Dilger was born in Front Royal, Virginia, to which his parents had moved from Ohio in the decades after the Civil War. He was educated in Germany after going there at the age of nine. He attended Gymnasium in Bensheim and trained as a physician in Heidelberg and Munich, later working for the University of Heidelberg surgical clinic while researching his doctoral dissertation. His dissertation involved growing animal cells in tissue culture, at which he was unsuccessful. He received his doctorate summa cum laude in 1912. Dilger was the grandson of anatomist Friedrich Tiedemann. Tiedemann was the Director of the Institute of Anatomy at Heidelberg University. He was also the cousin of Generalmajor Hubert Lamey, as well as General der Kavallerie, Carl-Erik Koehler. Koehler was the commander of the 20th Army Corps.
When World War I began, Dilger was in Germany, but he returned to the United States in 1915 with cultures of anthrax and glanders with the intention of biological sabotage on behalf of the German government's biological sabotage officer Rudolf Nadolny. The U.S. was then neutral, but Germany wanted to prevent neutral countries from supplying Allied forces with livestock, and the fact that Dilger had a U.S. passport from 1908 onwards made it easy for him to travel to and from America. Along with his brother Carl, Dilger established a laboratory in the Chevy Chase district north of Washington, DC in which cultures of the causative agents of anthrax and glanders—Bacillus anthracis and Burkholderia mallei—were produced. A 1941 report reveals that the bacteria were to be painted onto the nostrils of horses. In the U.S., Baltimore stevedores, who were at first recruited by German officers to plant incendiary devices among ships and wharves, were eventually given bottles of liquid culture with orders to infect horses near Van Cortland Park. The stevedores claimed to have done the deed with rubber gloves and needles. The U.S. biological sabotage program is thought to have ended sometime in late-1916, after which time Anton returned to Germany. Upon his return to the U.S., Dilger found himself under suspicion of being a German agent by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and fled to Mexico, where he used the surname "Delmar".
Sabotage program: nature and impact
The United States was the only target of German biological sabotage to which Dilger traveled personally, but Romania, Norway, Spain, and South America were all wartime targets of the program. Dilger was the only known individual with the required medical knowledge to have presided over the program in Germany, even if he was not directly involved with each country. The methods of infecting livestock became more advanced as the war progressed, going from crude needles to capillary tubes of bacterial culture hidden inside sugar cubes. The effects of the German effort to sabotage neutral support of Allied countries is unknown. No reports have been made of disease outbreaks among livestock, so it is not yet known whether the cultures used were pathogenic or even viable. Certainly the amateurish method by which the U.S. stevedores infected horses would have given rise to accidents, but none were reported. That alone is cause for suspicion among researchers of the cultures used. Indeed, in the war treaties signed in the wake of World War I, no specific provisions were made for the prohibition of biological warfare, so it is presumed that officials either did not know about the German effort, or did not consider it a serious threat.His relative Jürgen Schöfer, Ph.D. writes today about biosafety in science magazines.
