During WWII Hitler reportedly issued orders prohibiting biological weapons. But research was conducted anyway, and Dr. Kurt Blome, Reich Deputy Health Leader, promised the Fuhrer a Wunderwaffe, a miracle weapon that would turn the tide of war in Germany’s favor. He worked with plague, typhoid, cholera and anthrax to develop as weapons to use against the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union.
Himmler had a special interest in weaponizing plague and ordered Blome to experiment with it on concentration camp prisoners to test the efficacy of vaccines. Blome did his research in a secret research center in Posen, in central Poland, which was surrounded by a ten-foot high wall and guarded by a special S.S. unit.
In 1945, as the war started to come to a close, Blome fled his research center and was arrested in Munich in May 1945 by the U.S .Counter Intelligence Corps.
In 1947, Blome was tried at the Nuremberg Doctor’s Trial, charged with experimenting on concentration camp prisoners. During the trial he only admitted he had been ordered to experiment with plague vaccines on the prisoners, and some say that the U.S. saved him from execution in exchange for information about biological warfare, which the Americans were interested in for their own biological weapons programs. After Blome was aquitted they they moved him to Camp King, located north west of Frankfurt, Germany which the United States Army used as an interrogation center and intelligence post.
Jacobsen explains it in an excerpt published on The Daily Beast from her fascinating book Operation Paperclip:
In an offshoot of Operation Paperclip, the CIA teamed up with Army, Air Force and Naval Intelligence to run one of the most nefarious, classified, enhanced interrogation programs of the Cold War. The work took place inside a clandestine facility in the American zone of occupied Germany, called Camp King. The facility’s chief medical doctor was Operation Paperclip’s Dr. Walter Schreiber, the former Surgeon General of the Third Reich. When Dr. Schreiber was secretly brought to America—to work for the U.S. Air Force in Texas—his position was filled with another Paperclip asset, Dr. Kurt Blome, the former Deputy Surgeon General of the Third Reich and the man in charge of the Nazi’s program to weaponize bubonic plague. The activities that went on at Camp King between 1946 and the late 1950s have never been fully accounted for by either the Department of Defense or the CIA.
Later in life Blome returned to practicing medicine in West Germany.
