Abstract
The curator of a police museum in Trondheim, Norway, recently discovered in his archive collection a glass bottle containing two irregularly shaped sugar lumps. A small hole had been bored into each of these lumps and a glass capillary tube, sealed at its tip, was embedded in one of the lumps (Fig. 1). A note attached to the exhibit translated as follows: “A piece of sugar containing anthrax bacilli, found in the luggage of Baron Otto Karl von Rosen, when he was apprehended in Karasjok in January 1917, suspected of espionage and sabotage”.
Sugar lumps with an embedded glass capillary shown to contain spores of Bacillus anthracis.
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References
Berg, R. Norway on its Own, 1905-1920 (Univ. Oslo Press, 1995).
Hugh-Jones, M. WickhamSteedandGermanbiologicalwarfareresearch. Intell. Nat. Security 7, 379–402 (1992).
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Redmond, C., Pearce, M., Manchee, R. et al. Deadly relic of the Great War. Nature 393, 747–748 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/31612
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/31612
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