Albarelli, the author of A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, is a meticulous researcher, and his examination of the wide-ranging influence of the U.S. importation of Nazis after World War II, and the influence on a number of U.S. enterprises, not least the CIA/DoD operations at Edgewood Arsenal and the MKULTRA progams, is highly worth reading.
From the beginning of Albarelli's article:
In the second part of his investigation, Hank Albarelli peels off another layer of the ongoing Operation Paperclip cover up and unveils one of its darker legacies. Working with Paperclip Nazi scientists and building on the results of their often deadly research, the CIA tested LSD psychoactive drugs on almost 7,000 unwitting U.S. citizens over a 20-year period. Those LSD experiments, and Paperclip itself, were among the first manifestations of what became a guiding principle of the Cold War right to the present day, that the ends justify the means.For more, see Albarelli's article. And here's the link to Part I: CIA’s Denial of Protecting Nazis is Blatant Lie.
Dr. Herbert Bruno Gerstner was not the only former Nazi researcher to be brought to Texas by Project Paperclip. When Gerstner arrived, there were already a dozen Nazi aeromedical scientists working at the Air Force’s School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio. Among this initial group was one physician who would eventually become widely known and controversial. This was Dr. Hubertus Strughold, today unabashedly considered the “Father of American Space Medicine.” Suspicions loom large today that Strughold’s past wartime involvement in human experiments was overlooked and covered-up by Paperclip officials so that his expertise could be exploited by America’s then burgeoning aerospace program.
When Strughold died in 1986, years after retiring from an illustrious 18-year career with the U.S. government, the Justice Department had only just come around to investigating his wartime activities, an inquiry that eventually went nowhere. Additionally, readers who think Strughold had no links to the CIA should think again. Military and aerospace activities at SAM in the 1950s, and beyond, very much involved the CIA as is well documented in recent years by numerous declassified documents and reports concerning the ultra-secret U-2 spy aircraft program, Projects Idealist and Aquatone, and other espionage activities centered in Texas.
Strughold consistently argued that he knew nothing about Nazi human experiments until after the war ended. “I was against Hitler and his beliefs”, Strughold told one reporter in the 1968. He claimed, “I sometimes had to hide myself because my life was in danger from the Nazis”, but this defense appears trumped-up in light of evidence uncovered by American historian and investigative journalist Linda Hunt. Hunt— whose life was threatened a number of times during her ten-year investigation of Project Paperclip, and who was shot at by an unknown assailant on one occasion— discovered that on October 26 and 27, 1942, Strughold attended a Nazi scientific conference in Nuremberg to discuss “Medical Problems Arising from Distress at Sea and Winter Hardships.”
At the conference, a Nazi researcher, identified as Professor Holzloehner, presented his findings through experiments he conducted on Dachau concentration camp inmates “who were frozen to death in vats of ice water in the camp yard during winter.” According to Holzloehner’s presentation, the human subjects suffered excruciating pain before they died from having various body parts frozen. Linda Hunt also discovered at least five other Paperclip scientists who worked at SAM who knew about the Dachau experiments through their participation at the same 1942 conference. These were Drs. Walter Schreiber, Hans Clamann, Ulrich Luft, Konrad Buettner, and Richard Landenberg.
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