Spanish Flu made its first appearance in 1918; soldiers returning from World War 1 brought the virus home to their countries with them. In 1920 in New York City over 500 people a day were dying of it, and with no cure it had to run its course like the great plagues of earlier centuries. It is estimated that 20% of the world’s population were infected! and between 60 and 100 million people died. This is roughly 3 times as many people as were killed and wounded in World War One, and is comparable to WW2 losses, yet this modern plague has disappeared down the memory hole and we have to ask was it even man made?
The Facts About Spanish Flu
Just as the killing of the First World War was finally starting to wind down in March 1918, mother nature unleashed the deadliest strain of virus in modern history. Infecting as much as 40 percent of the global population over the next 18 months. Of these, an estimated 20 to 50 million perished; more than the 17 million people killed during the First World War! The pandemic stretched from the United States and Europe, to remote Greenland and the Pacific islands. President Woodrow Wilson being one of its victims, who became ill negotiating the Treaty of Versailles by early 1919.
Flu Facts: Influenza is a highly contagious virus that attacks the respiratory system. When an infected person coughs, sneezes or talks, respiratory elements are transmitted into the air, and can then can be inhaled by anyone nearby – a person who touches something with the virus on it and then touches his or her mouth, eyes or nose can become infected.
Wartime Censors Suppressed News of the Flu
As the pandemic reached huge proportions in the fall of 1918, it became known as “Spanish Flu” in Europe and the United States. Many assumed this was because the sickness had originated in Spain, but it was actually the result of a widespread misunderstanding. Spain was one of only a few major European countries to stay neutral during the First World War. Unlike in the fighting nations; where wartime censors were suppressing news of the flu to avoid affecting morale, the Spanish media was free to report on it in gory detail!
Madrid in late-May 1918 gave rise to the first news stories, with news increasing after the Spanish King Alfonso XIII came down with the nasty virus. Since nations undergoing a media blackout could only read in depth accounts from Spanish news sources, they naturally assumed that the country was the place of origin. Meanwhile the Spanish felt that the virus had spread to them from France, so they took to calling it the “French Flu!”
The First Reported Case March 11th 1918
While it is unlikely that the virus originated in Spain, scientists are still unsure of its source. France, Britain, India or even China have all been suggested as the potential birthplace of the virus, as well as the United States, where the first known case was reported on March 11th 1918 at a military base in Kansas.
The Origin Still Unknown
Researchers have also conducted extensive studies on the remains of victims of the pandemic, but they have yet to discover why the strain that ravaged the world in 1918 was so lethal.
Was The Spanish Flu Epidemic Man-Made?
In 1948 Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo, told his CIA interrogator that the most devastating plague in human history was man-made. Mueller said the flu started as a US army bacteriological warfare weapon that somehow infected US army ranks at Camp Riley KS in March 1918, and spread around the world.
Indeed, symptoms in 1918 were so unusual that initially influenza was misdiagnosed as dengue, cholera, or typhoid. One observer wrote, “One of the most striking of the complications was hemorrhage from mucous membranes, especially from the nose, stomach, and intestine. Bleeding from the ears and petechial hemorrhages in the skin also occurred. Another unusual feature of this pandemic was that it mostly killed young adults? with 99% of pandemic influenza deaths occurring in people under 65 and more than half in young adults 20 to 40 years old. This is unusual since influenza is normally most deadly to the very young (under age 2) and the very old (over age 70). ”
Mueller’s Source
Apparently at a 1944 Nazi bacteriological warfare conference in Berlin, General Walter Schreiber, Chief of the Medical Corps of the German Army told Mueller that he had spent two months in the US in 1927 conferring with his counterparts.
They told him that the “so-called double blow virus” (i.e. Spanish Flu) was developed and used during the 1914 war and aimed at attacking the enemy.
“But,” according to Mueller, “it got out of control and instead of killing the Germans who had surrendered by then, it turned back on you, and nearly everybody else.” (“Gestapo Chief: The 1948 CIA Interrogation of Heinrich Mueller” Vol. 2 by Gregory Douglas, p. 106)
The Double Blow Virus
The interrogator, James Kronthal (CIA Bern Station Chief) asked Mueller to explain “double blow virus.” It reminds me of AIDS.
Mueller: “I am not a doctor, you understand, but the ‘double-blow’ referred to a virus, or actually a pair of them that worked like a prize fighter. The first blow attacked the immune system and made the victim susceptible, fatally so, to the second blow which was a form of pneumonia.. [Schreiber told me] a British scientist actually developed it. Now you see why such things are insanity. These things can alter themselves and what starts out as a limited thing can change into something really terrible.”
The subject of the Spanish Flu arose in the context of a discussion of typhus. Mueller said the Nazis deliberately introduced typhus into Russian POW camps and, along with starvation, killed about three million men. The typhus spread to Auschwitz and other concentration camps with Russian and Polish POWS! In the context of the Cold War, Mueller says: “If Stalin invades Europe.. a little disease here and there would wipe out Stalin’s hoards and leave everything intact. Besides, a small bottle of germs is so much cheaper than an atom bomb.
Is Mueller credible?
This is something for you to decide. Gregory Douglas apparently is a pseudonym for his nephew with whom he left his papers. Normally a hoax would not run to thousands of pages. The Interrogation being 800 pages long! The Memoirs are 250 pages. A Microfilmed Archive apparently covers 850,000 pages! Finally, sources say the material read is incredibly well informed, authoritative and consistent.
