was born in Front Royal, Virginia, on 13 February 1884, the son of
German immigrants. At the age of 10, he moved to Germany and
attended high school in Bensheim (Hesse). In 1912, he completed
his medical studies with highest honors at Heidelberg and Munich,
writing his dissertation on the propagation of animal cells in tissue
culture. Later that year, a personal invitation by Queen Elenore led
him to wartime Bulgaria, where he directed several field hospitals.
His experience in the two Balkan wars gave him a specialized knowl-
edge of battlefield wounds and bacteriological infections and also
prompted an award and gift from the royal couple in 1913, despite
Bulgaria’s ultimate defeat.
With the outbreak of World War I, unable to volunteer for service
in the German army because of his American citizenship, Dilger
became a “noncombatant surgeon” at the Military Reserve Hospital
in Rastatt, not far from the western front. The following summer,
however, saw a new mission on behalf of the General Staff’s Politi-
cal Section. Returning to the United States and establishing a medi-
cal practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland, he secretly began a sabotage
campaign in his basement laboratory. His objective was to aid the
German war effort by hindering the further shipment of horses and
mules to Great Britain for use on the battlefield. Using cultures he
brought from Germany, he prepared vials of liquid containing deadly
anthrax and glanders bacteria, which were then given to hired dock-
hands to be administered with needles to the animals in the harbor
corrals (the largest British one was in Newport News, Virginia). He
also worked closely with his paymaster Paul Hilken and other Ger-
man agents active on the eastern coast of the United States. Neverthe-
less, most of animals shipped across the North Atlantic to the Allies
managed to survive, due in large measure to the efforts of British
veterinary officers. Dilger’s bacteriological sabotage went unde-
tected by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and only became
known during the postwar investigations of the U.S.–German Mixed
Claims Commission.
Leaving the laboratory in the hands of his older brother Carl, and
adopting the pseudonym Albert D. Delmar, Dilger returned to Ger-
many in early 1916 and resumed his work in field hospitals in Rastatt
and Karlsruhe. His next intelligence mission was to broker a foreign-
aid agreement with Mexico that would convert it from a neutral na-84 • DILGER, ANTON