Dachau

Dachau was a Nazi concentration camp where S.S. doctors took the search for scientific knowledge of military value to its most awful extreme during World War II. In a closely guarded, fenced-off part of the camp, doctors studied questions such as how long a downed airman could survive in the North Atlantic in February. At Heinrich Himmler's personal order, doctors sat by huge tubs of ice water with stopwatches and timed how long immersed prisoners took to die. In other experiments under the cover of "aviation medicine," inmates were crushed to death in high-altitude pressure chambers to learn how high pilots could safely fly, and prisoners were shot so that special blood coagulants could be tested on their wounds.¹

Mescaline and Hypnosis Experiments

Less than 200 miles from Albert Hofmann's Sandoz laboratory in Basel, doctors connected to the S.S. and Gestapo were conducting experiments that led to the testing of mescaline, a drug with many of the mind-changing qualities of LSD, on prisoners at Dachau. Germany's secret policemen had the notion, completely alien to Hofmann, that they could use drugs like mescaline to bring unwilling people under their control. According to research team member Walter Neff, the goal of the Dachau experiments was "to eliminate the will of the person examined."¹

The mescaline tests at Dachau, run by Dr. Kurt Plötner, were not nearly so lethal as the others in the "aviation" series, but the drug could still cause grave damage, particularly to anyone with pre-existing mental instability. The danger was increased by the fact that the mescaline was administered covertly by S.S. men who spiked the prisoners' drinks. Unlike Hofmann, the subjects had no idea that a drug was causing their extreme disorientation. Many must have feared they had gone stark mad on their own. Always, the subjects were Jews, gypsies, Russians, and other groups on whose lives the Nazis placed little or no value.¹

Results and Aftermath

After the war, Walter Neff told American investigators that subjects showed a wide variety of reactions: some became furious, others melancholy or gay, as if drunk. Not surprisingly, "sentiments of hatred and revenge were exposed in every case." Neff noted that the drug caused certain people to reveal their "most intimate secrets." Still, the Germans were not ready to accept mescaline as a substitute for their more physical methods of interrogation. They went on to try hypnosis in combination with the drug, but they apparently never felt confident that they had found a way to assume command of their victim's mind.¹

American Exploitation of Records

After an Allied tribunal convicted the first echelon of surviving Nazi war criminals, American prosecutors charged the Dachau doctors with "crimes against humanity" at a second Nuremberg trial. The judges, all Americans, sentenced seven of the Germans, including Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician, to death by hanging. Nine others received long prison sentences. The judges put forth what came to be known as the Nuremberg Code on scientific research.¹

Even before the verdicts were in, however, special U.S. investigating teams were sifting through the experimental records at Dachau for information of military value. The report of one such team found that while part of the data was "inaccurate," some of the conclusions, if confirmed, would be "an important complement to existing knowledge." Military authorities sent the records, including a description of the mescaline and hypnosis experiments, back to the United States. None of the German Mind Control research was ever made public.¹