Seventy-five miles south of Nordhausen, in the Thuringian Forest at the edge of the Harz, Allied soldiers liberated the town of Geraberg. Here, they came upon a curious-looking research facility concealed in a thick grove of trees. Clearly the place had recently been abandoned. It comprised a laboratory, an isolation block, animal houses, and living quarters for fourteen men. Part of the facility was still under construction. Word was sent to SHAEF headquarters in Versailles that a team of bacteriologists was needed in Geraberg. Alsos scientists were dispatched to investigate. One of the first biological warfare experts to arrive was Bill Cromartie, who had been hunting for evidence of Hitler’s biological weapons program since the mission began back in Strasbourg, France. Back in November, Cromartie had been one of the men scouring files with Samuel Goudsmit, inside the apartment of Dr. Eugen Haagen, when Alsos agents first learned that the Reich was testing deadly vaccines on prisoners in concentration camps. Arriving at Geraberg, Cromartie determined that the laboratory here was a significant lead.
“The building and sites were on either side of a small valley and constructed under tall trees,” read Cromartie’s classified report. “On one side there was a building [that] was to have been the experimental laboratory,” he surmised, suggesting that this facility was designed to produce experimental vaccines to protect German soldiers against a biological weapons offensive.
A local villager provided Cromartie and a colleague, J. M. Barnes, with two key pieces of information in the biological weapons puzzle. The villager explained that an SS man named Dr. Karl Gross had been overseeing work at this facility. Gross kept dozens of trunks and boxes locked in the upper floors of a local schoolhouse, and, while he had recently disappeared, he had left the trunks behind. The villager took the American scientists to the schoolhouse to investigate.
An inventory was taken of Dr. Gross’s possessions, mostly laboratory equipment. “There were crates of test tubes and small flasks and large numbers of test tube racks. There were two incubators and an autoclave. There were two boxes of gas mask filters and some rubber hoods and gowns,” read the report. Everything was military-grade protective gear, marked as having “been obtained from the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen SS.” There was also a large collection of books, “several boxes of periodicals all dealing with infectious diseases.” The ones that really caught the scientists’ attention were “Russian contributions on plague.”
Next, the villager took the Alsos agents to the nearby boardinghouse where Dr. Gross had been renting a room. The place was cleared out and void of personal possessions. “His landlady said she believed he had burnt a lot of papers the night before he left,” the Alsos scientists noted in their report. But Dr. Gross was only the intermediary, the landlady said. There was another man who came to the facility and appeared to be in charge. He was an older man, about fifty, five foot nine, with a mustache and black hair. On his upper lip he had a pronounced dueling scar. He had to have been of high rank, because everyone on the staff deferred to him. When cross-referenced by Alsos against the Osenberg List, the situation became even clearer: Dr. Karl Gross worked under Dr. Kurt Blome, the individual in charge of biological weapons research and the deputy surgeon general of the Third Reich.
All indicators pointed to the idea that Geraberg was a Reich facility for biological weapons research. Alsos agents photographed the site: the animal house, the vaccine station, the experimental laboratory, and the isolation hospital. They typed up a report and filed it away for future use. Now, near the top of the biological weapons Black List was the name Dr. Kurt Blome.
Sixty miles north of Nordhausen, a battalion of American soldiers with the First U.S. Infantry moved cautiously through the forest on the western edge of a small city called Braunschweig. It was April 13, 1945, when they came upon a compound of about seventy buildings. Great care had gone into camouflaging this place, the soldiers noted. Thousands of trees had been planted closely so that the area would appear from the air to be dense forest. The buildings in the compound had been designed to look like simple farmhouses. Traditional gardens had been planted and tended to. Stork nests covered the rooftops.