Biological weapons use?

Discussion in 'The Eastern Front' started by ourbill, Sep 3, 2011.

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  1. ourbill

    ourbill Senior Member

    Taken from: Biohazard by Ken Alibek published 2000.
    ‘The chilling true story of the largest covert biological weapons program in the world—told from the inside by the man who ran it’

    Ken Alibek was USSR’s Deputy Chief of Biopreparat from 1988 to 1992. He defected to United States in 1992.

    There has always been the impression that biological weapons were not used in the european area of WW2. Inspite of the fact that all combatants held stocks of various sorts of biological weapons there is no evidence that they were actually used in combat. The book contains references to one use and I will post here the extract from the book.
    While at the Tomsk Medical Institute Ken Alibek was asked to analyze a mysterious outbreak of tularermia on the front shortly before the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942.

    ‘ I spent several nights leafing through the twenty-five –volume History of Military Medicine in the Great Patriotic War: 1941-1945 …As I read. I became fascinated by what seemed an explicable sequence of events.

    The victims of tularemia were German panzer troops, who fell ill in such large numbers during the late summer of 1942 that the Nazi campaign in southern Russia ground to a temporary halt.

    Most of the journals reported this as a naturally occurring epidemic, but there had never been such a widwspread outbreak in Russia before. One epidemiological study provided a telling statistic: in 1941, ten thousand cases of tularemia had been reported in the Soviet Union. In the year of the Stalingrad outbreak, the number of cases soared to more than one hundred thousand. In 1943, the incidence of the disease returned to ten thousand.

    It seemed strange that so many men had first fallen sick one side only. The opposing armies were so close together that a multaneous outbreak was all but inevitable. Only exposure to a sudden and cancentrated quantity of tularemia could explain the onslaught of infection in the German troops alone. Seventy percent of those infected came down with a pneumonic form of the disease, which could only have been caused by a purposeful dissemination.’

    Ken Alibek goes on to say that when he presented his analysis to the superiour officer he was told to forget he had ever read about the epidemic. However, the conclusion was that Soviet troops must have sprayed tularemia at the Germans, and he later discovered that a tularmeria weapon had been developed in Kirov in 1941, a year before the Battle of Stalingrad. He had no doubt that the weapon had been used.

    In the first link below modern day opinions are somewhat different to Ken Alibek original conclusions. In the world of war and politics nothing is done without reason. The Battle of Stalingrad seems to be the turning point in the German advance whether the outbreak of tularemia was a natural event or a deliberate occurrence of a developed weapon only a total knowledge of the facts will show the truth. Of course it could be a ‘conspiracy theory’ or some sort of natural occurring event, or just one of the cloak and dagger plots by the Soviets. If this is not truthful then what is the answer. However, the number and type of casualties must have alerted German command to the fact that something was happening out of the ordinary.
     
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  2. Tab

    Tab Senior Member

    Lets face it these men had poor food and probably drunk the local water which was untreated, carrying heavy loads with very little rest, they would have been open to many illnesses and in large numbers.
     
  3. Gerard

    Gerard Seelow/Prora

    I havent come across anything that would indicate that the Soviets were going to or had used chemical weapons on the field of battle. Certainly the Soviets were aware that to do start something like that would leave them open to retaliation. And Soviet troops were defeinitely not equipped to withstand any chemical attack, I dont even think they had gasmasks. In a Chemical war, the Soviets would have come off second best in a big way.
     
  4. Tom Canning

    Tom Canning WW2 Veteran WW2 Veteran

    Our Bill
    a long time ago I read somewhere that both German and Russian troops carried grain as their daily rations - which apparently gave them enough sustenance to carry on fighting - the difference being that the Russians carried this grain next to their skin and thus the grain had some germination from their body heat - the German carried his outside of his uniform and thus NO germination and his grain was eaten in the raw state.

    Might this have been the cause of some such illness ?
    Cheers
     
  5. Smudger Jnr

    Smudger Jnr Our Man in Berlin

  6. Bobs grandson

    Bobs grandson Member

    It amazes me that neither side did use biological weapons either the russians/soviets in 41/42 or the germans in 44/45 as a last desperate act ? does anyone have any knowledge of why not or was it just a case of knowing that either side dreaded the idea of retaliation attacks ? phil
     

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