Dr. 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.[4]
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, Traub experimented with over forty lethal viruses on large test animals.[5]
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 Tubingen. 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 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 Reichsfuhrer 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 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? 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 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 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 Shope, 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, Traub continued his directorship of the Tubingen laboratory in West Germany, though he visited Plum Island frequently. In 1960, he was forced to resign as Tubingen's director under a dark cloud of financial embezzlement. Traub continued sporadic lab research for another three years, and then left Tubingen for good — a scan dalous end to a checkered career. In the late 1970s, the esteemed virologist Dr. Robert Shope, 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 — 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 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.
I began to feel like a man made out of glass, like someone hit me with a baseball bat and shattered me from the top of my head to the balls of my feet," the nuclear power plant guard recalls. "Never in my life had I experienced such pain." His hands gnarled into contortions, and his vocal cords weakened and then became paralyzed, rendering him mute. The left side of his body went numb. A rheumatologist misdiagnosed him — just like doctors misdiagnosed the children of Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1975—with rheumatoid arthritis. Then, the neurological symptoms set in. He experienced violent mood swings where he would be calm one moment and bawling silly the next. A newfound sensitivity to light made him a prisoner in his home, with the shades drawn and lights turned off. Noise was magnified a hundredfold, to the point that the vibrations from a person walking across the floor were excruciating. His incessant reflexive coughing was so powerful, it broke three of his ribs and brought up large globs of blood. When he told the doctor he suspected he had the long-misunderstood ailment Lyme disease, the doctor laughed. But with the help of his wife, a registered nurse, he diagnosed himself with thirty-eight of the forty symptoms of Lyme. Results showed he had some of the highest known titers of Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb) known in New York State. He was ordered to a hospital bed for intensive intravenous antibiotic treatment. The treatments for Lyme disease, which can range from oral antibiotics to massive weekly IV infusions, are like "trying to put out a forest fire with a watering can," according to another sufferer.
The symptoms subsided six months after the tick bite, but came back with new fury five months later. More IV antibiotics were prescribed. "I remember sitting in my doctor's office and saying, 'Doc, you know, I think I'm losing my mind.' " His heart, trying to cope with the large doses of chemicals, was failing him, but he figured he had nothing more to lose. He was dying. Teetering on the edge, the security guard mustered up what little strength he had left for one last hope. A deeply religious man, active in his church as a lay minister for some twenty-five years, he turned to a higher power.
4
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.
5
Linda Hunt, author of