Secret Weapons

by Brian Ford

  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, 1/20 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, pr
otected 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 United States and human experiments

  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 40 °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.

  The most important medical research in the wartime United States was purely beneficial, however. It brought penicillin into widespread use for the treatment of bacterial infections and this launched the present-day era of antibiotic therapy. The antibiotics had been discovered in England, but little had been done by the British to realize their potential as an agent of treatment. It was American enterprise and scientific skill that would bring this from a laboratory curiosity into a therapeutic agent that would save countless millions of lives.

  BRITISH DOCTORS AT WAR

  The British were among the nations that, when war broke out, had large stockpiles of chemical weapons ready for use. Germany and the Allies both knew how poison gases had been a dominant factor in World War I, and each played a waiting game with the other. Undoubtedly there would have been no reluctance to use these dreadful devices, if the other side had done so first. The only reason gas war did not break out was because of this tactical stalemate; it was not because of principle. From the outbreak of war, the British were all equipped with gas masks and were told to keep them handy. Just as present-day youngsters carry a lunchbox to school, children in wartime Britain ran to school clutching their gas masks in their hands. There were regular drills in how to use them, and practices of mustering in the air-raid shelters hastily constructed in the school yard, every week. The threat of these secret weapons was ever present.

  Although British research during World War II was aimed partly at offensive action, through the study of the latest bacteriological and chemical secret weapons, there was also a strong undercurrent of defensive research though the development of new drugs, of which penicillin proved to be the most important.

  The principal research activity into biological and chemical warfare has long been based at Porton Down, near Salisbury, Wiltshire. It was established in 1915 as a laboratory to investigate a response to German chemical weapons, and remains a top-secret facility. Officially known as the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, it is an agency of the Ministry of Defence. It covers 7,000 acres (2,800 hectares) and also houses the Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response. Some science-based companies are now also active in the area.

  After World War I, a committee had been set up to determine what Britain should do about chemical and biological warfare, and the research at Porton Down was prioritized. Funding was made available, and the establishment began to expand steadily. In 1922, there were 380 servicemen, 23 scientific and technical civil servants and 25 civilian staff acting as secretaries, administrators and clerks. By 1925 these civilians had doubled in number. In 1930, the British ratified the Geneva Protocol with an intriguing and important codicil — in renouncing the use of chemical and biological warfare agents, they reserved the right to use them ‘in retaliation’. Research during World War II focused on secret weapons containing mustard gas and phosgene. There was also a continued effort to perfect germ warfare, through biological agents like anthrax and Clostridium botulinum toxin.

  A successful test of anthrax was carried out on the Scottish island of Gruinard in 1942, which the government purchased from the owners. Eighty sheep were shipped over to Gruinard and the secret weapons — bombs containing a particularly virulent strain of anthrax spores — were exploded nearby. Within days, the sheep began to die. These bacteria grow rapidly in the body and the blood vessels become clogged with a viscous growth that overwhelms the body. The tests were regarded as successful, though the results were pointless — if this were to be used against the German cities, they would be rendered totally uninhabitable, even by the Allies. In my view they would have been better advised to create an anti-anthrax vaccine first. Thus the island was declared officially off-limits and visits were banned, with the exception of masked and gowned bacteriologists from Porton Down who came to check contamination levels from time to time. From 1986 there was a concerted campaign, Operation Dark Harvest, designed to have the island cleared for human occupation. Hundreds of tons of formaldehyde were sprayed on the infected regions and the infected top-soil, containing surviving spores, was removed and incinerated. Some sheep were released on the island and carefully observed; all remained healthy. Finally, in 1990, the Junior Defence Minister Mr Michael Neubert went to Gruinard on an inspection tour, and declared it safe to visit. The warning signs were taken down and there have since been no cases of anthrax among the only permanent residents — a flock of sheep.

  Later research at Porton Down concentrated on the German nerve gases tabun, sarin and soman which eventually gave rise to the development VX nerve poisons. This was the research that led to t
he death from sarin experimentally administered to a young volunteer in 1953. The establishment, which still exists to this day, is now shrouded in secrecy, but it is widely accepted that the main focus of attention at the present time is the prevention and cure of disease and disability caused by possible new secret weapons.

  The miracle drug

  One of the greatest discoveries of twentieth-century medicine came from an obscure British researcher — yet it languished in obscurity until the urgent demands of World War II suddenly brought attention to bear on ways of treating wounded troops. This was penicillin, the first and most important of all the antibiotics. Although it was discovered by the British, it was the United States that took it from a laboratory curiosity with potential to a major new product for general use. The first famous observation of the anti-bacterial action of this wonder-drug was recorded by a Scottish doctor and Nobel Laureate, Sir Alexander Fleming. In 1928 he showed that the mould Penicillium notatum could be grown experimentally in broth, and the result was a liquid that could kill disease-causing bacteria.