marathon Man; Boys From Brazil; Dr. Strangelove; The Right Stuff; The Good Sheperd; and countless television shows and fiction and non-fiction titles.

The earliest aggressive attempt at seizing Nazi scientists was a special team of U.S. soldiers called the Alsos Mission, led by U.S. army officer Boris T. Pash and civilian scientist Samuel Goudsmit. The Alsos Mission searched across Europe for targeted Nazis, most of who fell into the broad categories of nuclear, rocketry, and chemical/biological warfare researchers with highly coveted credentials, quite literally pulling a number of less-than-willing scientists from places of hiding in cupboards, dank cellars, medieval castles, and byzantine caves chuck filled with cartons of concealed documents.

Bio-Chemical Warfare Experiments & Nazis

Abhorrent human experiments by Nazi scientists were conducted on large numbers of people by the German Nazi regime in its concentration camps during World War II. Much overlooked in the large numbers of German scientists secreted into the United States were a sizable number of former Nazi chemists and biochemists brought into the country along with their families. Many of these scientists had been intensely involved in the conduct of human experiments for the Nazis, including horrific activities conducted under the auspices of the dreaded SS and its ultra-secret Ahnenerbe Institutes at several concentration camps.

Illustrative of the thinking and fervor with which the United States pursued Nazi bio-chemical researchers are sections of a 1946 report on targeted German scientists. It reads: "Dr. Reetz is deemed an outstanding scientist in the field of chemical warfare agents, especially in synthesizing of new war chemicals. While employed with the German Chemical Warfare Laboratories (NWA) at Spandau, he is known to have synthesized more than one hundred war gas compounds. Dr. Reetz is also known to be thoroughly conversant in the chemistry of nerve gases, such as Sarin, Somar, and Tabun, and with the irritant gas Excelsior as developed in the German Chemical Warfare Laboratories at Spandau and Raubkammer…. Dr. Schrader conducted research on the synthesis of Tabun, Sarin, and Soman… Dr. Von Juergen Klenk was manager of the Sarin plant at Seewerk. Because of his knowledge of this chemical warfare agent he should be interrogated by organic chemist and chemical engineers on the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service…Dr. Gross Eberhard has also worked with Sarin, Tabun, and Soman, as to toxicity and treatment of symptoms… specialists from Camp Detrick should be assigned to the interrogation of all of these doctors…. Also high on the list is Dr. Hoffmann who worked in the Gatow chemical laboratories."

"Dr. Hoffmann" was German scientist Dr. Friedrich "Fritz" Hoffmann, who came to America in 1947 through the Paperclip pipeline. During the war, Hoffmann had been based in Frankfurt and Gatow, a district of Berlin, where he conducted a myriad of chemical experiments for the Third Reich. Reportedly, Hoffmann, a large, gregarious man, who spoke English fairly well, was opposed to the Nazi ideology but evidence of this appears slim. After the war, the British counterpart Paperclip project, Operation Matchbox, had recruited him. He worked developing synthesized poison gases at Porton Down, but he did not like living in England and failed to get along with British researchers.

In the U.S., Hoffmann was initially posted at Camp Detrick and Edgewood Arsenal, where he continued his work with refining lethal sarin and tabun gases for warfare objectives, utilizing a specially built gas chamber, put together along with Edgewood Arsenal research chief Dr. Seymour Silver, within which countless animals were destroyed, and at least 25 alleged 'volunteer' American servicemen were experimented upon. Reports that several servicemen died in these experiments have persisted for decades, but the Pentagon refuses to release any documents concerning the experiments.

Sarin-gas breathing experiments at the Edgewood Arsenal facility. During the 1960s thousands of Army enlisted men served as "volunteers" for the secret testing of chemical and incapacitating agents. The actual historical record, however, has until now remained disturbingly incomplete. In early 1952, the CIA, in conjunction with researchers at Camp Detrick and Edgewood Arsenal, including relocated Nazis Hoffmann, and Dr. Karl Tauboeck, who had researched truth serums and nerve gases for the Nazi SS, undertook construction of yet another special chamber that could be used "in oxygen deprivation experiments" similar to those conducted by the Germans on concentration camp inmates. Reads an April 11, 1952 CIA memorandum: "[Oxygen deprivation] affects the higher brain centers, resembling alcoholic inebriation. Some subjects [in experiments conducted thus far] became exhilarated, talkative, or quarrelsome, with emotional outbursts or fixed ideas. Some complained of headache or numbness. Voluntary coordination and attention are impaired… burns and bruises are not noticed."

Hoffmann also worked on organophosphate insecticides while at Camp Detrick and helped develop protective clothing for researchers there, a project that brought him into occasional contact with U.S. Army researchers Drs. Frank R. Olson and Harold A. Abramson.

Eventually, in the mid-1950s, Hoffmann joined the staff of a specially created CIA front-organization called Chemrophyl Associates. The company, which had Drs. Sidney Gottlieb, Robert Lashbrook, and Ray Treichler of the CIA's Chemical Branch as its primary corporate officers, was headquartered in a Washington, D.C. post office box and had a desk at the CIA's Technical Services Section (TSS), then located on the National Mall near the Reflecting Pool. Chemrophyl soon evolved into another CIA front called the Amazon Natural Drug Company.

At about the same time, Hoffmann ordered a hefty supply of LSD-25 [eight cartons of LSD ampoules] from the Sandoz Chemical Company in Basle, Switzerland. Hoffmann would also rendezvous with pioneer mycologist Gordon Wasson and University of Delaware professor and covert CIA consultant James Moore in Mexico. Hoffmann would also meet several times with officials of Sandoz Chemical company, including Albert Hofmann and Dr. W.A. Stohl, Jr. and would on at least two occasions also meet with Dr. Henry K. Beecher, a noted Harvard University professor, who in turn had also met often with Sandoz officials Hofmann and Stohl, as well as with the covert operative who had secretly worked since 1946 for U.S. Army intelligence in the Sandoz laboratories.

Former CIA Chemical Branch chief Dr. Sidney Gottlieb spoke of the Moore and Sandoz agency connections in 1998: "Moore was perhaps not the best choice but he was a friend of a friend… and, of course, we were well aware that the military, people with the Army, had been well ahead of us in the way of hallucinogens, especially LSD… Operatives, as well as informants, had been inside the Sandoz laboratories for years and information from insiders was being relayed to Edgewood [Arsenal] on a weekly basis sometimes, but still we went ahead with our own subprojects, some of which peripherally involved Hoffmann."

Hoffmann would also see to it that hundreds of rhesus monkeys from Latin and South America were shipped by the CIA's front-company to Fort Detrick's Special Operations Division, Frederick, Maryland, where the primates would be fed a steady diet of psychotropic drugs in efforts to study various stages of induced "psychotic behavior." These experiments would quickly evolve into human experiments conducted among U.S. service personnel at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland and several federal prisons. Said one former Detrick researcher, "I don't know which was more frightening, one of the monkeys pumped-up on a cocktail of psychedelics or one of the drugged, out-of-control inmates at Atlanta's federal penitentiary."

Other front organizations maintained by the CIA's Security Research Services that involved Hoffmann, and other former Nazis transported to the U.S., included a front-organization called the Morwede Company, which maintained a small office on New York Ave. NW in Washington, D.C. The Morwede Company worked closely with the CIA-created Human Ecology Fund in the late 1950s and 1960s and focused some of its activities on matters that clearly fall into the esoteric realm.

In the late 1950s, Dr. Hoffmann's work for the CIA and Fort Detrick also evolved into intensive research regarding the development of lethal chemical agents to be used as weapons in Vietnam. One of these weapons initially became known as Agent White, then Agent Blue, and eventually and infamously as Agent Orange, a so-called herbicide, or defoliant, that wreaked havoc with the health of countless American soldiers and veterans. Agent Orange, which contains deadly Dioxin (unsafe at any level of use), was authorized (along with Agent White) for use in Vietnam in November 1961, with the stated objective of "improving road and waterway visibility and clear camp perimeters" so that "greater numbers of enemy troops could be killed."

Earlier in 1959, and perhaps even before that, Dr. Friedrich Hoffmann, working for the Army Chemical Corps and CIA, had been dispatched to Europe to scan the chemical-biological landscape there for "potential warfare agents." Hoffmann met with a wide array of military and corporate officials in Europe all of whom overwhelmingly supported the use (and sale) of chemical warfare agents such as Agent Orange-type compounds, which were then in the very early stages of development by U.S. military researchers. While in Europe, Hoffmann also, ironically through a series of meetings with German and U.K. scientists, became aware of what he later termed "startling information about the toxicity of Dioxin" including the fact that the chemical had been strongly linked to "severe and sometimes fatal liver damage." Through these contacts Hoffmann became aware of industrial incidents and accidents during which "trace amounts of dioxin in a wood preservative had caused several deaths from liver failure among [exposed] workers." When Hoffmann returned to the U.S. he promptly wrote a report to his superiors within which he revealed his findings about Dioxin, but his report apparently was ignored. The subsequent widespread damage and destruction done by years of Agent Orange use in Vietnam is amply documented and is still very much with us today.

Radiation Experiments and Paperclip Nazis

Project Paperclip brought Dr. Herbert Bruno Gerstner from Germany to the United States in 1949. Following processing and orientation in New York City at the now gone Alamac Hotel, Gerstner, a small, slim man with three long scars across his left cheek, was sent in 1950 to Texas where he began his work at the Air Force's School of Aviation medicine in San Antonio. Prior to coming to America, Gerstner had spent much of his professional career in Leipzig, Germany. There he worked for the University of Leipzig. Some readers may recall that the University employed a number of physicians who were quite prominent in the Nazi's euthanasia program aimed at the mentally ill, including large numbers of children.

Gerstner interned at the Leipzig's University Medical Policlinic, where he worked as a scientific assistant in the University's Physiology Institute directed by Dr. Martin Gildemeister. Gildemeister was an authority on the effects of electricity on people struck by lightning and on victims of accidental electrocution, as well as a widely regarded researcher of electromagnetic fields. Gerstner considered Gildemeister his mentor and the two men were close professionally and on a social basis. Following Gildemeister's death in 1943, Gerstner vigorously continued his mentor's research. It is suspected that in the mid-1930s Gerstner had extensive contact with German psychiatrist Dr. Frederick Panse. Panse was the inventor of the "Panse method" or "Pansen", an extreme form of shock therapy that one U.S. government report dubbed as "pure unadulterated sadism." Dr. Pansen became a psychiatric consultant for the German military under the Third Reich. In 1935, he became a founder and director of the Rhenish Provincial Institute for Psychiatric and Neurological Genetics. In 1937, he was a much sought after lecturer on racial hygiene. In 1940, be became a lead consultant for Hitler's T4 euthanasia program. Under the program, Panse advocated for the extermination of those with "incurable mental illness" and he was praised for "expertly guiding" hundreds of people into the gas chambers, after he made them "drunk with elation" through the administration of a number of drugs.

All the while Panse was developing his skills at guiding the mentally ill toward their murders, Dr. Herbert Gerstner worked diligently on studying the effects of electricity on the human body. As early as 1935, Dr. Gerstner began collaborating with Dr. Siegfried Koeppen, a close associate of Dr. Panse. Koeppen worked closely with Professor Julius Hallervoden, who under the T4 euthanasia program dissected the brains of hundreds of people killed because they were found "undesirable to society." Together Gerstner and Koeppen conducted a series of experiments on untold numbers of human subjects designed to compare the wounds inflicted upon human skin from burns and electrocution. The scant files that remain on these experiments indicate that the two researchers had ample supplies of "fresh human skin" that is believed to have come in part from the "feeble minded" children exterminated by the T4 program. Remarkably, when Gerstner was first interviewed by Project Paperclip officials, before being sent to the U.S., he admitted to using human subjects in his experiments, explaining that from 1937 through to 1939 he used subjects that were "cancer patients" and "old people and young people who were sick."

When Gerstner was recruited by Paperclip officials for work in San Antonio at the M.D. Anderson Hospital for Cancer Research his research in Nazi Germany made him a perfect match for the objectives of the Air Force and CIA, both of which were most interested in learning all that they could about how many flights a pilot of a nuclear-powered aircraft might take without harmful radiation exposure, as well as how to treat radiation and electrical burns on human flesh. Dr. Gerstner's Texas cancer patients never for a moment suspected that their treatment at the hands of Gerstner and his associates was not in their best interest or aimed at curing their illness. Even when they became deathly sick with constant vomiting, dehydration, skin lesions, and rapid weight loss, Gerstner's patients did not suspect that they were being administered an extreme amount of X-ray dosages that would eventually kill them.

[End of Part 1 of a three-part article.]

Hank P. Albarelli Jr.

Investigative journalist and writer who lives in Florida and Vermont. Last book published : « A Terrible Mistake : The murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's secret Cold War Experiments ». Albarelli's book documents and details numerous CIA and Pentagon sponsored experiments on unwitting human subjects. Albarelli is a founding member of the recently formed North American Truth and Accountability Commission on Human Experimentation.

Edited December 12, 2010 by William Kelly