Nazis tried to halt Allies in Italy with malaria epidemic attack - Telegraph

Nazis tried to halt Allies in Italy with malaria epidemic attack

14/02/2006

The Nazis tried to halt the advance of British and American troops through Italy in the Second World War by unleashing malaria-carrying mosquitoes in what is believed to be the only biological warfare attack out in Europe, according to new research.

The plan was designed to hinder the Allied push from the south and to punish the Italian population for what the Germans saw as treachery after they switched sides and joined the Allied powers.

According to Prof Frank Snowden, a history professor at Yale University whose book The Conquest of Malaria in Italy draws on American archives and the diaries of Italian soldiers, the scheme was orchestrated in the autumn of 1943 by Erich Martini, a medical entomologist, Nazi Party member and friend of the SS commander Heinrich Himmler.

But British and American soldiers, who landed at Anzio just south of the marshes, survived the biological attack because they were given anti-malarial drugs.

Rates of the disease among the local Italian population returning from the fields soared, however.

Official malaria cases rose in the area from 1,217 in 1943 to 54,929 in 1944 in a population of 245,000. Unofficial rates, Prof Snowden suggests, were much higher.

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