From Dachau to Baltimore (Part 1)
The roots of the modern psychedelic drug industry
While Adolf Hitler was getting shot up with oxycodone and administered hits of cocaine on cotton swabs, his underlings were conducting some particularly harrowing drug experiments in the Nazi concentration camps. At the end of World War II, the Allied powers learned of these experiments; they also learned of a new drug called LSD that had been developed at a Swiss pharmaceutical firm. These events sparked a tidal wave of research as the US government (and others) scrambled to find drugs that could be employed for tactical purposes. The phenomenon created in its wake a new sector within the global drug market: synthetic tryptamines and phenethylamines, which—along with their botanical counterparts—are more commonly known as psychedelics.
Let’s explore how Nazi drug experiments in Dachau, Auschwitz, and Dnipro served as political fuel for the growth of psychedelic research from Baltimore to the Bay Area and beyond.
As readers will already be aware, the Nazis built and ran several concentration camps throughout Europe in which they imprisoned and tortured various minority populations during World War II. What is less well known is that in the camps, the Nazis conducted numerous experiments on their prisoners with an array of drugs.
Mescaline, opioids, barbiturates, and scopolamine were all utilized in non-consensual and often extremely bizarre experiments which were scrupulously documented by Nazi scientists. The experiments were carried out in the concentration camps at Dachau (in Germany) and Auschwitz (in Poland) as well as a separate location in Dnipro (Ukraine). The Nazis also operated an herb plantation at Dachau which they intended to serve as an industrial center for Germany’s drug market. They built a similar facility in Ukraine, and had plans for more.
After the war, the US military learned about these experiments. They also learned about a new drug called LSD, thanks to a tip from a Nazi chemical weapons specialist named Richard Kuhn.
Let’s see how this series of events impacted—arguably, gave rise to—the development of the modern commercial market for LSD, MDMA, and psilocybin.
Dachau
In the story of the Dachau concentration camp we can see several themes that bear interest to the broader history of the psychedelic industry. The most obvious is the experimental use of mescaline. Another is the use of drugs for interrogation purposes. A third theme—and a particularly fascinating one, in my opinion—is the construction of a large medicinal herb plantation which the Nazis hoped would function as an industrial center for Germany’s drug market. All of these themes, as we will see, would continue in some form or fashion well after the war.
The mescaline experiments at Dachau were overseen by Kurt Plötner, an SS officer who taught at Leipzig University. Plötner’s work was informed by similar experiments conducted at the Auschwitz camp by Bruno Weber that also involved mescaline, as well as opioids and barbiturates. They had been launched by the Nazis in an attempt to develop drugs which could facilitate the interrogation of enemy troops.1
But these experiments had another, broader aim as well. A nurse who was involved later revealed that Plötner and his associates aimed “to eliminate the will of the person examined.”2
In the Dachau experiments, mescaline was administered to people non-consensually, dissolved into their drinks without their knowledge. They were then interrogated about any number of topics. All of it was documented carefully in German.3 At the end of the war, these documents were seized by US authorities and Plötner was recruited to continue his research for the US. We’ll get to that in a moment.
We should also note, however, something else that occurred at Dachau. The Nazis had established a large herb plantation there which was run with the forced labor of people imprisoned in the concentration camp. Dubbed the Institute for Medical Herbal Studies and Nourishment, its creation was ordered by Heinrich Himmler, the top commander of the Nazi SS (who, like Hitler, received “treatment” from Dr. Theodor Morell4). As Norman Ohler writes in Blitzed, Himmler envisioned the Dachau herbarium as “a major building block for the economic empire that he was trying to expand the SS into.”5 The centralized, state-controlled drug production facility powered by forced labor was intended to move Germany toward import independence.
The operations of the Nazi herb plantation at Dachau were overseen by SS officer Franz Lippert.6 Lippert was an anthroposophist, i.e. a follower of the anthroposophy system developed by Rudolf Steiner. Steiner’s ideas directly informed the facility’s operations. More broadly, many top Nazi officials were also anthroposophists. In fact, Steiner’s followers were privately granted political protection while other occult groups in Germany faced fierce opposition from the Nazi regime. More on that in Part 2.
Thus, at Dachau, the Nazis were simultaneously engaged in elaborate, nonconsensual drug experiments as well as industrial production of botanically-derived drugs, all overseen and protected by the apparatus of the German state.
Dnipro + Vinnytsia
The Nazis established a similar facility in Vinnytsia, Ukraine. It had been set up by Theodor Morell and was called Ukrainian Pharma-Works.7 Although Vinnytsia sits in western Ukraine, Morell hoped to expand the Nazis’ Ukrainian drug production further into the country. He had plans for large, herbal plantations like the one at Dachau to be built in the Crimean region and off the coast of the Black Sea.
But the war was lost before those plans materialized. (More recently, however, the US has stepped in to lobby for the creation of a new drug market in Ukraine to serve neo-Nazi patients. History rhymes with itself…)
While Morell was expanding the Nazis’ drug production, more mescaline experiments were carried out by Nazis in Dnipro, Ukraine (then known as Dnjepropetrowsk). Doses of mescaline and scopolamine were administered via injection to “airborne troops” repeatedly every 30 minutes.8 Surviving documents indicate that the research was done on Allied POWs, but writer/historian Dominic Streatfield suspects the experiments were actually carried out on Nazi troops, an argument he put forth in his book Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control.
Auschwitz
As mentioned above, the Dachau mescaline research had originally been inspired by a similar series of experiments at the Auschwitz concentration camp. These involved not only mescaline but also opioids and barbiturates. They were overseen by Bruno Weber, who directed the Nazis’ Hygienic Bacteriological Research Center at Auschwitz. Ohler writes that Weber’s drug experiments were “focused on brainwashing and consciousness control.”9 Like those conducted at Dachau, they were involuntary.
Operations at Auschwitz were managed by Otto Ambros, a chemist who worked simultaneously for IG Farben and the Nazi government.10 According to historian Annie Jacobsen, Ambros was Hitler’s favorite chemist.11 His employer IG Farben was a chemical conglomerate that was closely linked with the Nazi regime and which constructed the Auschwitz camp.12
The CEO of IG Farben, Hermann Schmitz, was friends with Hitler.13 The company funded Hitler’s work and produced chemical weapons for the Nazis, including the gas which was used to murder millions in the concentration camps.14 Indeed, IG Farben was so close with the Nazi regime that the company had learned of the Nazis’ plans for war before it started.15
IG Farben + Sullivan & Cromwell
IG Farben’s legal business was handled in part by Sullivan & Cromwell, an incredibly powerful New York law firm that is still active today. The firm’s more recent alumni include Peter Thiel, among others.16 They count multinational oil companies, processed food corporations, and other delightful entities among their clients.
The connection between Sullivan & Cromwell and the Nazi regime was considerably tight. And the firm did business with other Nazi-linked businesses in addition to IG Farben. Sullivan & Cromwell attorneys even signed letters to their German clients with “Heil Hitler.”17
Among the people responsible for overseeing IG Farben’s affairs at Sullivan & Cromwell were Allen Dulles and brother John, both of whom would go on to assume top positions in US government after the war (Allen as director of the CIA; John as secretary of state). During the war, Dulles worked for the OSS (the bureaucratic forerunner to the CIA) and spent time in Switzerland. He used his OSS post in Switzerland to look after the legal business of Sullivan & Cromwell clients.18
After the War…
With the end of the war in sight, IG Farben destroyed documentation of its work with the Nazis.19 Otto Ambros, who ran the operations at Auschwitz, and Kurt Plötner, who directed the mescaline research at Dachau, were recruited by the United States to continue their research. Theodor Morell, the Nazi doctor who set up a pharma factory in Ukraine, was interrogated by the US Secret Service for two years. And SS commander Heinrich Himmler, who had ordered the creation of the herb plantation at Dachau, became drinking buddies with Allen Dulles. Dulles assured Himmler that he would not face legal consequences for his involvement in the Nazi atrocities while the two of them sipped scotch by a fireplace.
Ambros was similarly granted clemency and then hired by John McCloy to work for the US government. McCloy was the assistant secretary of war at the time, and worked directly under Skull & Bones member Henry Stimson, the secretary of war appointed by Franklin Roosevelt who had overseen the Manhattan Project.20 McCloy would go on to become the second president of the World Bank.21 Ambros later served as a consultant to the Dow Chemical Company, among others.22
Along with Ambros and Plötner, several other Nazi scientists who were involved in the Dachau experiments were also hired by the US in the following years.23 They were just a small handful among an enormous number of Nazis who were provided with political protection and employment by the US government and private sector after the war.
This fleet of Nazi-scientists-turned-US-government-contractors proved enormously useful to their new bosses, who had more or less the same goals as their old ones: military dominance, industrial self-reliance, and the creation of an array of arms, drugs, and more that could enhance their grip on power. The project which managed this mass migration of Nazi professionals was known as Operation Paperclip, named after the discretely placed paperclips which were attached to their files in the US Army Intelligence office.24
The US Navy’s mescaline program
Plötner’s mescaline experiments particularly caught the eye of US military and intelligence agencies. Like their Nazi forebears, they sought drugs that could facilitate interrogation or any other number of strategic objectives. The Secret Service found the documentation of Plötner’s experiments and passed the information along to the Navy, who then continued the research at a naval research facility in Washington, DC.25 Plötner himself was hired by the US government to assist with the process.26
The Navy mescaline program was given the code name Project Chatter and was overseen by Charles Savage and Henry Beecher. Beecher was affiliated with Harvard University, which soon became a focal point of similar research. Savage went on to work with a number of different people and institutions that were directly involved in the growth of the psychedelic industry. Among them: Bill Richards, who later played a key role in the development of the psilocybin research program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
In Part 2, we’ll see how LSD entered the picture (that’s where Richard Kuhn comes in), and what IG Farben has to do with all of this (a subject of heated debate among acid historians). We’ll also add some further context that may help us understand what Allen Dulles was doing in Switzerland for IG Farben during World War II. The subject of anthroposophy will pop up again too, and Carl Jung will even make a brief cameo. We’ll wrap up with several (of the seemingly countless) direct connections between this era of militarized drug research and the subsequent growth of the psychedelic industry.
Thanks for reading.
Max Rinkel)a German Psychiatrist who brought some of the first doses of Sandoz LSD over to the US in 1949, was utilizing it on his patients at Boston Psychopathic Hospital where he worked...1949
Norman Ohler book LSD Mama should shed light to some of this information. Mike Jay & Alan Piper have both investigated this topic heavily. Jay & Ohler gained access to Novartis(Sandoz) archives somewhat recently.