01x07 - Dark Science

[bunniefuu]

Throughout time,

governments and the people

who work for them have

done strange and even terrible

things in the name of national interest,

including scientific projects so shocking,

they are kept secret for decades.

From experimenting on orphans

He'd force-feed the

children, stimulate the wrist.

They'd start salivating.

To breeding super soldiers using apes.

He ultimately wanted to

create a living w*r machine.

And even to weaponizing

incurable diseases.

These guys are playing with fire.

What could possibly go wrong?

Just how far will nations

go to gain an edge?

Now it's time to bring

these dark experiments into the light.

During world w*r ii,

the Nazis and the allies

are locked in a race to

develop a nuclear weapon.

But little is known about how radioactivity

affects people exposed to it.

To learn more, one nation conducts

covert experiments that

are covered up for decades.

That nation is the United States.

Oak Ridge is the headquarters

of the Manhattan project,

the U.S. quest to

develop an atomic b*mb.

Scientists here are facing a problem.

They are working with

radioactive elements

they know are dangerous.

But they don't yet fully understand

the risks of exposure.

Workers must protect themselves

from the "hot stuff,"

as they call radioactive materials.

But the deadly radiation

from the "hot stuff" is

invisible and hard to avoid.

Sometimes workers

even inhale plutonium dust.

If this dust gets into the lungs,

it can get into the bloodstream

and travel throughout the body.

So they need to determine,

what is a safe exposure

limit for scientists?

And what is going to be lethal?

So the Manhattan

project scientists turned

to testing, first on animals.

It's reported that they used

25,000 mice, and even dogs.

But they want more information.

They felt that, you know,

the physiological reactions

of mice and dogs might be different

in significant ways from humans.

So to safeguard their staff,

they need even more reliable tests.

The Manhattan project

science committee decides

to go one step further.

They will run radiation

exposure tests on humans.

The only question is, where to begin?

They decide to start close to home.

An ambulance speeds

through oak Ridge,

rushing construction worker ebb Cade

to the hospital after a head-on collision

with a dump truck.

Ebb Cade is in a horrific car accident.

He shatters his arm and his leg.

But when he goes to the hospital,

the doctors start a course of treatment

that really isn't consistent

for broken bones.

That's because ebb Cade

is about to become

the Manhattan project's

first human radiation testing subject.

In the hospital, ebb

Cade is being injected

with a syringe that's only

marked with the number 49.

In a few days, he starts

to feel absolutely terrible.

It turns out that 49,

the substance that

Cade was injected with,

was the code name for plutonium.

Without his knowledge or consent,

scientists make Cade

part of their experiments.

Cade is injected with 4.7 milligrams

of plutonium, five times what is deemed

to be safe for human exposure.

They delay Cade's treatment

for his shattered arm and leg

so that they can take

bone samples from him

after a few days of radiation exposure.

As if that's not enough damage,

the scientists pull out 15 of Cade's teeth.

It's like they don't give

a damn about this guy.

They send the teeth,

along with bone samples,

to the labs at los Alamos.

As soon as he can move, ebb Cade gets

out of the facility where

he's being treated.

But by that point, it's kind of too late.

He's already been exposed to plutonium.

He's already been irradiated.

A few years after this

incident, he's gone blind.

And he eventually dies in 1953.

Cade never knew what

had happened to him.

Ebb Cade is not the only victim

of the secret radiation exposure testing.

Between 1945 and 1947,

Manhattan project scientists

used 18 other unsuspecting civilians

as human Guinea pigs.

They injected these

people with plutonium

and other radioactive compounds

and just waited to see

what would happen.

These experiments

stay secret for decades

Until 1987, when a junior reporter

in Albuquerque, new Mexico, stumbles

across something strange.

Eileen welsome is a new

neighborhoods reporter

at "the Albuquerque tribune."

One day, welsome is flicking

through declassified documents

from kirtland air force base

about radioactive waste.

There's a footnote in one of the reports

that she's looking at

that makes reference

to plutonium exposure experiments.

And that sets off alarm bells right there.

Plutonium is one of the most dangerous

elements in the world.

So welsome sets off on

an investigative deep-dive.

Over a period of five years,

welsome tracks down

retired government scientists

and historians.

In 1993, welsome

publishes a series of articles

exposing the Manhattan project's

radiation testing on

unsuspecting citizens.

Welsome's investigation

quickly becomes public.

She's going to win the pulitzer prize

for her reporting on this issue.

President Clinton is

going to wind up ordering

a deeper investigation into the allegations

that welsome has brought to light.

They plowed through

a lot of evidence that

had been previously

suppressed, kept at arm's distance

from reporters like

this assiduous member

of "the Albuquerque tribune."

And what they find is

the U.S. government

really did inject American citizens

with radioactive materials

to see what the effects would be.

Whether in w*r or at peace,

this is one of the most appalling

abuses of government

power in U.S. history.

Finally there was an

acknowledgment that

this had actually happened.

So the government is forced to apologize

and give a payout of $400,000 apiece

to the surviving families

of 12 of the victims.

In 1997, the U.S. congress passes a law

that prohibits the use

of unknowing subjects

in medical research.

As experts from the Manhattan project

experiment on Americans

without their consent,

some researchers in the Soviet union

are also pursuing dark science.

They want to create a new kind of life,

a cross between human and ape.

Seven years after

the Russian revolution,

the Soviet government

cements its power.

Now its leaders look

to stamp out religion,

seeing it as a hindrance

in a socialist society.

Lenin and Stalin are both convinced,

they have to absolutely eradicate religion

if they're going to bring about

the glorious communist revolution.

Following the ideas of Marx,

they think it's the opium of the people.

And it's got to go.

To further that cause, Stalin turns

to a scientist named ilya Ivanov,

who has an unusual

interest in human genetics.

To show off the potential

of this new science,

Ivanov has already

produced crossbreeds.

But in 1924, he decides

to try something far beyond

merging two animals together.

What Ivanov is

proposing is to crossbreed

humans and chimpanzees

to create what he'll call a humanzee.

It's a project that's just so perverse,

it boggles the mind.

But Ivanov is staking his reputation

and his life on its success.

Ivanov is convinced that

if his experiments work

and apes and humans

can successfully interbreed,

that this means they

share a common ancestor.

And therefore, the Bible and the notion

of unique creation is false.

Once Stalin gives Ivanov funding,

the pressure is on to deliver.

Ivanov travels to Guinea,

French west Africa,

and gets to work.

Ivanov artificially inseminates

three female chimpanzees

with human sperm.

Shocker, it doesn't take.

So he decides to flip the experiment

use chimp sperm in a human woman.

This is just so dark and perverted that

it proves to be too much

for the authorities in Guinea.

They've had enough of Ivanov.

And they just expel him from the country.

"You are not welcome here."

Ivanov is terrified at the prospect

of not being able to succeed.

He received serious

funding from the ussr.

And this is not a

government to disappoint.

So you can imagine, the pressure is on.

Let's be honest.

Stalin kills anybody

who makes a promise and can't fulfill it.

Coming up When

Ivanov returns to Russia,

he tries to recruit new

subjects for his experiments.

He wants to entice Soviet women in

and artificially inseminate

them with chimpanzee sperm.

Then the real purpose behind

Ivanov's perverse experiments

is exposed.

What Stalin wants is regiments

of completely obedient,

super capable super soldiers.

In the 1920s, a Russian scientist

named ilya Ivanov engages

in a shocking experiment

with Stalin's support.

He tries to create a hybrid creature

by crossbreeding humans and apes.

His alleged goal?

Challenge the belief

that god created man.

After his experiments in Africa fail,

Ivanov returns home

with four chimpanzees.

He wants to entice Soviet women in

and artificially inseminate

them with chimpanzee sperm.

But the chimp that he has

earmarked to donate samples,

a 26-year-old named Tarzan,

dies of a brain hemorrhage

before he can get a sample.

Ivanov is officially a failure.

And Stalin does what he does

with those who disappoint him.

Ivanov is off to the gulag.

Ivanov's notes and research

disappear for decades,

lost in the labyrinths

of the Soviet archives.

When they're finally uncovered,

they reveal something new.

The real hidden purpose

of Ivanov's experiments

doesn't become known until 2005,

when a revelatory story is published

in "the scotsman" newspaper.

The paper reveals that this was never

about undermining religion.

It was about developing a new breed

of half-human, half-ape super soldiers.

It sounds like something you

would read in a comic book

when you were a kid.

But according to the paper,

Stalin ordered Ivanov to create

a living w*r machine for the red army.

Consider the physical characteristics

of chimpanzees.

Incredibly strong.

They would ignore pain.

They wouldn't care what type

of food they were being fed.

They would accept any

abuse in service of the state.

What Stalin wants is regiments

of completely obedient,

super capable super soldiers.

Stalin's hybrid human-ape

army never comes to pass.

But just a few years

after Ivanov is carrying out

his research, Japanese scientists are

working on their own dark experiments,

experiments that lead to the largest

biological warfare

attack in human history.

Imperial Japanese

troops invade manchuria

in northeast China and

begin a brutal occupation.

Japan's top microbiologist in the 1930s

is a man named shiro ishii.

And he is posted to manchuria

during the Japanese invasion

of mainland China.

Ishii's mission is to develop

hideous biological weapons

for the Japanese army.

In 1935, with the backing

of the Japanese military,

ishii creates a huge

bio-warfare laboratory.

The imperial Japanese bulldoze a set

of villages at pingfang.

In their place, they construct

a massive new headquarters

for ishii's covert division, unit 731.

It's set to become

one of the most notorious divisions

in the entire Japanese military.

They are creating at

pingfang an eastern Auschwitz.

They're creating a place where

they will perfect the mechanisms

for the extermination of human life.

He creates a cover story

to explain the construction.

He says it's a lumber mill.

And the scientists there

refer to their victims as logs.

The Japanese, over and

over again at special unit 731,

treat Chinese people

as if they are animals,

as if they have no feelings,

as if they have no families,

as if they don't deserve

to live on the planet.

The new facility soon grows

to the size of a small town.

Ishii and his team

round up Chinese citizens

and imprison them there.

What happens next is shocking.

These monsters, these

butchers in unit 731,

they deliberately infect male prisoners

with venereal diseases like syphilis.

And then those same men are forced

to r*pe female prisoners,

just so ishii can test

disease transmission.

They would inject them

with plague and Anthrax

and then watch them die.

Sometimes it was even worse than that.

As the disease was advancing,

they would conduct a "living dissection,"

a vivisection of the test subject.

They were going to take your organs out

and examine them to see

the progression of disease.

You're still alive while this is happening.

You're awake.

You're not under anesthesia.

They are holding you down

and taking out your organs.

You are going to die,

and you're going to watch it happen.

By 1942, ishii reaches

the culmination of his experiments.

He unleashes biological

warfare on entire cities.

What the Japanese do is they essentially

breed fleas and make sure

that they are plague carriers.

And then they use aerial bombardment

to drop those fleas on

Chinese urban areas,

in the hopes of touching

off a plague epidemic.

Nobody knows for sure how many

people are actually k*lled.

But estimates have given us numbers

as high as 50,000

people, possibly even more.

This is the largest

biological weapons attack

on people in the whole

w*r-torn 20th century.

In 1945, the Russians

invade manchuria,

ending Japan's occupation of China.

Ishii's reign of terror is over.

Ishii and their team slaughter

their remaining prisoners.

And then they just run back to Japan,

taking all of this blood-soaked

experimental data with them.

Between 1945 and 1947,

U.S. w*r crimes investigators

question ishii and the unit 731 team.

Through that interrogation, it was learned

what had been done at special unit 731.

They not only k*ll about

14,000 Chinese test subjects

living, breathing human beings that are

treated like test animals

they k*ll off about 50,000 Chinese people

through actual weaponization of the flea.

Despite having clear

proof of ishii's guilt,

investigators decide not to

charge him with any w*r crimes.

Why doesn't the U.S. prosecute

this known w*r criminal?

The answer is simple.

The military wants his data.

In exchange for his research,

ishii gets off scot-free.

The facts are revealed in a 1998 letter

from the department of justice.

The U.S. government was

prohibited from conducting

actual ghoulish testing

against human test subjects

that had been an

everyday matter of business

at special unit 731.

And so we wanted to benefit

from it by having access

to the details of all of

the technical information

that his institute had developed.

Sometimes American

authorities made compromises

with horrible people as part of its pursuit

of advantage against the Soviet union.

The leader of unit 731 lives in peace

until his death from

throat cancer in 1959.

During the cold w*r, the Soviets carry out

covert science experiments

in remote locations.

One place will become

known as plague island.

But it only becomes a

priority for U.S. spy agencies

when a boat strays too close to shore.

The aral sea, deep inside

the Soviet union, 1971.

The research vessel "lev berg"

is working in waters

near a remote island there.

It's a normal day on

board, when suddenly,

the ship runs into something strange.

It's a brown cloud of haze

hovering just above the water,

and it's too late to avoid it.

The ship sails right through it.

On board the ship, a young researcher

comes down with a mysterious illness,

and a terrible rash breaks

out all over her body.

When she gets back to her

home village, her illness spreads.

It's a severe contagion.

Within weeks, three people in the town

are dead, including

two newborn children.

Doctors find out that

what she was infected with

was one of the most deadly diseases

that humans have ever

encountered, smallpox.

Smallpox is terrifying.

It k*lled more people in the 20th century

than all of the wars in

that century combined.

But the researcher is

vaccinated against smallpox.

She should have been immune to it.

One year later, a fishing boat is found

washed up near the same island.

Inside the boat are two

fishermen, stone-cold dead.

Meanwhile nearby, other fishermen are

bringing in catches filled

with dead and dying fish.

When villagers examine the bodies

of the dead fishermen,

they find them covered

in pustulous swellings.

The lesions on these fishermen

are consistent with bubonic plague,

one of the deadliest diseases

that confronts humankind,

with a fatality rate of about 50%.

When U.S. intelligence agencies

get wind of these strange

deaths, they have questions.

What's happening on this remote island?

The island is located

1,500 miles from Moscow.

Access is restricted by

the Soviet government.

American spies have been trying

to study the island for years.

Photos of the island snapped

from spy planes and satellites

show that it's far from ordinary.

Other settlements nearby have

fishing piers and fish packing sheds.

The secret island

appears to instead have

things like barracks and r*fle ranges,

as well as animal

pens, research buildings,

and what appears to be

an open air testing site.

The images confirm

the CIA's worst fears.

The island is clearly a military

scientific research base.

But the question remains,

what kind of horrifying weapons

are being dreamed up and tested there?

What's going on on this island

remains a mystery until

after the end of the cold w*r.

In 1992, a year after the ussr fails,

Soviet military microbiologist

colonel Ken alibek

flees to america and brings with him

the truth about plague island.

The former insider reveals that the island

is more than just a

military scientific base.

It's devoted to transforming

natural diseases

into deadly weapons bio-warfare,

which is ill*gal under international law.

For decades, the Soviets have been

experimenting here

with some of the deadliest

diseases known to man.

Beginning in the

1930s, they're attempting

to weaponize everything,

from smallpox and plague

to these monstrous viral diseases

which have no known cure.

They were trying to

make bacterial pathogens

resistant to antibiotics, make viruses

more difficult to detect and treat.

What they hoped to create

were unstoppable plagues,

which they could launch at their enemy:

The United States and her allies.

Things that were

developed on that island still,

to this day, have no cure.

Safety protocols are tight,

but these guys are playing with fire.

And sure enough, things

go wrong, very wrong.

Just a little leak or the smallest spill

can have deadly consequences.

We have no idea how many people

were k*lled in the process

of developing these weapons.

Were k*lled in the process

of developing these weapons.

To this day, plague island is

one of the most poisonous

places on the planet.

Many U.S. soldiers

returning from world w*r ii

carry battle scars, both

physical and mental.

When they seek help,

some receive treatment

that can only be called shocking.

The U.S. army's bombardment

group are flying b-17s

on dangerous daytime raids.

Flying combat missions over Europe

is one of the most dangerous aspects

of world w*r ii for

American service personnel.

On every mission, these

men were dancing with death.

22-year-old Roman tritz is

one of those American aviators

flying 34 combat missions over Europe.

Tritz sees many of his comrades,

his friends, being shot out of the sky.

B-17 out of control at 3 o'clock.

The unit loses more than 100 planes

over the course of the w*r.

Come on, you guys.

Get out of that plane.

Bail out!

There's one. He's come

out of the b*mb bay.

Yeah, I see him.

It's an experience he'll never forget,

and it'll haunt him

for the rest of his life.

When the w*r ends in 1945,

Roman tritz comes home

to ticker tape parades

and public adulation.

After being discharged, tritz is given

a clean bill of health by the army medics.

But for the young b*mber pilot,

the wartime trauma just won't go away.

When tritz comes home,

his life effectively starts to fall apart.

He can't sleep.

He starts to have

hallucinations and delusions.

Tritz is probably suffering from a form

of post-traumatic

stress disorder, or PTSD,

something people don't

understand at the time.

PTSD as a diagnosis doesn't exist yet.

So doctors call someone

with these symptoms

either shell-shocked or say

that they have battle fatigue.

His parents, who are not

psychiatric professionals,

they don't know what to do with him.

They gave this kid to the U.S. army.

The U.S. army gave him back,

and he was a complete mess.

They couldn't do anything for him.

And so they have him committed.

Training footage released

in 1944 by the U.S. military

suggests what veterans like

tritz might have experienced.

In the psychiatric facility, he is given

66 rounds of the

so-called "needle shower."

He is exposed to intensely hot water,

followed by intensely cold water.

And it was thought

that this would somehow

help him get over this condition.

The doctors try Insulin shock therapy,

which puts tritz into a

medically-induced coma.

The treatment is intended to break

the cycle of mental illness.

They later hit him with 28

rounds of electroshock therapy,

in the hopes that this will improve

tritz's brain chemistry.

When this doesn't work,

medics turn to a new form

of psycho-surgery: Lobotomy.

A lobotomy is a surgical procedure

that was developed in 1935

by Portuguese

neurologist Antonio moniz.

Surgeons use a device called

a leucotome to physically sever

the connection between the frontal lobe

and the thalamus in the brain.

The operation is supposed to work

by eliminating excessive emotions

and stabilizing wild mood swings.

Lobotomy is permanently damaging,

and the va doctors know it.

As far back as 1941,

the American medical association

warns of "severe negative effects."

They report that some 10,000 lobotomies

had already been performed

in the United States.

Some patients don't

survive the procedure.

But those that do, some of them end up

just living out the rest of their lives

almost like just a drooling zombie.

Tritz's parents don't know that,

and they give their consent.

In tomah veterans hospital in Wisconsin,

on the 1st of July, 1953,

tritz is taken into surgery.

At 11:05 A.M., a surgeon peels back

the flesh from his skull

and drills two holes right into it.

Tritz survives the operation,

but he doesn't improve.

After the surgery, tritz experiences

crippling seizures, which the doctors

do attribute to the lobotomy.

He lapses into catatonia

and is plagued by paranoid delusions.

In 2013, more than 50 years after

Roman tritz is lobotomized,

a journalist unearths

evidence deep in the national archives.

Against all odds,

journalist Michael Phillips

actually uses this information

to track down Roman tritz,

who is still alive seven

decades after world w*r ii,

in la crosse, Wisconsin.

Years later, even into his old age,

Roman is still suffering

from the after-effects

of his brutal lobotomy.

He still has paranoid delusions

about being pursued by the FBI.

He also makes references

to what he calls his "magnetic brain."

Phillips discovers that tritz is not alone.

Michael Phillips finds a memorandum

that mentions how

lobotomies are being used

to treat veterans for

psychiatric conditions.

The memo shows they

are being performed at

some 50 hospitals across america.

Between 1947 and 1950,

the va had carried out

lobotomies in 1,500 American veterans.

And hundreds more

are lobotomized later.

Roman tritz lives to see

his story made public.

He dies at age 97, he dies at age 97,

still blaming the government

for his brutal surgery.

At the beginning of the cold w*r,

Washington is on edge about the threat

of communist infiltration.

In 1956, a book by Edward hunter

is published that confirms

the public's worst fears.

Its subject the Soviets are developing

brainwashing as a weapon.

When Edward hunter

comes out with his book,

it really just throws a lot of kerosene

on a fire that was ready to explode.

Hunter claims that Soviet

brainwashing science is

now so advanced, it can create a kind of

mass hypnosis across the country

that would Rob Americans

of their free will entirely.

He suggests that the

Soviets could do this

at such a wide scale to

create an army of puppets

under Soviet control.

Hunter bases his claims on the idea

that Americans captured

during the Korean w*r

were brainwashed into

making false confessions.

I came over here and

dropped germ bombs on people.

Hunter traces Soviet

brainwashing experiments

back decades to before

the Russian revolution,

to nobel laureate Ivan pavlov.

Pavlov is world famous for his pioneering

research into the brain.

A film produced in Russia in 1926

illustrates his work with dogs.

Pavlov is most known

for his conditioning dogs.

He trained dogs to react to a sound.

Every time they heard the sound,

they would get a treat,

to the point where,

every time they heard the sound,

they would start salivating

in anticipation of that treat.

Pavlov calls this behavior

"conditioned response."

What he's proved is that, essentially,

the dogs' brains can be hijacked.

Hunter gets a lead that

pavlov's experiments

went far further than most realize.

Hunter learns from a source

that pavlov's experiments

didn't end with dogs.

He hears that there is

hidden secret footage

of other experiments.

And he sets out to find it.

After months of digging,

he manages to trace a copy.

But his book keeps

the source under wraps.

When he sits down to

watch the secret film,

he discovers something terrifying.

The footage from 1926 proves that

pavlov's work extends into

much darker experiments

than his famous animal research.

What hunter finds is footage of pavlov

running the same experiments,

but with human children.

He conditions young orphaned boys

to have the same salivating

response to a sound

that he did with dogs.

He'd force-feed the

children, stimulate the wrist,

force-feed the children,

stimulate the wrist.

They'd start salivating.

Pavlov's proving that humans can be

conditioned, just like dogs.

Hunter wonders if

the Soviets aren't using

this kind of conditioning

brainwashing tactic

on prisoners of w*r.

If a human can be conditioned,

then how far could that conditioning go?

Two years after his book comes out,

Edward hunter testifies

before the house committee

on UN-American activities.

Hunter warns that the

U.S. is losing the cold w*r

because the Soviets have

such a massive head start

when it comes to psychological warfare

and mind control techniques.

He wonders if the Soviets

haven't honed this research

and have been doing mass

brainwashing for decades.

In a country that's already on edge

about the communist

menace, hunter's report

about the advances

in brainwashing science

by the Soviets just ratchets up that fear

to a pitch of utter hysteria.

There's a final twist in the tale

of "journalist" Edward hunter.

So a number of years

later, it was discovered that

Edward hunter actually

wasn't who he purported to be.

He's an agent of the CIA,

operating in their propaganda wing.

Pavlov's experiments

on children were real.

But the link hunter makes

to Soviet mind control

is entirely fictitious.

His writing about brainwashing

is, in effect, a black op,

designed to spread mistrust

and hatred of the communists

during the cold w*r.

Once you have a

negative thought or feeling

about an individual or a

group or an organization,

it doesn't take much to continue

to build that confirmation

bias that they are bad,

that they're trying to do

nefarious things against us.

And so that's what he

was doing by spreading

this disinformation.

When citizens tear down

the Berlin wall in 1989,

investigators discover the crimes

of east German scientists.

They've doped their athletes

and used psychological warfare

on their own citizens.

They also uncover stranger experiments.

For decades after the second world w*r,

east Germans lived in terror

of their notorious

secret police, the stasi.

At the head of the stasi,

we have erich mielke.

He's a stalinist enforcer,

and has no problem

doing that enforcing

in his own homeland.

He's in charge of the most pervasive

police state in modern history.

And frankly, he's terrifying.

The west German press

dubbed him the master of fear.

As the regime collapses,

east German citizens

storm the stasi headquarters.

Inside they find agents frantically

shredding documents, desperately

trying to cover their tracks.

But there's simply too

much evidence to hide.

There are literally 68 miles of shelving,

just chock full of spy agency

files on their own citizens.

There's photos, tape recordings

all kinds of invasions of citizen privacy.

But there's also

something more puzzling.

As they continue through

these endless miles of shelves,

they come to what are

effectively Mason jars,

sealed shut, inside of which, typically,

are little bits of yellow cloth.

The citizens are left wondering,

what exactly are these for?

What is the purpose of

these sealed containers?

Shortly after, newspaper

articles expose the answer.

The jars have actual

people's scent inside them.

They're smell jars.

These are jars full of

people's actual body odors.

He has been collecting body odors.

Mielke believes that a person's scent

is every bit as individual

as their fingerprints are.

So just as police around the world

keep files on fingerprints of suspects,

that's what mielke is

doing with body odor.

This is actually good science.

Modern researchers

find that by analyzing

some 15 volatile organic compounds,

they can identify gender and ethnicity

with up to 80% accuracy.

In order to satisfy his paranoia,

mielke orders the creation

of a library of body odor.

The stasi take the collection of odors

very seriously.

They go about the country

stealing articles of clothing.

So, sorry about your favorite sweater.

They'll go into a home

when no one's there,

leave a little vial that will collect

the odors in the house.

No constitutional

issues in east Germany.

And they'll come back

again and collect that.

What agents actually do is,

they wipe some of their suspects

in their sensitive areas

with a special cloth

to collect their scent.

Another method involves

calling suspects in for interrogation.

And when they go in, they're forced

to sit in a special chair.

The suspect, this local German,

is brought in, interrogated,

intentionally pushed to a point

of great nervousness

so that they will sweat.

And as that sweat then

seeps down into the fabric,

it's being absorbed by this bit of cloth

underneath the upholstery.

But mielke has a problem.

Humans can't track these smells.

So he turns to dogs.

Compared to humans,

dogs have an incredibly

refined sense of smell.

They have up to 300

million olfactory receptors

in their noses.

And this means their noses are up to

100,000 times more

sensitive than those of humans.

So the stasi trained

dozens of specialized dogs

to smell the odor within a jar, and then go

track that out and

about in the city to find

their potential suspects.

Mielke's strange

experiment causes real harm.

It's used to track down and

imprison unknown numbers

of enemies of the state.

About one in six east Germans were,

in fact, somehow answering

to, working on, serving, the stasi.

So everywhere you

go in life, imagine this.

Whether you're at school,

work, perhaps even at home,

you never know just

who might be collecting

this vast catalog of

odors, scents, and smells

from the citizenry, with the expectation

that this will enable

them to identify a criminal

or enemy of the state in the future.

Mielke keeps collecting

his sinister smell samples

Until east German communism

is finally overthrown in 1989.

From treatments given

to American citizens

without consent

to attempts to weaponize

deadly diseases,

dark experiments all too often

take place in the shadows.

But with luck and hard work,

these secrets can be revealed.