Wilhelm Reich

Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897 to November 3, 1957) was an Austrian-born physician and psychoanalyst who entered the United States in August 1939 to teach at the New School for Social Research.¹ He died on November 3, 1957 in the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, while serving a two-year sentence for violating an injunction against the interstate shipment of his orgone energy accumulators.² The Federal Bureau of Investigation kept a file on him from 1940, recording an arrest on December 12, 1941, a teaching career that ended because, in its summary, his teaching "smacked of quack tactics," and, after his death, a request from the prison's chief medical officer that the Bureau laboratory examine his stomach contents for poison.³

Vienna, Berlin and Oslo

The New York office of the Bureau reported in December 1941, on the word of an informant whose name is redacted, that Reich was a psychoanalyst and "a foremost student of political psychology," that he "was active in the Socialist Movement in Germany and Austria," and that he joined the Communist Party in Vienna and Berlin and severed all connections with it in 1933 because of differences in political belief. The same synopsis states that he was reported to have been a member of the Communist Party in Oslo, Norway, and adds: "No evidence of subject's Communistic connections in the US."⁴

A different set of statements reached the Bureau through the U.S. Department of State. A letter of January 6, 1940 from the Department enclosed a strictly confidential dispatch of December 7, 1939 from the American consul Paul C. Squire on persons who might have Communist connections. J. Edgar Hoover thanked Assistant Secretary of State George S. Messersmith for it on January 19, 1940 and sent a copy to the New York office the same day; on March 26, 1940 he wrote to Assistant Secretary Adolf A. Berle Jr., who is addressed in that letter as the sender of the letter of 6 January, that a confidential source of the New York field office had stated that Reich was on the "Medical Advisory Board" of the Communist Party of the United States, and asked whether the Department had issued a passport to Reich.⁵ On April 11, 1940 the Bureau forwarded the Department's reply to New York. On March 26, 1941 the Bureau sent the New York office a State Department communication titled "Communist Activities of Dr. Wilhelm Reich," with a request that his Communist connections and activities in the United States be determined; the enclosure is withheld in the file as a State Department document.⁶ A Bureau memorandum of May 6, 1941, written about the visa application of Mrs. Elsa Stai, for whom Reich was a sponsor, summarizes the reports as stating that Reich had been a member of the German party before 1933, joined the Norwegian party after moving to Norway, and was expelled from it in 1936 for not adhering closely enough to the party line; that he was reported to have been a paid Communist agent in Austria before the Anschluss and to have been expelled from Austria and other countries; and that his visa had been issued on August 11, 1939 because he was able to prove that the "New York Seminar for Vegetotherapy" was part of the New School. The December 1941 New York report adds that the State Department could not definitely establish his connection with the Communist Party in Norway because the party's files had been confiscated.⁷⁸ On May 7, 1941 Assistant Director Edward A. Tamm wrote to Assistant Director R. P. Kramer that "from the information furnished concerning Dr. Wilhelm Reich, sponsor of Mrs. Elsa Stai, it appears that this man is a potentially dangerous threat to the internal security," and asked whether a custodial detention card had been prepared; Kramer answered on May 8, 1941 that a card had been prepared but not approved, that an investigation had been requested of the New York office on March 26, 1941, and that his background had not yet been brought to the attention of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.⁹

The Orgone Institute's 1955 compilation, which the Bureau's New York office received that year, states in a parenthetical that "since 1934 WR no longer was a psychoanalyst."¹⁰ The same compilation, reproduced in the Bureau file, dates the opposition to him in Norway to 1938, when a Norwegian newspaper campaign led by psychiatrists and pathologists followed the publication of his book on the bions, and states that in 1939 the New School invited him to teach in the United States.¹¹

The New School, 1939 to 1941

The immigration record states that Reich arrived at the Port of New York on August 28, 1939 aboard the Stavangerfjord from Oslo on non-quota immigration visa No. 19, issued by the American consulate in Oslo on August 11, 1939, destined for the New School at 66 West 12th Street. He declared birth at Dobrzanice, Poland, and described himself as professor of psychology at the Psychological Institute of the University of Oslo, come "solely for the purpose of teaching psychology at the New School."¹ The Bureau's New York report of December 1941 gives his birth on March 24, 1897 at Dobzonica, "located in Austria, and subsequently to 1918 being in Poland, and in Ukrainia," records his declaration No. 287944 of November 20, 1939, names the New School, "Dr. Alvin Johnson, Director," as his destination, and states that he married Dr. Annie Reich in Vienna in 1922; the synopsis of that report gives the arrival date as August 26, 1939, while its body and the immigration record give 28 August.¹²

An official of the New School, whose name is redacted in the file, told Bureau agents in December 1941 that Reich had been an associate professor for two years, during 1939 and 1940, at about $1,500 a year, and that the connection ended after the spring term of 1941. According to the agents' report, the official said Reich "seems to break with any of his acquaintances after he has known them for a while," that he "is very egotistical and disregards the ideas of other scientists," and that he "claims to have a cure-all for cancer," all of which the official "stated smacked of 'quack' tactics on subject's part." The same official was reluctant to analyze Reich's politics and said the school "makes no inquiry of their political views or background." A second interviewee, name redacted, who had attended one New School lecture at the instance of a former student of Reich then connected with the Vanderbilt Clinic, said he was "not impressed enough to want to attend any others," that Reich "has gone off on a tangent," and that his work "is looked down upon generally by the best psychoanalysts in this country."¹² The Bureau's summary of February 1957 later condensed this to a statement that Reich taught "until let out by the school because his teaching 'smacked of quack tactics.'"¹³

Typescripts of Reich's 1940 New School lectures, supplied from the Archives of the Orgone Institute by the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust, are held in the New School Archives in a bound photocopy made for a 2018 exhibition.¹⁴

Custodial detention, 1941 to 1943

On July 15, 1941 Hoover reminded the New York office of requests of 28 April and May 29, 1941 for an investigation of Reich.¹⁵

The New York report of December 24, 1941 states that Reich was apprehended on December 12, 1941 at his residence at 9906 69th Avenue, Forest Hills, Long Island, and delivered into the custody of the Immigration and Naturalization Service at Ellis Island. The report lists a basement laboratory, an "Orgonometer" marked with patent application No. 377,277, a library of about a thousand volumes, and pamphlets Reich acknowledged writing, including a 1933 edition of the Mass Psychology of Fascism. It names his common-law wife as Ilse Ollendorff and his former wife as Annie Rubenstein.¹⁶ The report summarizes the informants' statements that in 1939 Reich announced a "biological energy," orgone, applied for a patent, and sought to form an Orgone Research Institute association to commercialize a cancer treatment.¹²

Alien Enemy Hearing Board Number One, Eastern District of New York, composed of Charles H. Kelby, C. Walter Randall, Henry Vollmer Jr. and Stuart H. Steinbrink, heard him on December 26, 1941 and recommended unconditional release.¹⁷ Attorney General Francis Biddle ordered him released on January 27, 1942, and in April 1942 Hoover informed the Director of Naval Intelligence and the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, of the release.¹⁸ A Bureau letter of January 31, 1942 recorded that the Special Defense Unit of the U.S. Department of Justice, headed by Lawrence M. C. Smith, had tentatively placed him in Group B, "Individuals believed to be somewhat less dangerous but whose activities should be restricted."¹⁹ On June 2, 1942 Reich wrote to the New York Police Commissioner that plainclothesmen were questioning his neighbors; the New York office replied to the Bureau on July 27, 1942 that on May 29, 1942 a New York police patrolman had telephoned for the disposition of the alien enemy case, and that on June 28, 1942, after the date of Reich's letter to the Commissioner, Special Squad No. 1 of the police department had made an inquiry about Reich.²⁰ A memorandum of the Attorney General of July 16, 1943 to Assistant Attorney General Hugh B. Cox and Hoover stated that the danger classifications "serve no useful purpose" and directed that classifications already made not be regarded as classifications of dangerousness. On July 21, 1943 Hoover asked the Newark office, which carried Reich on its key figure list, whether anything warranted keeping him there, noting that the New York case had been closed with a report of February 7, 1942 showing no activity in Communist affairs in this country; the Newark office answered on August 10, 1943 that its key figure was William Robert Reich, who operated a Communist Party literature bookstore at 216 Halsey Street, Newark, and taught at the Workers School in New York, and that the two men were "not identical."²¹ In 1947 an investigator of the Food and Drug Administration asked the Bureau to check Reich's name and to open its file; the Bureau declined to show the file under Departmental Order 3229.²²

Einstein, Brady and the press

The Orgone Institute's compilation "The Red Thread of a Conspiracy," placed in the Bureau file, states that in the winter of 1940 to 1941 Reich brought his discovery to the attention of Albert Einstein; that Einstein's first response was serious interest, followed by arguments from his assistant Leopold Infeld, then silence; and that in April 1942 the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Morris Fishbein, requested review copies of Reich's journal and of The Function of the Orgasm and printed no review.²³

The same compilation quotes Mildred Brady, writing in The New Republic in 1947 under the title "The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich": "The simplest solution would be to take the current standards of the American Psychoanalytic Association and write them into law." The compilation states that on August 5, 1947 FDA Inspector Wood appeared privately at Orgonon and said that a friend of his in Portland, Maine had sent him Brady's article, and that in January 1948 FDA Inspector Kinney acknowledged that the Brady article was the basis of his prejudice.²⁴ On August 5, 1952 Ilse Ollendorff wrote to Hoover for the Wilhelm Reich Foundation that three men showing FDA badges, A. Harris Kenyon, Robert B. Heller and Karl W. Brimmer, had driven through a chained road at Orgonon on July 29, 1952, and asked whether they were officers of the agency.²⁵

Orgone, Orgonon and Oranur

Reich's laboratory at Orgonon, near Rangeley, Maine, was the site of the Oranur experiment. His first report states that two one-milligram radium sources in lead containers arrived on January 5, 1951, that one was placed in a small orgone accumulator charger at 11:30 that day and left there for about five hours, and that the "Oranur sickness" that followed required the evacuation of ill workers and the interruption of the experiment.²⁶ The Bureau's New York office had meanwhile heard from Reich's assistant Myron Sharaf about an episode of August and September 1949. A Harvard special student named Washington, who had worked at Orgonon, telephoned Reich on August 16, 1949 that he was being held for questioning at the Argonne National Laboratory; Reich telephoned the Atomic Energy Commission laboratory on 24 August. Sharaf told the Bureau on October 11, 1949 that he came as Reich's representative, that Washington had "swindled them out of some money" and had used motors in orgone experiments, that Reich feared the Russians might obtain the information, and that a Mr. Mayer, security officer of the Argonne laboratory, had advised Reich to report the matter to the Bureau. Sharaf said that Washington had all of the information on the nature of orgone energy and that orgone energy, which he said Reich held to be stronger than electromagnetic energy, "might serve as some defense to rays of radio-active material or atomic energy." A security official of the Commission in New York told the Bureau that Reich had approached the Commission in New York on several occasions, that Reich had presented his experiments to the Commission in Washington and been told they were outside its scope, and, in the Bureau's words, that the scientists of the Commission were of the opinion that Reich was mentally unsound in his scientific experiments. The New York office wrote that it could not determine whether Sharaf or Reich had ulterior motives in reporting the matter.²⁷

Cloudbusters and the 1954 injunction

On July 22, 1952 Reich wrote to the Department of Justice, with copies to the Passport Division of the State Department and the Bureau, that he planned an expedition to the southwestern United States, possibly Mexico and northern South America, to study atmospheric orgone energy over desert country, because he had "succeeded, to some extent, in the Rangeley, Maine, region in forming and destroying clouds." He asked to travel incognito under the name Walter Roner.²⁸

The United States District Court in Maine received the complaint of the Attorney General on February 10, 1954. Reich, appearing by letter and not by counsel, wrote to Judge John D. Clifford on February 25, 1954 that his position "does not permit me to enter the case against the Food and Drug Administration, since such action would, in my mind, imply admission of the authority of this special branch of the government to pass judgment on primordial, pre-atomic cosmic orgone energy." The injunction by default was entered on March 19, 1954, and the FDA announced the same day that there is no such energy as orgone energy.²⁹ The court of appeals later recorded that certified copies of the decree were served on March 22, 1954 and that on March 30, 1954 Ilse Ollendorff sent the United States Attorney a telegram stating that the foundation was "far advanced in preparing full compliance with injunction of March 19, 1954."³⁰

On 23 and March 24, 1954 William Moise, described in the Bureau's memorandum as assistant to Reich, was interviewed in the Bureau's Crime Records Division; he had come to give Hoover documents which he alleged were proof of a "red fascist instigated plot" against the Orgone Institute and the United States, and he asked that Hoover write to Reich acknowledging receipt. The memorandum of March 25, 1954 records a telegram of 23 March from the Orgone Institute stating that a telegram had been sent to the Weather Bureau the day before predicting a snowstorm over Rangeley, and states that Moise explained that, as a result of the injunction, Reich "had decided to flood the East Coast with rain" to prove the value of his experiments.³¹ Moise married Reich's daughter Eva.³² Reich's own journal for July 1954 describes cloudbuster operations at Orgonon in July 1953 and states that "US Army planes appeared for the first time over Orgonon monitoring the atmosphere on the morning of July 8, 1953." It places the cause of distress at Orgonon since January 1951 in "the Keyhoe report on the so-called Flying Saucers" of autumn 1953 and a book by Major Donald Keyhoe.³³ Reich's Contact with Space reproduces his letter of January 29, 1954 to "U.S. Airforce Intelligence," signed by Reich and Ollendorff, reporting two lights seen on the night of January 28, 1954; a letter of March 10, 1954 from Flight 3-G, 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron, Presque Isle Air Force Base, Maine, stating that the report had been sent to headquarters at Colorado Springs and enclosing a USAF Technical Information Sheet; a letter of March 16, 1954 from 1st Lt. Andrew Matyas; and Reich's letter of March 19, 1954 returning the questionnaire with a manuscript on the orgonomic view of visitors from outer space.³⁴

OROP Desert Ea, 1954 and 1955

A letter dated October 9, 1954 over the signature of William Moise as "Oranur Weather Control Operator," sent for the Orgone Institute Press to the court at Portland, listed as copies the Office of the President, the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, "Commander, Air Technical Intelligence Center, U.S. Air Force," and Hoover.³⁵ Reich's later petition for certiorari states that "the cosmic event was report[ed] to the Air Force Technical Intelligence by one of the operators, William Moise, the Clerk of the Foundation, on his way to Arizona in Dayton, Ohio, on October 14, 1954, at 4:00 p.m." It quotes his own text that after a "star" faded four times in succession in front of his cloudbuster pipes, "the cloudbuster had suddenly changed into a SPACEGUN," and describes an OROP Desert Ea expedition to Arizona from October 1954 to April 1955.³⁶ Reich's Contact with Space publishes a report by Moise of the Dayton visit. Moise reported that on October 11, 1954 he telephoned General Watson, whom he identified as commander of the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, to report that two UFOs, which the Institute called Ea, had been disabled on October 10, 1954 by Reich, and that Watson told him a group from the CIA was coming on the Friday. According to the report, Watson was not available on 14 October and Dr. W. H. Byers, Captain D. M. Hill and a civilian, Harry Haberer, met Moise instead; on 15 October he reported to the deputy commander, Colonel Wertenbaker, with the same three present, asked that sealed copies of Reich's space equations be deposited with the Air Force, and asked that the Air Force tow the Oranur radium to Arizona behind an aircraft. Moise wrote that Wertenbaker said the first could be done, that he lacked authority for the second and would forward it to Washington, and that he thanked the Orgone Institute on behalf of the Air Force. The book states that the Air Force was thereafter coded in the Institute's records as Eaa.³⁷

A statement submitted to the Bureau under Moise's signature on February 26, 1957 lists among the facts that might make him appear to be a planted spy that he was a former naval officer and a "cousin of Admiral Walter S. Anderson, former Chief of Naval Intelligence," that he had been a member of the "Tucson, Arizona Expedition in fall of 1954 as Cloudbuster Operator and Secretary to Dr. Wilhelm Reich" of OROP Desert Ea, and that he "had meeting with General Trumend Landon USAF Inspector General during the summer of 1954 concerning Cosmic Orgone Engineering work," held at the Pentagon. The statement adds that General Landon "was a friend of the family during his youth in home town of Carlinville, Illinois," that Moise "had contact with Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller as Art Teacher in the Mt. Desert Schools," and that he was the person responsible for sending "important communications to Court, CIA, Air Force Intelligence, Marshall's Office, etc." concerning Reich's appearance in Portland. The statement is headed as a discussion with Reich at Orgonon in the summer of 1956 of the possibility that Moise was a planted spy of "Black Fascist" and Navy interests, and it records that Reich's space equations were stored after his May 1956 arrest at the house of Aurora Karrer.³²

Contempt, appeal and burning

On the morning of October 7, 1955 the United States Attorney for Maine, Peter Mills, and the FDA General Counsel, Joseph Maguire (typed "McGuire" in the memorandum), came to see Assistant Director Louis B. Nichols and outlined a conversation with Reich's former attorney Asa Richardson, who had said he had talked to a "big fellow in the FBI." Nichols wrote that at the request of Senator Margaret Chase Smith he had seen Richardson on February 23, 1954, that Richardson said Reich thought the case could not be handled in federal court because national security was involved, and that he told Richardson "that we had no current interest in Dr. Reich; that he might check with Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Atomic Energy Commission." Mills said Reich was "now being brought up on contempt proceedings because he has not followed the terms of the injunction."³⁸

The First Circuit recorded that the contempt information was filed on July 15, 1955 and that trial by jury began on May 3, 1956; the jury found Reich and his associate Michael Silvert guilty.³⁰ A Bureau memorandum of February 14, 1957 gives the trial as 2 through May 7, 1956, the sentences as two years for Reich and a year and a day for Silvert, and a fine of $10,000 for the corporation.³⁹ Reich's later text dates his arrest in Washington to May 1, 1956, and Moise's statement gives 2 May.⁴⁰ The First Circuit affirmed in Reich v. United States, 239 F.2d 134 (December 11, 1956), and the Supreme Court denied certiorari in No. 688 on February 25, 1957.³⁰⁴¹ Reich's petition states that his literature was burned on court order in August 1956.³⁶ The writer David Rosen, reviewing Christopher Turner's Adventures in the Orgasmatron, wrote that on August 23, 1956 agents of the FDA seized six tons of publications from a Greenwich Village warehouse and burned them at the New York Sanitation Department's Gansevoort Street incinerator, after a burning a few weeks earlier near Rangeley, Maine, at which 251 volumes and other materials were destroyed under FDA direction.⁴²

Washington, 1957, and death

On the morning of February 14, 1957 Reich telephoned the Director's office from the Alban Towers Apartments, 3700 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, identified himself as director of the Orgone Institute Research Laboratories, said he was living there under the alias "Roner," and said he was mailing a letter for Hoover personally. The Bureau's memorandum of that day states that in 1956 and in January 1957 Reich and members of his staff had contacted the Boston office, the Augusta, Maine, resident agency and the Washington Field Office, in its word "ostensibly" to offer information on espionage, and that each time the contact ended in a plea for his theories and laboratories.¹³ A Washington Field Office memorandum records that on February 25, 1957 agents interviewed him in Apartment 509, where he introduced a young woman as his daughter Eva, telephoned the Bureau to verify the agents' credentials, and asked them to sign an appointment book, and that Reich spoke of something that had been going on for ten years, referred to cosmic energy and "flying saucers," and, asked whether his knowledge of them prompted his contacting the Bureau, "replied in the affirmative but once again could not be specific." He repeatedly said that Hoover knew all about his work, displayed three heavily sealed envelopes bearing his initials and asked an agent to deliver one to Hoover and sign a receipt. The memorandum states that before the contents of the envelope could be questioned he turned to another subject, and records that the contents of the envelope "was never resolved, and was retained by the subject."⁴³

After the Supreme Court's denial Reich and Silvert surrendered to the custody of the Attorney General at the Portland proceedings of March 11, 1957. A Boston airtel of March 12, 1957, captioned with the names of William Steig and William Moise and the words "Assaulting of Federal Officer" and "Conspiracy," records that no disturbances were created and that the associates and subjects "departed from Portland area without making any 'citizen arrests.'" Records found do not establish whether the William Steig named is the cartoonist of that name.⁴⁴ On March 21, 1957 Moise wrote to Senator Smith that Reich had "time and time again restrained us, at that time his assistants, from our desire to use his discovery in a war-like manner" and that "I find myself facing the decision of whether or not to use Orgone Energy, which the U.S. Government has declared does not exist, to storm and flood portions of the U.S.A. in an attempt to stop this infamy." The letter adds that the responsibility for such a decision rests with "the few genuinely responsible government persons such as yourself and the President." The Senator's administrative assistant, Bill Lewis, gave the letter to the Bureau on March 25, 1957, saying that the Senator did not intend to answer it and that the group around Moise "may be crackpots but in some respects were brilliant." A Bureau memorandum of March 27, 1957 noted that Moise taught at the Groveton High School in Virginia and recommended that Lewis be asked to inform the Virginia authorities; a note of April 3, 1957 records that, after discussion with Clyde Tolson, the Bureau would not go back to the Senator's office.⁴⁵⁴⁶ A Bureau memorandum later records that Reich died of a heart attack in Lewisburg penitentiary in November 1957,⁴⁷ and a Bureau memorandum of January 20, 1959 states that the communications Reich forwarded to it "were not acknowledged."⁴⁸

The finding aid of the National Library of Medicine to the Aurora Karrer Reich Collection (MS C 580) states that Aurora Karrer met Reich at a conference at the Orgone Institute in the summer of 1955, entered a common-law marriage with him later that year, and gave up her position as a medical technician at the National Institutes of Health.⁴⁹

On December 9, 1957 Dr. Leon A. Witkin, chief medical officer of the penitentiary, wrote to the Director of the Bureau, enclosing the stomach contents of "Doctor Wilhelm Reich, Reg. No. 23937-NE, who died suddenly on November 3, 1957." The letter states that post mortem examination showed severe aortic stenosis and myocardial scarring, that "his family fears that he may have been poisoned," and that Dr. Janney, Medical Director of the Bureau of Prisons, had instructed that the specimen be sent. The enclosed autopsy report of November 26, 1957 lists bronchopneumonia, myocardial scarring with congestion of viscera, and fatty changes in liver and kidney. The Bureau laboratory reported to Witkin on January 2, 1958 that formaldehyde was detected in the specimen, that no other materials commonly considered poisonous were detected in tests that included cyanide, strychnine, barbiturates, chloral hydrate and arsenic, that the formaldehyde prevented testing for alcohols, and that the specimen was consumed in the examination.³