membranes, windpipes and eyes. Each daily experiment lasted sixty minutes. On the sixth day, Schnurman started to get nauseated, then very ill. He asked to be released. The technicians refused. Then he demanded to be released. The technicians still refused. Seconds later, he passed out. When he came to, he was lying outside on a snowbank still wearing his gas mask, which was full of vomit.
“I was presumed dead,” he testified before Congress after more than forty years of illnesses. The next day, seventeen-year-old Schnurman got his first heart attack.
Since he was no longer useful, two soldiers dressed him, carried him onto the bus, and drove him to a train station at the end of a one-way track. They threatened him with a long vacation in Leavenworth for treason if he ever revealed the experiment, and they warned him never to come back. “You wouldn’t know where to find us anyway,” they said before carrying him into the train—an engine and three coach cars.
Back at his base in Bainbridge, Schnurman’s superiors took one look at him and sent him home for a week of rest. He needed it. He was suffering from pneumonia and laryngitis. He had blisters on his body and blood in his stool. The damage was permanent.
Like Private Galione, Seaman Schnurman kept the secret. The first time he brought up the gas experiment was during a physical exam more than forty years after the gassing, when his doctor asked if he had ever been exposed to chemicals.
Schnurman was just one of more than four thousand servicemen who received dangerous doses of mustard gas and lewisite during the 1940s and who died as a result or suffered permanent damage. The U.S. military used them to test the reliability and longevity of gas masks and protective clothing and to calculate how long it took for subjects to be seriously injured.
To assist in its experiments, the U.S. military recruited at least six Paperclip chemists and chemical engineers—war criminals who, like Rascher, had experimented on concentration camp prisoners.{In response to my FOIA request for the roster of military and civilian personnel who worked at Edgewood from 1950 to 1960, the U.S. military personnel center in St. Louis claimed that it could not find a single roster containing the names of civilians stationed at the army base during that time period.} Sent to Edgewood, they continued the mustard/lewisite experiments before moving on to nerve gases like tabun and sarin, which they themselves had created. Waiting for them to work with at Edgewood and other chemical warfare centers in the United States were ten tons of the gases—the spoils of war.
Between 1950 and 1975, Nazi Paperclip and American scientists experimented on nearly seven thousand American servicemen, exposing them to as many as 254 different chemicals. Before long, the military and the CIA expanded the medical experiments to include unwitting and vulnerable civilians—veterans, orphans, prisoners, mentally handicapped children, and poor pregnant women. They were radiated and exposed to, fed, and injected with plutonium. They were treated to heavy doses of LSD and PCP, among other mind-altering drugs. As with the gases, the physical and psychic damage was permanent.
In 1994, more than fifty years after the secret medical experiments had begun, the General Accounting Office (GAO) reported: “Precise information on the number of tests, experiments, and participants is not available… and the exact numbers may never be known. However, we have identified… experiments in which
Texas congressman Martin Frost, who heard Nathan Schnurman’s testimony, spoke for the entire congressional committee when he said: “Experiments like these happened in Nazi Germany… Not here.”
The first question raised in this book was, Why did it take almost sixty years for the United States to find and extradite John Demjanjuk for trial in Germany as a Nazi collaborator? It is the question that is asked most often in discussions of the Demjanjuk case. A partial answer is now clear.
A small group of powerful and unaccountable military and intelligence officers resisted and blocked the investigation of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators hiding in America because they had secrets to protect: obstruction of justice, illegal use of funds to hire former Nazis and Nazi collaborators as spies, fraudulent whitewashing of the records of former Nazis, illegally helping former Nazis acquire U.S. citizenship, and criminally experimenting on U.S. servicemen and civilians. Every single Nazi or Nazi collaborator hiding in America posed a potential threat to those secrets. Exposing them and the war crimes they committed might raise embarrassing questions.
But no secret is forever. Strands of the government cover-ups started to unravel in the late 1970s, as the tide of American indifference began to shift. There were several reasons for the change in attitude. The old entrenched layer of bureaucrats at the Pentagon, State Department, and Justice Department began to retire. The Cold War rants of McCarthyites had turned to hoarse whispers. The nation was no longer “distracted” by Korea and Vietnam. The Watergate scandal and the resignation of Richard Nixon no longer riveted the nation, and perhaps even inspired a new demand for accountability in government. Millions saw the
In sum, there was a new generation of Americans for whom World War II was a chapter in a history book, not a traumatic personal experience. They were curious and willing to question.
Nazi war criminals in America? You’ve got to be kidding. Where?
With that new awareness dawning on America, the dominoes leading to John Demjanjuk began to tumble with increasing speed. And Elizabeth Holtzman caused most of the tumbling.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Elizabeth Holtzman had a razor mind and a rapier tongue. Although she knew exactly what had to be done to bring Nazis and Nazi collaborators hiding in America to justice, she was handicapped. In 1973, as a junior member and the only woman on the House Immigration Subcommittee, she had limited clout. So she relied on a bit of wisdom she had gleaned from her years at Radcliffe and at Harvard Law.
Screw the rules.
As Holtzman saw it, there were five things that needed to be done yesterday: formally request Bonn and Tel Aviv to supply information about the alleged Nazis on the Karbach list; forge an anti-Nazi alliance with Moscow and the Iron Curtain countries; investigate the INS for obstruction of justice; close a major loophole in immigration law; and move the investigation of suspected Nazis from the compromised INS to a special, independent Nazi unit in the Justice Department.
It would take an iron fist and seven years to get the job done.
A critical first step was to penetrate the Iron Curtain. All but one of the alleged Nazis on the Karbach list were from the Soviet bloc countries of Eastern Europe. At least six of them were either about to be tried in absentia for war crimes committed in their countries of origin—Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, and Romania—or had already been convicted of such crimes in absentia. Assuming the investigations into their Nazi collaboration were not frame-ups and their trials were not conducted in kangaroo courts, there had to be documentary evidence of their crimes and credible eyewitnesses. The question was: Why didn’t the State Department ask the Soviet Union for cooperation on an issue that both countries presumably agreed on—namely, that former Nazis and their collaborators should be punished for their crimes against humanity?
Holtzman sent blistering letters to INS commissioner Leonard Chapman and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in April 1975 demanding that they open channels to Bonn, Tel Aviv, and Moscow. Under pressure from her and the chairman of the Immigration Subcommittee, Representative Joshua Eilberg of Pennsylvania, Kissinger caved in. He agreed to review the names on the Karbach list, one by one, then ask Bonn to provide what information it had on each.
Kissinger’s promise was an empty one because all but one of the people named on the Karbach list were Eastern Europeans. It was highly unlikely that West Germany would have any useful information on them as it had on Braunsteiner, a Western European. And, in fact, it turned out that Bonn couldn’t help.
A month later, in May 1975, Holtzman was part of a congressional delegation to the National Conference on Soviet Jewry (NCSJ), held in Moscow. The conference focused on the Soviet campaign of intimidation to prevent Jews from joining their families living outside the Iron Curtain. NCSJ did not pull any political punches. It accused
