![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article summarizes published and archival information about Imperial Germany’s attempts to infect draft animals in some Allied and neutral countries with anthrax and glanders during World War I. It casts doubt on claims that the Isle of Man was among the places affected. It considers the extent to which contemporary terrorist activity more closely resembles German biological sabotage plots than it does most modern state weapons-of-mass-destruction programs.
Notes
1 Erhard Geißler, “Anwendung von Suechenmitteln gegen Menschen nicht erwünscht” [Use of epidemic agents against human beings not welcome], Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, Vol. 56, No. 2 (1997), pp. 107—55; Erhard Geißler, Biologische Waffen—nicht in Hitlers Arsenalen. Biologische und Toxin-Kampfmittel in Deutschland von 1915 bis 1945 [Biological weapons—not in Hitler’s arsenals. Biological and toxin weapons in Germany from 1915 to 1945] (Münster: LIT Verlag, 1998) ; David Hamlin, “Disease, Microbiology, and the Construction of a Colonial Space: Romania and the Central Powers in the First World War,” War and Society, Vol. 36 (2017), pp. 31–43.
2 Thomas Boghardt, Spies of the Kaiser German covert operations in Great Britain during the First World War Era (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 131–34 ; Chris Northcott, MI5 at War 1909–1918: How MI5 Foiled the Spies of the Kaiser in the First World War (Ticehurst, UK: Tattered Flag Press, 2015), p. 195. The file is HO 45/10839/333624, in the TNA (Kew). About fifty pages long, it comprises interdepartmental correspondence involving the Home Office, MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service, the Horse Guards (GHQ Home Forces), Naval Intelligence, the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, the Metropolitan Police and other police forces, a firm of analytical chemists who were consultants to the Home Office, and the Isle of Man Lieutenant Governor’s office.
3 Mark Wheelis, letter, Nature, September 17, 1998, p. 213 ; Mark Wheelis, “Biological Sabotage in World War 1,” in Erhard Geissler and John Ellis van Courtland Moon, eds., Biological and Toxin Weapons: Research, Development and Use from the Middle Ages to 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 35–62 ; Martin Hugh-Jones, “Wickham Steed and German Biological Warfare Research,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1992), pp. 381–83 ; W. Seth Carus, Bioterrorism and Biocrimes: The Illicit Use of Biological Agents since 1900 (Washington, DC: Center for Counterproliferation Research, National Defense University, 2001), pp. 69–70 . Carl Troester (1856–1928) was an expert on glanders research and during the First World War was responsible for all vaccine supplies obtained from horse serum; see Robert Koenig, The Fourth Horseman: One Man’s Mission to Wage the Great War in America (New York: Public Affairs, 2006); Alexander Kast, “Contributions to German–Japanese Medical Relations, III: Carl Troester, a Horse Doctor in Tokyo 1880–83,” Acta med-hist Adriat, Vol 3, No. 1 (2005), pp. 59–76.
4 For example, Malcolm Dando, Bioterror and Biowarfare (New York: Rosen, 2009), p. 25; Neil Davison, “The Role of Scientific Discovery in the Establishment of the First Biological Weapons Programmes ,” Bradford Project on Strengthening the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, Science and Technology Report No. 5, 2005, pp. 9–10, <https://bradscholars.brad.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10454/711/ST_Report_No_5.pdf?sequence=1>; Piers D. Millett and Simon M. Whitby, “State Agro-BW Programs,” in Jason Pate and Gavin Cameron, eds., Agro-Terrorism: What Is The Threat? (Livermore, CA: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, University of California, 2003); Russ Zajtchuk, ed., Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare. Textbook of Military Medicine (: Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, 1997), chapters 2 and 18; British Medical Association, Biotechnology, Weapons and Humanity (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999), pp. 11–13.
5 For example, see the United Kingdom’s National Risk Register (London: Cabinet Office, 2020), pp. 5, 28–29, <https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/61934/national_risk_register.pdf>; Nick Bostrom and Milan M. ćircović, eds., Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), chapters 18–20; Peter Hennessy, Distilling the Frenzy: Writing a History of One’s Own Times (London: Biteback, 2012), pp. 34–36.
6 See, e.g., L.D. Haber, The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Jonathan B. Tucker, War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to al-Qaeda (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006); Jean Pascal Zanders, Innocence Slaughtered: Gas and the Transformation of Warfare and Society (London: Uniform Press, 2016).
7 The WMD literature is of course too massive to seek to summarize here, but UK and US assessments of several states’ programmes are summarized in the Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction: Report of a Committee of Privy Counsellors (London: Stationery Office, 2004)—generally known as the “Butler Report,” and The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction: Report to the President of the United States, March 31, 2005 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2005). Both reports also summarize information about al-Qaeda.
8 Wheelis, “Biological Sabotage,” p. 36; Boghardt, Spies of the Kaiser, p. 131.
9 TNA, KV 3/383, serial 18a, with my emphasis: a 1947 US Navy report TA/A/35 on “The setting up of the Etappe,” p. 6. (KV 3/383—3/384 are MI5’s file on Germany’s Etappe service.) This is presumably at least part of what led Christopher Andrew to write, in The Defence of the Realm (London: Allen Lane, 2009), “German naval documents captured after the Second World War revealed that plans to set up a shipping agency as a cover for intelligence operations which included the contamination and poisoning of cargoes bound for enemy ports had begun before the First World War” (p. 79, n. 118).
10 For example, Jennifer Jenkins, “Fritz Fischer’s ‘Programme for Revolution’: Implications for a Global History of Germany in the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 48, No. 2 (2013), p. 407; Wheelis, “Biological Sabotage,” pp. 58–59.
11 Hugh-Jones, “Wickham Steed and German Biological Warfare Research,” p. 383.
12 Modern accounts include: Carus, Bioterrorism and Biocrimes, pp. 60–70; Jules Witcover, Sabotage at Black Tom: Imperial Germany’s Secret War in America 1914–1917 (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1989), pp. 136–37, 238, 247–49; Koenig, The Fourth Horseman, pp. 307–20; Howard Blum, Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany’s Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America (New York: Harper Collins, 2014), pp. 266–72, 351–57, 375–88, 403–10; Kurt Link, Understanding New, Resurgent, and Resistant Diseases: How Man and Globalization Create and Spread Illness (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), p. 91.
13 Hamlin, “Disease, Microbiology, and the Construction of a Colonial Space” ; Claudiu-Lucian Topor, “A Forewarning of a Massacre in the Antechamber of War? The German Legation in Bucharest and the Diplomatic Scandal of the ‘Microbes’ (1916),” 2014, <http://history.uaic.ro/ research/foreigndiplomats/downloads/ForeignDiplomats_Topor_Sarajevo-2014_paper.pdf>. See also Charles J. Vopicka, Secrets of the Balkans: Seven Years of a Diplomatist’s Life in the Storm Center of Europe (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1921), chapter 11, <https://archive.org/stream/secretsofbalkans00vopi/secretsofbalkans00vopi_djvu.txt>. Vopicka was US ambassador to Romania, Serbia, and Bulgaria. Examples of contemporary media coverage are New York Times, “Directions in German Found in the Buried Box of Microbes left in Legation Garden at Bucharest,” September 24, 1917, <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9D04E5D8103AE433A25757C2A96F9C946696D6CF&legacy=true>); The Times, “German Poison Plot in Rumania,” October 10, 1916; The Times, “Plot against Romania,” September 24, 1917; both transcribed at <http://1914-1918.invisionzone.com/forums/index.php?/topic/185117-glanders-germ-warfare/>).
14 For example, Hugh-Jones, “Wickham Steed and German Biological Warfare Research,” p. 381.
15 [Arnold Toynbee,] Microbe-Culture at Bukarest: Discoveries at the German Legation. From the Rumanian Official Documents (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1917), <https://archive.org/stream/microbecultureat00roma_0/microbecultureat00roma_0_djvu.txt>; Erik Goldstein, “The Foreign Office and Political Intelligence 1918–20,” Review of International Studies, Vol. 14, No. 4 (1988), reveals the pamphlet’s authorship.
16 Wheelis, “Biological Sabotage in World War I,” pp. 46–50.
17 Alan Judd, The Quest for “C”: Mansfield Cumming and the Founding of the Secret Service (London: HarperCollins, 1999), pp. 93, 126; Michael Smith, Six: A History of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. Volume 1, Murder and Mayhem 1909–1939 (London: Biteback, 2010), pp. 129–30. Under pressure from the Swedish ambassador, the Norwegians released von Rosen before the full extent of what he had done was known, so he did not face legal action in Norway (TNA, FO 491/31 [“Norway: Annual Reports, 1906–1968”], Sir M. Finlay to Earl Balfour, June 22, 1922: paragraphs 51–57 describe the von Rosen incident and detail the horse- and reindeer-drawn trade from Britain across Norway to Russia which it was intended to disrupt).
18 J. Glenn Songer and Karen Post, Veterinary Microbiology: Bacterial and Fungal Agents of Disease (St. Louis: Saunders, 2004). See also the website of Jamie Bisher <http://anthrax1916.weebly.com/> for a detailed description of the von Rosen case.
19 Caroline Redmond, Martin J. Pearce, Richard J. Manchee, and Bjorn P. Berdal, “Deadly Relic of the Great War,” Nature, June 25, 1998, pp. 747–48; M.H. Antwerpen, J.W. Sahl, D. Birdsell, T. Pearson, M.J. Pearce, C. Redmond, H. Meyer, and P.S. Keim, “Unexpected Relations of Historical Anthrax Strain,” American Society for Microbiology, April 25, 2017 (mBio 8:2, March/April 2017).
20 HO 45/10839/333624, cutting from The Times of September 3, 1917. This file also contains other wartime press cuttings about German BW plots, plus extracts from a series of—fictional—articles by the bestselling spy-scare novelist William Le Queux (1864–1927).
21 Mark Wheelis, letter, Nature 395, September 17, 1998, p. 213. Some secret German telegrams relating to Argentina were published in W. Reginald Hall and Amos J. Peaslee, Three Wars with Germany (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1944). Surviving wartime British Admiralty and Room 40 files covering the U-boat reportedly intended to transport materials intended for Argentina, U-35, contain no reporting about this aspect of her history (TNA, ADM 1/8461/155; ADM 137/3883; HW 7/1 to 7/3; HW 7/27).
22 Patrick Beesly, Room 40 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982), pp. 201–02; James Wyllie and Michael McKinley, Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team that Changed the Course of the First World War (London: Ebury Press, 2015), p. 135.
23 Philip Vickers, ed., A Clear Case of Genius: Room 40’s Code-Breaking Pioneer Admiral Sir Reginald “Blinker” Hall (Stroud: History Press, 2017), p. 41. Hall wrote his autobiography in 1923 but most of its text was destroyed; only a few chapters survived to be published.
24 Hall and Peaslee, Three Wars with Germany, p. 85. (This book includes transcripts of incriminating German telegrams, decrypted during the war by the Admiralty’s Room 40 and shared by Hall with Peaslee in the 1920s, when Peaslee was a lawyer involved in a case about German wartime sabotage. The strange story of Hall’s collaboration with Peaslee is explored in a National Security Agency paper written c. 1960 and declassified in 2012: “The Room 40 Compromise,” DOCID3978516: <https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/nsa-60th-timeline/assets/files/1960s/19600101_1960_Doc_3978516_Room40.pdf.>. See also Wheelis, “Biological Sabotage,” p. 53.
25 Wheelis, “Biological Sabotage,” p. 54.
26 Hugh-Jones, “Wickham Steed and German Biological Warfare Research,” pp. 382–83; see also Wheelis, “Biological Sabotage,” pp. 55–56.
27 TNA, HO 45/10839/333624: attachment to a letter from Assistant Commissioner Basil Thomson to the Home Office, March 30, 1917; letter from the Chief of General Staff, Home Forces, to the Home Office, April 5, 1917. MI5 also reported learning of events in France, but it is not clear from the surviving Home Office file if they had heard direct from the French or via one of the other departments.
28 World War I diaries of [Corporal] Stapleton Tench Eachus, <www.facebook.com/Stapleton.Eachus.War.Diaries/photos/o.82710639034/872566789473802/?type=3.
29 Major W. de B. Wood, ed., The History of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry in the Great War, 1914–1918 (London: Medici Society, 1925), p. 251.
30 AIF 3rd Divisional Signal Company unit war diary for November 1918, <http://1914-1918.invisionzone.com/forums/index.php?/topic/198996-biological-warfare-in-the-great-war/>.
31 TNA, HO 45/10839/333624: letter from the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries to the Government Secretary, Isle of Man, June 1917 , emphasis added.
32 Boghardt, Spies of the Kaiser, p. 134; Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, p. 79; Northcott, MI5 at War, p. 195. The file is HO 45/10839/333624.
33 I am indebted to Isle of Man archival researcher Pat Griffiths for checking the relevant Manx official files and books (email correspondence, April 2018). The official was Bertram Edward Sargeaunt, who worked for the Manx government from 1910 until his retirement as government secretary in 1943. He was the author of Isle of Man and the Great War (Douglas, Isle of Man: Brown, 1920) and A Military History of the Isle of Man (Arbroath, UK: T. Buncle, 1949).
34 Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction for Ireland, “Report of Proceedings under the Diseases of Animals Acts with Returns of the Exports and Imports of Animals for the Year 1917,” <www.dippam.ac.uk/eppi/documents/15943/download>.
35 In World War I, MI9 dealt with postal censorship. (The better-known organization with the same designation in World War II dealt with escape and evasion matters.)
36 TNA, HO 45/10839/333624, undated summary, immediately after a letter from V.G.W. Kell to the Home Office of January 13, 1918.
37 Hall and Peaslee, Three Wars with Germany, pp. 82, 85–87, referring to the United States and Argentina and quoting from some of the intercepted German telegrams; Beesly, Room 40, pp. 200–02, referring to Spain, Argentina, Romania, and Norway; Wyllie and McKinley, Codebreakers, pp. 130, 135, 173–77, 210–11.
38 See, e.g., Wilhelm F. Flicke, War Secrets in the Ether: The Story of German Code-Breaking Successes and Radio-Espionage during and between the World Wars (Walnut Creek, CA: Aegean Press, 1994), chapters 1–11. Flicke worked in German signals intelligence in both World Wars. On German naval sigint, see Keith W. Bird and Captain Jason Hines, “In the Shadow of Ultra: A Reappraisal of German Naval Communications Intelligence in 1914–1918,” The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord, Vol. 28, No. 2 (2018), pp. 97–117.
39 See, e.g., Beesly, Room 40; Hall and Peaslee, Three Wars with Germany. There is Russian émigré memoir literature (e.g., a 1930 talk by the former Naval General Staff codebreaker Captain 2nd Rank V.V. Romanoff, published in 1937), and modern Russian archival research (notably by retired Captain 1st Rank M.A. Partala), making this point, with respect to the Russian Navy. See also, e.g., Thomas R. Hammant, “Communications Intelligence and Tsarist Russia,” Cryptologia, Vol. 24, No. 3 (2000), pp. 235–49; Thomas R. Hammant, “The Magdeburg Incident: Russian Intercept and Cryptanalytic Efforts in World War I,” Cryptologia, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2000), pp. 333–38.
40 TNA, ADM 1/23899. This file contains a transcript of a talk given by Professor Ewing to the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, on December 13, 1927. The story is mentioned in, e.g., Beesly, Room 40, p. 201; Wheelis, “Biological Sabotage,” pp. 37–38; Carus, Bioterrorism and Biocrimes, p. 70; Boghardt, Spies of the Kaiser, p. 131.
41 In practice, Zeppelins proved a very inaccurate means of delivering even conventional high-explosive bombs, not least due to the great difficulty of accurate night navigation and bomb aiming. See, e.g., Douglas H. Robinson, The Zeppelin in Combat: History of the German Naval Airship Division, 1912–18 (London: G.T. Foulis, 1962).
42 Wheelis, “Biological Sabotage,” p. 38.
43 Friedrich Konrich, “Krankheitserreger aks Kampfmittel in Kriege? Bemerkungen zu dem Artikel von a Lustzig ‘Der Bakterien-krieg” [Pathogens as weapons of war? Comments on the article by A. Lusztig, “Bacteriological warfare”], Zeitschrift fur Desinfektions- und Gesundheitswesen, Vol. 23, No. 6 (1931), pp. 268–71, quoted in Wheelis, “Biological Sabotage,” p. 38.
44 Hugh-Jones, “Wickham Steed and German Biological Warfare Research,” p. 383.
45 For a detailed wider exploration of Imperial Germany’s attitude to international law and practice before and during World War I, see Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Isabel V. Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law during the Great War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).
46 Wheelis, “Biological Sabotage,” p. 37.
47 See, e.g., Anne Stenersen, Al-Qaida’s Quest for Weapons of Mass Destruction: The History behind the Hype (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr Müller, 2008), pp. 29–31, 33–34; Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, “Al Qaeda’s Nuclear Ambitions,” Foreign Policy, November 16, 2010, <www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/11/16/al_qaedas_nuclear_ambitions>; René Pita, “Assessing al-Qaeda’s Chemical Threat,” Athena Intelligence, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2007), <www.files.ethz.ch/isn/47339/Vol2%20No%202%20Art%203.pdf>; Sammy Salama, “Manual for Producing Chemical Weapon to Be Used in New York Subway Plot Available on Al-Qaeda Websites since Late 2005: An Analysis for WMD Insights,” Special Report, Monterey Institute, 2006; Don Rassler et al., “Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Ladin sidelined?” Combating Terrorism Center, May 3, 2012, <www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/letters-from-abbottabad-bin-ladin-sidelined>.
48 See, e.g., David E. Kaplan, “Aum Shinrikyo (1995),” in Jonathan B. Tucker, ed., Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Richard J. Danzig, Marc Sageman, et al., “Aum Shinrikyo: Insights into How Terrorists Develop Biological and Chemical Weapons,” Center for a New American Security, July 20, 2011, <www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_AumShinrikyo_SecondEdition_English.pdf>; Milton Leitenberg, “Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat,” Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, December 2005, <www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?pubid=639>; Milton Leitenberg, “Botulinum Toxin: The Linkage with Bioterrorism,” in Addressing Foodborne Threats to Health: Policies, Practices, and Global Coordination: Workshop Summary (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2006), <www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK57093/>).
49 Al-Qaeda’s anthrax program is summarized in Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, Al Qaeda Weapons of Mass Destruction Threat: Hype or Reality? (Cambridge, MA: Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2010). Wider-ranging accounts of Islamist extremists’ interest in CBRN materials as weapons may be found in Gary Ackerman and Jeremy Tamsett, eds., Jihadists and Weapons of Mass Destruction (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2009); and Stenersen, Al-Qaida’s Quest for Weapons of Mass Destruction, which is particularly good in describing jihadist interest in crude materials.
50 Jeffrey K. Smart, “History of Chemical and Biological Warfare: An American Perspective,” in Russ Zajtchuk, ed., Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare. Textbook of Military Medicine, p. 16. For some American Civil War cases, see, e.g., Jane Singer, The Confederate Dirty War: Arsons, Bombings, Assassination and Plots for Chemical and Germ Attacks on the Union (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2005).
51 For the sabotage campaign in general, see, e.g., Blum, Dark Invasion; Witcover, Sabotage at Black Tom; Koenig, The Fourth Horseman; Hall and Peaslee, Three Wars with Germany; Jamie Bisher, The Intelligence War in Latin America, 1914–1922 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016); Captain Franz von Rintelen, The Dark Invader: War-Time Reminiscences of a German Naval Intelligence Officer (London: Lovat Dickson, 1933).