A Health Ministry memorandum dated April 9 last year, which called for about €30 million (£20 million) to fund an inoculation campaign, was leaked over the weekend.

Opposition politicians, briefed by the BND intelligence service, accuse Gerhard Schröder, the Chancellor, of playing down the threat to Germany to maintain the anti-war policy of his election campaign.

“The German security services have documentary evidence that the smallpox virus is being illegally manufactured outside the official laboratories . . . and is being stored in Russia, Iraq and North Korea,” the memorandum said. “There are concerns that Iraq will react (to a US invasion) with its available biological weapons, including the smallpox virus.”

The memorandum, published by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, said that Germans were not sufficiently immunised. “We would therefore have to reckon with 40 to 45 per cent fatalities, that is 25 million people in Germany alone.”

Otto Schily, the Interior Minister, said that the memorandum was genuine, but accused the Health Ministry of giving a false impression. The Government, he said, did not have concrete evidence of a smallpox storage unit in Iraq.

The German Army has 70 million doses of smallpox immunisation fluid, which will be distributed to regional centres, but this is not part of a general immunisation campaign. The side-effects are regarded as potentially too dangerous to give to the public and there is the calculation that fears of a biological attack could sway the national mood in favour of a preventive war.

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