UK Government linked to secret ‘Nazi-style’ experiments on CIVILIANS

The documents, obtained by The Mirror, reveal the workings of The Technical Cooperation Programme (TTCP), a secretive defence research body serving the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

Minutes from a 1969 gathering in Whitehall show senior RAF, Royal Navy and British Army officers examining horrific experiments performed on unsuspecting civilians and requesting additional information.

The revelations expose Britain’s previously unknown connection to experiments that caused scandal in America during the 1990s.

But the data remains inaccessible to both victims and Parliament – and could hold evidence which may back up claims by former servicemen that they were treated as human guinea pigs in atomic experiments.

The MoD has acknowledged it still holds data on information regarding radiation’s effects on veterans from Britain’s nuclear weapons testing programme – and has said a probe is now underway.

Kevin Ruane, emeritus professor of Cold War history at Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent, condemned the Government’s actions.

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“The UK Government welcomed and utilised data of the most profoundly unethical kind; it’s like hiring a hitman to do your dirty work, and thinking you are not morally compromised,” he said.

“I expect they would say it was in the interests of national security. But they had no qualms about accepting the results of frankly outrageous experiments that were not far from the realm of Dr Mengele in the Nazi death camps.”

The minutes from a TTCP sub-committee designated “N-5” detailed experiments carried out on cancer patients in Cincinnati, Ohio, by American military researchers.

Among the victims was Geneva Snow, a 42-year-old mother-of-three diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1964, who was positioned like a soldier seeking cover and bombarded with radiation equivalent to 15,000 chest x-rays before being injected with nitrogen mustard.

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“Her legs looked like cooked meat,” said her daughter Joyce Slover, now 79. “She was poor and they used her as a guinea pig. She was in severe pain and died soon after.”

The Cincinnati programme ran from 1960 to 1971, involving patients aged nine to 84, with 63 per cent being African-American.

More than 20 died within the first month.

The documents state patients were never informed about potential symptoms and were “simply observed”.

British military officers are said to have been indifferent to the suffering, with one lieutenant colonel saying “the onset of incapacitation is the thing which really matters”.

An RAF officer, meanwhile, said “operational tasks may assume overriding importance” over the risks of casualty.

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Campaigners and historians are now demanding the N-5 research be made public.

Alan Owen, founder of campaign group LABRATS, said: “The question is whether data from the monitoring of our own servicemen was shared with the US. The MoD has to come clean about what it thinks the link is between these experiments and our own troops.”

The revelations connect to the Nuked Blood Scandal, which prompted a Thames Valley Police review considering misconduct in public office charges.

An MoD spokesman said: “Officials have been commissioned to look seriously into unresolved questions regarding veterans medical records as a priority and this is now underway.

“The work will be comprehensive, and enable us to better understand what information the department holds in relation to the medical testing of service personnel who took part in the UK nuclear weapons tests.”