Talk:Kurt Blome

message: 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, stronly 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 dispersants 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 that it has thus far recieved, 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.  
SOURCE: Ute Deichmann, Biologists under Hitler, trans Thomas Dunlap (Harvard 1996).
http://books.google.com.bz/books?id=gPrtE4K0WC8C&pg=PA173&dq=kurt+blome&hl=en&ei=P3o3TOLMBMKCnQe39rTVAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=kurt%20blome&f=false
One of Blome's colleagues 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.  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 colleages 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 teh French and tried before a military court in Metz, which waited until 1952 to sentence him to life inprisonment.  This sentence was overturned in 1954 when he was sentenced to 20 years at hard labor.  Released yet again in 1955, von Haagen went to work at the Federal Institute of Viral Pathology in West Germany. 
As with Blome and other Germans involved in biological warfare activities, his postwar career requires more research.  
SOURCE: Naomi Baumslag, Murderous Medicine: Nazi Doctors, Human Experimentation and Typhus (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005), pp. 152-55.
 
--Mcmchugh99 (talk) 20:26, 9 July 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, I took that whole section out because, as written, it's a discussion of a bunch of other people and has nothing to do with Blome apart from a distant, irrelevant connection.  If you want it back in, rewrite it so it's relevant and not just a take down of a bunch of guys who aren't Blome.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.202.111.138 (talk) 16:06, 11 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Blome's Involvement in Cancer Research and Biological Warfare 

message: "(there is evidence that Blome experimented with Sarin gas on Auschwitz prisoners)".
Really, is that evidence as the lampshades found in Buchenwald? --41.151.75.133 (talk) 20:25, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Evidence? 

message: The blockquote in this section looks odd. 
I don't know enough of the facts to edit the content, so I haven't touched it.
Does anybody agree it needs editing?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Richtbreak (talk • contribs) 14:50, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Strange block quote in the section "Postwar activities and employment by the United States"