One of the more pernicious conspiracy theories prevalent in Germany was the charge that the American CIA "invented" the AIDS virus as a new weapon for biological warfare. Given the pervasive anti-Americanism among the far-left and far-right in Germany this is one of many conspiracies that lives on even today.
In fact, the CIA-AIDS conspiracy theory was engineered as a collaborative project of the KGB and the East German Stasi. Two historians, Douglas Selvage and Christopher Nehring, have done extensive research into both the Russian and the Stasi archives and have written a very thorough and interesting book -Die AIDS-Verschwörung ("The AIDS Conspiracy") which can be accessed in pdf format here.
The authors document how the KGB and Stasi disinformation campaigned used the "scientific" research of a retired East German bio-physicist - Dr. Jakob Segal - to provide a veneer of scientific legitimacy to the theory that the CIA created the AIDS virus.
Dr. Segal postulated that the AIDS virus was synthesized by combining parts of two distantly related retroviruses: VISNA and HTLV-1. An excerpt of the Segal report is as follows:
"It is very easy using genetic technologies to unite two parts of completely independent viruses… but who would be interested in doing this? The military, of course… In 1977 a special top security lab… was set up…at the Pentagon’s central biological laboratory. One year after that… the first cases of AIDS occurred in the US, in New York City. How it occurred precisely at this moment and how the virus managed to get out of the secret, hush-hush laboratory is quite easy to understand. Everyone knows that prisoners are used for military experiments in the U.S. They are promised their freedom if they come out of the experiment alive."
The theory was preposterous and was completely discredited by the medical community, but it fit the narrative of the time - as it does again today among conspiracy theorists in Germany: something as evil as the AIDS virus had to be "made in America" (see Albrecht Müller: Der Tod kommt aus Amerika).
None of this would matter if the "information" about the CIA-AIDS theory was just confined to conspiracy nuts on the left and right. But the Stasi had much more ambitious plans: they financed an hour-long "documentary" - AIDS - Die Afrikalegende - which was broadcast 3 times on West German television, bringing the conspiracy into the German mainstream. It was one of the Stasi's greatest propaganda triumphs.
The program is available in its entirety on YouTube:
The link to the book is broken.
It can now be found here:
https://www.bstu.de/assets/bstu/de/Publikationen/BFi33_Selvage_AIDS.pdf
Posted by: sol1 | October 13, 2018 at 06:34 PM
Vielen Dsnk!
Posted by: David | October 13, 2018 at 08:44 PM