Stanley Johnson, Boris Johnson's father, famously wrote a book based on the 1967 outbreak. The Guardian paper wrote a piece about his book "The Marburg virus" when Stanley Johnson republished it forty years later (since it was out of print).
The Behringwerke Laboratory where the #Marburg #virus was discovered has a disreputable history having being involved in Nazi research on diseases like typhus during the second world war. In collaboration with the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS they took inmates from the Buchenwald concentration camp and experimented on them. Prisoners were infected with typhus in order to constantly have fresh pathogens available for experiments. 127 inmates are said to have died from these experiments.
But biological warfare experiments could not have taken place in Marburg after the fall of the Nazi regime, could they?
After World War II, a Nazi doctor involved in the experiments at Marburg, Kurt Heissmeyer was convicted and sentenced to death but not all Nazi doctors experienced the same fate. A notable example was Dr. Kurt Blome who was a high-ranking Nazi scientist who had worked on biological weapons research during World War II, some of it related to the work at Marburg. After the war, he was recruited by the U.S. military as part of Operation Paperclip, and in 1947 he was brought to the United States to work on biological warfare research. Unsurprisingly his presence in the USA caused a lot of controversy and his visa was not granted.
So in the early 1950s, Blome was transferred to the European Command Intelligence Center (ECIC) that was a military intelligence organization that operated within the United States European Command (USEUCOM). This was at Oberursel, West Germany just an hour’s drive from the laboratory at Marburg. At the centre, he worked on developing the USA’s biological warfare capabilities while also assessing the capabilities of the Soviet Union in the field of biological warfare.
There is evidence to suggest that the research conducted at the lab in Marburg, Germany, was related to the development of biological weapons connected with this ECIC program. The lab began work in the early 1960s for research into viral hemorrhagic fevers. This just happened to be the place where a new super viral hemorrhagic fever emerges in 1967, the Marburg virus. That is blamed on green monkeys who had brought the disease from Uganda. There are grounds to believe that the monkeys received it from the viral genetic engineering that took place at Marburg.
A possible origin of the Marburg virus could be Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV) which is from the same family of viruses, called Filoviridae. It was first ‘discovered’ in 1944 in the Crimean Peninsula, now disputed territory between Russia and Ukraine. At the time, Soviet scientists were investigating an outbreak of a disease characterized by fever, haemorrhage, and death among farmers and agricultural workers in the region. They isolated the virus from infected ticks and later from the blood of patients. This just happened to be a region that had just been occupied by the retreating Nazis. At a time when Dr. Kurt Blome was said to be developing a ‘miracle’ biological weapon for Adolf Hitler that could save them the war. The fatality rate of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV) is around 10% to 40%, the fatality rate of Marburg is 25% to 90%. The Ebola virus is also in the same family and was first identified during outbreaks in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1976. It has proved less fatal but is more contagious. Whatever the extent of the human involvement and genetic manipulation of these viruses there is no doubt with extensive evidence that these viruses have been weaponised by both the USA and Russia.
The influence of the Behringwerke laboratory in Marburg has continued to grow. Now an Industrial Park with approximately 7,000 employees working within the biotechnology centre. The centre has attracted many cutting edge pharmaceutical companies including BioNTech.
BioNTech are of course famous for creating the mRNA vaccine for the Covid-19 vaccine with dubious effectiveness. The site at Marburg is amongst the largest #mRNA manufacturing facilities worldwide. producing up to 750 million doses of the #Covid-19 #vaccine a year. With the increasing side effects associated with the vaccine, some have questioned if it is itself a biological #weapon.
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