The Gorilla Diary

About the Book

The American State Department has requested that a panel of three men try to verify the accuracy of a diary written by Janet West, a primatologist, who died under mysterious circumstances at her isolated camp in Uganda in 1977. She had apparently been murdered and her body mutilated after death. Her diary ended a few days prior to her death and only became available to the State Department in 1994 – the time in which the novel is set. In her diary, Janet West had described her habituation of a gorilla family culminating in bridging the evolutionary gap between homosapiens and the gorilla, by allowing herself to be mated by a member of this lower primate group. To her surprise, she became pregnant and carries the infant to near term, at which time the diary ends.

The three panel members consist of Dr. Frank Clarke, a distinguished primatologist, James Boswell from the State Department and Colonel Ahmed of the Uganda Police, in whose jurisdiction Janet West died.

They listened to tapes of the evidence taken after her death, by the local magistrate, from the police and the pathologist who performed the postmortem on Janet West.

The men also familiarized themselves with the evidence taken at the time from her fiancé, who visited her the day before she died. The evidence of the pathologist, who did the postmortem on Janet West, suggested that the mutilation of her body was done after she had died. A statement from her university Ph.D. supervisor was also listened to. The panel then heard testimony from the Director of the American Army Medical Archives who produced documents captured from the Germans after the war, which showed that a Dr. Karl Cleinman, a Nazi doctor in Auschwitz, had performed experiments on female Jewish and Gypsy prisoners; the experiments of particular interest were his attempts to artificially inseminate the prisoners with semen from a gorilla. Apparently, he was successful and a Jewess conceived following such a procedure.

Himler and Hitler became deeply involved and interested in Cleinman’s successful experiments. Hitler believed the breeding of a Jewess and a gorilla fully confirmed, what he had told the world for years, the biological inferiority of the Jewish race.

Following the Russian drive to the west in 1944, Cleinman left Auschwitz with the pregnant Jewess and escaped to Germany. On instructions from an anti-Hitler group in the Wehrmacht, the pregnant prisoner was apparently executed but Cleinman escaped to the Russian zone. The interview with the archivist was only one amongst many, with varied specialists, that was held to try and provide a scientific background to the possibility of human interspecies fertilization. They talked to a molecular biologist who instructs them in comparative molecular biology, the chromosome structure of man and the ape and the possibility of interspecies fertilization.

It was during the panel’s series of interviews that they were asked by the Russian government to attend a meeting with their representatives at the Swiss Embassy in Washington. No explanation was given as to the reason for the meeting other than the cryptic comment, “Janet West, Cleinman East.” The Russian’s tell them that Cleinman and the pregnant woman both escaped to Moscow and that she was not killed by the Wehrmacht, but was delivered of a female Hybrid infant. Miriam, the pregnant Jewess who was delivered of the Hybrid child, was told that the child was stillborn and Miriam was sent to live in Kiev with a Jewish family. With the cooperation of the K.G.B., Cleinman expanded his experiments on interspecies fertilization using female prisoners from the Moscow jail and gorillas from the Moscow and Budapest Zoos. The Russians showed the three members of the State Department panel movies taken during the period 1946 to 1985 which illustrated the growth of the Hybrid population, which in 1989 numbered 15,000 and had grown to this figure in th

About the Author

Sydney Shubert is a practicing physician who obtained his medical degree from the University of Manchester, England. He immigrated to Canada and now lives in Toronto with his wife. His special interests are medical genetics, chromosome abnormalities and the biological basis of ethnic diversity.