CHAPTER 8

DACHAU MODEL

At the first Nuremberg trial, an International Military Tribunal sentenced Hermann Goering and eleven other top Nazi officials to death. Twelve additional tribunals followed, known as the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings. In the first of those, the Doctors Trial, twenty-three leading German physicians and administrators were identified as war criminals.

One of the greatest examples of cognitive dissonance in the early stages of the Cold War was the contrasting U.S. policy of hiring and hanging Nazis at the same time. “Even before the verdicts were in,” John Marks wrote about the Doctors Trial, “special U.S. investigating teams were sifting through the experimental records at Dachau for information of military value.”

The Doctors Trial ran for 140 days, during which the court heard eighty-five witnesses testify to how Nazi doctors asphyxiated, burned, carved up, drowned, froze, and poisoned thousands of concentration camp prisoners, including children. None of the victims were volunteers. None had granted their consent. All the accused doctors had taken the Hippocratic Oath: “First, do no harm.”

“This case and these defendants have created this gruesome question for the lexicographer,” said Brigadier General Telford Taylor, the chief American war crimes prosecutor. “For the moment we will christen this macabre science ‘thanatology,’ the science of producing death.” Dr. Leopold Alexander, one of the American investigators, later said, “It sometimes seems as if the Nazis had taken special pains in making practically every nightmare come true.”

A gamut of experiments causing prolonged suffering—and often death—had been undertaken to explore ways of keeping German troops alive under extreme conditions. To investigate the limits of human endurance at extremely high altitudes, a subject of interest to the Luftwaffe, prisoners at Dachau were placed into a chamber that could duplicate altitudes as high as sixty-eight thousand feet—nearly thirteen miles above sea level, more than twice as high as Mount Everest. Many died from lack of oxygen. The Luftwaffe also wanted to protect their air crews from hypothermia. To that end, naked prisoners were immersed in tanks of ice water for hours, developing “extreme rigor.” The German navy, along with the Luftwaffe, sought to make seawater drinkable. The subjects of this experiment were deprived of food and given only chemically processed seawater to drink.

Muscles and nerves were harvested to investigate regeneration; bone transplants were done from one person to another. Such mutilations produced agony and permanent disability. Concentration camp inmates were regularly used—and killed—during tests of hazardous chemicals and lethal biological agents. Of the prisoners at Buchenwald who were shot with poisoned bullets, prosecutor Taylor clarified that their purpose was not as “guinea pigs to test an antidote for the poison; their murderers really wanted to know how quickly the poison would kill.”

Sixteen of the defendants in the Doctors Trial were found guilty, and seven were executed. One of the seven men acquitted was Dr. Kurt Blome. He had been the deputy surgeon general in the Third Reich—the Reichsgesundheitsführer—and headed its biological warfare program. The Nuremberg prosecution charged him with conducting deadly experiments using malaria, tuberculosis, bubonic plague, and mustard gas. Though not mentioned in the indictments, it was later reported that Blome had used aircraft to spray Auschwitz prisoners with tabun and sarin, highly lethal nerve agents. He was also linked to experiments with the hallucinogenic mescaline.

In its acquittal of Blome, the Nuremberg judges wrote, “It may well be that the defendant Blome was preparing to experiment on human beings in connection with bacteriological warfare, but the record fails to disclose that fact, or that he ever actually conducted the experiments.”

It is strongly suspected that senior U.S. military officials intervened in Dr. Blome’s case and may have managed to suppress incriminating evidence. This supposition is supported by what Blome did next. Almost immediately after being exonerated, he was hired by U.S. intelligence. His senior role in the largest and most horrendous science experiment on human beings ever attempted was apparently judged too good to pass up.

In the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Alfred McCoy wrote, “In sum, medical science was repulsed by Dachau’s inhumanity, but U.S. intelligence was intrigued. Consequently, Washington’s postwar defense research was soon infected by the Dachau model, whose methods it mimed across a broad spectrum of Cold War experiments on, literally, tens of thousands of unwitting human subjects—from atomic, chemical, and biological warfare to psychological torture.”

Shortly after Blome’s acquittal, representatives from Fort Detrick in Maryland—the location of the Army’s top bacteriologists and chemists—went to Europe and interviewed the Nuremberg-charged concentration camp doctor about germ warfare. He was then hired to work at Camp King, strategically situated in the village of Oberursel, eleven miles northwest of the U.S. European Command headquarters in Frankfurt.

Concealed by the rolling Taunus Hills, surrounded by barbed wire, Camp King had previously been the site of the Luftwaffe’s famed Durchgangslager Luft interrogation center. As it turned out, little changed when new management took over. In the early part of the Cold War, the bulk of the staff at the secret compound was made up of ex-Gestapo officers, ex-Nazi doctors, and ex–German intelligence operatives, including General Reinhard Gehlen, who, after a long period of debriefing at Virginia’s Fort Hunt, was sent back to Germany to work for U.S intelligence.

In an offshoot of Operation Paperclip, Camp King was reportedly used to resurrect Nazi experiments in torture and interrogation, a program identified as among the most nefarious and inhumane of the Cold War. “At the time,” wrote Annie Jacobsen, “U.S. intelligence officials believed the Soviets were pursuing mind control programs—supposedly a means of getting captured spies to talk—and wanted to know what it would be up against if the Russians got hold of its American spies.” As a so-called black site, Camp King was seen as a suitable spot for the testing of torture techniques that would be far more problematic if attempted inside the United States. In this German hideaway, as one official put it, “disposal of the body is not a problem.”

Camp King’s first chief medical doctor was Dr. Walter Schreiber, the surgeon general of the Third Reich. Dr. Schreiber would eventually join thirty-four other recruited Nazi doctors at a new School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Field, Texas—“bringing,” as McCoy wrote, “the Third Reich’s scientific esprit into the heart of U.S. military medicine.” In 1950, the U.S. Air Force effectively altered the historical record of these scientists—and unofficially expunged their war crimes—with the publication of a book titled German Aviation Medicine: World War II. It was a laudatory assessment, portraying the doctors as noble men who “showed great scientific understanding… and personal concern in aeromedical research.” In spite of the con job, complaints about Dr. Schreiber’s blotted résumé never ceased, and in 1952 he left the United States for Argentina.

Dr. Schreiber’s successor at Camp King was an equally pernicious choice: Nuremberg-indicted Dr. Blome, the former deputy surgeon general of the Third Reich. Tainted by the very visible association with the Nuremberg trials, Blome had no chance of receiving a visa from the State Department to travel to the United States—more cognitive dissonance in action. However, this didn’t prevent U.S. scientists from coming to him.

Blome would consult regularly with visitors from the Army Chemical Corps at Camp Detrick, where the highly classified and morally dubious work of researching biological and chemical warfare was assigned to a unit called the Special Operations Division. The work was based at a top-secret facility within Camp Detrick, designated Building No. 439, a drab one-story block of concrete that, by intention, was as forgettable-looking as the many other nondescript structures at the base. From 1950 to 1975, the Special Operations Division is believed to have conducted experiments on more than seven thousand soldiers. The experiments included the use of mind-altering drugs and the dangerous incapacitating chemical agents tabun and sarin, substances very familiar to Dr. Blome.

Dr. Blome also began an association with the U.S. Navy Medical Research Institute near Washington. Dr. Charles Savage, a U.S. physician hired by the Navy, had studied the mind-control experiments done at Dachau as a way to secure information during interrogations without using force. Dr. Savage began conducting experiments with mescaline under a program with the code name Chatter. Because Chatter showed little success, it was discontinued in 1953. Yet the U.S. government persisted in testing psychedelic substances, only to find out what Dr. Savage already knew by 1953. These kinds of drugs didn’t control minds. They scrambled them.