THE SURGEON
Anton Casimir Dilger was born in Front Royal, Virginia (in the United States) on February 13, 1884. His father, Hubert “Leatherbreeches” Dilger, was a German immigrant from Engen. Hubert fought for the Union cause in the American Civil War and rose to the rank of captain. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his work as an artilleryman during the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863. Hubert also fought in the decisive Battle of Gettysburg two months later.
Young Anton was the grandson of anatomist Friedrich Tiedemann (1781–1861), who was the Director of the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Heidelberg. He also had two high-ranking military cousins: Generalmajor Hubert Lamey (commander of the 118th Jager Division), and General der Kavallerie, Carl-Erik Koehler (commander of XX Army Corps).
Settling in Virginia’s lush Shenandoah Valley after the American Civil War, Hubert purchased 1,800 acres of land near the Blue Ridge Mountains, where young Anton was born. He spent an idyllic childhood in the rolling hills riding the horses raised by his father.
But Anton’s mother wanted something “more than horses” for her boy. When his sister Eda married a Mannheim businessman, the ten-year-old Anton accompanied them to Germany. He attended Gymnasium in Bensheim and trained as a physician in Heidelberg and Munich. Buoyed by his brother-in-law’s wealth, Anton worked hard at his studies, eventually winning a position at the University of Heidelberg as well as studying medicine.
At eighteen, Anton returned to the United States for a visit. But everything was different: rural Virginia seemed primitive compared with the cities of Germany, and his parents had aged considerably. After returning to Germany, Anton began work at the University of Heidelberg surgical clinic while he researched his doctoral dissertation, which involved growing animal cells in tissue culture (which was unsuccessful). He received his doctorate summa cum laude in 1912 and accepted a position as an assistant surgeon.
Determined to be a professor of surgery, Anton found his plans derailed when the First Balkan War broke out that same year. The young doctor was asked personally by the Bulgarian tsaritsa and native German Queen Eleonore to become a field surgeon. The experience benefited Dilger! Battlefield service burnished his credentials, giving Dilger greater confidence and whetting his interest in military intrigue.
CAVALRY AND CHEMICALS
When the Great War began, Dilger was once again in Heidelberg. The conflict was just two weeks old when Anton received word that his nephew, fighting for Germany, had been killed by a French sniper. Dilger had a decision to make: should he return to America and remain neutral, or should he enter the conflict? As an American citizen, Anton was excluded from German military service, but he was able to volunteer as a non-combat surgeon near the Western Front. Thus, he chose to stay.
The cavalry accounted for almost a third of the majority of the European armies in 1914, and it was regarded as the key element in any military offensive. But all of that was about to change… as mounted soldiers faced machine guns for the first time. Cavalry regiments were massacred, and the once-fluid battlefield transformed into fixed trench warfare by the end of 1914.
While Anton treated horrific battlefield injuries, he questioned the neutral stance of the United States, which allowed for shipments of food, munitions, and horses to the Allied armies. Frustrated by his behind-the-lines work as a physician, Dilger pushed for a more active role in the war.
In late January 1915, the German Army used 18,000 shells filled with xylyl bromide (a type of tear gas) against the Cossacks at Bolimów in Russian Poland, which proved unsuccessful in the freezing cold. Three months later in Belgium, the Germans fired more than 150 tons of lethal chlorine gas against two French colonial divisions in the Second Battle of Ypres, which turned out to be more effective. It was the dawn of chemical warfare.
Soon after, a unit of the General Staff in Berlin began a campaign to use germs as weapons of sabotage. The covert operation required someone with medical expertise, who could enter the United States without arousing suspicion… and who was utterly loyal to Germany. That person was Anton Dilger.
BIRTH OF BIO-TERRORISM
The same year chemical warfare was introduced on the battlefields of Europe, Anton Dilger returned to the United States with the intention of biological sabotage on behalf of Rudolf Nadolny (Germany’s biological sabotage officer). The U.S. was still neutral, but Germany wanted to prevent neutral countries from supplying Allied forces with livestock. The fact that Dilger had an American passport from 1908 onwards made it easy for him to travel to and from the U.S.
Along with his brother Carl, Anton Dilger established a laboratory in the Chevy Chase district north of Washington, D.C., not more than six miles from the White House. His target would be the horses and cattle supplied to the Allied armies by the United States, and Dilger set about cultivating anthrax (Bacillus anthracis) and the germ that causes glanders (Pseudomonas mallei), a crippling equine disease.
Although the cavalry was relegated to a secondary role during the war’s remaining years, horses and mules were still needed to pull supply wagons, haul large guns and support reconnaissance missions. It was these animals that Dilger sought to eliminate.
In his basement laboratory, Anton tested his concoctions on a cage of guinea pigs… and when the animals died, he was ready for the next step. After placing the cultures into more than thirty bottles, Dilger showed his fellow saboteurs how to disseminate the bacteria: anthrax should be injected into the horses, while the glanders germs could be rubbed inside the horses’ nostrils… or poured into their feed or water troughs.
In the U.S., Baltimore stevedores, who were at first recruited by German officers to plant incendiary devices among ships and wharves, were eventually given bottles of liquid culture with orders to infect horses near Van Cortland Park. The stevedores claimed to have done the deed with rubber gloves and needles.
Agents also headed for ports in Newport News, and Norfolk in Virginia… infecting transports all winter. It was difficult to determine how many animals perished. Diagnostic tests for glanders did exist, which helped blunt the impact of the sabotage.
As anti-German sentiment increased, the saboteurs moved their lab to the Midwest. Reports at the time noted the emergence of severe outbreaks of disease among horses and mules. Army veterinarians noted that disease also struck American horses being shipped to France. But the focus of Dilger’s espionage work was about to change.
The U.S. biological sabotage program was thought to have ended sometime in late 1916… after which Anton returned to Germany. But upon his return to America, Dilger found himself under suspicion of being a German agent by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In an infamous secret message intercepted by the British (better known as the Zimmermann Telegram), Germany proposed an alliance with Mexico that would allow the latter to “reconquer its lost territory in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona”. This plan was backed by generous financial support from Berlin.
When the United States entered the war months later, Dilger secretly obtained German citizenship, and he traveled to Mexico City using the surname “Delmar”. His mission was to goad the Mexican government into invading the United States!
However, dissension among German intelligence agents became apparent… and these men were soon identified by the Allied secret services. As his mission unraveled, Anton Dilger left Mexico City for Madrid, Spain. There, the young doctor contracted the deadly Spanish influenza. He died on October 17, 1918 at the age of only thirty-four.
The germ saboteur had fallen due to a virus!
LEGACY
The United States was the only target of German biological sabotage to which Dilger traveled personally, but Romania, Norway, Spain, and South America were all wartime targets of the program. Dilger was the only known individual with the required medical knowledge to have presided over the program in Germany… even if he was not directly involved in each country. The methods of infecting livestock became more advanced as the war progressed and went from crude needles to capillary tubes of bacterial culture hidden inside sugar cubes.
The effects of the German effort to sabotage neutral support of Allied countries is unknown. Since reports was made of disease outbreaks among livestock, it is not yet known whether the cultures used were pathogenic or even viable. Certainly the amateurish method by which the U.S. stevedores infected horses would have given rise to accidents, but none were reported. That alone is cause for suspicion among researchers of the cultures used. Indeed, in the treaties signed in the wake of the First World War, no specific provisions were made for the prohibition of biological warfare and so it is presumed that officials either did not know about the German effort or did not consider it a serious threat.
Dilger’s relative, Jürgen Schöfer, Ph.D., now writes about biosafety in science magazines.