“This happened a very long time ago,” Ambros told the reporter. “It involved Jews. We do not think about it anymore.”
The third act of Dr. Kurt Blome’s life contradicts the idea that the Soviets were desperately trying to hire Hitler’s former biological weapons maker. In February 1962, a group of Communist physicians from Karl Marx University, in Leipzig, East Germany, sent an open letter “to all the doctors and dentists living in Dortmund,” as well as many widely distributed newspapers “regarding the matter of the Dortmund physician, Dr. Kurt Blome.” The letter listed the war crimes Blome had been accused of at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial and stated that everyone in the town of Dortmund should “know who he is and what he did to the Jewish people.” The Leipzig doctors identified the doctor in Dortmund as “the Deputy Surgeon General of the Third Reich.” They wrote that Western German medical colleagues should distance themselves “from this man who dares to call himself a doctor.” Blome was contacted by the East German radio station, Radio Berlin International, for comment. He agreed, and an interview was arranged for February 22, 1962.
“I have read the two pages you have presented to me,” Blome told his interviewer on the appointed day. “During the war I got the task to prepare a serum, a vaccine, against a bacterial plague. This all started because [Major General] Dr. Schreiber told a lie. Schreiber is a pawn of the Russians. It’s a sworn lie.” Blome spent the rest of his radio time blaming Schreiber for his own misfortunes. He ended by pointing out his innocence; Blome reminded the radio announcer that he had endured a ten-month trial at Nuremberg. “I was acquitted on every point that there was,” Blome said. “The U.S. judges were not easy. They handed out seven death penalties and five lifelong imprisonments. If I had been guilty, they would have convicted me.”
The allegations opened a subsequent investigation into Blome. Two weeks later, on April 4, 1962, the state’s attorney in Dortmund wrote to the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes to see if there was anything on Dr. Kurt Blome. The state’s attorney put together a dossier on Blome, with most of the focus on a letter Blome had written on November 18, 1942, to Reich Governor (Reichsstatthalter) Arthur Karl Greiser, mayor of a Polish area near Posen and subsequently executed for war crimes. The subject matter was Sonderbehandlung, or “special treatment,” of Poles with tuberculosis. By now, in 1962, it had been established that Sonderbehandlung was a Nazi euphemism for extermination. In this 1942 correspondence, Blome and Greiser agreed that the best way to deal with this group of tubercular Poles being discussed was to give them “special treatment.” But Blome also raises “a problem” that had to be dealt with—namely, that if these tubercular Poles were to be exterminated, “[t]he general perception by relatives would be that something unorthodox is going on.” Blome reminds Reich Governor Greiser that the group they are proposing special treatment for totals approximately thirty-five thousand people.
Blome was called in to an interview with the state’s attorney. “I am aware that there is an investigation,” Blome said. “My position is that this has already been investigated by the Americans.” Dr. Blome then made the same argument he had used at Nuremberg as a defendant in the doctors’ trial: that he may have recommended the extermination of thirty-five thousand Poles as a course of action, but that there was no proof that that action ever took place. Intent, Blome maintained, is not a crime. “Furthermore,” Blome told investigators, “I want to add that I put the blame on [Major General Dr. Walter] Schreiber based on what I learned at the trial.” Blome said that Dr. Schreiber was the true murderer and that he had framed Dr. Blome to deflect the guilt away from himself. After several days of consideration, on May 21, 1962, the state’s attorney placed the investigation of Dr. Blome on hold. Blome continued to practice medicine in Dortmund and the case against him was never reopened. Three years later, Blome was dead. “He died of emphysema,” says his son, who also reports that, by the time of his father’s death, Dr. Kurt Blome was alone and estranged from the world.