After the meeting, the Detrick doctors requested from the Army Chemical Corps everything they knew about Dr. Erich Traub. That Dr. Blome said he was most afraid of an outbreak of cattle plague was serious news. Traub was the world’s leading expert in the disease. Now the U.S. Army wanted him as their own.
Dr. Traub was a virologist, microbiologist, and professor and a doctor of veterinary medicine. He had been the second in command at the Reich’s State Research Institute at Riems since 1942. He was also an expert in Newcastle disease, a contagious bird flu, that he was rumored to have weaponized. The Chemical Corps knew Traub spoke fluent English, that he had dark brown hair, gray-brown eyes, and two pronounced saber scars on his face—on the forehead and upper lip. And they knew that from 1932 until 1938, Traub had been a staff member at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, in New Jersey. But after meeting with Dr. Blome, the Chemical Corps wanted more information on Traub, and they tracked down two of his former American colleagues for interviews. One of them, Dr. Little, described Traub as a “domineering German and a surly type individual with a violent temper.” Another colleague, Dr. John Nelson, found that despite “long training in the care of animals, [Traub] went out of his way to be cruel to animals.” This troubled Nelson, who felt that “any person who is cruel to animals shows little distinction and difference to his treatment of his fellow human beings.”
Before the war, Traub was given the opportunity to stay in America and continue his research full-time. He chose to return to Germany, citing loyalty to the Reich. In 1939, Traub was drafted into the Wehrmacht, Veterinary Corps, and in 1940, he was elevated to captain and fought in the campaign against France. He was a member of several Nazi organizations, including the Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrerkorps (NSKK), or National Socialist Motor Corps; the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV); and the Reichsluftschutzbund (RLB), or State Air Protection Corps. Dr. Traub’s talents as a virologist had been identified, and he had been pulled back from the front lines and assigned to biological weapons work. According to Blome, Traub was the most talented scientist working on anti-animal research—biological weapons designed to kill the animals that a nation relies upon most for food. At the end of the war, when the Riems lab fell to the Russians, with it went Dr. Traub, his wife, Blanka, and their three children. The laboratory was renamed the Land Office II for Animal Epidemic Diseases and the Soviets put Traub back to work on bioweapons research. Now, in 1947, the Army began a plan to lure Traub away.
As for Dr. Blome, the scientists from Detrick knew it was far too risky to offer him a Paperclip contract just weeks after he’d been acquitted of capital war crimes at Nuremberg. Drew Pearson’s reporting on the Paperclip contract offered to Karl Krauch in prison had upset General Eisenhower and nearly brought the program to its knees. While Blome made clear his willingness to work for the Army, the Detrick scientists knew he would have to remain an under-the-radar consultant, relegated to the JIOA target list for potential hire at a future date.
The army bacteriologist and biological weapons expert Dr. Harold Batchelor returned to Camp Detrick with many new ideas to explore, including assassination-by-poison techniques that had been shared with him by Dr. Blome. The Reich had been researching biological weapons that would initiate epidemics but could also “kill certain people,” according to Blome. In 1947, however, with scientific frontiers opening up wide, there would be hundreds of new ways to assassinate individuals using a single device carrying a biological or chemical agent. This was an area in which the CIA was interested. The Chemical Corps had the perfect scientist for the job of exploring poisons that could be used for individual assassinations, Fritz Hoffmann. But Hoffmann had a backlog of work. He still had to figure out how to synthesize tabun gas so the Chemical Corps could hurry up and begin producing it on an industrial scale.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Headless Monster