‘America’s Dr. Mengele’: The Jewish Biochemist Backed by the CIA Who Experimented on Thousands

If Sidney Gottlieb’s parents hadn’t fled Hungary in the early 20th century, we can assume that his life, like that of millions of other European Jews, would have ended in one of the extermination camps built by Nazi Germany. Had he been deported to Auschwitz he might even have fallen into the hands of the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele.

During World War II, however, Gottlieb was living in quiet and safe New York City, to which his parents had emigrated. That didn’t stop him, later in life, from adopting some of Mengele’s methods of abuse or even hiring some of the same doctors and scientists who had worked in the service of the Nazi Party to the task force he assembled in his work for the CIA during the 1950s and ‘60s.

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– Sidney Gottlieb