Dr. Lamb is a deeply unsettling film which matches the disturbing crimes that were actually committed in Hong Kong several decades ago. The film can be a bit campy and over-the-top which helped audiences of the time accept these deranged actions, but which might put modern audiences at a slight distance after having gnarly true crime tales injected into their veins over the past decade-plus. Nevertheless, it is a deeply fascinating and off-putting tale that you cannot help but be drawn in by. Category III films will be thrilled to have this one so readily available. Unearthed Films has released a Blu-Ray featuring a pretty strong A/V presentation and some great special features. If the subject intrigues you and you think you can stomach it, you should seek it out. Recommended
Two
Soviet Partisans, one a child carrying a German MP-40 submachine gun,
the other armed with a PPSH-41 submachine gun, in the Bryansk forests,
Soviet Union, 1943.
On this day, 3 September 1945, US president Harry Truman officially approved and expanded Operation Paperclip, a secret plan to bring Nazi scientists to US.
Originally called Operation Overcast, the US was keen to make use of German technology in order to rival the Soviet Union. Eventually, 1,600 Nazi technicians were brought to the US, where they largely avoided prosecution for war crimes. Instead they were given jobs developing chemical and biological weapons, experimenting with “mind-control” in the notorious MKUltra scheme, and working on the space program.
Wernher von Braun was made a senior director on the space programme, which was later absorbed by NASA. He was just one of the officials who was intimately involved in the Holocaust, as he selected enslaved labourers from concentration camps to be worked to death building rockets. Chief Nazi medical officer Walter Schreiber was involved in human experiments on prisoners of concentration camps, including supervising experiments where victims were injected with typhus, men were sterilised, prisoners were submerged in freezing water and locked into low pressure chambers, destroying their lungs. Schreiber was later exposed by the Boston Globe, so the US military flew him to safety in Argentina where he was sheltered by the government of Juan Perón, which harboured many other Nazi war criminals.
Another Nazi doctor, Hubertus Strughold, also reportedly had knowledge of these same experiments, and was listed as “wanted” for war crimes by the US Army. But rather than face trial he was employed by the Air Force, described as “the father of aerospace medicine”, had a library named after him at the Brooks Air Force Base, which was only eventually renamed in 1995, and was honoured with a portrait in a mural of “medical heroes” at Ohio State University.
Pictured: German scientists in the US
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