1. Anton Casimir Dilger was a German-American medical doctor and a main actor in the German biological warfare sabotage program during World War I Dilger eventually fled to Madrid, Spain, where he died during the 1918 flu pandemic.
13 Facts About Anton Dilger
1. 2.
Anton Dilger was educated in Germany after he had gone there at the age of nine.
3.
Anton Dilger attended Gymnasium in Bensheim and trained as a physician in Heidelberg and Munich.
4.
Anton Dilger later worked for the University of Heidelberg surgical clinic while he researched his doctoral dissertation.
5.
Anton Dilger's dissertation involved growing animal cells in tissue culture at which he was unsuccessful.
6.
Anton Dilger was the son of Captain Hubert Dilger, a decorated artillerist in the Union Army during the American Civil War, awarded the Medal of Honor for his exploits during the Battle of Chancellorsville.
7.
Anton Dilger's grandfather was anatomist Friedrich Tiedemann, who was the Director of the Institute of Anatomy at Heidelberg University.
8.
Anton Dilger was the cousin of Generalmajor Hubert Lamey, the commander of the 118 Jager Division, as well as General der Kavallerie, Carl-Erik Koehler, the commander of the 20th Army Corps.
9.
When World War I began, Anton Dilger was in Germany, but he returned to the United States in 1915 with cultures of anthrax and glanders with the intention of biological sabotage on behalf of the German government's biological sabotage officer, Rudolf Nadolny.
10.
The US was still neutral, but Germany wanted to prevent neutral countries from supplying Allied forces with livestock, and the fact that Anton Dilger had a US passport from 1908 onwards made it easy for him to travel to and from the US Along with his brother Carl, Anton Dilger established a laboratory in the Chevy Chase district north of Washington, DC, in which cultures of the causative agents of anthrax and glanders were produced.
11.
The US biological sabotage program is thought to have ended sometime in late 1916 after which Anton Dilger returned to Germany.
12.
The United States was the only target of German biological sabotage to which Anton Dilger traveled personally, but Romania, Norway, Spain, and South America were all wartime targets of the program.
13.
Anton 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.