The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (15 page)

By 1935, strict Kochian logic—the idea that bacteria inevitably cause disease—was out of date. Nicolle and others had shown that some people (“Typhoid Mary,” for example) carried and could transmit bacteria without becoming ill. Scientists were starting to notice the abundance of seemingly harmless bacteria in and on the human body. Yet these observations had to reckon with a scientific culture permeated with “primitive images of war” brought down from earlier periods of human thought, Fleck wrote: “The disease demon haunted the birth of modern concepts of infection and forced itself upon research workers irrespective of all rational considerations.”
This was despite the fact
that “man appears as a complex to whose harmonious well-being many bacteria, for instance, are absolutely essential.” Imbalance, rather than invasion, was a better analogy for disease, he wrote, but in 1935 this idea was “not yet clear, for it belongs to future rather than present biology. It is found in present-day biology only by implication, and has yet to be sorted out in detail.” As Fleck predicted, today we know that people are colonized by trillions of bacteria that play crucial roles in our digestion and other bodily functions. It was not until the 21st century that science began focusing in earnest on these commensal organisms.

Among the procedures Fleck worked on as a bench scientist was the Wassermann reaction. This test’s value in establishing a diagnosis of syphilis was the specific “fact” Fleck examined in
Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact
. The Wassermann test took its name from the German-Jewish scientist August Paul von Wassermann, who with colleagues at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin announced the creation of the test in 1906. For Fleck, the development of the Wassermann reaction perfectly embodied the culturally conditioned nature of science.

First of all, the test came about because the German health minister, in competition with the French, had offered special funds to scientists to develop a quick test for syphilis. The disease had a major impact on the military and other groups, which gave it a political significance. Culturally, it symbolized the evils of fornication, and thus a blood test was seen not only as crucial to public health but also as necessary to uncovering the tainting of the blood, whose “purity” continued to have deep cultural meaning. “Thus from the very beginning,” Fleck wrote, “the rise of the Wassermann reaction was not based upon purely scientific factors alone.”

Fleck also found it revealing that the test that Wassermann “discovered” was not really a test for syphilis. Syphilis, an organism known as a treponeme, could not be grown easily in a petri dish. It was like typhus in this way. Since he couldn’t grow pure cultures of syphilis, Wassermann used heart tissue from syphilis-infected cows. When he mixed these tissues with the blood of syphilitic patients, it caused a reaction that destroyed the red blood cells—indicating the presence of antibodies to syphilis in the patients’ blood. The test had not been out long, however, when other scientists noticed that extracts of noninfected cow hearts produced the same reaction, which was caused not by the treponemes, it turned out, but by cardiolipin, a substance present in beef hearts. The Wassermann reaction, though often inaccurate, quickly became a standard tool in the medical diagnostician’s handbasket. If Wassermann had been as clumsy in formulating a test against, say, athlete’s foot, his inquiry probably would have ended with the initial failure. But society required action on syphilis.

Fleck was not the only
scientist of this period to push against old-school bacteriological notions. The 1930s in Germany saw the growing resurgence of the ideas of Max von Pettenkofer, the Munich hygienist who had lost the environment-versus-germ argument to Robert Koch in the late 19th century. Pettenkofer believed that germs were not fundamental to infectious diseases, which he thought broke out in epidemics where populations lived in filth or had chronically bad health and nutrition. His beliefs were incorporated into an old-new theory called
Geomedizin
, whose leading practitioner was Heinz Zeiss of the Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases in Hamburg. Like Pettenkofer,
Geomedizin
’s followers took a holistic view of infectious disease, going beyond the presumed causative agent, the germ.
But whereas the social
medicine promoted by Pettenkofer’s school was aimed at improving the health of individuals by improving community nutrition, water, education, and other factors,
Geomedizin
defined disease in racial and cultural terms. Zeiss and his disciples—the SS doctors Joachim Mrugowsky and Erwin Ding trained with him in Berlin in the late 1930s—amassed great influence under Nazi rule.
Zeiss called his field
the “science of terrain-related medicine”; a colleague elaborated that “the borders that contain a race [
Volkskörper
] also include a particular disease-causing flora and fauna. The climatic environment of a people, its cultural level, and its customs also fit into its own microworld.”

Geomedizin
was exactly
the kind of quackish, totalizing system of thought that Fleck castigated in his book; it borrowed real scientific findings to prop up a worldview based on culture alone. Fleck viewed such belief systems as deluded claptrap. But they were dangerous beliefs, because the followers of
Geomedizin
, race hygiene, and other dubious Nazi ideas were to become medical authorities in occupied Europe.
In a 1944 journal
article, for example, Mrugowsky concluded that one could judge a country’s level of “culture” by the types of infectious illness that predominated (diseases carried by insects [typhus] and water [typhoid fever] were characteristic of underdeveloped Southern and Eastern European cultures, he wrote; Nordics suffered primarily from respiratory illnesses). It was an entirely pointless article in terms of its scientific content, but it was not without significance, for Mrugowsky, at the time, was one of the leading SS health officers.
He was responsible for
medical experiments at concentration camps around Europe. He procured the Zyklon B cyanide gas that ended up being used in Auschwitz’s gas chambers.

The ideology of
Geomedizin
—that illness was an irrefutable and inevitable result of culture—carried tragic significance for the Jews of Eastern Europe, for it provided an excuse for the doctors who worked with the Nazi invaders to refuse care to the Jews and to quarantine them behind ghetto walls.
In Eastern Europe, with its
“low cultural level, terrible poverty and lack of cleanliness, typhus is a daily disease in broad swaths of the population, especially the Jews,” one
Geomedizin
follower wrote.
The louse, carrier of
typhus, was the symbol of the Jew in Nazi racial ideology: a filthy, parasitic, blood-sucking disease vector that had penetrated the German nation but was being massively extirpated. “
The Jew is a bacillus
and a plague,” said Julius Streicher, editor of the Nazi newspaper
Der Stürmer
. “He is not a human being, rather an enemy, a criminal, a disease carrier, that in the interests of humanity we must eliminate.” The association of lice and Jews was known to Franz Kafka when he opened his 1915 story,
The Metamorphosis
, with Gregor Samsa’s waking discovery that he had been transformed into
einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer
—“a monstrous vermin.” While some translators prefer “giant bug,” Samsa could just as well have been louse as roach.

The belief that certain cultures
were inevitable carriers of a given disease embodied what Ludwik Fleck called “proto-ideas” in medicine. An 18th-century example was Cotton Mather’s belief that smallpox was caused by “animalcules.” It is tempting to view this as a perceptive progenitor of the notion of infectious microorganisms, but Mather’s concept was really a proto-idea, a piece of an earlier “thought style” in which the “animalcule” was no indifferent microorganism, but rather an agent of evil. In Mather’s time, the invisibility of the microbial world made its denizens impossible to distinguish from the demons and angels whose existence was every bit as real as smallpox to Mather and his compatriots.

Geomedizin
’s suggestion that Jews
were “natural” carriers of typhus stemmed from the “proto-idea” that Jews were plague carriers, parasites, and well-poisoners. This was a convenient linkage for the Nazi physicians ostensibly charged with looking out for the health of Jews. It gave a pseudo-scientific gloss to the notion of Jews as insidious, poisonous contaminants in the body politic of the Aryan race, and provided cover for the most heinous crimes. Exposure to this ideology does not excuse their actions, but even the stupidest and most venal acts flow more easily within the confines of a common thought collective.

The Germans were, of course, correct that diseases like typhus were endemic to the East, including some areas of Poland, among the very poor, Jew and Slav alike.
And there were legitimate cultural
explanations, many of them poverty-related, like the scarcity of running water for washing and few changes of clothing in towns and shtetls where winters were hard and people grew accustomed to their lice. But the public health campaigns in Poland in the interwar period, with the contributions of men like Weigl, Rajchman, and Hirszfeld—the latter two, notably, were Jews by birth—had put Poland on the path to elimination of the disease.
Typhus wasn’t an inevitable
consequence of belonging to a less-favored culture as long as that “culture” had the resources with which to combat typhus.

Hermann Eyer in uniform. (Courtesy of Peter Eyer.)

Geomedizin
was the dominant philosophical turn of mind in the fields of infectious disease and public health in 1930s Germany; it was Nazi medicine. Although he was not an ideologically reliable Nazi, Dr. Hermann Eyer—who would later oversee Rudolf Weigl’s work in a way that paralleled Erwin Ding’s relationship to Fleck—also published within the
Geomedizin
world.

Compared with Ding or Mrugowsky, Eyer is a morally complex figure. He served the Nazi military efficiently, and his scientific ability and organizational skills doubtless did more to strengthen the German war effort than did the clumsy sadism of the SS doctors. Yet Eyer’s relationship to power remains somewhat opaque. Though his early publications suggest that anti-Semitism was part of his worldview and approach to disease, his wartime actions would demonstrate an unusual degree of civil courage.

Eyer, like Weigl, was a tinkerer and jack-of-all-trades who took a deep interest in many facets of science and technology. Born in 1906, the son of a Mannheim steel salesman, he had begun studies in machine construction before obtaining PhDs in both chemistry and medicine. Like Weigl, Eyer was skilled at fixing household objects and designing machines.
He was also a lifelong
practicing Catholic who saw no conflict between his scientific research and his faith.
As a faculty member
at the University of Erlangen in 1935, Eyer felt pressured to join the Nazi Party and became a candidate member that year, though he abandoned his candidacy after joining the military, where he believed he could pursue an academic career without deeper commitment to the Nazi cause. At this time, the Nazis had forced the well-known Jewish serologist Hans Sachs, who had been Eyer’s academic adviser at the University of Heidelberg, to surrender his position; he would eventually emigrate to Ireland. According to his son, Eyer admired and respected Sachs. But the work he published following his adviser’s departure suggests that Eyer had decided to seek
Gleichschaltung
, or conformity, laced as it was with the nationalistic, eugenic claptrap of the times. Eyer toured the Ostmark, an impoverished region of Bavaria lying on the Czech border, where he measured villagers’ skulls to determine the “Nordic” and “Alpine” attributes of the population, and provided invidious comparisons of Czech and Bavarian “blood.”
He praised the anti-Semitic
gauleiter
(Nazi district chief) of the Ostmark, Hans Schemm, who had stated, among other things, that “a Jew should dangle from every lamppost.” Eyer urged that the health of the area be improved “to build a natural wall on Germany’s border out of responsible, duty-conscious citizens.”
^*

In 1937, Eyer studied virology in Berlin under Professor Eugen Haagen, a fanatical Nazi who had worked several years at the Rockefeller Institute in New York.
After the annexation
of Austria in 1938, Eyer served several months’ rotation as a troop doctor in Vienna, while training to become the army’s typhus specialist.
Although Germany had been
a leader in typhus research in the World War I period, its best laboratory, in Hamburg, at the Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases, had neglected research on the disease since 1920. By the time war broke out in 1939, Richard Otto, an elderly former student of Koch and Ehrlich at Frankfurt’s Institute for Experimental Therapy, was the only senior typhus expert in Germany. The Robert Koch Institute—Germany’s leading scientific institution—did not even mention typhus in its official reports until 1940.