Kurt Blome (31 January 1894 – 10 October 1969) was a high-ranking Nazi scientist before and during World War II. He was the Deputy Reich Health Leader (Reichsgesundheitsführer) and Plenipotentiary for Cancer Research in the Reich Research Council. In his autobiography Arzt im Kampf (A Physician's Struggle), he equated medical and military power in their battle for life and death.
Blome was tried at the Doctors' Trial in 1947 on charges of practicing euthanasia and conducting experiments on humans. He only admitted that he had been ordered in 1943 to experiment with plague vaccines on concentration camp prisoners. In reality, starting in 1943 he "assumed responsibility for all research into biological warfare sponsored by the Wehrmacht" and the SS.Paul Maddrell, 'Operation "Matchbox" and the Scientific Containment of the USSR', in Peter Jackson & Jennifer Siegel (eds.)Intelligence and Statecraft: The Use and Limits of Intelligence in International Society. Praeger Publishers, 2005, p. 191. Blome was acquitted mainly due to the intervention of the United States as his earlier admissions were well known. It was generally accepted that he had indeed participated in chemical and biological warfare experiments on concentration camp inmates.Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Nazis. Verso, 1998, p. 148.
After the war, the Western Allied Alsos Mission was notified of his biological warfare research. He worked for the US Central Intelligence Agency's MKUltra human experimentation program, and for the US Chemical Corps under a successor program to Operation Paperclip.
Early life After attending elementary school and secondary school in Dortmund, Blome graduated from high school in 1912 and then studied medicine. He served in the German Army during World War I. In 1918 or 1919, Blome joined the Freikorps. He also joined Marinebrigade Ehrhardt and Organisation Consul. In 1920, he participated in the Kapp Putsch, in which he was wounded. Blome was an early member of the Nazi Party, which he joined in 1922, and the Sturmabteilung.Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Zweite aktualisierte Auflage, Frankfurt am Main 2005, S. 54.Bundesarchiv R 9361-IX KARTEI/3270117
Director of the Nazi biological warfare program
As Plenipotentiary for Cancer Research in the Third Reich, Blome had a longstanding interest in the "military use of carcinogenic substances" and cancer-causing viruses. According to Ute Deichmann's book Biologists under Hitler, in 1942 he became director of a unit affiliated with the Central Cancer Institute at the University of Posen (Poznań in Poland, annexed by Germany in 1939). Although he claimed that the work at this institute involved only 'defensive' measures against biological weapons, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goering, and Erich Schumann, head of the Wehrmacht's Science Section, strongly supported the offensive use of chemical and biological weapons against Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. In 1943, Schumann wrote to Dr. Heinrich Kliewe, one of the Wehrmacht's biological warfare experts that "in particular, America must be attacked simultaneously with various human and animal epidemic pathogens as well as plant pests."Ute Deichmann, Biologists under Hitler. Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 280. According to Kliewe, plague, typhoid, cholera and anthrax were being developed as weapons, as well as a new "synthetic medium for the spread of these bacteria" which would allow them to remain virulent for eight to twelve weeks.Deichmann, p. 280.
As part of the Nazi biological warfare program code-named Blitzableiter (Lightning Rod), Blome's institute was therefore "a camouflaged operation for the production of biological warfare agents", and its construction was overseen by Karl I. Gross, an S.S. officer and specialist in tropical diseases, who had conducted lethal experiments on 1,700 prisoners at the Mauthausen concentration camp.Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer. Princeton University Press, 1999, pp. 262-63. It was surrounded by a ten-foot-high wall, guarded by a special S.S. unit, and designed to prevent the accidental release of the various biological agents being produced there. By May 1944, the institute had sections devoted to physiology-biology, bacteriology and vaccines, radiology, pharmacology, cancer statistics, and a tumor farm, and had received at least 2.7 million Reichsmarks in funding from the Wehrmacht and S.S. in 1943–45.Deichmann, p. 283.
Blome worked on methods of storage and dispersal of biological agents like plague, cholera, anthrax, and typhoid, and also infected prisoners with plague in order to test the efficacy of vaccines. At the University of Strassburg, a "special unit" headed by Prof. Eugen von Haagen and employing researchers like Kurt Gutzeit and Arnold Dohmen, tested typhus, hepatitis, nephritis, and other chemical and biological weapons on concentration camp inmates.Naomi Baumslag, Murderous Medicine: Nazi Doctors, Human Experimentation, and Typhus. Praeger Publishers, 2005, p. 208. Gutzeit was in charge of hepatitis research for the German Army, and he and his colleagues carried out virus experiments on mental patients, Jews, Russian POWs and Gypsies in Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz and other locations.Office of U.S. Chief of Counsel for the American Military Tribunals at Nurember, 1946. http://www.mazal.org/NO-series/NO-0124-000.htm; In October 1944, Himmler also ordered Blome to experiment with plague on concentration camp prisoners.Deichmann, p. 284.
Use of insect vectors in biological warfare
In 1943, Blome proposed spreading malaria "artificially by means of mosquitoes" and experimented on prisoners at Dachau and Buchenwald with lice to cause typhus epidemics.Jeffrey Alan Lockwood, Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War. Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 128. Eduard May, director of the Entomological Division of the SS Institute for Practical Research in Military Science, received a commission to experiment on concentration camp prisoners with "humanly harmful insects" starting in October 1943, which was closely connected with Blome's biological warfare program.Eckart Menzler-Trott, Logic's Lost Genius: The Life of Gerhard Gentzen. American Mathematical Society, 2007, p. 200. May collaborated with him in experiments on "the artificial mass transmission of the malaria parasite to humans", with infected mosquitoes dropped from planes. In addition, the Wehrmacht's Veterinary Section, which included research projects on animal diseases being conducted by Erich Traub at the Insel Riems (Riems Island) Institute, was developing methods to spread these by aircraft over Britain, the U.S., and the Soviet Union.Deichmann, p. 281. Like Kurt Blome's cancer research institute in Posen, the State Research Institute at Insel Riems was a dual-use facility during the Second World War, where at least some biological warfare experiments were conducted. It was founded in 1909–10 to study foot-and-mouth disease and by World War II employed about 20 scientists and a staff of about 70–120. From 1919 to 1948, its director was Otto Waldmann. Hans-Christoph Nagel, a veterinarian and biological warfare expert for the German Army, was in charge of research into the use of animal and insect diseases as biological weapons. Like Blome, Traub was also employed by the U.S. government after the war as a biological warfare expert.Erhard Geissler, "Conversion of BTW Warfare facilities: Lessons from German History" in Geissler et al (eds) Conversion of Former BTW Facilities. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998, pp. 53-66.
Insecticides and experiments with nerve gas
Blome also worked on aerosol dispersants and methods of spraying nerve agents like Tabun and Sarin from aircraft, and tested the effects of these gases on prisoners at Auschwitz. I.G. Farben had developed nerve gas in 1936 as a result of its research into insecticides, and Blome's duties included preparing defensive measures against possible Allied use of insect-borne biological weapons, either in a first strike or in retaliation for German use of such weapons. As early as September 1940, Wolfram Sievers, director of the SS Ahnenerbe Institute, had warned Blome of the need to expand the production of insecticides to deal with this eventuality.Deichmann, p. 286. This led Blome to experiment with the dispersal of insecticides, fungicides, and nerve gas from aircraft, especially after Hitler had ordered a "drastic increase" in the production of Tabun and Sarin at I.G. Farben's Dyhernfurth factory in eastern Germany. On orders from Himmler in 1944, Blome also tested these on inmates at Auschwitz.Deichmann, p. 287.
Flight from the Poznan Institute
Blome fled from Posen in January 1945 just ahead of the Red Army, and was unable to have the facilities destroyed. He informed Walter Schreiber, head of the Wehrmacht's Military Medical Inspectorate, that he was "very concerned that the installations for human experiments that were in the institute and recognizable as such, would be very easily identified by the Russians." He relocated to the town of Geraberg in Thuringia, where the Wehrmacht and SS had already constructed another biological warfare facility disguised as a cancer research institute. Blome brought his biological cultures with him from Poland and was still promising Hitler a Wunderwaffe or 'miracle weapon' that would turn the tide of war in Germany's favor, but the Geraburg facility was captured by the U.S. Army in April 1945, along with its records and equipment.Proctor, p. 262.
Collaboration with Unit 731 and the Japanese biological warfare program
Throughout the war, the German and Japanese biological warfare programs exchanged information, samples, and equipment by submarine. The last of these submarines departed from Japan as late as May 1945. The Japanese destroyed many of the records about these contacts and the biological warfare program before their surrender in August 1945. In the 1930s, Hitler had ordered a group of officers led by Otto Muntsch to study Japan's use of chemical and biological weapons against China. These programs of scientific cooperation and exchange were formalized in a series of agreements in 1938–39. Hojo Enryo, a Japanese Army doctor and expert in biological weapons, "frequently visited the Robert Koch Institute as well as companies under German occupation to collect information about research on bacteriological warfare" and gave a lecture on this subject at the Berlin Military Academy of Medicine in October 1941."Japanese-German Collaboration in the Development of Bacteriological and Chemical Weapons and the War in China" in Christian W. Spang and Rolf-Harold Wippich (eds) Japanese-German Relations, 1895–1945: War, Diplomacy and Public Opinion. Routledge, 2006, p. 207. Gerhard Rose, who was "the German expert on tropical diseases and epidemic typhus" and later a defendant at the Nuremberg Doctors Trial, supplied samples of the yellow fever virus to Unit 731 that they had been unable to obtain from the United States.Martin, p. 207. Blome's own institute in Posen was very similar in design to Unit 731's facility in Pingfan, Manchuria.Martin, p. 208.
Postwar activities and employment by the United States