Secret Weapons (22 page)

From 1942 onwards, the range of secret medical experiments diversified and greatly increased in number. At the Dachau concentration camp, inmates were deliberately infected with malaria. Once the disease had developed, the victims were used as experimental subjects and given a range of possible treatments in the hope of finding a cure. Half the subjects died. Dachau was also the focus of freezing experiments, in which prisoners were fitted with various designs of protective clothing (designed for pilots) and immersed up to the neck in iced water for prolonged periods of time. Experiments were also carried out in which prisoners were chained in the open air and left naked in sub-zero temperatures for hours on end. The results were noted down, partly to determine how rapidly people succumbed to the cold, and also to attempt different approaches to revival so that the results could be used to treat German military personnel – pilots who had been shot down in Arctic waters, for example. Auschwitz also took part in a similar series of trials in which victims were frozen, sometimes to death. This research increased with the prospect of war on the Eastern Front, and among the victims were Russian soldiers. The Nazis speculated that the severe Russian winters would give the Soviet soldiers a great genetic predisposition to survival in Arctic conditions, and the experiments were run in parallel to see if this was true. The results were communicated directly to Heinrich Himmler and specialist conferences were held, including one in 1942 entitled ‘Medical Problems Arising from Sea and Winter’ at which the results were presented in the manner of a scientific symposium.

From 1942, inmates of the Dachau concentration camp were tested for the effects of decompression. The Luftwaffe were keen to know what would happen to pilots whose aircraft were destroyed at altitude, and at what height they would parachute to earth. It was known that severe decompression sickness caused many to be incapacitated or killed, and so a hypobaric chamber was constructed that could have the air partially sucked out to simulate the air pressure at high altitudes (up to 60,000ft, about 20,000m). Bubbles of gas appeared in the blood at such low pressures, and most of the victims died in the chambers. They were then dissected so that the effects could be seen. Many were incapacitated, not killed, and they were subject to vivisection so that their bodies could be studied as the fatal lesions took their toll.

Later experiments at Dachau involved methods of using seawater as an emergency drink. Roma people were chosen for these trials and groups were given no fresh water to drink and were allowed access only to seawater. They became desperately ill as a result, and some were seen licking water from freshly mopped floors. The Roma people were selected for experiments as the Nazis felt they were an inferior race and might have a more robust response to abuse.

At Buchenwald, another of the extant concentration camps that I have visited in the course of research, the effects of poisons were the focus of human experimentation. Toxic compounds were mixed with the inmates’ food and some were shot with bullets containing poisons and were later dissected to ascertain the damage that had been done. There have been episodes since the war in which this idea has resurfaced. The most famous of these is the murder of the Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov in 1978. He had a tiny hollow metal pellet shot into his leg by the Bulgarian Secret Service from a modified umbrella as he walked across Waterloo Bridge in central London. The tiny bullet contained ricin, a toxin extracted from seeds of the castor oil plant. Ricin had been patented by the US Secretary of the Army in 1952 for possible use as a weapon, and the patent description concluded that ‘the product might be used as a toxic weapon’. At first, Markov’s death was put down to food poisoning, and it was only the diligent investigations ordered by Scotland Yard that eventually led to the discovery of the tiny hollow bullet,
in (less than 2mm) in diameter, inside which the ricin had been concealed. Doubtless the assassins believed such a tiny projectile would never be found, and it is a remarkable story of detection. The use of a chemical poison hidden inside a small bullet stemmed from the ideas that originated in Nazi Germany, and it may still be used again.

Tests at Buchenwald were also done with phosphorus burns to the body. White phosphorus is a particularly inhumane weapon as it sticks to the skin and burns deep into the body. At Buchenwald concentration camp, inmates were covered with white phosphorus of the kind used in incendiary weapons and the effects were meticulously recorded.

The Nazis flourished in the era of eugenics, when the genetic nature of a race was considered an important indicator of what might be called ‘social rank’. They felt that weak genetics predisposed races to a subservient role in the global community. It was a highly fashionable belief, but was never based on sound scientific grounds. The remarkable lack of connection between the achievements of parents and children is well observed – we all know bright and highly successful individuals who come from an inauspicious background, and uninspiring people whose parents were overwhelmingly intelligent and gifted in many ways. The roots of our adult selves do not lie in such a simple understanding of genetics.

Nonetheless, to the Nazis, there was a special appeal in studies of identical twins. The main organizer of experiments with twin children was Dr Josef Mengele, who became known as the Angel of Death. He was obsessed with the idea that the physiognomy of an individual – the surface features of the face – could be correlated with their intellectual abilities. The idea had first surfaced in the pseudoscience of phrenology, in which the exterior of the head was measured, and was taken to indicate the most propitious zones of the brain that lay within. In Victorian times this was a popular topic, but it had been repeatedly disproved until it was abandoned by science. The last official application of the notion was in the 1930s, when the Belgian authorities tried to use phrenology in Rwanda to document the assumed superiority of the Tutsi tribes over the Hutus. It is still practised in some quarters; indeed the state of Michigan announced a new tax on the practitioners of phrenology as recently as 2007.

During his early years as a doctor, Josef Mengele had perceived a strong resonance between Nazism and his private beliefs on genetic superiority, and he published his doctoral thesis for the University of Munich on the subject of ‘Racial Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups’. It was not an anti-Semitic thesis, but paralleled the Nazis’ enthusiasm for the correlation of racial disparity with innate ‘worth’. He went on to carry out surgical experiments, including stitching pairs of twins together in an attempt to create conjoined twins, and injecting them to see if the hue of their eyes could be permanently changed. He carried out experiments on about 1,500 sets of whom only 100 individuals were known to have survived.

Some of the trials involved tests of the drug sulfanilamide, a potent anti-bacterial treatment that derived from the research at the giant German drug manufacturer Bayer. Children were deliberately infected with tuberculosis and they were then submitted to surgery for the removal of lymph nodes, both with and without drug treatment, to observe the progress of the disease or the possible success or failure of treatment. The experiments were taking place at the Neuengamme concentration camp, near Frankfurt, and as the Allied forces approached in the closing months of the war, all the surviving children were murdered – along with their carers – in an effort to keep the nature of the experiments secret.

The experiments on human victims gave results that were (and still are) used to understand the dangers facing high-altitude pilots and troops in extreme conditions. There was a wanton disregard for the human rights of the subjects in all all those medical trials – not simply because the doctors were intent on cruelty, but as part of the nationalist culture. Hitler’s creed was based on the inherent superiority of the Aryan race. There are many repercussions of these German medical experiments in the modern world. White phosphorus has been widely used in recent conflicts, including the attacks on Fallujah, Iraq, by United States troops from 2004, and again in Afghanistan in 2009. It caused widespread injuries to civilians. In their attacks in south Lebanon and in Gaza, Israeli troops have fired shells of white phosphorus causing terrifying injuries to the civilian population, and Saudi aircraft have been reported to have used phosphorus shells in attacks against Houthi fighters in northern Yemen in 2009. The position is interesting in international law, since the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which came into force in 1978, included a protocol banning the use of all incendiary attacks against civilians. The Israelis have never signed this agreement, and in any event the United States sanctions the use of white phosphorus as a means of illuminating a war zone at night. They state that there is no prohibition of this deployment of ‘flare’ (as phosphorus is known by the American military) and the burning of civilians is thus taken as an incidental side effect, and not the prime purpose.

We now have an extensive understanding of the effect of hypothermia on the human body which is widely published and universally consulted – and all of it stems directly from the medical experiments in Nazi Germany. The United States also has the detailed results from the Japanese medical experiments, but has kept them classified so they remain truly secret weapons to the present day. The legal position remains unclear; when the 23 German medical staff were prosecuted in the so-called ‘Doctors’ Trial’ in 1946–47 they argued that there was no international convention covering medical experimentation.

The prosecution by the Allies of the German experimenters offers a revealing comparison to the way the Japanese were treated by the United States. Whereas Dr Shiro Ishii lived on to die of natural causes, protected through secrecy by the United States, the aim of the Allies with the Nazi perpetrators was to bring them to trial. Some were – those tried at Nuremberg were widely publicized as being the guilty men who were to suffer for their crimes. However, many of the scientists and doctors whose work might prove to be of value to the West were secretly taken to American institutes with their falsified papers and encouraged to continue working for the other side. Josef Mengele responded to the approach of Allied forces by moving to a camp in Lower Silesia and then to the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in what is now the Czech Republic. Eventually he was apprehended and arrested by the United States military but they concluded that he had no special knowledge of interest to America, and need not be detained further. In June 1945 he was suddenly released and provided with papers under the name Fritz Hollmann. Under instructions to lie low, he worked as a farmhand until he was able to secure transport to Buenos Aires, Argentina. To this day I have found an acceptance in that fine city of former Nazi officials, many of whom fled there after the war. A number of prominent Nazis also fled to nearby Paraguay, whose leader was of German descent and who involved them in the modernization of the country. Mengele began life in South America as a construction worker but – as more German escapees arrived and befriended him – he quickly rose to the position of co-owner of the Fadro pharmaceutical company. Teams of Israelis went out to find him and capture him to face trial, so he later moved to a bungalow in a suburb of São Paulo, Brazil, for the last years of his life. Shortly before Mengele’s death by drowning while on holiday in 1979, he met his son for the first time as an adult and explained that he remained steadfast to his Nazi beliefs, and insisted that he had never harmed anyone in his life. There have since been reports that he continued his medical experimentation in South America for many years.

The use of results from human experimentation against prisoners is controversial at best. Yet there had long been examples of top-secret human experimentation of this sort in the United States, albeit on a far more modest scale. During the 1930s experiments were carried out in which people were unwittingly injected with cancer cells and injected with radioactive nucleotides, and in Alabama 400 black workers were experimentally injected with syphilis, while in Iowa 22 orphans were put under such intense psychological distress that they were experimentally turned from being normal children into stuttering, quivering victims. The United States Army infected 400 Chicago prisoners with malaria, without their knowledge or consent.

When the war began, top-secret medical research gained pace. The Chemical Warfare Service carried out tests with poison gases that could be used in secret weapons (Lewisite and mustard gas) on 4,000 unwitting young soldiers. During the development of the atomic bomb under the Manhattan Project, plutonium was injected into soldiers. It is unlikely that they understood the risks, and three became seriously ill. One died.

Late in the war years, the University of Chicago Medical School organized the injection of malaria into mental patients at Illinois State Hospital, and the University of Rochester organized more trials with plutonium being injected into the veins of prisoners. The malaria research continued in Atlanta, with 800 prisoners being infected, and at the Argonne National Laboratories, Illinois, radioactive arsenic was injected in order to study how this element was eliminated from the body.