World War II Database

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseFriedrich "Fritz" Hoffmann was a German scientist who conducted experiments on concentration camp prisoners during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1945, he testified during the trials at Dachau Concentration Camp in Germany regarding the murder of 324 Czechoslovakian Catholic priests who were exposed to malaria during experiments. After the war, he was recruited by the British as a part of Operation Matchbox. In 1947, he joined the US Army on research programs involving nerve agents (such as sarin), psychoactive agents (such as lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD), and others. In the mid-1950s, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency and continued to work with psychoactive agents, particularly LSD. Around this time, working at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, United States, his test subjects, all US Army enlisted men and federal prison inmates, were experimented upon without being told that they were given doses of various toxins. He also experimented with LSD on thousands of rhesus monkeys imported from South America for that very purpose. In the late 1950s, he worked on the development of chemical weapons codenamed Agent White, Agent Blue, and Agent Orange; the latter, a herbicide used to defoliate vegetation, would negatively affect the health of military and civilian populations alike on both sides of the Vietnam conflict. He also worked on chemicals used in the attempted assassinations on Cuban leader Fidel Castro. He passed away in 1967.

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