Operation Vegetarian
Operation Vegetarian ( English ; German: 'Operation Vegetarian ') refers to a plan developed by the British military in 1942for the use of linseed cake contaminatedwith anthrax spores in the air war against Germany. The linseed cakes contaminated with anthrax spores were supposed to bedroppedover fields in Germany by the British Royal Air Force . Farm animals should eat the flaxseed cake and become infected with it. This in turn should lead to a mass infection of German civilians. The uninfected population was to be further decimated by the massive food shortage caused by the death of a large part of the German livestock. Several million German civilians were expected to die as a result of these measures. The plan was not implemented, but this bioweapon was tested.
The tests took place on Gruinard Island , off the coast of Scotland . This island was a restricted military area until 1990 because of its extensive pollution with anthrax spores resulting from the tests .
The five million flax seed cakes that were produced, which were contaminated with anthrax spores for use against Germany, were destroyed in an incinerator in Great Britain at the end of 1945 .
literature
- Jeanne Guillemin: Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism. Columbia University Press, 2005, ISBN 978-0-231-12942-8 .
- SK Prasad: Biological War. Discovery, 2009, ISBN 978-81-8356-385-7 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Charles Arthur: Porton Down's secret human guinea pigs . The Independent. August 27, 1999. Retrieved September 17, 2009. ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )
- ↑ Ed Toner: Anthrax: An Old Scare . The Washington Post. October 22, 2001. Retrieved September 17, 2009. ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )