• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

53. kidnapped by Dr. Josef Mengele: Interview with Gerald Posner; Posner and Ware, Mengele: The Complete Story, 83.

54. performed unspeakable experimental surgical procedures: Spitz, Doctors From Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans. Spitz worked as a typist during the Nuremberg trials. Forgiving Dr. Mengele, a film by Bob Hercules and Cheri Pugh (2006); CANDLES Holocaust Museum, Biography of Eva Mozes Kor. The Japanese also performed grotesque experiments on humans during the war. “U.S. War Department, War Crimes Office, Judge Advocate General’s Office, #770475.” Japan’s version of Josef Mengele, General Ishii, was pardoned by the U.S. War Crimes Office on the grounds that information regarding the grotesque medical experiments he performed would somehow benefit the United States. Although it is science fiction, The Island of Dr. Moreau, written in 1896 by H. G. Wells, tells a twisted tale of human experimentation on a remote island.

55. children, dwarfs, and twins: Koren and Negev, In Our Hearts We Were Giants, 85–197.

56. Josef Mengele’s efforts to create a pure, Aryan race: Erik Kirschbaum, “Cloning Wakes German Memories of Nazi Master Race,” Reuters, February 27, 1997. America is not exempt from eugenic theology; see Edwin Black, “Eugenics and the Nazis: The California Connection,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 9, 2003.

57. painter named Dina Babbitt: Ibid., 103–31 and photographic inserts. Bruce Weber, “Dina Babbitt, Artist at Auschwitz, Is Dead at 86,” New York Times, August 1, 2009. Babbitt’s maiden name (used at Auschwitz) was Gottlieb.

58. Dr. Martina Puzyna: Koren and Negev, In Our Hearts We Were Giants, 109.

59. According to his only son, Rolf: Interview with Gerald Posner. Posner interviewed Rolf Mengele and was given access to 5,000 pages of Mengele’s written correspondence as well as his personal journals written after the war.

60. Mengele held up his side of the Faustian bargain: Interview with EG&G engineer.

61. Mengele never took up residence in the Soviet Union: Interview with Posner.

62. Eileen Welsome wrote a newspaper story: Eileen Welsome, “The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War,” Albuquerque Tribune, November 1993.

63. direct violation of the Nuremberg Code: Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, Vol. 2, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949. Nuremberg Code: (1). The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. (2). The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature. Full text available at http://ohsr.od.nih.gov/guidelines/nuremberg.html.

64. President Clinton opened an investigation. The advisory committee was made of fourteen members who reported to the president through a cabinet-level group called the Human Radiation Interagency Working Group, and it included the secretaries of defense and energy (formerly the Atomic Energy Commission) as well as the attorney general and the director of the CIA. The committee was dissolved in October of 1995 after publishing its findings. Today, the Office of Health, Safety and Security (HSS), a Department of Energy office, maintains a Web site. Of its efforts, DOE says, “We have undertaken an intensive effort to identify and catalogue relevant historical documents from DOE’s 3.2 million cubic feet of records scattered across the country.” Given that there are approximately 2,000 pages of documents in a single cubic foot, it is telling that a record search for “EG&G” at the HSS/DOE database delivers a paltry 500 documents.

Epilogue

Interviews: Colonel Leghorn, Ed Lovick, EG&G engineer, David Myhra

1. Army Air Forces commemorative yearbook: This is the government-issued “Official Report, Task Force 1.52” and is meant to look like a high school yearbook.

2. The U.S. government spent nearly two billion dollars: Atomic Audit, 102. “Operation Crossroads was an astonishing $1.3 billion