As part of the Nazi biological warfare program code-named 'Blitzableiter' (Lightning Rod), Blome's Institute was therefore "a camouflaged operation for the production of biological warfare agents", and its construction was overseen by Karl I. Gross, an S.S. officer and specialist in tropical diseases, who had conducted lethal experiments on 1,700 prisoners at the Mauthausen concentration camp. It was surrounded by ten-foot high wall, guarded by a special S.S. unit, and designed to prevent the accidental release of the various biological agents being produced there. By May 1944, the Institute had sections devoted physiology-biology, bacteriology and vaccines, radiology, pharmacology, cancer statistics and a tumor farm, and had received at least 2.7 million Reichsmarks in funding from the Wehrmacht and S.S. in 1943-45.
Blome worked on methods of storage and dispersal of biological agents like plague, cholera, anthrax, and typhoid, and also infected prisoners with plague in order to test the efficacy of vaccines. At the University of Strassburg, a "special unit" headed by Prof. Eugen von Haagan and employing researchers like Kurt Gutzeit and Arnold Dohmen, tested typhus, hepatitis, nephritis, and other chemical and biological weapons on concentration camp inmates. Gutzeit was in charge of hepatitis research for the German Army, and he and his colleagues carried out virus experiments on mental patients, Jews, Russian POWs and Gypsies in Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz and other locations. In October 1944, Himmler also ordered Blome to experiment with plague on concentration camp prisoners.
Blome also worked on aerosol dispersants and methods of spraying nerve agents like Tabun and Sarin from aircraft, and tested the effects of these gases on prisoners at Auschwitz. Originally, I.G. Farben had developed nerve gas in 1936 as a result of its research into insecticides, and Blome's duties included preparing defensive measures against possible Allied use of insect-borne biological weapons, either in a first strike or in retaliation for German use of such weapons. As early as September 1940, Wolfram Sievers, director of the S.S. Ahnenerbe Institute, had warned Blome of the need to expand the production of insecticides to deal with this eventuality.
Blome was arrested on 17 May 1945 by an agent of the United States Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC, an army intelligence service) in Munich. He had had no papers except his driving licence.
It is believed that American intervention saved Blome from the gallows in exchange for information about biological warfare, nerve gas, and providing advice on to the American chemical and biological weapons programs. In November 1947, two months after his Nuremberg acquittal, Blome was interviewed by four representatives from Camp Detrick, Maryland, including Dr. H.W. Batchelor, in which he "identified biological warfare experts and their location and described different methods of conducting biological warfare." In 1951, he was hired by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps under Project 63, one of the successors to Operation Paperclip, to work on chemical warfare. His file neglected to mention Nuremberg.
He was not arrested or charged with war crimes again after his acquittal at the Nuremberg Doctor's Trial in 1947. He also continued to practice medicine in West Germany, and was active in politics as a member of the right-wing Germany Party. He died in Dortmund in 1969.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Blome