1945-1973, Germany/USA: From Dachau to MKULTRA 

Timeline

By Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain

October 1945: U.S. Navy Technical Mission reports on Nazi use of mescaline in interrogation tests at Dachau concentration camp.

1947: U.S. Navy initiates its own mescaline studies called Project Chatter.

1950: CIA launches Project Bluebird. [To create "exploitable alteration of personality" in "potential agents, defectors, refugees, POWs and others."  To "control an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will ... even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation."]

Aug. 1951: CIA begins Project Artichoke [Agents were sent abroad in search of rare herbs for "truth serum."]

Oct. 21, 1951: First known CIA experiments with LSD.

Dec. 1952: George White began giving LSD to unwitting U.S. citizens at a CIA safehouse in Greenwich Village.

April 13, 1953: CIA's Technical Services Staff initiates MKULTRA.

 1954: CIA began Operation MKPILOT at Lexingon Narcotics Hospital, Kentucky. [To test 800 drugs, mostly on black prisoners and drug addicts.]

 1955: Army begins testing LSD at the Edgewood arsenal.

 1958: Army begins experiments on BZ, a superhallucinogen.

 1961: U.S. Army initiates LSD interrogations under Operation Third Chance [to field test LSD] in Western Europe.

 1962: U.S. Army launches Operation Derby Hat [To field test LSD in Asia.]

 1962: BZ becomes part of the U.S. Army's standardized chemical warfare arsenal.

 1962: CIA ends support for above-ground LSD studies.

 1964: Army begins using BZ gas in Vietnam.

 1965: Drug Abuse Control Amendment restricts LSD research.

 1965: CIA phases out MKULTRA; begins MKSEARCH.

 1966: Senate Hearings about CIA use of LSD.

 1967: Joint FDA/NIMH Psychotomimetic Advisory Committee formed with strong input from CIA-linked doctors

 1967: A CIA-Army drug research program OFTEN/MK-CHICKWIT. [To create new drugs to "be used offensively."]

 1973: MKSEARCH and OFTEN/MKCHICKWIT end.

 1975: Rockefeller Commission reports on CIA drug tests.

 1976: Church Committee reports on CIA and Army drug tests.

 1977: Senate hearings on MKULTRA.

 Source: Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties and Beyond, 1986. www.levity.com/aciddreams/timeline.html

Nazi Scientists

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul

 The Nuremberg Tribunal revealed that some respected medical professionals were involved in a vast crime network of the SS.  Two hundred German doctors conducting these experiments.  Most were friends of the U.S. before the war.  Despite their inhuman experiments, the U.S. rebuilt relationships with them after the war.  The U.S. tracked down Dr. Hubertus Strughold, the aviation doctor in charge of "aviation medicine" experiments at Dachau. 

      General Eisenhower gave his approval to exploit the work and research of the Nazi death camps.  Within weeks, many notorious Nazi doctors were working for the U.S. Army at Heidelberg.  Army teams scoured Europe for scientific experimental apparatus such as pressure chambers, compressors, G-force machines, giant centrifuges and electron microscopes.  These doctors were wined and dined by the U.S. Army while most German citizens virtually starved.

      Under Strughold's leadership, 34 Nazi scientists accepted contracts from Project Paperclip and were moved to Randolph Air Force Base, Texas. Authorization to hire them came from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Despite the lessons of Nuremberg and the death camps, the CIA, U.S. Navy and the Army's Chemical Corps targeted groups for experimentation who were unable to resist; prisoners, mental patients, foreigners, ethnic minorities, sex deviants, the terminally ill, children, U.S. military personnel and prisoners of war.  They violated the Nuremberg Code by conducting and subsidizing experiments on unwitting citizens.  The CIA began MKULTRA in 1953, the very year the U.S. signed the Nuremberg Code pledging to prohibit experiments on captive populations without full and free consent.

 When Americans landed on the moon, two groups of scientist shared the credit:

 (1) the rocket team under Werner von Braun who perfected the V-2s, built in Nordhausen where 20,000 slave laborers from prison camp Dora were worked to death. 

 (2) the space doctors, led by Hubertus Strughold, whose work was pioneered at Dachau and the torture and death of hundreds.  The torture chambers used to slowly kill Nazi prisoners were the test beds for apparatus that protected Neil Armstrong from harm, from lack of oxygen and pressure, when he walked on the moon.

Source: Napa Sentinel, Nov. 19 and 22, 1991. www.sonic.net/sentinel/gvcon8.html

 

 

Dr. Hubertus Strughold

"Father of U.S. Space Medicine"

 

 

Dachau Concentration Camp

 Strughold's experiments at Dachau, used prisoners as test subjects.  Prisoners included: Communists, Social Democrats, Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma, clergymen and homosexuals.  Inmates were immersed in tubs of ice water while instruments monitored their deaths.  Other experiments tested the limits of human endurance at high altitudes: lack of oxygen, high pressure, etc.  These "experimental" pressure chambers were also used to execute prisoners.