At the end of World War II, German scientists and technical experts were being held in a variety of detainment camps by the allies and Russians. The British, French, Americans and Russians became embroiled in highly competitive recruiting efforts to secure the services of these German specialists. Many of the scientists, however, could not qualify for immigration visas into the United States because they were war criminals or had actively served the Nazi cause. The prospect of losing the industrial and scientific services of these German experts lead to the creation of a series of secret programs including PAPERCLIP, PROJECT 63 and NATIONAL INTEREST40, 135, 287, 288.
Through these programs, over 1000 German scientists and their families were secretly brought into the United States without State Department scrutiny or approval. Recruitment of German scientists through PAPERCLIP and related projects continued into the 1980’s. The most famous individual brought over in this manner was Werner von Braun, the rocket scientist.
Von Braun was the head of the German V2 rocket program during World War II. The V2 rocket factory was the Mittlewerk, a site visited personally by von Braun. Labor for the factory was provided by the inmates of nearby Camp Dora. It is estimated that 20,000 inmates were worked to death at the Mittlewerk; 6000 bodies were found on the ground when American troops liberated the camp late in the War.
One of the survivors of Camp Dora, Yves Beon, said that workers were given one piece of bread and margarine per day. Despite these conditions, workers were able to sabotage some of the V2 rockets by tampering with parts or urinating on them. When sabotage was discovered, the prisoners were hanged in their work tunnels. Beatings by prison guards were routine.
Besides visiting the Mittlewerk personally, von Braun attended a meeting at which the Nazis discussed bringing French civilians in as slave labor for building rockets. At the Nuremberg trials, von Braun was said by a Nazi defendant to have worked closely with Dr. Albin Sawatzi. Camp Dora prisoners identified Sawatzi as being in charge of much of the deadly treatment they received, and as personally administering beatings.
A report by the Office of Military Government U.S., the OMGUS Security Report, listed von Braun as an ardent Nazi and a security threat to the United States, hence the need for routing through PAPERCLIP. Two weeks after the first U.S. moon landing, on August 2, 1969, von Braun wrote a letter to retired Major General Julius Klein on his Director of Marshall Space Flight Center stationery, in which he said, “It’s true that I was a member of Hitler’s elite SS. The columnist was correct. I would appreciate it if you would keep the information to yourself as any publicity would harm my work with NASA.”
The NASA rockets that took Neil Armstrong to the moon were built by von Braun and his colleagues. When Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon, he did not realize that he was stepping on the ashes of 20,000 people who died at Camp Dora. Arthur Rudolph, head of production at the Mittlewerk, became the head of the U.S. Saturn V Rocket Program. Another Mittlewerk team member, Kurt Debus, became the first Director of the Kennedy Space Center.
Medical doctors also came over under PAPERCLIP. Dr. Albertus Strughold was named chief scientist of the Aerospace Medical Division of the U.S. Air Force in 1961. He is regarded as the father of aviation medicine. Strughold’s first job in the U.S. was head of the Air Force School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Field, Texas. In 1949 he took charge of the newly created Department of Space Medicine. Honors awarded Strughold included the Americanism Medal from the Daughters of the American Revolution. Also, June 15, 1985 was declared “Dr. Albertus Strughold Day” by the Texas Senate. The Aerospace Library at the School of Aerospace Medicine, Brooks Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas is dedicated to Strughold.
An article in The Dallas Morning News, October 27, 1993 (page 8A) describes efforts by the Simon Weisenthal Center and other groups to have honors paid to Dr. Strughold, including the Library dedication, removed.
Strughold was head of the Luftwaffe Institute of Aviation Medicine in Berlin during the War. At the Nuremberg trials his military superiors, close associates and a subordinate were all tried for war crimes. Strughold, however, was never arrested, interrogated or called as a witness. Nuremberg investigator Herbert Meyer was given firsthand information about Strughold’s direct involvement in war crimes for which people close to him were tried. Hermann Becker-Freysing, who gave this information to Meyer, was found guilty at Nuremberg and sentenced to twenty years in prison.
One study conducted by Nazi aviation doctors involved an attempt to ascertain the effects of ejecting from an airplane at high altitudes. Concentration camp prisoners were placed in a special chamber and the pressure would suddenly be dropped to the equivalent of 39,260 feet. One question addressed in the experiment was whether the decompression was more painful in the prone or sitting position. Some subjects went insane and some died.
At Dachau, Himmler personally approved the use of 200 prisoners (Jews, Russians, and members of the Polish resistance) in experiments by Dr. Sigmund Rascher. The experiments were expected to be fatal. Rascher went a step beyond prior research; he instantly decompressed subjects to the equivalent of 69,000 feet, which caused many to pull out their hair, tear their faces with their fingernails, and pound their heads on the wall.
Nearly eighty men died from being kept at simulated high altitude for up to thirty minutes. Others were taken out of the chamber alive, held under water till they drowned, then autopsied to determine the amount of air embolism in their brains. The reactions of the men inside the chambers were often filmed.
Karl Hoellenrainer was a gypsy prison-camp inmate who survived experiments at Dachau prison hospital conducted by Dr. Wilhelm Beigelboeck. Hoellenrainer was in Auschwitz briefly, where his own child, and his sister and her two children were killed. He was to have been transported from there to Buchenwald but was rerouted to Dachau. There, he and other subjects were starved then forced to drink putrid seawater, or seawater treated by one of two purification methods. Those who refused were tied up and force-fed by tubes.
Subjects in these experiments became violently ill, some went into coma, some were seriously wounded, and some died when their livers were punctured to drain off blood and water. The purpose of the experiments was to develop methods that would enable Nazi pilots downed at sea to survive by drinking seawater.
Besides strictly medical experiments, Dachau was also the site of mind control experiments involving the drug mescaline. Nazi doctors including Dr. Kurt Plotner administered mescaline to unwitting subjects by spiking prisoner’s drinks184. During the same period, similar experiments involving mescaline, marijuana, barbiturates, and scopolamine were conducted by Dr. Winfred Overholser at St. Elizabeth’s hospital in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. mind control experiments at St. Elizabeth’s were conducted under the auspices of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the CIA. A participant in the experiments, OSS officer George White, later became the contractor on the CIA’s MKULTRA Subprojects 3, 14, 16, 42 and 149 that ran from 1953 to at least 1964.
An unanswered question is whether any Nazi psychiatrists or mind control experts were brought over under PAPERCLIP or related projects156. The full range of German scientific technical expertise was recruited through these programs including medical doctors, rocket scientists, propulsion experts, and experts in ball bearings, film, lubricants, jet engines and countless other areas of interest to the military. It seems unlikely that no psychiatrists were included in the recruitment programs, especially since the OSS was already testing and interested in the same mind control methods studied in the death camps.
It is not difficult to identify possible PAPERCLIP scientists in the medical literature. Theodore Wagner-Jauregg was a chemist born on May 2, 1903 in Vienna and educated in Munich and Vienna. He died on February 19, 1992. His father, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1927 for research on syphilis42.
Theodore Wagner-Jauregg worked at the Kaiser Wilhem Institute in Germany before the War and then worked at Edgware Arsenal from 1948 to 1955 before returning to Europe. Edgeware Arsenal was one of the key centers for CIA and Army LSD and mind control research during the 1950’s and 1960’s. In a paper on a defensive chemical weapon, an antidote to a class of drug called acetylcholinesterase inhibitors104 the authors say in a footnote that, “The experimental results in this paper were obtained several years ago, but its publication has been delayed for various reasons.”
Most likely, publication was delayed until the results of the work were declassified. Under the listing of authors, the paper is said to be, “From the Research Directorate, United States Army Chemical Research and Development Laboratories, Army Chemical Center, Maryland.” Whether or not Wagner-Jauregg came over under PAPERCLIP is not the point; the point is that any psychiatrists brought over as mind control experts ought to be identifiable.
There was a round of declassification of mind control documents in the 1970’s, which were the foundation of books published in the 1970’s and 1980’s38, 65, 105, 158, 184, 278, 301. These documents and books did not examine the possible role of German PAPERCLIP psychiatrists in mind control experimentation. The subject remains untouched by scholarly and investigative hands, but is an essential part of the historical background.