The Death toll of Hitler's Anthrax Plan to Destroy Germany
If the secret “Operation Vegetarian” program had been carried out, millions of Germans could have died and thousands of square miles of land in Europe would still be deserted and uninhabited.
On September 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler launched an attack on western Poland, starting World War II. Poland's defeat on October 6 began a series of consecutive victories for the fascists. Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and France all fell to Hitler within just five weeks of fighting. On July 10, Hitler began bombing Britain in preparation for Operation Sealion, with the goal of invading the British Isles.
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Faced with the threat of invasion, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued an urgent order to Porto Down, a secret military facility in the south that had been established during World War I to research the use of poison gas as a military weapon. The facility was established after the Germans introduced chlorine gas to the battlefield in 1915. Churchill gave Porto Down a new mission: to find a way to use the deadly anthrax bacteria as a biological weapon.
This biological weapons program was called “Operation Vegetarian.”
Anthrax is the name of a disease caused by the bacteria Bacillus anthracis, which lives in soil. If the spores of this bacteria enter a person through a cut in the skin, the patient will become seriously ill and the mortality rate is about 20% at that time. When anthrax spores are swallowed or inhaled, the risk of death is much higher.
In the 1930s, anthrax bacteria could kill 60% of patients or animals that ingested the spores; the mortality rate for victims who inhaled the spores was as high as 95%.
Death from the sky
When anthrax spores are eaten by cattle, even if the infected animals do not die, their meat will spread the disease to anyone who eats it. The contagious nature of anthrax led the scientists at Porton Down to focus on a bold plan: to disrupt Germany's meat supply by wiping out huge herds of cattle across northern Germany.
They would prepare large quantities of “cattle cakes” containing anthrax spores and drop them by plane over German cattle fields. Any animals that ate the cakes would die within days.
Officials at Porton Down ordered enough raw material to make five million “cattle cakes.” They then hired a London soap manufacturer to cut the material into 2.5cm-wide cakes. Finally, Porton Down hired a dozen soap makers, all women, to come to the secret facility and inject the “cattle cakes” with anthrax spores. The spores were provided by the British Ministry of Agriculture.
By the spring of 1944, all five million of the “cattle cakes” had been produced, filled with anthrax spores. Royal Air Force bombers were ready to drop the cakes across northern Germany. The generals in charge of the operation calculated that it would take the planes only 18 minutes to reach their targets in Germany.
Every 2 minutes, a plane drops 400 cookies, so dropping 4,000 cookies would take 20 minutes. If 12 planes were involved in the mission, the team would drop 48,000 cookies in the same time.
By the end of the campaign, most of the pastures in northern Germany would be contaminated with anthrax. And there would still be millions of “cattle cakes” left over for other regions. Because anthrax spores can survive in soil for a century or more, contaminated land would be uninhabitable for generations.
All that remained was to await orders from Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
But the final order to launch the anthrax briquettes was never given. The war had changed decisively by then. Hitler’s Operation Sealion, an invasion of Britain, was abandoned after British fighters shot down too many of the German bombers that had been preparing the way. Instead of landing troops in Britain, Hitler turned his attention to the Soviet Union, and on June 22, 1941, the Germans opened fire on the Soviet Union’s western flank.
When the Second World War ended in 1945, all 5 million “cattle cakes” remained in storage at Porton Down and were destroyed in the incinerator.
Deadly Island
The only remaining name associated with the British anthrax weapons program is Gruinard Island, a small island less than a mile off the northwest coast of Scotland. In 1942 and 1943, the British government used it as a testing site for anthrax bombs. In one test, an anthrax spore bomb exploded near 60 sheep. Inhaling the spores, all the sheep died within days.
Gruinard Island has been off-limits ever since. In the 1980s, the British government decided not to wait for the anthrax spores to disappear naturally. They scraped tons of the island’s most contaminated soil, pumped 20 tons of formaldehyde into the water supply to kill any remaining anthrax spores, and reintroduced sheep to the island. In 1990, with the sheep still alive and soil samples showing no signs of anthrax, the island’s warnings were lifted.
