Hellmuth Simons

Hellmuth Simons (1893–1969), who predominantly published under the name H. C. R. Simons, was a German-Jewish bacteriologist and authority on tropical diseases, who encouraged the belief that Germany was developing biological weapons before and during World War II.

Simons worked at I. G. Farben before escaping Germany as a refugee. He provided scientific help to Heinz Liepman for his 1937 book Death from the skies: a study of gas and microbial warfare.^[1] When World War II broke out he was working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, but was offered a chair at a university in Pennsylvania. In autumn 1939 he and his son were interned at Marseilles en route to the United States.^[2] At some point he visited England, where he reportedly worked at the British Library and in Cambridge, and came to know Wickham Steed.^[3] In 1943, when Simons was working at the Zurich Polytechnic Institute, Allen Dulles passed on Simons' fear that Germany would use bacillus botulinus for bacteriological warfare.^[3] According to Donald Avery, Simons claimed that I. G. Farben was producing botulin at its plant at Hoechst, at a Berlin laboratory, and elsewhere.^[4]

In 1947 Simons started teaching biology at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science.^[5]

The bacterial genus Simonsiella is named after him.^[6]

References

1. Death from the skies: a study of gas and microbial warfare by Heinz Liepman with the scientific assistance of H. C. R. Simons. London: Secker & Warburg, 1937. Translated by Een and Cedar Paul from the German. US edition published as Poison in the air, 1937.
2. Zosa Szajkowski, Jews and the French Foreign Legion, Ktav Pub. House, 1975, p.161
3. Allen Dulles, telegram from OSS Bern, 8 December 1943, in Neal H. Petersen, ed. From Hitler's doorstep: the wartime intelligence reports of Allen Dulles, Penn State Press, 1996 p.173
4. Erhard Geissler & John Ellis van Courtland Moon, eds., Biological and toxin weapons: research, development and use from the Middle Ages to 1945, Oxford University Press, 1999, p.113
5. School and Society Vol. 66 (1947), p.362
6. names after people entry in LPSN; Euzéby, J.P. (1997). "List of Bacterial Names with Standing in Nomenclature: a folder available on the Internet". International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology. 47 (2): 590–2. doi:10.1099/00207713-47-2-590. PMID 9103655.