“My father understood the risks [of] being a chemist at Edgewood,” Gabriella Hoffmann says. “Because he never spoke of anything he did there is so much that is unknown.” For Gabriella Hoffmann, memories of an unusual childhood include trips to military bases. “Whenever we traveled, me and my mom and dad, it was always to a military installation. We went to White Sands in New Mexico. We went to military bases in California, Arizona, North Dakota, and Dugway, Utah. I remember dad giving a lecture at Dugway Proving Ground.” Hoffmann was a central player in some of the most mysterious and controversial government programs of the 1950s and 1960s, but the record of most of his work was destroyed or, as of 2013, remains classified. Gabriella Hoffmann is in the dark about her father’s legacy, as is most of the rest of the world.
What remains are Gabriella Hoffmann’s memories of the company her father kept. Dr. L. Wilson Greene, the man who coined the term “psychochemical warfare,” lived down the street and was a colleague and family friend. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Greene continued his LSD research for the army and the CIA’s psychochemical warfare programs. LSD and other incapacitating agents were tested on thousands of U.S. soldiers and sailors with a questionable degree of informed consent. To Gabriella Hoffmann, Greene was simply an eccentric neighbor. “I recall [going] to the Greenes’ house to see the amazing train garden, his hobby, that he built in the basement. It [had] hills and towns and little people. Ponds and lights and trains that whistled and chugged along with wisps of smoke. My attention and interest was solely on the trains.” Another unusual neighbor on the same street was Maurice Weeks, from the Directorate of Medical Research at Edgewood. Weeks was chief of the Vapor Toxicity Branch, with expertise regarding “the inhalation toxicity of combustion products,” and spent his time researching how biological and chemical agents became even more deadly when smoke and gas were involved. This picked up where Dr. Kurt Blome’s research left off; it had been discussed by Blome in Operation Paperclip consultations in Heidelberg. “Maurice Weeks was a neighbor of ours,” recalls Gabriella Hoffmann. “His son, Christopher, and I were the best of friends. There were all these monkeys in cages in Christopher’s backyard. Christopher and I would amuse ourselves watching these monkeys for hours on end. Obviously it never dawned on me back then what they were for.” Gabriella only learned the true nature of her father’s job during interviews for this book.
The strange, tragic thing about Fritz Hoffmann and his legacy in Operation Paperclip is that during the war he was anti-Nazi—at least according to the affidavit written by the wartime American diplomat Sam Woods. And yet here in America, working for the Army Chemical Corps and for the CIA, Fritz Hoffmann’s science projects took on a monstrous life of their own. This includes what his daughter believes was a role in the development of Agent Orange, the antiplant weapon, or defoliant, used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War.
“During the Vietnam War, I remember one evening we were at the dinner table and the war was on the news,” Gabriella Hoffmann explains. The family was watching TV. “Dad was usually a quiet man, so when he spoke up you remembered it. He pointed to the news—you could see the jungles of Vietnam, and he said, ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to defoliate the trees so you could see the enemies?’ That’s what he said. I remember it very clearly. Years later I learned one of Dad’s projects was the development of Agent Orange.”
The army’s herbicidal warfare program during the Vietnam War started in August 1961 and lasted until February 1971. More than 11.4 million gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed over approximately 24 percent of South Vietnam, destroying 5 million acres of uplands and forests and 500,000 acres of food crops—an area about the size of the state of Massachusetts. An additional 8 million gallons of other anticrop agents, code-named Agents White, Blue, Purple, Pink, and Green, were also sprayed, mostly from C-123 cargo planes. Fritz Hoffmann was one of the earliest known U.S. Army Chemical Corps scientists to research the toxic effects of dioxin—possibly in the mid-1950s but for certain in 1959—as indicated in what has become known as the Hoffmann Trip Report. This document is used in almost every legal record pertaining to litigation by U.S. military veterans against the U.S. government and chemical manufacturers for its usage of herbicides and defoliants in the Vietnam War.
It is the long-term effects of the Agent Orange program that Gabriella Hoffmann believes would have ruined her father, had he known. “Agent Orange turned out not only to defoliate trees but to cause great harm in children,” Gabriella Hoffmann says. “Dad was dead by then and I remember thinking, Thank God. It would have killed him to learn that. He was a gentle man. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”