Monsanto, the Manhattan Project, Operation Paperclip and the Human Radiation Experiments

Part of our Billions Against Bayer campaign’s Secret Military History series. This is Part 2. The Monsanto-Bayer Merger of 1954: The Union of a Nazi Collaborator and a Pentagon Contractor is Part 1.

Monsanto was an essential part of the top-secret Manhattan Project–not that you would know that by watching the movie Oppenheimer.

It ran the U.S. nuclear weapons program’s Mound Laboratories from 1943 to 1988, as well as Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1945 to 1947.

Then, in 1954, Monsanto merged with Bayer, a German company that had done most of its business during the war at Auschwitz.

How could  this happen? World War II was supposed to be about defeating the Nazis–not merging with them!

But, the modern assumption that the U.S. defeated Hitler to “liberate” the Jews from his extermination camps isn’t borne out by the historical record. 

Companies like Monsanto wanted the expertise Bayer had amassed working in Hitler’s war machine–no matter if it had come from using prisoners of Nazi death camps as slave labor and human subjects in gruesome experiments.

Not only did Monsanto merge with Bayer, a company run by convicted war criminals, it offered jobs to Nazi scientists through the CIA’s Operation Paperclip.

Secretly, Operation Paperclip funneled as many as 10,000 Nazis into plum jobs in industry, academia and the government at a time when Jewish refugees, fresh from the “liberated” extermination camps, were denied asylum in the U.S.

Monsanto and Bayer’s work together as Mobay (and ever since) is exactly what one would expect from the merger of a Pentagon contractor and a Nazi collaborator.

It was during the Mobay years (1954-1977) that Monsanto worked with the Pentagon on deadly radiation experiments—without the consent of their human subjects, including prisoners.

Monsanto’s secret military radiation experiments included spraying a low-income, mostly African-American St. Louis housing project with radiological weapons in 1953 and 1954.

Monsanto supplied radioactive materials for an unknown number of government-sanctioned human radiation experiments, including one in 1945-1947 where 829 pregnant women were secretly given radioactive iron, causing at least four children to die from childhood cancers.

Monsanto even sought to profit from these experiments by creating consumer products, including a nuclear-powered pacemaker (in use from 1966-1988).

All the while, from 1943 to 1988, it was running a deadly human experiment on its own workers at Oak Ridge and Mound Laboratory. Monsanto collected urine samples and maintained laboratories to monitor the health impacts of workplace radiation exposure, but when their employees got cancer, they were SOL. 

Monsanto and the Manhattan Project

The Human Radiation Experiments are said to have originated in the Manhattan Project, the secret Pentagon project to create and deploy atomic bombs at the end of World War II.

However, there is evidence that Monsanto was already conducting radiation experiments prior to the official start of the Manhattan Project.

Prior to 1943, Monsanto, along with the Rockefeller Foundation, funded a cyclotron (“atom smasher”), and a radiochemistry building to house it, at Washington University in St. Louis. The cyclotron would be used to produce plutonium for the Manhattan Project. In the meantime, it was used to produce radioactive materials that Louis Hempelmann, who would become the Los Alamos medical director, injected into patients several times per week.

“Decades after some eleven patients had been injected with plutonium under his supervision, Hempelmann told investigators that ‘a deliberate decision was made not to inform the patient of the nature of the product that was injected.’” That’s according to the 2011 Ph.D. dissertation of Lisa Martino-Taylor, “The Manhattan-Rochester Coalition, Research On The Health Effects Of Radioactive Materials, And Tests On Vulnerable Populations Without Consent In St. Louis, 1945-1970.” She went on to write the book Behind the Fog: How the U.S. Cold War Radiological Weapons Program Exposed Innocent Americans.

Monsanto’s involvement in the Manhattan Project began in 1943 when Charles A. Thomas, who directed research at Monsanto, was chosen by Gen. Leslie Groves (played by Matt Damon in the Oppenheimer movie) to coordinate work at Los Alamos, Chicago, Berkeley and Ames. Thomas was chosen because, unlike most of the other scientists involved who were academics, he had the industrial experience that the Manhattan Project required. 

Thomas was actually offered co-directorship of the project, along with J. Robert Oppenheimer, but he declined. That’s according to the Dayton Daily News which continues:

“In the end, Thomas was one of just 14 scientists among the thousands involved in the Manhattan Project to be awarded the Medal for Merit, the highest civilian honor for wartime service.

“Thomas’ career at the Monsanto Chemical Company continued to rise after the war. He served as president of Monsanto from 1951 to 1960 and as chairman of the board from 1960 to 1965 before retiring from the company in 1970. He died in 1982.”

Monsanto’s contribution to the Manhattan Project, the development of the polonium trigger, was known as the Dayton Project.

Workers at Monsanto’s Dayton Unit III were tasked with separating the polonium from irradiated bismuth using acid extraction methods and assembling the triggers for the atomic bomb.

At the end of the war, the Manhattan Project’s human radiation experiments were expanded, allowing for the distribution of radioisotopes for human experimentation and other medical research to scientists and doctors outside the secret project. Monsanto would be a research hub and the monopoly radioisotope supplier. 

Beginning during the Manhattan Project, Monsanto supplied radioactive materials for an unknown number of human radiation experiments, including the Tennessee Vanderbilt Nutrition Project where 829 pregnant women were secretly given radioactive iron (1945-47), causing at least four children to die from childhood cancers. In a lawsuit, lawyers representing the women and their children alleged that the Rockefeller Foundation and Monsanto had funded the study and sold the radioactive isotopes. The case was settled out of court for $10.3 million.

In June 1946, the Manhattan Project publicly announced its program for distributing radioactive isotopes, complete with a liability waiver. According to the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments:

“Although Manhattan Project approval was required, the actual purchase [of radioactive isotopes] was from the private contractor-operator of the Clinton Laboratories (later designated the Oak Ridge National Laboratory) in Oak Ridge, at that time Monsanto Chemical Company. The final purchase agreement contained a clause relieving both the government and the private contractor from any responsibility for ‘injury to persons or other living material or for any damage to property in the handling or application of this material. . . .’”

The minutes of a January 1947 meeting of the post-war phase of the Manhattan Project, known as the Manhattan-Rochester Coalition, outlined “an ambitious program to focus on the physical measurement of radiation, the biological effects of radiation, methods for the detection of radiation damage, methods for the prevention of radiation injury, and protective measures. There followed an itemized list of the work to be done at Argonne National Laboratory, Los Alamos, Monsanto, Columbia University, and the Universities of Michigan, Rochester, Tennessee, California, and Virginia.” That’s according to the 1995 Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.

The Human Radiation Experiments, Operation Paperclip and “a Little of the Buchenwald Touch”

When the secret human radiation experiments that began during the Manhattan Project were first revealed in the 1990s, investigators couldn’t ignore the Nazi connections.

Declassified documents revealed that the men involved in the human radiation experiments admitted to one another privately that they had “a little of the Buchenwald touch.”

(Buchenwald was a Nazi extermination camp where gruesome human experiments were conducted. Certainly, the Nazis were known for their race hatred and love for eugenics, but the camps, including Buchenwald, were run by and for corporate interests. I.G. Farben/Bayer was the Nazi’s “Machiavellian planner.” One Buchenwald experiment that killed about 600 people with typhus bacteria involved testing the effects of Bayer tranquilizers on typhoid encephalopathy.)

The human radiation experiments weren’t just like experiments carried out by Nazi scientists, they actually were experiments carried out by Nazi scientists–who had been brought to the U.S. through Operation Paperclip.

In 1995, the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments drafted a memo, “Post-World War II Recruitment of German Scientists–Project Paperclip,” that explored the relationship between Nazi scientists who had been snuck into the country through Operation Paperclip and the human radiation experiments, focusing on two scientists who worked at the Air Force’s School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, where dozens of human radiation experiments took place: Herbert Gerstner and Hubertus Strughold.

Terrifying accounts of Gerstner and Strughold’s lives were posted at HistoryCollection.com. (Warning: These are graphic descriptions of actions of war criminals).

Monsanto, Project Paperclip and the Radiation Experiments 

Herbert Gerstner and Hubertus Strughold didn’t work for Monsanto, but other scientists who conducted the same human radiation experiments did and Monsanto had its own Project Paperclip scientists. 

Just like Herbert Gerstner, Monsanto’s Robert Stone did total body irradiation experiments for the U.S. nuclear program when he led the “health division” at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, including when Monsanto ran Oak Ridge from 1945 to 1947. The New York Times reported in 1994:

“From 1942 to 1946, Dr. Stone exposed 32 dying patients to powerful X-rays to examine radiation’s effect on the body. Such information was needed to develop treatments for the inevitable victims of radiation accidents at the bomb factories that were proliferating around the country. …

“[He was] intrigued with another obvious application of their research: using deliberate contamination with radiation as a weapon of war. As early as the spring of 1943, [he] discussed with the Army killing an unspecified number of the enemy by poisoning food or water with radioactive strontium.

“By 1948, protests against human radiation experiments were being raised in the A.E.C. That fall, the chairman of the commission’s advisory committee on biology and medicine, outraged that Dr. Stone was giving whole-body X-rays to arthritis patients, notified the radiologist that the commission’s experts ‘do not wish to collaborate in clinical investigations with physicians in whose considered judgment they do not have confidence.’

“In July 1949, the head of the commission’s division of biology and medicine wrote Dr. Stone that he was ‘taking an increasingly dim view’ of human experimentation. Undeterred, Dr. Stone defended the radiation experiments on the grounds that he and his colleagues, not the commission, had the right to select the patients and choose the type of therapy.”

Monsanto took Paperclip scientists into its work providing radioactive materials for, and conducting, human radiation experiments.

Editha Karl-Kroupa was one of the Paperclip scientists who went to work for Monsanto. She was “an inorganic microchemist who specialized in radioactive elements.” Her wartime research partner, Friedrich Hecht was as ardent Nazi, according to his Wikipedia entry which states, “Even before the Anschluss, in 1933 Hecht was a member of the (at that time illegal) National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) or Nazi Party and Sturmabteilung or SA, from 1934, the Schutzstaffel or SS.”

“Ardent” Nazis weren’t allowed into the U.S. If “ardent Nazi” was written in a scientist’s file, “not an” was crammed in to correct it, so it’s not surprising that we know nothing of what Kroupa’s political views were.

Kroupa and Hecht had created triple-weight hydrogen, a key component of the hydrogen bomb, so Kroupa, with her expertise in nuclear weapons technology, went to work for Monsanto in Dayton where its Manhattan Project spin-off, Mound Laboratories, was headquartered.

Kroupa started working for Monsanto in January 1954, the same year Monsanto and Bayer formed Mobay.

Did Kroupa participate in Monsanto’s human radiation experiments? 

There are no documents that can confirm that, but Monsanto’s Mound Laboratory was one big human experiment—on the employees who worked there and the surrounding community. 

From 1946 to 1948, Monsanto created laboratories to test the biological impact of polonium radiation on humans, including by mining the thousands of urine samples it had collected from its Dayton Project personnel for information about polonium exposure. According to the Dayton Daily News:

“From 1946 to 1948 after the initial development of the bomb, the Monsanto Company leased the [General Electric warehouse] building’s three upper floors, coined it the ‘Warehouse’ and created a laboratory to test the biological impact of polonium radiation on humans. …

“Thousands of urine samples from Dayton Project personnel were screened for polonium exposure. …

“Two others have been torn down — the original Monsanto research lab at 1515 Nicholas Road and the former Runnymede Playhouse in Oakwood.

“Preliminary research was conducted at the Monsanto facility on Nicholas Road. X-ray and spectrographic work on polonium remained there until 1949, when Mound Laboratory in Miamisburg was completed.”

Not all of the experiments were limited to unavoidable workplace or environmental exposure. There were also controlled experiments, involving deliberate radiation exposure, like this one in 1953:

“One set of experiments was conducted with employees at the Monsanto Chemical Company’s Mound Laboratory, Miamisburg, Ohio. A mixture of contaminants containing alpha emitters, and not further identified, was placed on the palms of four employees and detergents tested for removal. In addition, detergents were tested on the hands of three other employees ‘whose hands were contaminated in the normal course of work.’” That’s according to a 1986 government investigation, American Guinea Pigs: Three Decades of Radiation Experiments on U.S. Citizens, which described the studies:

“Radioactive material placed on human skin

“In 1953, Foster D. Snell, a consulting firm, placed synthetic radioactive soil on the palms of over one hundred human subjects, and examined the ability of different cleaning agents to remove the radioactive material. The objective of this experiment was to determine the efficiency of various cleaning agents in removing radioactive contaminants from “human skin and hair.” 

“These experiments were performed for the Chemical and Radiological Laboratories of the Department of the Army, and were reported in a U.S. Atomic Energy Commission technical publication. Removal of Radioactive Contaminants from Human Skin, NP-4935, June 15, 1953. It appears that at least part of the reason for conducting the experiments was to provide information that could be used on a battlefield during a nuclear exchange, since there is a reference to decontamination ‘from the point of view of the soldier in the field.’

“For the experiments, a drop of a liquid mixture of radioactive material was deposited on the palms or arms of human subjects. allowed to dry, and counted with a Geiger counter. The contamination was then washed off with various cleaning agents, and the skin counted again to determine efficiency of removal. Initial experiments were conducted on metallic surfaces, then on rabbits and pigs. Preliminary work was also done on hair removed from humans, and then on 16 human subjects. Most of this work was done with a suspension of ‘synthetic soil,’ a mixture composed chiefly of soil, sand, and clay, mixed with fission products. Some experiments were performed with synthetic soil which had been irradiated in a nuclear reactor, synthetic soil mixed with Carbon-14, or a sample of soil from the Nevada test site. These other mixtures did not adhere well to skin, and were not used in later experiments. In these first human experiments, solutions registering up to 2,900 counts per minute were placed on subjects’ forearms or palms. These experiments showed that it was most difficult to wash radioactivity from palms, and most subsequent experiments placed the radioactive material on palms only.

“Subsequent experiments were conducted on about 102 different human subjects, placing larger amounts of radioactivity, typically 10,000 to 20,000 counts per minute, on subjects’ palms. A variety of detergents and hand creams were examined for their ability to remove the radioactive contamination. One set of experiments was conducted with ‘radiological warfare agents,’ composed of small pellets of zinc bromide which contained radioactive Tantalum. Droplets containing 13,000 to 49,000 counts per minute of these agents were placed on the palms of six human subjects. 

“One set of experiments was conducted with employees at the Monsanto Chemical Company’s Mound Laboratory, Miamisburg, Ohio. A mixture of contaminants containing alpha emitters, and not further identified, was placed on the palms of four employees and detergents tested for removal. In addition, detergents were tested on the hands of three other employees ‘whose hands were contaminated in the normal course of work.’

“Except for the experiments at Mound Laboratory, the Department of Energy, had not been able to identify where these experiments were conducted or how the 118 human subjects were obtained. Subjects were male and female, and ranged in age from 18 to 66.  The Department of Energy reported no medical follow up on any of these subjects.”

Around Mound Laboratory, it eventually became clear what the effects of radiation exposure were. This 2010 letter to the Dayton Daily News tells a common story:

“Beginning in 1960, the Mound released radioactive tritium into the air and contaminated the soil with plutonium-238. Our city water supply was piped up Mound hill; we played at the Adena Indian mound, spent countless hours at the Miamisburg public pool and fished in the pond.

“My father worked at Presto Adhesive Paper, below Mound Lab, on Mound Avenue. He died at the age of 53 of a rare cancer called multiple myeloma.

“Our mother had already undergone radical mastectomy and radiation for breast cancer prior to age 50; she would later die of mesothelioma.

“Our older brother died in his early sixties of bladder cancer, and my daughter had her cancerous left kidney removed while in her mid-thirties.

“My family’s experiences are only a small part of our neighborhood cancer history. Beginning with Mound Road, spreading back Marsha Drive and all along Meadowview Drive, one — and in most households, both — parent experienced different types of malignant disease, i.e.: multiple breast and colon cancers, parotid tumor, bladder, prostate, lung, skin, mesothelioma, brain, aplastic anemia and a child with leukemia.

“I estimate that cancer occurred in 90% of the households in that neighborhood.”

Monsanto collected urine samples and maintained laboratories to monitor the health impacts of workplace radiation exposure, but when their employees got cancer, Monsanto did nothing for them. Instead, Monsanto got the government to take on the liability. Then the government did nothing for them. The Dayton Daily News reported in 2006:

“Sherrie Neff was just out of high school in 1967 when she landed a job at Miamisburg’s Mound Laboratory.

“‘I was proud of working out there,’ said Neff, 58. ‘I trusted the government. I thought they were not going to jeopardize our health over there.

“‘I guess that was stupid of me.’

“She found her first cancer in 1983. She felt the lump in her left breast as she was nursing one of her children. Neff had a mastectomy on June 8, 1983. When she recovered, she went back to work at the Mound.

“Neff, a former Germantown councilwoman, worked there until June 2004. Since then, she’s had four major cancer surgeries. In April, doctors amputated her right leg near the hip because of a rare soft-tissue cancer. On Oct. 11, they removed her right lung to extract a tumor the size of a melon.

“How much compensation has she received from the government she served?

“‘Nothing.’

“…[S]he has received only stacks of claim forms to fill out — followed by denials.

“And bills. Neff’s lifetime $250,000 in medical insurance is exhausted. She has paid $46,000 out of pocket so far. She can’t afford a prosthetic leg.

“Sick workers from most federal nuclear installations, including Mound, have an uphill battle in proving their cancers were caused by on-the-job radioactive exposures so they can qualify for federal compensation.

* * *

“’The only real protection I had was steel-toed shoes and safety glasses.’

“Neff first filed for compensation for her 1983 breast cancer in December 2001, shortly after the federal program began.

“While she was waiting for a ruling, in September 2004, doctors removed a cancerous tumor from her left leg. She reapplied, seeking compensation for the breast and leg cancers.

“In November 2004, the Labor Department turned down Neff’s original claim relating to the breast cancer only. A dose reconstruction estimated her career exposure to radiation at 16 rem, documents show. Officials called that an ‘overestimate.’ 

“Rem is a unit of measurement that relates the absorbed dose in human tissue to the biological damage of the radiation. Not all radiation has the same effect, even if the dose is the same. A single chest X-ray gives about two onehundredths of a rem. 

“Just six months after Neff’s first dose reconstruction, the same three officials of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health who signed it sent her a second reconstruction for both the breast and leg cancers. This time, her breast exposure was listed at just 2.5 rem while the leg was 8.3 rem, for a total dose of 10.8 rem.

 “In other words, NIOSH estimated Neff’s dose for two cancers far lower in the second reconstruction than it did earlier for only one cancer.

 “NIOSH found a 43.76 percent probability — below the required 50 percent — that Neff’s breast and leg cancers were workplace-related, and she was again denied compensation.

 * * *

“Two months after Neff’s second denial, in August 2005, doctors found cancer in her right lung. She had the lower lobe removed and underwent 96 hours of chemotherapy and 38 radiation treatments. 

“The cancer in her leg returned a few months later, resulting in the amputation on April 10. A checkup revealed a recurrence of the lung cancer, leading to the removal of the lung last month. 

“Early this year, federal officials revealed to Neff for the first time that an X-ray from her 1983 physical exam at Mound showed scarring that could indicate she has beryllium disease from exposure to the toxic metal. Neff filed a beryllium claim, which was rejected earlier this month.

“She still has a pending claim that she may have been sickened by Mound exposures to chemical hazards.

 “As part of the claims process, the Labor Department asked her for a list of all the toxins she recalls encountering at Mound. When Neff asked the Energy Department to provide her with that information, she was told it would cost her $35,000 in fees for staff time and copying.

 “‘It’s like I’ve got a vicious Catch-22 here,’ she said. ‘I feel like I’m beating my head against a brick wall, and I’m just one individual.’

 “Neff said the latest surgery has left her deeply fatigued. She has been on morphine since the amputation in April. In addition to pain from her surgeries, she still experiences an amputee’s ‘phantom pain’ — the sensation of being stabbed in her missing heel.

 “‘I have never smoked a day in my life, never drank, never did recreational drugs,’ Neff said. ‘I just worked at a bad place.’”

Related Posts