The War Crimes Office had considerable information about Dr. Kurt Blome. He was deputy surgeon general of the Third Reich and vice president of the Reich’s Physicians’ League, Reichs?rztekammer. He was believed to have reported directly to G?ring and maybe even to Himmler, or to both. Blome had been named head of Reich cancer research in 1942. Alsos and OSS presumed that this was a cover name for biological weapons work. Blome was a dedicated and proud Nazi. His book Arzt im Kampf (Doctor in Battle) compared a doctor’s struggle with the struggle of the Third Reich. Soldiers, officers, and doctors weren’t all that different, each constantly in battle against invading forces and disease.
Investigators were trying to piece together the labyrinthine medical hierarchy of the Third Reich so as to understand who was in charge of what organization. Particularly interesting to the interrogators was the fact that Dr. Kurt Blome had been part of a top-tier group of Nazi doctors who focused on “hygiene.” This word connoted disease control but was also believed to have been used by the Reich as a euphemism for ethnic cleansing and extermination of Jews. Alsos was in possession of correspondence between Blome and Himmler that discussed giving certain groups of sick individuals—in this case tubercular Poles—“special treatment” (Sonderbehandlung). What exactly did special treatment mean? At the time of Blome’s capture and interrogation, Allied intelligence agencies believed that there was only one physician higher than Blome in the hierarchy of the Reich Hygiene Committee, and that was the notorious Reich Health Leader (Reichsgesundheitsführer), Leonardo Conti.
Dr. Blome spoke fluent English with his first army interrogator. He described himself as a “good Nazi”—obedient—and promised that he was willing to cooperate with the Allies. At first his interrogators were thrilled by the prospect of learning more about Reich medicine from such a big fish as Dr. Blome.
Why was he cooperating? Blome was asked.
“[I] can not approve of the way new advances in medical science have been used for atrocities,” declared Dr. Blome.
What kind of atrocities? Blome’s investigator wanted to know.
Blome stated that in his capacity as deputy surgeon general of the Reich he had “observe[d] new scientific studies and experiments which led to later atrocities e.g. mass sterilization, gassing of Jews.” It was an astonishing admission. Until Dr. Blome gave up this information so freely, no physician in the inner circle had admitted to having known about such wide-scale atrocities as mass murder and sterilization programs. That Blome was willing to talk was extremely promising news. Blome was “cooperative and intelligent,” noted his interrogator. Most important, he was “willing to supply information.”
But the U.S. investigators’ excitement did not last long. By his next interrogation, Dr. Kurt Blome had shut down entirely. He told his interrogating officer, Major E. W. B. Gill, that he had only ever been an administrator for the Reich; that he did nothing “hands-on.” Major Gill pressed Blome for information about his direct superior, Dr. Leonardo Conti. Blome said he knew nothing about Conti’s job.
“When I pointed out that the deputy must presumably know something about his chief’s job,” Major Gill wrote in his report, “he said the organization was extremely complicated and really he would like to draw me a diagram on it.” Gill lost his temper. “I told Blome I didn’t want his dammed diagrams, but an answer to a simple question. How did he take Conti’s place if he [Conti] were absent or ill if he knew nothing of the job?”
Blome repeated his position. That it was all too complicated to explain to a man like Major Gill. Outraged by the sidestepping, Gill kept at it. But by the end of Blome’s Alsos interrogation, Major Gill had been unable to get even a scrap of new information from Blome. He claimed never to have heard of the majority of the names of fellow doctors that Major Gill asked him about. Instead, Blome insisted that he knew nothing about the medical chain of command inside the Third Reich or the SS, despite the fact that he had personally met with Himmler five times since 1943. Gill asked how Blome, a “cancer expert,” had been put in charge of the Reich’s bioweapons program, a subject he claimed to know very little about. Blome said he had no answer for that.
“On my suggestion that a most important branch of war research would not be assigned to a complete ignoramus he, after endless explanations of the complexity of the German world, finally said it must have been because, as an undergraduate, he wrote on BW [biological weapons] as his thesis for a doctorate.” Major Gill felt for certain that Dr. Blome was lying. But there was nothing he could do except present Blome with information and evidence that Alsos had compiled about him since they had seized Dr. Eugen Haagen’s apartment six months before.