Part 2: Air Force Teaching Guide Minimizes History of Recruiting Nazis

For Part One of this article, which covered the history of various key Nazis brought to work for the U.S. military, and how this history was withheld in Air Force training documents, click here. Both Part One and Part Two of this article take off from an investigation by Jason Leopold at Truthout and documents obtained via FOIA by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.
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Not Just Rocket Scientists -- the MKULTRA Connection

According to the Air Force "Space History," Paperclip was limited to the operation to move the Nazi rocket scientists. But Paperclip and assorted similar programs brought hundreds of Nazi scientists to the U.S. According to Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair in their book, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press (out of print), these included Kurt Blome, "who had tested Sarin nerve gas on prisoners at Auschwitz;" Hermann Becker-Feyseng and Konrad Schaeffer, who conducted hideous experiments on prisoners at Dachau, injecting salt water into the veins, or forcing salt water down the throats of dozens of prisons, all of whom died.

According to Cockburn and St. Clair, "One of the most despicable cases was that of Nazi aviation researcher Emil Salmon, who during the war had helped set fire to a synagogue filled with Jewish women and children. Salmon was sheltered by US officials at Wright Air Force Base in Ohio after being convicted of crimes by a denazification court in Germany."

The list of Nazi scientists goes on and on, especially those employed by the Air Force. Consider the case of Dr. Hubertus Strughold, dubbed the “Father of American Space Medicine.” In 1995, the Anti-Defamation League got Secretary of the Air Force "to remove Dr. Hubertus Strughold's name from the Aeromedical Library at Brooks Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas.... "Dr. Strughold headed the Third Reich's [Luftwaffe] Institute of Aviation Medicine during the war, which subjected concentration camp inmates to abuse and torture, thinly disguised as 'experiments.'" (X-File fans might remember the character of Conrad Strughold, who was based upon Dr. Strughold.)

Among the most secret of the Paperclip scientists were those brought to Edgewood Arsenal. Investigative journalist Hank Albarelli, Jr., in a fascinating article on Paperclip, wrote about one of the scientists brought to Edgewood as part of Nazi importation program. (Disclosure: I have also co-authored a few articles with Albarelli, and hosted his FDL Book Salon for his landmark book on the killing of Frank Olson, A Terrible Mistake.)

Dr. Friedrich “Fritz” Hoffmann... 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.

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.

Hoffman later turned to LSD experiments at Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division, Frederick, Maryland. According to Albarelli, "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," including Atlanta federal penitentiary.

"Operation Paperclip: CIA Denial of Coddling Nazis Far From the Truth"

I hope readers didn't miss H.P. Albarelli's second part of his series on Operation Paperclip: CIA Denial of Coddling Nazis Far From the Truth.

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.

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.

For more, see Albarelli's article. And here's the link to Part I: CIA’s Denial of Protecting Nazis is Blatant Lie.