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Evil Doctors and Scientists From World War II

Khalid Elhassan January 15, 2021 33 min

Second Battle of Champagne - Second Battle of Ypres — French soldiers wearing gas masks in WWI trenches, waiting for an order to launch an attack. Flickr

28. After Experimenting on Prisoners During World War II, This Nazi Doctor Ended Up Developing LSD For America

Dr. Friedrich Hoffmann. World War II Database

After the war, Dr. Friedrich Hoffmann turned to snitch and gave evidence against other scientists and doctors during the Dachau trials. Although he testified about his involvement in the murder of 324 Czechoslovak Catholic priests, who were deliberately infected with malaria to examine its effects, he escaped punishment. Dr. Hoffmann ended up in Britain as part of Operation Matchbox, the British counterpart to the American Operation Paperclip. The British put him to work developing synthetic poison gasses for them in Porton Down.

However, Hoffmann neither liked living in postwar Britain, nor got along with British researchers. So the British passed him on to the Americans, and in 1947, he was brought to the US as part of Operation Paperclip. In America, Hoffmann went to work for the US Army in Fort Detrick and the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, the center of America’s biological and chemical weapons research. His work included the development of nerve agents such as sarin, and psychoactive agents such as LSD.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.