Did a Stolen Virus Cause…

Compare the Secret Document of 1941

There have always been warnings from terrorist experts about foot-and-mouth. In America, for instance, there are fears that terrorists will introduce the virus and damage the country’s farming. The list of biological weapons which the Federal Republic of Germany agreed to refrain from producing also includes the foot-and-mouth virus. Until 1969, the United States continued to develop biological weapons under extreme secrecy. The same was the case in the former Soviet Union, in whose laboratories human and animal pathogens are still stored – often inadequately protected. Time and again in the past, armed forces have thought about the use of foot-and-mouth disease, even in Germany. By the 1920s ethical and legal reservations had already been relativized in a memorandum published by the Military Medical Service. In an expertise written in 1925 by Prof. Dr. R. Otto, infection by the foot-and-mouth virus was explicitly mentioned as a possible form of biological warfare. However, it was not until the outbreak of World War II, when the German High Command discovered that the French were developing a biological weapons programme at Laboratoire Porphylaxie in Vert-le-Petit near Paris, that they began to make preparations ‘to have bacteriological weapons combat ready as a countermeasure at all times,’ as a 1941 secret document stated. No plans to use biological weapons as a first strike weapon existed at that time since Hitler was against active biological warfare.
However, this did not prevent members of this working group from deliberating on the use of foot-and-mouth, the potato-beetle and other crop pests against Britain. Experiments were undertaken with foot-and-mouth on an island in Northwest Russia in the spring of 1943 (the virus specimen for this experiment were cultivated in the Reich’s research laboratory on the Island of Riems, which today is the Federal Research Institute for Viral Infections, where BSE tests are carried out under the strictest security measures). A plane equipped with a drizzling tank sprayed a solution containing the virus specimen over the whole island. Of the 50 reindeers released on the island, 80 percent were apparently infected. Later, experiments with feed containing the dried virus were carried out, which were equally successful. The encouraging results of the experiments convinced the director of the expert commission, Hanss-Christoph Nagel, that foot-and-mouth disease was, from a veterinarian perspective, ‘the only viable biological weapon which can be used against England’.
In the era of globalization biological weapons programmes are not needed to start animal epidemics. Foot-and-mouth disease is still endemic in many countries in Asia and South America. Cross-border animal transports, international exchange of goods, and even increasing tourism to exotic countries can result in the virus being introduced to countries which were formerly FMD free. So-called firebreaks, such as those in West Anatolia, are of little use, and neither are temporary stricter control of goods and tourist traffic as practised by Canada and Argentina at the moment. The foot-and-mouth disease will continue to come and go, leaving its traces on our collective memory so that later generations will still be able to use it as an apt political metaphor, such as the Czech author Jiri Kratochvil did in his book ‘Undying Story’, in which he compared Hitler’s 1939/40 Blitzkrieg with the rapid spread of the foot-and-mouth disease. This is no poor comparison as the disease had shortly before not only plagued Germany but also Switzerland.