The two doctors did not get along. Blome became convinced that Dr. Gross had been sent by Himmler to spy on him. He told his interrogators that he was under great pressure to work faster. Himmler repeatedly “reiterated that the methods of waging BW [biological warfare] must be studied in order to understand the defense against it.” What this meant was that Himmler wanted Blome to infect human test subjects with plague to see what would happen to them.
The third meeting took place four or five months later, in February 1944. By this time, Blome said, the facility at Nesselstedt had been built. There was ample staff housing, a well-equipped laboratory, and an animal farm. The block for experimental work included a climate room, a cold room, disinfectant facilities, and rooms for “clean” and “dirty” experiments. There was an isolation hospital for sixteen people in the event that workers on Blome’s staff contracted the disease. Work progressed slowly, Blome said, and Himmler became enraged. Rumors of an Allied invasion of the European continent had become a constant thorn in the side of the Reichsführer-SS. Why wasn’t the Reich’s bioweapons program more advanced, Himmler demanded to know. He asked Blome if it was possible to “do something now—for example disseminate influenza—that would delay the heralded Anglo-American invasion in the West.” According to Blome, he told Himmler “it was impossible to do anything on these lines.” Himmler proposed another idea: How about disseminating a virulent strain of hoof-and-mouth disease? Or tularemia, also called rabbit fever, which affected man in a manner similar to plague? Blome told Himmler that these were dangerous ideas, as any outbreak would surely affect Germany’s troops. The Reich needed a massive stockpile of vaccinations before it could feasibly launch a biological attack.
Himmler stretched his thinking to target the Allies on their own soil. How about spreading cattle plague, also called rinderpest, in America or England? Himmler told Blome that infecting the enemy’s food supply would have a sinister effect on enemy troops. Blome agreed and said he would investigate what it would take to start a plague epidemic among the enemies’ cows. There was, however, a problem, Blome explained. An international agreement prohibited stocks of the rinderpest virus to be stored anywhere in Europe. Strains of cattle plague were available only in the third world.
Himmler said that he would get the cattle plague himself. He sent Dr. Erich Traub, a veterinarian from the Reich’s State Research Institute, located on the island of Riems, to Turkey. There, Dr. Traub acquired a strain of the lethal rinderpest virus. Under Blome’s direction, trials to infect healthy cows with rinderpest began. Riems, in northern Germany in the Bay of Greifswald, was totally isolated and self-contained. It was the perfect place for these dangerous tests. The veterinary section used airplanes to spray the cattle plague virus on the island’s grassy fields, where cows grazed. Blome said he didn’t know much more about the program or its results—only that Dr. Traub, second in command at the research facility, was taken by the Russians when the Red Army captured Riems, in April 1945.
Blome’s fourth meeting with Himmler took place in April or May of 1944. Himmler had become paranoid by now, Blome said. He believed that the Allies were plotting a biological weapons attack against the Reich. “Blome was summoned by telephone to see Himmler urgently. The latter had received a number of curious reports. Grass had come floating out of the sky over some part of Austria and a cow that had eaten some of it had died.” Blome told Himmler he’d look into it. There were additional strange events, Himmler confided to Blome. “Some small balloons had been found near Salzberg [sic] and Berchtesgaden” not far from Hitler’s mountain residence, the Berghof. And potato beetles had been dropped in Normandy. Blome promised to study each incident.
Blome told Himmler he had a pressing issue of his own. Given the progress of the Red Army, he thought it was wise to move his plague research institute at Posen (Poznań) somewhere inside Germany. The place Blome suggested was Geraberg, in the Thuringian forest, at the edge of the Harz Mountains. Himmler said that the Russians would never reach Posen. By early fall, he had changed his mind. In October a new biological weapons research facility was being built, concealed inside a pine forest in the village of Geraberg.
In the meantime, Blome told his interrogators, work on vaccines was moving forward—not at either of his research institutes but inside the army instead. G?ring had moved epidemic control into the jurisdiction of a major general named Dr. Walter Schreiber, surgeon general of the Reich. Blome held the position of deputy surgeon general of the Reich, but the two men had equal positions under G?ring, Blome explained. He, Blome, was in charge of creating the biological weapons; Dr. Schreiber was in charge of protecting Germans against biological weapons, should they be used—Major General Dr. Schreiber specialized in epidemic control. The sword and the shield.