At their first meeting, which occurred in the summer of 1943—Blome recalled it as being July or August—Himmler ordered Blome to study various dissemination methods of plague bacteria for offensive warfare. According to Blome, he shared with Himmler his fears regarding the dangerous boomerang effect a plague bomb would most likely have on Germany. Himmler told Blome that in that case, he should get to work immediately to produce a vaccine to prevent such a thing. To expedite vaccine research, Blome said, Himmler ordered him “to use human beings.”
Himmler offered Blome a medical block at a concentration camp like Dachau where he could complete this work. Blome said he told Himmler he was aware of “strong objections in certain circles” to using humans in experimental vaccine trials. Himmler told Blome that experimenting on humans was necessary in the war effort. To refuse was “the equivalent of treason.”
Very well, said Blome. He considered himself a loyal Nazi, and it was his intention to help Germany win the war. “History gives us examples of human disease affecting the outcome of wars,” Blome told his Alsos interrogators, taking a moment to lecture them on history. “We know [that] from antiquity up till the time of [the] Napoleonic wars, victories and defeats were often determined by epidemics and starvation,” Blome said. Spreading an infectious disease could bring about the demise of a marauding army, and Blome said that the failure of Napoleon’s Russian campaign was “due in great part to the infection of his horses with Glanders,” a highly contagious bacterial disease. History aside, Blome said he counseled Himmler on the fact that a concentration camp was a terrible place to experiment with bubonic plague because the population was too dense.
Blome then told Himmler that if he were to experiment with plague bacterium, he would need his own institute, an isolated facility far removed from population centers. Himmler and Blome agreed that Poland would be a good place, and they settled on Nesselstedt, a small town outside the former Poznań University (by then operated by the Reich). Blome’s research institute was to be called the Bacteriological Institute at Nesselstedt.
In the interim, in Berlin, Blome oversaw a field test using rats, history’s traditional carrier of bubonic plague. A debate had been taking place inside the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS as to whether or not rats were the best plague carriers. Himmler’s idea was “to take infected rats on to U-boats and release them near the enemy shores so they could swim to land.” Blome doubted that rats could swim great distances. He believed they could swim only for as long as the air in their fur kept them afloat. To prove his point, Blome arranged for a test on a Berlin lake. “About thirty rats were taken out in a police boat and released at different distances from the shore to swim both with and against the wind.” Blome said that the rats were dumber than he thought—that when placed in the water, “they had no idea where the shore was and swam around in different directions.” A few of them drowned in ten minutes. The longest any of the rats swam for was thirty minutes. Of those released a little over a half-mile from shore, only a third reached land. As far as Blome was concerned, Himmler’s U-boat dispersal idea was not practical.
Meeting Number Two took place a month or two later, in September or October 1943, and was largely a repetition of the first, at least according to Blome. There was one significant development, however. Himmler asked Blome if he needed an assistant. Blome agreed that a bacteriologist would be helpful. Himmler assigned Dr. Karl Gross, formerly a staff member at the Waffen-SS Hygiene Institute.