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