Fritz Hoffmann’s untimely death came like something out of a Special Operations Division’s Agent Branch playbook. He suffered a serious illness that came on quickly, lasted for a relatively short time, and was followed by death. On Christmas Eve 1966, Fritz Hoffmann was diagnosed with cancer. Racked with pain, he lay in bed watching his favorite television shows—“Cowboy westerns and Rod Serling in The Twilight Zone,” Gabriella Hoffmann recalls. One hundred days later, Fritz Hoffmann was dead. He was fifty-six years old.
“He did try, periodically, to go to work,” Gabriella Hoffmann remembers, “but he was in too much pain. I do have a recollection of a lot of different men in dark suits always coming by the house to talk to him. At the time, Demerol as a painkiller had just come on the market. He had a prescription for it, from a doctor at Edgewood. During the time that [he was dying] there were a lot of questions asked of my mother and [me] that led me to think the FBI or the CIA, or whoever the men in the dark suits were, were worried that my father would start talking about whatever it was that he did. He never did say anything. He was silent until the end.”
Hoffmann’s antiplant work in herbicides was one element of Detrick’s three-part biological weapons division, the other two being antiman and antianimal. Antianimal weapons were aimed at killing entire animal populations, with the goal of starving to death the people who relied on those animals for food. At the locus of the U.S. antianimal program was Operation Paperclip’s Dr. Erich Traub, Dr. Kurt Blome’s deputy. Traub was recruited into the Accelerated Paperclip program by Dr. Blome’s handler, Charles McPherson, and arrived in America on April 4, 1949.
Traub worked on virological research at the Naval Medical Research Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland. Almost all of Traub’s work remains classified as of 2013. At the Naval Medical Research Institute, Traub became friendly with the Luftwaffe physiologist and explosive decompression expert Dr. Theodor Benzinger, whose early work for the navy also remains classified. In addition to working for the navy, Traub worked at Camp Detrick on antianimal research. The agents and diseases being studied by Detrick researchers at this time, meant to decimate a specific animal population, included rinderpest, hoof-and-mouth disease (also called foot-and-mouth disease), Virus III disease of swine (likely African swine fever), fowl plague, Newcastle disease, and fowl malaria. All of Traub’s Camp Detrick work remains classified as of 2013.
In 1948, Congress had approved a $30 million budget for antianimal weapons research (roughly $300 million in 2013), but because this work was so dangerous, Congress mandated that it needed to take place outside the continental United States, on an island and not connected to the nearest mainland by a bridge. Plans moved forward and the army chose Plum Island, a 1.3-square-mile land parcel located off the coast of Connecticut in the Long Island Sound. The obvious choice for a director was the world’s expert on antianimal research, Dr. Erich Traub. But the plan to activate Plum Island for biological weapons research languished for several years.
Traub received his immigrant visa on September 7, 1951, and he worked on classified programs for three more years. Then, under mysterious circumstances, in 1954, he resigned his position as medical supervisory bacteriologist at the Naval Medical Research Institute and asked to be repatriated to Germany. He told the navy he’d accepted a position with the West German government, as director of the Federal Institute for Virus Research. This move alarmed the JIOA. “Dr. Traub is a recognized authority in certain fields of virology, particularly in hoof and mouth disease of cattle and in Newcastle disease of poultry,” read a declassified report. “It can be anticipated that this institution in Germany [where Traub was going] will become one of the leading research laboratories of the world in virological research.” In view of the “recognizable military potentialities in possible application of his specialty, it is recommended that future surveillance in appropriate measure be maintained after the specialist’s return to Germany.” Traub needed to be kept under surveillance, likely for the rest of his life.