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.