Kurt Blome - First Arrest and Trial

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. He had 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 Nuremberg 'Doctor's Trial' in 1946-47.

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. However, the Japanese destroyed many of the records about these contacts and the biological warfare program prior to their own surrender in August 1945. 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. 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.