Original subtitles

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 war 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 War 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 bomb.

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.

David] 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 war 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-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-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 war 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 rape 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 killed.

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 war-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. war 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 kill about 14,000 Chinese test subjects,

living, breathing human beings that are treated like test animals,

they kill 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 war crimes.

Why doesn't the U.S. prosecute this known war 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 a n 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 War,

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 killed 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 rifle 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 War.

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 illegal 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 killed

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 War 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 War II

for American service personnel.

On every mission, these men were dancing with death.

Twenty-two-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 3:00.

The unit loses more than 100 planes over the course of the war.

Come on, you guys. Get out of that plane.

- Bail out! - There's one.

- He's come out of the bomb 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 war 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 bomber 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 War 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,

still blaming the government for his brutal surgery.

At the beginning of the Cold War,

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 War

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 war.

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 War

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 War.

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 War,

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.

I'm David Duchovny.

Thanks for watching Secrets Declassified.