Kurt Blome
| Kurt Blome | |
|---|---|
Blome as defendant in the Doctors' Trial, Nuremberg
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| Born |
31 January 1894 Bielefeld, Germany |
| Died | 10 October 1969 (aged 75) |
| Citizenship | German |
| Fields | Virologist |
| Institutions | Reims Island, German Reich |
| Influenced | Erich Traub |
Kurt Blome (31 January 1894, Bielefeld, Westphalia – 10 October 1969) was a high-ranking Nazi scientist before and during World War II. He was the Deputy Reich Health Leader (Reichsgesundheitsführer) and Plenipotentiary for Cancer Research in the Reich Research Council. In his autobiography Arzt im Kampf (English: A Physician's Struggle), he equated medical and military power in their battle for life and death.
Blome only admitted that he had been ordered in 1943 to experiment with plague vaccines on concentration camp prisoners. He was tried at the Doctors' Trial in 1947 on charges of practicing euthanasia and conducting experiments on humans. In reality, starting in 1943 he "assumed responsibility for all research into biological warfare sponsored by the Wehrmacht." and the S.S. Although he was acquitted of war crimes charges at the Nuremberg Doctor's Trial, this was mainly due to the intervention of the United States and his earlier admissions were well known, so it was generally accepted that he had indeed participated in chemical and biological warfare experiments on concentration camp inmates.
As Plenipotentiary for Cancer Research in the Third Reich, Blome had a longstanding interest in the "military use of carcinogenic substances" and cancer-causing viruses. According to Ute Deichmann's book Biologists under Hitler, in 1942 he became director of a unit affiliated with the Central Cancer Institute at the University of Posen (Poznań), which is now in Poland. Although he claimed that the work at this institute involved only 'defensive' measures against biological weapons, Heinrich Himmler, Herman Goering, and Erich Schumann, head of the Wehrmacht's Science Section, strongly supported the offensive use of chemical and biological weapons against Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. In 1943, Schumann wrote to Dr. Heinrich Kliewe, one of the Wehrmacht's biological warfare experts that "in particular, America must be attacked simultaneously with various human and animal epidemic pathogens as well as plant pests." According to Kliewe, plague, typhoid, cholera and anthrax were being developed as weapons, as well as a new "synthetic medium for the spread of these bacteria" which would allow them to remain virulent for eight to twelve weeks.
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