I've read many books on the Ostfront and never read anything about use of WMDs by either side.
However, after reading several works about the German atomic waffen programmes I came across a claim that the enormous Soviet casualty figures could only have been so high if the Germans had used some kind of wunderwaffe that was capable of widescale fatality - a WMD in modern parlance.
The claim is made by author Joseph P Farrell in at least three of his books. In 'Reich of the Black Sun' he talks about a fuel-air bomb; in 'SS Brotherhood of The Bell' he expands a little on this and mentions a Japanese communique and the writings of Otto Skorzeny as evidence of the use of WMDs by the Germans on the Ostfront:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Z9w ... nt&f=false
Skorzeny mentions 'rockets filled with Liquid Air' and Farrell postulates that the work of Zippermayr on fuel-air explosives using coal dust was behind these stories; including an excerpt of a British intelligence report on German fuel-air explosives. He speculates that the Nebelwerfers would have been to deliver these fuel-air warheads.
The Japanese communique gives an instance of the use of a WMD in 1943, near Kursk:
I looked for other claims of specific instances of WMD use and found this speculation about Sevastopol in a Jim Marrs article:A third report dated December 14, 1944, but only declassified by the National Security Agency in 1978, is titled “Reports on the Atom-splitting Bomb.” This purports to be a decoded intercept of a message from the Japanese embassy in Stockholm to headquarters in Tokyo.
It reads:
This bomb is revolutionary in its results, and will completely upset all ordinary precepts of warfare hitherto established. I am sending you, in one group, all those reports on what is called the atom- splitting bomb. It is a fact that in June of 1943, the German Army tried out an utterly new type of weapon against the Russians at a location 150 kilometers southeast of Kursk.
Although it was the entire 19th Infantry Regiment of the Russians which was thus attacked, only a few bombs (each round up to 5 kilograms) sufficed to utterly wipe them out to the last man.
The following is according to a statement by Lieutenant Colonel... Kenji, adviser to the attaché in Hungary and formerly... in this country, who by chance saw the actual scene immediately after the above took place:
“All the men and the horses [within radius of] the explosion of the shells were charred black and even their ammunition had all been detonated. Moreover, it is a fact that the same type of war material was tried out in the Crimea too. At that time the Russians claimed that this was poison gas, and protested that if Germany were ever again to use it, Russia, too, would use poison gas.”
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/cienc ... ects77.htmFully one-half of the 50 million casualties of the war occurred in Russia, and several massive explosions, such as the one that destroyed a section of Sevastopol, have never been fully explained. It was announced that a hundred-foot below-ground ammunition bunker was destroyed after being struck by a lucky shot from Dora, a 311/2- inch German railway gun considered the largest in the world.
Such attacks were never reported by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, due to the fear of losing control over a panicked and war-weary Russian population. The use of a super-weapon on the Eastern Front also might explain why more is not known about this issue. Accurate war news from Russia was extremely hard to come by during the war and grew more so during the Cold War.
Obviously, the claims and 'evidence' are rather paltry and don't prove anything, but I find it a fascinating hypothesis that some unknown wunderwaffe was in use on the Ostfront and was responsible for part of the enormous Soviet losses.
Let the debate begin!