Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

by Annie Jacobsen

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.