Dialog International

Annals of German Anti-Americanism: The Great CIA-AIDS Conspiracy of the 1980s

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:

 

Review: Manfred Henningsen's Der Mythos Amerika

America, America, God shed His grace on thee! Most Americans embrace the notion that they live in a nation that has a special covenant with God.  We are the chosen nation: the greatest economy, the most powerful military, and, most important, the greatest force of good in the world.  In Der Mythos Amerika, Manfred Henningsen, long-time observer of America and a professor at the University of Hawaii, looks at the historical roots of American exceptionalism and at the same time examines the uncomfortable truths about the source of American power.  For the history of America has been written in blood, and the twin original sins of genocide and slavery have never been fully processed in the collective consciousness of the nation. 

Henningsen starts off with a premise that will ring familiar to any observer of the American political scene:

Nach einer mehr als zweihundertjährigen Geschichte versichern amerikanische Politiker noch immer, dass sie in der besten aller historischen Gesellschaften leben. Die formelhaften Superlative des Selbstlobs werden mit der gleichen Begeisterung von den republikanischen und demokratischen Kandidaten geäußert."

(After more than two hundred years of history American politicians reassure us still to this day that we live in the best of all historical societies.  The routine superlatives of self-congratulation are used with the same enthusiasm by both Republican and Democratic candidates.)