Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [213]
33. conducting barbaric experiments: In Linda Hunt’s Secret Agenda, chapter 5, “Experiments in Death,” she chronicles several Nazi scientists who became Paperclips. Siegfried Ruff and Hermann Becker-Freyseng conducted death experiments on prisoners at Dachau, placing them in a pressure chamber that simulated high altitudes of up to 39,260 feet. “The U.S. military still viewed Ruff and Becker-Freyseng as valuable assets, despite their connection to these crimes. They were even employed under Paperclip [at the AAF Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg, Germany] to continue the same type of research that had resulted in the murder of Dachau prisoners,” Hunt wrote. Ruff and Becker-Freyseng never got permanent U.S. Paperclip jobs; both were eventually arrested and tried at Nuremberg. Ruff was acquitted, Becker-Freyseng was convicted and given a twenty-year prison sentence. Another notable case was that of Konrad Schaefer. In an effort to study if Luftwaffe pilots could survive on seawater, Schaefer forced prisoners to drink seawater until they went mad from thirst. He then punctured their livers in order to sample fluid and blood. Schaefer was tried at Nuremberg and acquitted, at which point the United States hired him as a Paperclip. “When he arrived at San Antonio in 1950,” wrote Hunt, “he was touted as ‘the leading German authority on thirst and desalinization of seawater.’”
34. six hundred million still-classified: Pauline Jelinek, “U.S. Releases Nazi Papers,” Associated Press, November 2, 1999. But in reality, this number is just a guess, since documents can be hidden inside agencies that are still classified (as the National Reconnaissance Office, NRO, was from 1961–1992); Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records, April 2007. In 1998, President Clinton signed into law the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, which “required the U.S. Government to locate, declassify, and release in their entirety, with few exceptions, remaining classified records about war crimes committed by Nazi Germany and its allies.” An interagency working group was created to oversee this work. Steven Garfinkel, acting chair of this five-year effort, wrote: “the IWG has ensured that the public finally has access to the entirety of the operational files of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), totaling 1.2 million pages; over 114,200 pages of CIA materials; over 435,000 pages from FBI files; 20,000 pages from Army Counterintelligence Corps files; and over 7 million additional pages of records.” Garfinkel makes no mention of any Atomic Energy Commission files or the files of private contractors inside the Atomic Energy Commission, such as EG&G, who control documents classified as Restricted Data (RD).
35. U-2 was as radical and as unorthodox: Interview with Tony Bevacqua.
36. Edgerton’s famous stop-motion photographs: Available for viewing at the Edgerton Center at MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 4-405, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as online at Edgerton.org; Grundberg, “H.E. Edgerton, 86, Dies, Invented Electronic Flash,” New York Times, January 5, 1990.
37. Kenneth J. Germeshausen: Joan Cook, “Kenneth Germeshausen, 83, Dies; Was Nuclear and Radar Pioneer,” New York Times, August 21, 1990. Information on Germeshausen also comes from the Kenneth J. Germeshausen Center for the Law of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Franklin Pierce Law Center; MIT archives; author interviews with Al O’Donnell, Jim Freedman.
38. the most highly classified engineering