Kurt Blome
| Kurt Blome | |
|---|---|
 Blome as defendant in the Doctors' Trial, Nuremberg |
|
| Born | January 31, 1894 Bielefeld |
| Died | October 10, 1969 (aged 75) |
| Citizenship | German |
| Fields | Virologist |
| Institutions | Reims Island, German Reich |
| Influenced | Erich Traub |
Kurt Blome (31 January 1894, Bielefeld, Westphalia – 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 (English: Physician in Struggle), Blome equated medical and military power in their battle for life and death.
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[edit] First arrest and trial
Blome had been arrested on May 17, 1945 by an agent of the United States Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC, an army intelligence service) in Munich, and he had no papers except his driving licence. After some weeks of custody, in which the CIC checked on his identity, Blome was taken to Kransberg Castle (a medieval castle north of Frankfurt) by an escort.
A few days after his arrival at the castle a secret message was transmitted to Operation Alsos, an Anglo-American team of experts, whose order was to investigate the state of German and Italian weapons technology towards end of war:
- "In 1943 Blome was studying bacteriological warfare, although officially he was involved in cancer research, which was however only a camouflage. Blome additionally served as deputy health minister of the Reich. Would like you to send investigators?"
Blome admitted that he had been ordered in 1943 to experiment with plague vaccines on concentration camp prisoners. He was tried at the Doctors' Trial in 1947 on charges of practicing euthanasia and conducting experiments on humans. Although acquitted, his earlier admissions were well known, and it was generally accepted that he had indeed participated in the experiments (there is evidence that Blome experimented with Sarin gas on Auschwitz prisoners).
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, which is now in Poland. 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.
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. Eduard May, director of the SS Institute for Practical Research in Military Science, collaborated with him in experiments on "the artificial mass transmission of the Malaria parasite to humans", with infected mosquitoes dropped from planes. Blome also worked on aerosol despersants and methods of spraying nerve agents like Tabun and Sarin from aircraft, and tested the effects of these gases on prisoners at Auschwitz.
Blome fled from Posen in March 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."
Blome's entire career deserves a great deal more study than it has thus far received, including his subsequent work to the United States on biological and chemical weapons and his acquittal of war crimes charges at the Nurmeberg 'Doctor's Trial' in 1946-47.[1]
Throughout the war, the German and Japanese biological warfare programs exchanged information, samples and equipment by submarine, and indeed the last of these submarines actually departed from Japan as late as May 1945. The Japanese destroyed many of the records about these contacts and the biological warfare program prior to their own surrender in August, however. In the 1930s, Hitler had ordered a group of officers led by Dr. Otto Muntsch to study Japan's use of chemical and biological weapons against China, and these programs of scientific cooperation and exchange were formalized in a series of agreements in 1938-39. Dr. Gerhard Rose, one of the leading German experts on tropical diseases and later a defendant at the Nuremberg Doctors Trial, turned over samples of the yellow fever virus to Unit 731 that they had been unable to obtain from the United States. In February 1941, Dr. Hojo Enryo from Unit 731 arrived in Germany as scientific attache to the Japanese Embassy, and often visited the Robert Koch Institute and other facilities to gather information of German biological warfare efforts. He also gave a lecture on this subject to the Berlin Academy of Medicine in October 1941. Blome's own institute in Posen was very similar in design to Unit 731's facility in Pingfan, Manchuria.[2]
[edit] Testimony to Americans
It is believed that American intervention saved Blome from the gallows. In return Blome agreed to provide information to the Americans about his experiments in the Dachau concentration camp and advice in the development of their own germ warfare program [3] In November 1947, two months after his Nuremberg acquittal, Blome was interviewed by four representatives from Camp Detrick, Maryland, including Dr. H.W. Batchelor, in which he explained German biological warfare experiments in detail and identified other experts in the field.[4] In 1951, he was hired by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps under Project 63, one of the successors to Operation Paperclip, to work on chemical warfare. His file neglected to mention Nuremberg. Denied a visa by the U.S. Consul in Frankfurt, he was employed at European Command Intelligence Center at Oberursel, West Germany.[5]
[edit] Final arrest and imprisonment
Eventually, Blome was arrested by French authorities, convicted of war crimes, and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
One of Blome's colleagues and subordinates in biological warfare, Eugen von Haagen, was tried by the French after the war and imprisoned from 1947-55. Von Haagen was an officer in the Luftwaffe Medical Service and a professor at the University of Stassburg, which has been "a major biological warfare research base." His main interests since the 1930s, when he had worked at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, were virology and typhus research. He experimented with hepatitis and typhus vaccines of prisoners at the Natzweiler concentration camp, infecting them with the diseases before testing his vaccines.[6] Dr. Kurt Gutzeit was in charge of hepatitis research for the German Army, experimented with hepatitis ("Jaundice Virus") on concentration camp prisoners, as did von Haagen and his colleagues Dr. Arnold Dohmen and Dr. Hans Voegt. These experiments were carried out on mental patients, Jews, Russian POWs and Gypsies in Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz and other locations. Dohmen and Gutzeit also did experiments on humans with nephritis virus, which was found in mice and rabbits.[7] One question that is still unknown is whether Dohmen, Voegt and Gutzeit were ever employed by Operation Paperclip or similar programs after the war, as were Erich Traub, von Haagen and Blome.
The U.S. authorities arrested von Haagen in 1945 and he was interviewed by the ALSOS Mission, led by Boris Pash. After obtaining the desired information on his biological warfare activities, they released him, but then he was arrested again by the British in 1946 and appeared as a witness for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials and against his former colleagues at the Buchenwald Trial. Released once again, he went to work for the Soviets at the Institute for Medicine and Biology in Berlin. Von Haagen was arrested for the third time by the French and tried before a military court in Metz, which waited until 1952 to sentence him to life imprisonment. This sentence was overturned in 1954 when he was sentenced to twenty years at hard labor. Released yet again in 1955, von Haagen went to work at the Federal Institute of Viral Pathology in West Germany. In all of his repeated arrests and trials, American intervention protected von Haagen.[8]
As with Blome and other Germans involved in biological warfare activities and Operation Paperclip, his postwar career requires more research.
[edit] Works
- "Krebsforschung und Krebsbekämpfung". Ziel und Weg. Die Gesundheitsführung Nr. 11 (1940) S. 406-412
- Arzt im Kampf: Erlebnisse und Gedanken. - Leipzig: Barth, 1942
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^ Ute Deichmann; Thomas Dunlap (15 May 1999). Biologists Under Hitler. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-07405-7. http://books.google.com/books?id=gPrtE4K0WC8C.
- ^ Bernd Martin, "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, pp. 200-14.
- ^ Erhard Geissler, "Die Rolle deutscher Biowaffenexperten in der Zeit nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg," in Oehler-Klein & Roelcke,Vergangenheitspolitik in der universitaeren Medizin nach 1945 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2007), 101.
- ^ Linda Hunt (April 1985). U.S. Coverup of Nazi Scientists. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. pp. 16–25. http://books.google.com/books?id=DAYAAAAAMBAJ.
- ^ George J. Annas; Michael A. Grodin (1 August 1995). The Nazi doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-510106-5. http://books.google.com/books?id=4P04DuPIfAYC.
- ^ Leyendecker, B.; Klapp, F. (Dec 1989). "Human hepatitis experiments in the Second World War.". Z Gesamte Hyg 35 (12): 756–60. PMID 2698560.
- ^ Office of U.S. Chief of Counsel for the American Military Tribunals at Nurember, 1946.
- ^ Naomi Baumslag, Murderous Medicine: Nazi Doctors, Human Experimentation and Typhus (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005), pp. 152-55.
[edit] External links
- Kurt Blome in the German National Library catalogue (German)
- 1894 births
- 1969 deaths
- People from Bielefeld
- People from the Province of Westphalia
- German National People's Party politicians
- German Völkisch Freedom Party politicians
- German Nazi politicians
- German Party politicians
- Members of the Reichstag of Nazi Germany
- 20th-century Freikorps personnel
- Organisation Consul members
- Burschenschaft members
- Nazi physicians
- German microbiologists
- Holocaust perpetrators
