Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

Experiments with mustard gas on the British, Canadian, American, and Australian volunteer servicemen had been carried out since 1940. 269British experiments were performed at the Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment located in Porton Down in England, in India, and also in Alberta, Canada. Typically, British scientists studied the recuperation period for damage to eyes after the exposure to varying concentrations of mustard gas. Many British volunteers claimed later that they had not been fully aware of the experiment’s implications. Canada was a leader in such experiments, and literally hundreds of volunteers were used for testing. 270Both British and Canadian officials called these men by the misleading term “observers.” Unlike the Nazi or Soviet experimenting scientists, many Canadian scientists exposed themselves to the action of gas. 271

In 1943, American navy officials used the navy’s own servicemen (without their knowledge) at least once in experiments with mustard gas at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. 272As many as 60,000 [American] servicemen are believed to have been exposed to varying levels of mustard gas and other chemical agents during the war years to test the effectiveness of protective clothing and treatments as well as the strength of the gas. The main reason for these experiments was the fear that Japan might use mustard gas in the Pacific war theater. In 1991, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs approved disability benefits for World War II veterans who, without their knowledge or consent, had been placed in a chamber and exposed to mustard gas and arsenic. 273

The deployment of mustard gas by the Western Allies led to a tragedy. 274On December 2, 1943, the British ship John Harvey docked in the port of Bari (Italy). The ship had been damaged by a bomb during a German raid. It was loaded with 100 tons of mustard gas in 100-pound bombs. As a result of the action of the released gas, 628 British servicemen suffered terribly, and sixty-nine of them died. The information about this tragedy was covered up for a long time by Allied military officials.

Soviet intelligence was very anxious to find information about the Western Allies’ developments in chemical and biological weaponry. In the recently partially declassified letters dated 1941 and 1942, head of the NKVD First Department Pavel Fitin (in the documents, he is mentioned under the code name “Victor”) ordered rezidenti in New York (Vasilii Zarubin, code name “Maxim”; and his deputy, Gaik Ovakimyan, code name “Gennadii”) and in London (Anatolii Gorsky, code names “Vadim” or “Henry”) to collect information on the work of American and British scientists in chemical weaponry, military bacteriology, and the uranium-235 problem. 275Declassified parts of the documents do not contain details on chemical and biological research the NKVD/NKGB was interested in.

The information which was collected by the rezidenti has not yet been declassified. 276However, in 1942–1943, there were official discussions and exchanges in information on the chemical and bacteriological warfare at the diplomatic level and between the NKGB and a part of the British Intelligence Service, the Special Operation Executive or SOE. 277It seems that both the Soviets and the British used chemical and bacterial poisons for terrorist acts against the Nazis. According to the controversial historian David Irving, in 1942 “Himmler produced a year-old NKVD order covering instructions to the indigenous Russian population on the poisoning—again with arsenic—of German occupation troops.” 278If such an instruction existed, it was definitely produced by Sudoplatov’s NKVD Second Department, NKVD/NKGB Fourth Directorate. In 1943, there were cases of charges with poisoning guerrilla activities on Soviet territories occupied by German troops: in the Karachevo Region near the city of Bryansk, and in Kiev. In both cases, a typhus epidemic was spread. 279In response, the Nazis created a special military-medical inspection team within the Abwehr (German Military Intelligence). Definitely, Sudoplatov’s department/directorate was behind these attacks.

At least in 1942–1943, the SOE provided the Polish underground in Warsaw with arsenic and typhoid bacteria (which produces a lethal toxin). In 1943, the Polish liaison officer in Washington, Colonel Mitkewicz, reported to the Western Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff that during the first four months of 1943, 426 Germans were poisoned by the underground, 77 “poisoned parcels” were sent to Germany, and a few hundred Nazis were assassinated by means of “typhoid fever microbes [i.e., Salmonella typhosa ] and typhoid fever lice.” 280The assassination of the ruthless head of the SD (the SS Intelligence) and Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich, on May 23, 1942, in Prague was successful only because the assassins, the SOE-trained Czechs Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcik, used hand grenades that contained a filling of botulin, a toxin produced by the soil bacterium Clostridium botulinum (the British code-name of botulin was “X”). 281

Later, in 1944, an exchange in the same information took place between the NKGB and the American Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. 282The head of Soviet Foreign Intelligence, Pavel Fitin, informed the Americans about the location of German chemical factories that produced gases for bombs and grenades in Germany and Poland. 283One can assume that all this information was evaluated by the two NKVD/NKGB experts on chemical and bacteriological toxins, Mairanovsky and his colleague Sergei Muromtsev. In his memoirs, Sudoplatov mentioned that he provided Muromtsev with intelligence information on bacteriological weapons from Israel even after the war. 284

Possibly, the intelligence on biological and chemical warfare had serious value for the Soviets. According to some memoirs, since 1942 a secret laboratory within the NKVD system located in the Ural Mountains area produced a biological weapon that was tested on prisoners. 285Supposedly, Arkady Gertsovsky, who was in charge of providing prisoners for Mairanovsky’s experiments, headed this secret laboratory. According to not-very-reliable intelligence information obtained by the Americans from the Germans and Japanese, experiments on prisoners and Japanese POWs were also carried out with anthrax, encephalitis, glanders, and plague in Leningrad Prison and in Mongolia near Ulan Bator. 286If these laboratories in fact existed, Mairanovsky and Muromtsev were definitely involved in their work. Apparently, Merkulov supervised this activity: In May 1941, a month before the German invasion, he signed a detailed review of the show trials of the 1930s against microbiologists and issued a warning regarding bacteriological sabotage by the German and Japanese secret services. 287

It is difficult to find out who the victims were and how many prisoners were used for Mairanovsky’s experiments. In Mairanovsky’s lab, prisoners were referred to as ptichki (birdies). 288One can find a parallel to Nazi experiments in this inhuman way of referring to victims: According to a secret memorandum dated June 5, 1942, human beings marked by the SS for death in mobile gas chambers in Auschwitz were always referred to as “the cargo” or “the items.” 289The Japanese military doctors of the notorious Unit 731 regarded the victims of the experiments as maruta , or “logs.” “They were logs to me,” explained a former Japanese officer, Toshimi Mizobuchi, to the correspondent of the New York Times . 290“Logs were not considered to be human. They were either spies or conspirators… They were already dead. So now they die a second time [during the experiments]. We just executed a death sentence.” It is interesting to note that official Soviet labor camp documents used the same word. Varlam Shalamov, one of the best writers on Soviet labor camps (he spent almost thirty years in the worst of them), later wrote: “Official telegram reads: ‘Send 200 trees’ [i.e., send 200 new prisoners to the camp].” 291This was not merely a metaphor. In the permafrost of the tundra, frozen bodies of dead prisoners were used as railroad ties. A survivor of the Vorkuta camps (in northern Russia), A. Kuusinen, later recalled: “Prisoners… were fed poorly, and there was no medical help to sick prisoners. Those who fell to the ground [from exhaustion], were left to freeze to death. The dead bodies were used as railroad ties because of a lack in wood; there are no forests in those latitudes.” 292