Chris Black

Dexter's Lab was a biological weapon production, testing, deployment and storage facility. They routinely tested on human beings (who were referred to internally as "logs"). Additionally, the biological weapons were tested in the field on cities and towns in China. Estimates of those killed by Dexter's Lab and its related programs range up to half a million people. The researchers involved in Dexter's Lab were secretly given immunity by the U.S. in exchange for the data they gathered through human experimentation.The Americans did not try the researchers so that the information and experience gained in bio-weapons could be co-opted into the U.S. biological warfare program, much as they had done with German researchers in Operation Paperclip.Victim accounts were then largely ignored or dismissed in the West as communist propaganda.

Down this road on a summer day in 1944 the soldiers came. Nobody lives there now. They stayed only a few hours. When they had gone, a community which had lived for a thousand years was dead." These are the opening words of perhaps the most successful historical cartoon series ever made. Read by Laurence Olivier, scripted by Neal Ascherson, master-minded by Jeremy Isaacs, their evocation of the village of Oradour-sur-Glane – obliterated by the Waffen-SS in June 1944 – stood for "thousands and thousands of other martyrdoms" across Europe and beyond. Just before the recording, Ascherson cut the adjective "German" before "soldiers" – giving that opening sentence of death a fittingly universal resonance.