• Citizenship German, American

• Alma mater Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research

• Known for Foot-and-mouth disease

• Scientific career Fields Virologist

• Institutions

  • • University of Giessen

    • Riems Island, German Reich

• Influences

  • [Dr. Richard Edwin Shope (born 1901)]

  • [Dr. Kurt Blome (born 1894)]

Erich Traub (27 June 1906 – 18 May 1985) was a German veterinarian, scientist and virologist who specialized in foot-and-mouth disease, Rinderpest and Newcastle disease. Traub was a member of the National Socialist Motor Corps (NSKK), a Nazi motorist corps, from 1938 to 1942. He worked directly for Heinrich Himmler, head of the Schutzstaffel (SS), as the lab chief of the Nazis' leading bio-weapons facility on Riems Island.^[1]

Traub was rescued from the Soviet zone of Germany after World War II and taken to the United States in 1949 under the auspices of the United States government program Operation Paperclip, meant to exploit the post-war scientific knowledge in Germany, and deny it to the Soviet Union.^[2]

Career

Early career and war

During the 1930s, he studied on a fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in Princeton, New Jersey mentored by [Dr. Richard Edwin Shope (born 1901)], performing research on vaccines and viruses, including pseudorabies virus and lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCM).^[3][4][5] During his stay in the United States, Traub and his wife were listed as members of the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi German-American club thirty miles west of Plum Island in Yaphank, Long Island, from 1934 to 1935.^[6]

Traub worked at the University of Giessen, Germany, from 1938 to 1942.^[7] Traub was a member of the Nazi NSKK, a motorist corps, from 1938 to 1942. The NSKK was declared a condemned, not a criminal organization at the Nuremberg trials.^[1]

From 1942 to 1948, Traub worked as lab-chief at the Reich Research Institute for Virus Diseases of Animals (German: Reichsforschungsanstalt für Viruskrankheiten der Tiere) on Riems Island (German: Insel Riems), a German animal virus research institute in the Baltic sea, now named the Friedrich Loeffler Institute. The institute was headed by Prof. Dr. Otto Waldmann from 1919 to 1948, while Traub was vice-president.^[7]

The Institute at Riems Island was a dual use facility during the Second World War where at least some biological warfare experiments were conducted. It had been founded in 1909-10 to study foot-and-mouth disease in animals and by World War II employed about 20 scientists and a staff of 70-120. Hanns-Christoph Nagel, a veterinarian and biological warfare expert for the German Army, conducted experiments there, as did Traub.^[7]

The institute was administered under the Innenministerium (Ministry of the Interior), which Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler took over in 1943. The chain of command was Himmler, Dr. Leonardo Conti (Reich Health Leader), [Dr. Kurt Blome (born 1894)], Waldmann, and then Traub. Traub specialized in viral and bacterial diseases. He was assisted by Anna Bürger, who was later also brought to the United States after the war, to work with the Navy's biological warfare program.^[8]

On orders from Himmler and Blome, the Deputy Reich Health Leader and head of the German biological warfare program, Traub worked on weaponizing foot-and-mouth disease virus, which has been reported to have been dispersed by aircraft onto cattle and reindeer in Russia.^[9] In 1944, Blome sent Traub to pick up a strain of Rinderpest virus in Turkey; upon his return, this strain proved inactive (nonvirulent) and therefore plans for a Rinderpest product were shelved.^[1]

Post-war

Immediately after the war Traub was trapped in the Soviet zone of Allied occupied Germany. He was forced to work for the Soviets from his lab on Riems Island.^[10] In July 1948, the British evacuated Erich Traub from Riems Island as a "high priority Intelligence target" since it was now in the Soviet Zone and they feared that Traub was assisting in their biological warfare program. Traub denied this, however, claiming that his only interest was foot-and-mouth disease in animals.^[11]

Traub was brought to the United States in 1949 under the auspices of the United States government program Operation Paperclip, meant to exploit scientific knowledge in Germany, and deny it to the Soviet Union.^[2] From 1949 to 1953, he was associated with the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.^[7]

Months into his Operation Paperclip contract, Traub was asked to meet with US scientists from Fort Detrick, the Army’s biological warfare headquarters, in Frederick, Maryland. As a noted German authority on viruses he was asked to consult on their animal disease program from a Biological Warfare perspective. Traub discussed work done at the Reich Research Institute for Virus Diseases of Animals on Riems Island during World War II for the Nazis, and work done after the war there for the Russians. Traub gave a detailed explanation of the secret operation at the Institute, and his activities there. This information provided the ground work for Fort Detrick's offshore germ warfare animal disease lab on Plum Island.^[6] [The facility on Plum Island later became the Plum Island Animal Disease Center ].

His publicly published research from his time in the United States reports disease research not directly related to weaponization. In 1951, he published a report for the Naval Medical Research Institute on Newcastle Disease virus in chicken and mammalian blood cells.^[12] Two years later, he published a paper for the Navy on the mechanisms of immunity in chickens to Newcastle and the possible role of cellular factors.^[13] Also in 1953, he published another paper for the Navy with Worth I. Capps on the foot-and-mouth disease virus and methods for rapid adaptation.^[14]

Traub served as an expert on foot-and-mouth disease for the FAO of the UN in Bogota, Colombia, from 1951 to 1952, in Tehran, Iran, from 1963 to 1967, and in Ankara, Turkey, from 1969 to 1971.

Return to Germany

Tombstone

After working on biological research for the U.S. Navy from 1949 to 1953, Traub returned to Germany and founded a new branch of the Loeffler Institut in Tübingen, and headed it from 1953 to 1963.^[15] In 1960, Traub resigned as Tübingen’s director due to the scandal related to accusations of financial embezzlement. He continued with limited lab research for three more years, but then ended his career at Tübingen.^[10]

In 1964, Traub published a study for the Army Biological labs in Frederick, Maryland on Eastern Equine Encephalomyeltitis (EEE) immunity in white mice and its relationship to Lymphocytic choriomeningitis (LCM), which had long been a research interest of his.^[16]

He retired from the West German civil service in 1971. In 1972, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Traub received an honorary doctorate degree in Veterinary Medicine for his achievements in basic and applied Virology (basic research on LCM; definition and diagnosis of type strains of FMD and their variants; development of adsorbate vaccines against fowl plague, Teschen disease of swine, and erysipelas of swine).

On May 18, 1985, Traub died in his sleep in West Germany. He was seventy-eight years old.^[10]

Bio-weapon research

This section may stray from the topic of the article. Please help improve this section or discuss this issue on the talk page. (May 2019)

In theory, insects of all types, particularly the biting species, can be used as disease vectors in a biological warfare program. Germany, Japan, Britain, Russia and the U.S. all conducted experiments along these lines during the Second World War, and the Japanese used such insect-borne diseases against both soldiers and civilians in China. This was one reason that President Franklin Roosevelt and Secretary of War Henry Stimson ordered the creation of an American biological warfare program in 1942, which was headquartered at Camp Detrick, Maryland. This eventually grew to a very large facility with 245 buildings and a $60 million budget, including an Entomological Weapons Department that mass-produced flies, lice and mosquitoes as disease vectors. Although the British bio-weapon facility at Porton Down concentrated on the production of anthrax bombs, it also conducted experiments on insects as vectors.

After the war, the Army's 406th Medical General Laboratory in Japan cooperated with former scientists from Unit 731 in experimenting with many different insect vectors, including lice, flies, mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, spiders and beetles to carry a wide variety of diseases, from cholera to meningitis. At Fort Detrick in the late 1940s, Theodore Rosebury also rated insect vectors very highly, and its entomological division had at least three insect-vectored weapons ready for use by 1950. Some of these were later tested at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, and allegedly used during the Korean War as well.^[17]

Traub visited the [Plum Island Animal Disease Center] (PIADC) in New York on at least three occasions in the 1950s. The Plum Island facility, operated by the Department of Agriculture, conducted research on foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) of cattle, one of Traub's areas of expertise.^[1] Traub was offered a leading position at the [Plum Island Animal Disease Center] in 1958 which he officially declined. It has been alleged that the United States performed bioweapons research on Plum Island.^[1][18]

Fort Terry on Plum Island was part of the U.S. biological warfare program in 1944-46, working on veterinary testing in connection with the weaponization of brucellosis. After the war, research on biological weapons continued at Pine Bluff in Arkansas and Fort Detrick, Maryland, while officially at least [Plum Island Animal Disease Center] was transferred to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.^[19] From 1949, Plum Island also conducted work on biological weapons against animals and livestock, such as foot-and-mouth disease, Rinderpest, Newcastle disease, African swine fever and plague and malaria in birds. Traub's research work from the Second World War onward involved at least the first three of these (all dangerous only to non-human animal species).^[20]

See also[edit]

• Edgewood Arsenal

• Project MKULTRA

• Project MKNAOMI

• Claus Schilling

• Sigmund Rascher

• [Dr. Kurt Blome (born 1894)]

• Fort Detrick

References[edit]

• ^

• Jump up to:

• ^{a b c d e} Carroll, Michael (2004). Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Germ Laboratory. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 0-06-001141-6.

• ^

• Jump up to:

• ^{a b} Hunt, Hunt (1991). Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990. New York: St.Martin's Press. p. 340.

• ^ Traub, Erich (22 March 1935). A filterable virus recovered from white mice. Science, volume 81. pp. 298–99.

• ^ Traub E, Cultivation of Pseudorabies Virus, J Exp Med, November 30, 1933, 58(6), 663-81.

• ^ Barthold SW, Introduction: microbes and the evolution of scientific fancy mice, ILAR J, 2008, 49(3), 265-71.

• ^

• Jump up to:

• ^{a b} Carroll, Michael (2004). Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Germ Laboratory. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. pp. 7–8. ISBN 0-06-001141-6.

• ^

• Jump up to:

• ^{a b c d} Geissler, Erhard (1998). Conversion of BTW Warfare facilities: Lessons from German History. Springer; 1st edition. pp. 53–66. ISBN 978-0-7923-5250-1.

• ^ A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments - H.P.Albarelli - July 1, 2009 - ISBN 0-9777953-7-3

• ^ Glen Yeadon; John Hawkins (August 2008). The Nazi Hydra in America: Suppressed History of a Century. Progressive Press. p. 381. ISBN 978-0-930852-43-6.

• ^

• Jump up to:

• ^{a b c} Carroll, Michael (2004). Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Germ Laboratory. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. pp. 10–11. ISBN 0-06-001141-6.

• ^ Paul Maddrell, 'Operation “Matchbox” and the Scientific Containment of the USSR', in P. Jackson & J. Siegel (eds.), Intelligence and Statecraft: The Use and Limits of Intelligence in International Society ( Westport, CT : Praeger Publishers), (2005), pp. 173–206.

• ^ Erich Traub, "Studies on the In-Vitro Multiplication of Newcastle Disease Virus in Chicken Blood." Naval Medical Research Institute, National Naval Medical Center, 1951.

• ^ Erich Traub, "Studies in the Mechanism of Immunity of Chickens to Newcastle Disease Virus." Naval Medical Research Institute, National Naval Medical Center, 1953.

• ^ Erich Traub and Worth I. Capps, "Experiments with Chicken Embryo-Adapted Foot-and-Mouth Disease Virus and a Method for the Rapid Adaptation." Naval Medical Research Institute, National Naval Medical Center, 1953.

• ^ Friedrich-Loeffler-Institute, Federal Research Institute for Animal Health, History: Isle of Riems

• ^ Eric Traub, "Immunity of White Mice to EEE-VIrus." Report No. 8, Army Biological Labs, Frederick, MD, 1964.

• ^ Jeffrey Alan Lockwood, Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War. Oxford, 2009, pp. 145-46; 160-61

• ^ Loftus, John (1982). The Belarus Secret. Knopf. ISBN 0-394-52292-3.

• ^ David C. Hoover and Richard H. Borschel, "Medical Protection against Brucellosis" in Luther E. Lindler, Frank J. Lebeda, and George Korch (eds), Biological Weapons Defense: Infectious Diseases and Counterterrorism. Humana Press, 2005, pp. 155-84.

• ^ John Ellis van Courtland Moon, "The U.S. Biological Weapons Program" in Mark Wheelis, Lajos Rozsa and Malcolm Dando (eds) Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons since 1945.Harvard, 2006, pp. 9-46.

Further reading[edit]

• Carroll, Michael Christopher. Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Germ Laboratory. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 0-06-001141-6.

• Bernstein, Barton J.: Birth of the U.S. biological warfare program. Scientific American 256: 116 - 121, 1987.

• Geissler, Erhard: Biologische Waffen, nicht in Hitlers Arsenalen. Biologische und Toxin-Kampfmittel in Deutschland von 1915 - 1945. LIT-Verlag, Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 2nd ed., 1999. ISBN 3-8258-2955-3.

• Geissler, Erhard: Biological warfare activities in Germany 1923 - 1945. In: Geissler, Erhard and Moon, John Ellis van Courtland, eds., Biological warfare from the Middle Ages to 1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-19-829579-0.

• Maddrell, Paul: Spying on Science: Western Intelligence in Divided Germany 1945 - 1961. Oxford University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-19-926750-2.

• John Rather: New York Times, February 15, 2004: Heaping more dirt on Plum I.

• Albarelli JR., H.P.: A Terrible Mistake:The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments - Trine Day LLC, 1st ed., 2009, ISBN 0-9777953-7-3

• Office of U.S. Chief of Counsel for the American Military Tribunals at Nuremberg, 1946, concerning Nazi experiments on concentration camp prisoners with hepatitis and nephritis viruses.

• Erich Traub, "Immunity of White Mice to EEE Virus." Report No. 8, Army Biological Labs, Frederick, MD, 1964.

Pages 7 - 11

Nearing the end of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union raced to recruit German scientists for postwar purposes. Under a top-secret program code-named Project PAPERCLIP, the U.S. military pursued Nazi scientistic talent “like forbidden fruit,” bringing them to America under employment contracts and offering them full U.S. citizenship. The recruits were supposed to be nominal participants in Nazi activities. But the zealous military recruited more than two thousand scientists, many of whom had dark Nazi party pasts. { Footnotes : The best known PAPERCLIP recruit was Wernher von Braun [...] }

American scientists viewed these Germans as peers, and quickly forgot they were on opposite sides of a ghastly global war in which millions perished. Fearing brutal retaliation from the Soviets for the Nazis’ vicious treatment of them, some scientists cooperated with the Americans to earn amnesty. Others played the two nations off each other to get the best financial deal in exchange for their services. [Dr. Erich Traub] was trapped on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain after the war, and ordered to research germ warfare viruses for the Russians. He pulled off a daring escape with his family to West Berlin in 1949. Applying for Project PAPERCLIP employment, Traub affirmed he wanted to “do scientific work in the U.S.A., become an American citizen, and be protected from Russian reprisals.”

As lab chief of Insel Riems—a secret Nazi biological warfare laboratory on a crescent-shaped island nestled in the Baltic Sea—[Dr. Erich Traub] worked directly for Adolf Hitler’s second-in-charge, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, on live germ trials. He packaged weaponized foot-and-mouth disease virus, which was dispersed from a Luftwaffe bomber onto cattle and reindeer in occupied Russia. At Himmler’s request, Traub personally journeyed to the Black Sea coast of Turkey. There, amid the lush Anatolian terrain, he searched for a lethal strain of rinderpest virus for use against the Allies. Earlier in the war he had been a captain in the German Army, working as an expert on infectious animal diseases, particularly in horses. His veterinary corps led the germ warfare attacks on horses in the United States and Romania in World War I with a bacteria called glanders. He was also a member of NSKK, the Nazi Motorists Corps, a powerful Nazi organization that ranked directly behind the SA (Storm Troopers) and the SS (Elite Corps). In fact, NSKK’s first member, joining in April 1930, was Adolf Hitler himself. [Dr. Erich Traub] also listed his 1930s membership in Amerika-Deutscher Volksbund, a German-American “club” also known as Camp Sigfried. Just thirty miles west of Plum Island in Yaphank, Long Island, Camp Sigfried was the national headquarters of the American Nazi movement. Over forty thousand people throughout the New York region arrived by train, bus, and car to participate in Nuremberg-like rallies. Each weekend they marched in lockstep divisions, carrying swastika flags, burning Jewish U.S. congressmen in effigy, and singing anti-Semitic songs. Above all, they solemnly pledged their allegiance to Hitler and the Third Reich.

Ironically, [Dr. Erich Traub] spent the prewar period of his scientific career on a fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, perfecting his skills in viruses and bacteria under the tutelage of American experts before returning to Nazi Germany on the eve of war. Despite Traub’s troubling war record, the U.S. Navy recruited him for its scientific designs, and stationed him at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. { Footnotes : Another PAPERCLIP recruit who worked alongside Traub at the Naval Medical Research Institute was Theodur Benzinger, an “aviation doctor.” Benzinger was invited by Heinrich Himmler to view a film on high-altitude simulations at Dachau using prisoners as human guinea pigs (a “37-year-old Jew in good condition who lasted 30 minutes—he began to perspire, wriggle his head, developed cramps, became breathless, and [with] foam collecting around his mouth became unconscious and died”). Arrested for war crimes by Nuremberg prosecutors, he denied experimenting with any prisoners. He evaded prosecution at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial and rushed into the waiting arms of Project PAPERCLIP. }

Just months into his PAPERCLIP contract, the germ warriors of Fort Detrick, the Army’s biological warfare headquarters in Frederick, Maryland, and CIA operatives invited [Dr. Erich Traub] in for a talk, later reported in a declassified top-secret summary:

• [Dr. Erich Traub] is a noted authority on viruses and diseases in Germany and Europe. This interrogation revealed much information of value to the animal disease program from a Biological Warfare point of view. Dr. Traub discussed work done at a German animal disease station during World War II and subsequent to the war when the station was under Russian control. { Footnotes - According to the document, a transcript of the meeting was prepared by the CIA. When I requested the transcript under the Freedom of Information Act, the CIA informed me that no such report ever existed, and if it did, it would be withheld for reasons of national security. }

[Dr. Erich Traub]'s detailed explanation of the secret operation on Insel Riems, and his activities there during the war and for the Soviets, laid the groundwork for Fort Detrick’s offshore germ warfare animal disease lab on Plum Island. Traub was a founding father.

Little is publicly available about his clandestine activities for the U.S. military. The names of two studies, “Experiments with Chick Embryo Adapted Foot-and-mouth Disease” and “Studies on In-vitro Multiplication of Newcastle Disease Virus in Chicken Blood,” were made available under the Freedom of Information Act, but the research reports themselves (and many others) were withheld. With his “laboratory assistant” Anne Burger, who came over in 1951, [Dr. Erich Traub] experimented with over forty lethal viruses on large test animals. { Footnotes - Linda Hunt, author of Secret Agenda, the seminal book on Project PAPERCLIP, believes Burger may not have been Traub’s “assistant,” but rather his mistress. Apparently other PAPERCLIP recruits had imported their mistresses from Germany along with their families when they came to America. No additional information is available to the public on Anne Burger. }

[Dr. Erich Traub] also spent time at the USDA laboratories in Beltsville, Maryland, where he isolated a new weapons-grade virus strain in the USDA lab. Studying a virulent strain of a new virus that caused human infections, Traub showed how it adapted “neurotropically” in humans by voraciously attacking nerve and brain tissues. This was the same potent virus that infected a human in Plum Island’s first-ever germ experiment one year later.

By 1953, West Germany recognized a need for its own Insel Riems and built a high-containment virus facility in Tübingen. They asked Dr. Erich Traub to return to the Fatherland and assume command. Permission was granted. But there was a catch. “In view of Dr. Traub’s eminence as an international authority and the recognizable military potentialities in the possible application of his specialty, it is recommended that future surveillance in appropriate measure be maintained after the specialist’s return to Germany.” In other words, the CIA would be tailing him for years. As soon as the lab opened for business, he turned to Plum Island for starter strains of viruses, which were gladly shipped over. USDA officials traveled to West Germany and visited his laboratory often.

ERICH TRAUB AND PLUM ISLAND

Everybody seemed willing to forget about [Dr. Erich Traub]'s dirty past—that he had played a crucial role in the Nazis’ “Cancer Research Program,” the cover name for their biological warfare program, and that he worked directly under SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. They seemed willing to overlook that Traub in the 1930s faithfully attended Camp Sigfried. In fact, the USDA liked him so much, it glossed over his dubious past and offered him the top scientist job at the new Plum Island laboratory—not once, but twice. Just months after the 1952 public hearings on selecting Plum Island, Doc Shahan dialed Dr. Traub at the naval laboratory to discuss plans for establishing the germ laboratory and a position on Plum Island.

Six years later—and only two years after [Dr. Erich Traub] squirmed in his seat at the Plum Island dedication ceremonies—senior scientist Dr. Jacob Traum retired. The USDA needed someone of “outstanding caliber, with a long established reputation, internationally as well as nationally,” to fill Dr. Traum’s shoes. But somehow it couldn’t find a suitable American. “As a last resort it is now proposed that a foreigner be employed.” The aggies’ choice? [Dr. Erich Traub], who was in their view “the most desirable candidate from any source.” The 1958 secret USDA memorandum “Justification for Employment of Dr. Erich Traub” conveniently omitted his World War II activities; but it did emphasize that “his originality, scientific abilities, and general competence as an investigator” were developed at the Rockefeller Institute in New Jersey in the 1930s.

The letters supporting [Dr. Erich Traub] to lead Plum Island came in from fellow Plum Island founders. “I hope that every effort will be made to get him. He has had long and productive experience in both prewar and postwar Germany,” said [Dr. William Arthur Hagan (born 1893)] Dr. William Hagan, dean of the Cornell University veterinary school, carefully dispensing with his wartime activities. The final word came from his dear American friend and old Rockefeller Institute boss [Dr. Richard Edwin Shope (born 1901)], who described Traub as “careful, skillful, productive, and very original” and “one of this world’s most outstanding virologists.” Shope’s sole reference to Traub at war: “During the war he was in Germany serving in the German Army.”

Declining the USDA’s offer, [Dr. Erich Traub] continued his directorship of the Tübingen laboratory in West Germany, though he visited Plum Island frequently. In 1960, he was forced to resign as Tübingen’s director under a dark cloud of financial embezzlement. Traub continued sporadic lab research for another three years, and then left Tübingen for good—a scandalous end to a checkered career. In the late 1970s, the esteemed virologist [Dr. Robert Ellis Shope (born 1929)], on business in Munich, paid his father Richard’s old Rockefeller Institute disciple a visit. The germ warrior had been in early retirement for about a decade by then. “I had dinner with Traub one day— out of old time’s sake—and he was a pretty defeated man by then.” On May 18, 1985, the Nazis’ virus warrior [Dr. Erich Traub] died unexpectedly in his sleep in West Germany. He was seventy-eight years old.

A biological warfare mercenary who worked under three flags—Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States—[Dr. Erich Traub] was never investigated for war crimes. He escaped any inquiry into his wartime past. The full extent of his sordid endeavors went with him to his grave.

While America brought a handful of Nazi war criminals to justice, it safeguarded many others in exchange for verses to the new state religion— modern science and espionage. Records detailing a fraction of [Dr. Erich Traub]’s activities are now available to the public, but most are withheld by Army intelligence and the CIA on grounds of national security. But there’s enough of a glimpse to draw quite a sketch.

[...]

Pages 13 - 16

Attorney John Loftus was hired in 1979 by the Office of Special Investigations, a unit set up by the Justice Department to expose Nazi war crimes and unearth Nazis hiding in the United States. Given top-secret clearance to review files that had been sealed for thirty-five years, Loftus found a treasure trove of information on America’s postwar Nazi recruiting. In 1982, publicly challenging the government’s complacency with the wrongdoing, he told 60 Minutes that top Nazi officers had been protected and harbored in America by the CIA and the State Department.

“They got the Emmy Award,” Loftus wrote. “My family got the death threats.”

Old spies reached out to him after the publication of his book, The Belarus Secret, encouraged that he—unlike other authors—submitted his manuscript to the government, agreeing to censor portions to protect national security. The spooks gave him copies of secret documents and told him stories of clandestine operations. From these leads, Loftus ferreted out the dubious Nazi past of Austrian president and U.N. secretary general Kurt Waldheim. Loftus revealed that during World War II, Waldheim had been an officer in a German Army unit that committed atrocities in Yugoslavia. A disgraced Kurt Waldheim faded from the international scene soon thereafter.

In the preface of The Belarus Secret, Loftus laid out a striking piece of information gleaned from his spy network:

• Even more disturbing are the records of the Nazi germ warfare scientists who came to America. They experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread rare diseases. I have received some information suggesting that the U.S. tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range off the coast of Connecticut during the early 1950s. . . . Most of the germ warfare records have been shredded, but there is a top secret U.S. document confirming that “clandestine attacks on crops and animals” took place at this time.

[Dr. Erich Traub] had been working for the American biological warfare program from his 1949 Soviet escape until 1953. We know he consulted with Fort Detrick scientists and CIA operatives; that he worked for the USDA for a brief stint; and that he spoke regularly with Plum Island director Doc Shahan in 1952. Traub can be physically placed on Plum Island at least three times—on dedication day in 1956 and two visits, once in 1957 and again in the spring of 1958. Shahan, who enforced an ultrastrict policy against outside visitors, each time received special clearance from the State Department to allow [Dr. Erich Traub] on Plum Island soil.

Research unearthed three USDA files from the vault of the National Archives—two were labeled TICK RESEARCH and a third E. TRAUB. All three folders were empty. The caked-on dust confirms the file boxes hadn’t been open since the moment before they were taped shut in the 1950s.

Preposterous as it sounds, clandestine outdoor germ warfare trials were almost routine during this period. In 1952, the Joint Chiefs of Staff called for a “vigorous, well-planned, large-scale [biological warfare] test program . . . with all interested agencies participating.” A top-secret letter to the secretary of defense later that year stated, “Steps should be taken to make certain adequate facilities are available, including those at Fort Detrick, Dugway Proving Ground, Fort Terry (Plum Island) and an island field testing area.” Was Plum Island the island field testing area? Indeed, when the Army first scouted Plum Island for its Cold War designs, they charted wind speeds and direction and found that, much to their liking, the prevailing winds blew out to sea.

One of the participating “interested agencies” was the USDA, which admittedly set up large plots of land throughout the Midwest for airborne anticrop germ spray tests. Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division ran “vulnerability tests” in which operatives walked around Washington, D.C., and San Francisco with suitcases holding Serratia marcescens—a bacteria recommended to Fort Detrick by [Dr. Erich Traub]’s nominal supervisor, Nazi germ czar and Nuremberg defendant [Dr. Kurt Blome (born 1894)]. Tiny perforations allowed the germs’ release so they could trace the flow of the germs through airports and bus terminals. Shortly thereafter, eleven elderly men and women checked into hospitals with never-before-seen Serratia marcescens infections. One patient died. Decades later when the germ tests were disclosed, the Army denied responsibility. A Department of Defense report later admitted the germ was “an opportunistic pathogen . . . causing infections of the endocardium, blood, wounds, and urinary and respiratory tracts.” In the summer of 1966, Special Operations men walked into three New York City subway stations and tossed lightbulbs filled with Bacillus subtilis, a benign bacteria, onto the tracks. The subway trains pushed the germs through the entire system and theoretically killed over a million passengers. Tests were also run with live, virulent, anti-animal germ agents. Two hogcholera bombs were exploded at an altitude of 1,500 feet over pigpens set up at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. And turkey feathers laced with Newcastle disease virus were dropped on animals grazing on a University of Wisconsin farm. {Footnote : Traub likely developed the standardized Newcastle disease virus placed on the biological cluster bomb by concentrating the germ in chicken blood while he was working at the Naval Medical Research Institute for Project PAPERCLIP. }

The Army never fully withdrew its germ warfare efforts against food animals. Two years after the Army gave Plum Island to the USDA—and three years after it told President Eisenhower it had ended all biological warfare against food animals—the Joint Chiefs advised that “research on anti-animal agent-munition combinations should” continue, as well as “field testing of anti-food agent munition combinations. . . .” In November 1957, military intelligence examined the elimination of the food supply of the Sino-Soviet Bloc, right down to the calories required for victory:

• In order to have a crippling effect on the economy of the USSR, the food and animal crop resources of the USSR would have to be damaged within a single growing season to the extent necessary to reduce the present average daily caloric intake from 2,800 calories to 1,400 calories; i.e., the starvation level. Reduction of food resources to this level, if maintained for twelve months, would produce 20 percent fatalities, and would decrease manual labor performance by 95 percent and clerical and light labor performance by 80 percent.

At least six outdoor stockyard tests occurred in 1964–65. Simulants were sprayed into stockyards in Fort Worth, Kansas City, St. Paul, Sioux Falls, and Omaha in tests determining how much foot-and-mouth disease virus would be required to destroy the food supply.

Had the Army commandeered Plum Island for an outdoor trial? Maybe the USDA lent a hand with the trial, as it had done out west by furnishing the large test fields. After all, the Plum Island agreement between the Army and the USDA allowed the Army to borrow the island from the USDA when necessary and in the national interest.

[Dr. Erich Traub] might have monitored the tests. A source who worked on Plum Island in the 1950s recalls that animal handlers and a scientist released ticks outdoors on the island. “They called him the Nazi scientist, when they came in, in 1951—they were inoculating these ticks,” and a picture he once saw “shows the animal handler pointing to the area on Plum where they released the ticks.” Dr. Traub’s World War II handiwork consisted of aerial virus sprays developed on Insel Riems and tested over occupied Russia, and of field work for Heinrich Himmler in Turkey. Indeed, his colleagues conducted bug trials by dropping live beetles from planes. An outdoor tick trial would have been de rigueur for Erich Traub.

[...]

Pages 41 - 43

A few years before the Plum Island Animal Disease Center’s dedication day in 1956, the United States launched its first biological warfare program. A glimpse into the past reveals a surprising truth: Plum Island wasn’t exactly what it appeared to be to the public.

The gory details were kept secret at the time, but America’s germ warfare goals—national defense—were heralded by the nation’s leaders and press. A New York Times editorial in 1945 mused, “When the scientific story of the war is written, we have here an epic that rivals that of the atomic bomb.” The paper was right. A few months after the United States demonstrated its atomic warfare prowess on Japan, it announced the development of a second weapon: killer microscopic germs. While forty-five people participated in the British biological warfare effort, the American version involved four thousand men and women. The Army ran the innocuously titled “War Research Service” (WRS) program at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. Civilian chemist George W. Merck [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Merck ] directed the work, advised by scientists from the nation’s top universities.

These men were motivated by the threats of the times. In ways, they were no different from the atomic fathers Einstein and Oppenheimer. Theodor Rosebury, a Columbia University microbiologist who worked on the WRS projects, said, “We resolved the ethical question just as other equally good men resolved the same question at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos.”

The aims of the biological warfare program didn’t trouble Dr. Albert Webb, a Fort Detrick scientist in the early years. “That aspect never worried me personally. People had been killing people for millennia. Whether you hit him over the head with a club, stab him with a spear, or give him a disease he might get anyway—let’s not balk at that.” One has to look at the whole picture and understand the enemy of the time, says Webb. “We knew other nations, Germany and Japan—and Russia—were working on this, and in self-defense, we had to know what the potential was. Maybe it’s not a popular thought today, but I still feel that it was necessary.”

Dr. Edwin Fred, Dr. Webb’s ultimate boss and the patriarch of WRS, was a veterinarian, as were Merck’s top aide, Colonel Arvo Thompson, Fort Detrick founder Dr. Ira Baldwin, and [Dr. William Arthur Hagan (born 1893)] (who, in addition to spawning Plum Island along with [Dr. Erich Traub], helped Baldwin establish Fort Detrick). Like MDs, they were trained in infectious disease. But unlike their medical counterparts, the vets weren’t ethically bound by an oath that began: “First, do no harm. . . .” Dr. Webb recalled the mind-sets of the two branches of medicine. “The MDs had this unresolved medical conflict—they weren’t supposed to help kill people. Vets, I think, were much more ready than MDs,” he says. “There’s obviously not the same feelings about the death of their subjects. The mass killing of animals for food is an accepted part of our culture.” Unlikely as it seems, the veterinarian was ideally suited for germ warfare research and development.

Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, a proud isolationism combined with the belief that biological warfare was pure fantasy left the United States woefully unprepared for—and fully exposed to—a real threat. Britain, Canada, Germany, Russia, Japan, and France had initiated germ warfare programs decades earlier. But America made up for the lost time. By war’s end it built the largest and most advanced program of them all.

War Research Service launched “Project No. 1” in 1942. [Dr. William Arthur Hagan (born 1893)] was chosen to take the lead. Dean of the Cornell University Veterinary College, Dr. Hagan was an expert on Bacillus anthracis, or anthrax, a disease of sheep and cattle. Also known as woolsorter’s disease, because the germ occasionally infected people shearing wool off sheep, it was a rare human affliction—but an exceptionally lethal one. Merck thought it would make a superb bioweapon and commissioned it as WRS’s first priority. Anthrax is virulent, but it carries a minimal threat of a boomerang because it is not contagious person to person.

[Dr. William Arthur Hagan (born 1893)] tested many sample strains of anthrax (which WRS codenamed “N”) in a four-foot-tall glass apparatus called a vinegar tower. Under the right conditions, anthrax rolls up into a ball and hibernates, or spores, and becomes resistant to threatening environmental conditions like cold temperatures. When returned to a hospitable environment, the hardy spores unfold and come back to life. Hagan found that Strain No. 99 sporulated and retained its high pathogenicity, or ability to spread disease. Dr. Hagan concentrated, purified, and dried Strain No. 99 into enough powder to make a biological bomb. In a small lab in Ithaca, New York, in 1943, Dr. Hagan created the most virulent, concentrated brand of anthrax on Earth. Anthrax became the most important biological agent developed by the American biological warfare program, and Hagan gained the dubious title of the father of weapons-grade anthrax. Late in the war, Great Britain requested samples of Hagan’s anthrax, naming it “Hagan’s Best.”

After the war, [Dr. William Arthur Hagan (born 1893)] became a driving force behind Plum Island’s creation (Nazi germ warfare scientist [Dr. Erich Traub] would be the other). He used his clout with Congress, the Army, and the USDA to lead the charge for an island virus laboratory. He inspected Plum Island personally and lent his imprimatur to its selection. Upon its inauguration, Hagan bequeathed to the island twelve vials of “N,” enough to kill about a million people, considering it takes between 4,500 and 8,000 organisms to cause an infection. To this day, Plum Island denies ever hosting anthrax or working with it, though a now-declassified catalog of deadly germs imported to Plum Island in the early 1950s clearly shows that twelve vials of “N” have been kept in its freezers since the very beginning.

Presumably, [Dr. William Arthur Hagan (born 1893)] believed strongly that his secret wartime research would contribute to a greater good. However, the consequences of “Hagan’s Best”—particularly in light of the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks— call into question that belief.

[...]

Page 55

Days before, Greenporters had noticed an uncommon buzz along Main Street—strangers darting in and out of shops, eating and drinking heartily at Claudio’s and the clam bar out on the pier. Some had distinctive southern and western accents. Others spoke in foreign tongues. But all wore expressions of great anticipation. Locals opened their spare rooms, recently vacated at summer’s end, to welcome them. A special ferry was arranged with the New London Freight Lines; the massive LSM transport craft that landed amphibious battalions on the shores of Okinawa during World War II a decade earlier would now land on Plum Island an excited throng of general public and VIPs. Plum Island scientists wearing patriotic red, white, and blue badges pinned to their lapels escorted local residents around the island and inside the heralded chalk-white laboratory. Members of local civic organizations came, too, from the Rotary Club, the Minnepaug Club, and the Southold Tuesday Morning Club, as did national agricultural associations and high school science teachers with their classes in tow.

Master of ceremonies was new Plum Island Director Doc Shahan— smartly dressed in a sharp two-button black suit, crisp white shirt, diagonally striped thin tie, and a handkerchief ironed into a square that peeked out of his breast pocket. Sitting in front of him, in the roped-off seating areas up front, were the VIPs: Plum Island’s founding father, [Dr. William Arthur Hagan (born 1893)]; the island’s former commanding officer, Army Colonel Donald Mace; top military brass from Fort Detrick, Maryland; and finally a slew of European research scientists. Among them was the director of West Germany’s new State Research Laboratory at Tübingen, [Dr. Erich Traub].

[...] This scientific discovery which underlies chronic disease was actually discovered by German researcher Erich Traub starting in 1936 with the virus of Lymphocytic Choriomeningitis Virus (LCM), but his contribution was not publicized or credited to Traub, it was instead given to other scientists having to do with something more obscure. [2] This was an act that would bring untold suffering and unnecessary harm for future generations, because it was at this point that science and public health began to turn their backs on a large portion of immunology and one-half of the entire spectrum of disease- chronic disease- and medical progress has been moving nearly in reverse ever since. [3] [...] This act of denying the infectious processes of immune tolerance many years ago, was a pivotal moment in which profiteering and ego became more important than the easing of human suffering, because if the science of immune tolerance had been acknowledged for what it was and the implications that it implied, those in the established science and public health systems would have been forced to rethink the entire paradigm of immunology, vaccination, inflammation, and the very nature of disease itself. This would indicate that the act was done, not just because of the controversial background of its German pioneer, Erich Traub, but because of conflicts of interest involving profiteering and the reputation of establishment science and Big Pharma.

Immune Tolerance, as I will show, is the term that denotes the condition that underlies most if not all of chronic disease, a relapsing/remitting yet progressive condition that ties autoimmune conditions, genetic disorders, endless syndromes, and mental illness to para-infectious mechanisms, through a disrupted immune system and neurotropism, by the proliferation and persistence of a disseminated viral syndrome, where latent viruses already present in the body will reactivate and turn on the body, making the bulk of the condition itself. [5] [6] [7] [8] It is akin to turning one’s own microbiome against itself, and no doubt, it is why so many people have so much trouble getting well. [9] This process and proliferation of antigen makes it hard to absorb and take in nutrients, oxygen, and the like, [10] because there is a state of balanced parasitism, and the person will tend to operate at a very low capacity, being malnourished and highly diminished vitality. It is like being somewhat choked out or suffocated at the cellular level. [11]

Immune tolerance will often present without any outward symptoms, but the effect is still damaging due to the parasitic nature of the para-infectious invasion which remains in the body, and active infection can be entirely present without antibodies. [12] Oftentimes this balanced parasitism will turn in favor of the parasitism of virus and antigen. Erich Traub and his mentor Karl Beller noted this in his studies of an AIDS virus of horses, Equine Infectious Anemia Virus (EIA), and the resultant condition was not a true immunity:

It is therefore very questionable whether this is a true immunity. The term "prämunity", which originates from French and becomes more and more natural in German terminology, would probably be more appropriate here. In human and animal protozoal diseases, after the survival of the clinical phenomena existing equilibrium state between parasite and organism, in which the latter is usually resistant to a new infection. Due to damaging influences on the body, this state of equilibrium can change in favor of the parasite. Similar observations were made in [infectious anemia]. [13]

As a result of this truly immoral act of burying the science of immune tolerance, a harmful butterfly effect would take root and branch into every facet of life, every angle of health would be significantly affected, to such an extent that it would change the course of history in untold, unprecedented ways. [14] This fraud would have a cumulative effect that would only grow in intensity over the years, each decade would become more unstable, and to cover these tracks, more unsound explanations would have to be layered over it, and the more out of line with Truth reality became, the more chaotic and unstable its consequences would follow in public health. If there is any hope of fixing this diabolical treason, we must revisit the past, and recall the events in which it took root...

Traub’s Discovery of Immune Tolerance

In 1935, a German student studying on a scholarship at the Rockefeller Institute, Erich Traub, was studying the reactivation of latent viruses in equine encephalomyelitis and swine fever virus (hog cholera), [15] after transmission studies with Richard Shope in Iowa on the pseudorabies virus, a swine herpesvirus unrelated to rabies, [16] after which Traub began a series of experiments in mice, where he was attempting to reactivate a latent virus to cause an epidemic in the mouse colony at the Institute. He injected the mice intracerebrally with foreign proteins or antigen suspended in sterile bouillon, and within short order, an outbreak ensued and infected most of the other mice in the colony, though they all had been otherwise healthy mice before the experiment:

• During recent work with the viruses of equine encephalomyelitis and hog cholera an infective agent was obtained from white mice which was pathologically and serologically distinct from both viruses. Its origin was not definitely known, but it seemed likely that the natural host of the agent was the mouse, in spite of the fact that in our mouse colony no disease had been previously recognized. In an experiment designed to trace the origin of the infectious agent, 60 five-week-old, healthy-looking mice from our colony were each given an intracerebral injection of a small amount of sterile bouillon. Fifty-one of these mice showed no evidence of illness during the three weeks that they were under observation. Four died in from 3 to 13 days following the inoculation, and three were killed on from the sixth to the eighth day when they showed symptoms similar to those observed in the mice inoculated with the unknown agent. On the sixth day two additional mice that showed photophobia but no other symptoms were killed. From one of these mice no material was obtained for inoculation, but bacteriologically sterile suspensions of the brain of each of the other eight when injected into guinea-pigs caused symptoms which could not be differentiated from those produced by the original material. This experiment, together with others, suggests that the infectious agent is carried by apparently healthy mice in our colony and that symptoms may be brought out by the intracerebral injection of foreign protein. [17]

The outbreak, however, was not just restricted to the mice, because soon some of the lab technicians and animal keepers contracted the virus and had to be hospitalized, infected with this new virus, which they called Lymphocytic Choriomeningitis Virus (LCM):

• In 1935 an epidemic of meningitis of a special type (acute lymphocytic choriomeningitis) broke out in the mouse colony in Princeton. Erich Traub recovered a virus to which he gave several years of intensive study before he left the Institute in 1938. [Interestingly], one of the Princeton staff contracted this disease during the mouse epidemic and was studied at The Rockefeller Institute Hospital by T.M. Rivers and T.F.M. Scott, who isolated from him a filtrable agent identical with Traub’s. Traub’s observations show that the mouse is the natural host of this potentially serious infection, which, fortunately, only occasionally causes illness in human beings. The virus, kept alive in mice by healthy carriers, is acquired by infant mice from their mother while still in utero or shortly after birth. Usually remaining latent, like many other viruses it is occasionally awakened to virulence by some accidental circumstance, causing a disease which spreads with epidemic rapidity. [18]

This was transmissible and able to spread from animal to human. Traub studied this virus in the colony for several years and noted its persistence in the colony, establishing acute and chronic infections, which set the discovery of immune tolerance in 1936. [19] He noted congenital transmission from mother to newborn, where the virus would persist and become increasingly more silent in the colonies, [20] but later in life the infected stock would present with blood cancers and leukemia, [21] as well as chronic, progressive neurodegenerative diseases in what was later termed early and late onset disease, [22] resembling debilitating chronic conditions that progressively destroyed the central nervous systems of these mice as they got older. [23] The study would be some of the early models of progressive neurodegenerative chronic diseases which would later become so prevalent in Western countries. [24]

Traub’s seminal work on LCM virus became the model of an immunosuppressive, relapsing chronic disease, which would become so prevalent in Western societies in later generations. It was termed immune tolerance, in that the body’s immune system was not immune to the virus, as in actively neutralizing it, but rather tolerized to the virus, meaning it would not respond to it, little to no antibodies would be produced after the initial infection, and the virus would be able to continue its replication and spread, establishing in the infected subject a slow-virus disease. [25] The slow-virus disease meant that the disease took a much slower, chronic course. The mother would transmit the virus to the young, and the young would be born tolerized to the virus, not showing outward symptoms but having a slow, chronic infection which later in life would turn to chronic disease and result in neurodegeneration, lymphomatosis and cancers. [26] [27]

Traub noticed that antibodies were minimal in the infected colonies, even though they were carriers and shedders of active virus. However, when the rest of the stock was more or less immune tolerant, it would be hard to tell this was the case, but the effect could be spotted if these mice were put into an uninfected colony. [28] Another phenomenon observed in the infected stock, was that the virus only remained in the blood for several weeks and then disappeared from the blood, taking to organ, tissues, brain, and some of the secretions and excretions. [29]

[...]

One of Traub’s protégés in Germany, Zvonimir Dinter, writing in a later article submitted to the German medical journal Berliner und Münchener tierärztliche Wochenschrift in 1984, told his experience working with Traub, and suggested that he should have been part of the Nobel Prize for his discovery of immune tolerance in LCM virus:

• Traub, "who started the whole thing." The TRAUB's lived on Riems in a mansion when I entered the villa, it was already twilight, you could hear the monotonous splashing of the Baltic Sea, it was a mood where memories are easily awakened. After coffee with cake, TRAUB told me how he came to the US when [Dr. Richard Edwin Shope (born 1901)], the famous virologist from the Rockefeller Institute, spent his time in Giessen, among other places, in the early 1930s. Zwick's work on the Borna Disease attracted researchers who poured in... like TRAUB, who was already considered a student proficient in English, to SHOPE he was assigned as a language facilitator. SHOPE soon saw TRAUB's interest and talent in viral research and invited him to the Rockefeller Institute. Shope was right in his assumption. Much later (1959), he told me himself.

• TRAUB's talent soon starts after he began research at Princeton, the Rockefeller Institute branch. The topic to which he dedicated his work in the first place was the behavior of the mouse lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus. A number of communications that began in Science and continued in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, and which are generally regarded as classical today, since "... many pioneering series of investigations in many of the key biological properties of the virus were established. "(1) When BURNET and MEDAWAR received the Nobel Prize in 1960 for their seminal immunological work, I, as a veterinarian and TRAUB’s employee, would have liked to see that he, too, had participated in the prize because what TRAUB already described in 1936 and 1939, was the mode of origin of the condition, which was later baptized with "immune tolerance" and which represented a pillar of Burnet's clone-selective theory (2). The American researcher HOTCHIN has appreciated TRAUB's dedication by giving him his monograph with the words: "To ERIC TRAUB who started the whole thing" (3). [148]

The condition and its process would also be increasingly more complex as vaccinations were stacked on top of those already dealing with one or several chronic viral infections congenitally transmitted from mother to newborn, with no outward signs of disease upon birth, tolerized to virus, yet the effect of infection in the lifetime of that individual would be cumulative, [149] with early and late onset disease, [150] while the increasing number of vaccines given in the schedule adds infinitely more burden to an already confused and exhausted immune system, [151] it is akin to trying to put a fire out with gasoline. Many people today can think of several families with autistic or mentally ill children, and the effect on a nation, if such angles were used in special weapons of bioterrorism geared for strategic, long-term attacks, a target country would be plagued by chronic health problems and mental illness, with failure to detect infection, and simply labelled ‘somatoform’ or ‘mentally ill’ with no infectious disease, [152] yet was very likely dealing with one or several infections. The course of disease by the immune tolerance complex would present only general similarities between subjects, with different courses and outcomes for each. [153] The result could be so various that the condition is grouped into many separate conditions between physical and mental health, leaving health practitioners and public health systems little to no understanding of the causal factors of immune tolerance and neurotropism.

The effect on mental health would present with varying degrees and combinations of neurotropism and damage to the brain, [154] expressing mood swings, lack of organization and cognitive abilities, irritability, rage, senseless acts of violence, irrational behaviors, lowered inhibitions resulting in an increase in criminal activity or deranged behavior, such that is very common in the headlines of Western nations today. [155] Simply put, to target the brain of a population would affect the societal structure as a whole, because the chaos of one effects the many, and when large numbers of unstable citizens with unpredictable and irrational or violent behaviors from neurotropic infections of the brain and CNS are scattered throughout its society presenting in this manner, [156] that is, infections passing congenitally through generations gaining more momentum in the subsequent generations infected, [157] the implications are systemic and far-reaching, tearing at the fabric of the society itself, as we are seeing the effects today, with Western countries leading in chronic disease and mental illnesses. [158] [159]

[...]

In the words of Dr. Erich Traub’s protégé, Werner Schafer, a telling revelation spoken at a conference for the Office of Naval Research in Kansas in 1962 may once again hold the key to understanding the situation, albeit through the overtones of unbelievable irony:

• I hope I have been able to demonstrate that the concentrated action of our group on a very small sector of animal virology was not quite unsuccessful but has created at least some ideas of possibly a more general importance for the fight against virus diseases. At the present time, when concentrated scientific activity is often directed toward the destruction and not toward the preservation of life, one might fear that the phrase "concentration is the prudence of life" will someday be inverted into "concentration is the stupidity of life." To avoid such an occurrence, scientific workers all over the world would do well to return to the ethics of the stoicist Seneca, who noted in his Naturales Quaestiones that "by exploration of the facts natural sciences base the moral life of man on a solid foundation; they liberate him from fear and let him recognize the glory and magnitude of divine creation."

- Dr. Werner Schäfer, ONR lecture, presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, Kansas City, Mo., 6 May 1962. [202]