The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (17 page)

Professional status meant little in the camps. Blue-collar skills were useful because they could lead to assignment to indoor work, say, in a workshop or a factory. The SS eagerly shattered the will of professional men and women with back-breaking, calorie-depleting outside work—digging trenches, hauling stones and manure. “
A few weeks in Buchenwald
made it impossible to judge by anyone’s appearance or face what he might have done in civilian life,” wrote Walter Poller, a German labor activist brought to the camp a few months after Erwin Ding arrived. “When they stood in rank and file, the scientists beside the laborer, the clergyman beside the habitual criminal, the teacher beside the craftsman, the artist beside the imbecile, the merchant beside the tramp, it would have been hard to distinguish one from another. . . . Life in the camp nearly always destroyed one’s own values and sense of dignity. Those who knew how to retain their original personalities despite all they went through were the exception, not the rule.”

There were, however, a few professions in the biomedical field that, in the right circumstances, offered an advantage. Some doctors survived as camp physicians, whom the SS and capos required for a variety of reasons. Although the prison hospitals and clinics were often brutal places where mass murder of the weak occurred, at times they could be used to hide threatened prisoners. After a period of numbing work in a rock quarry, political allies placed Poller in the camp hospital. After recovering his strength, he was fortunate enough to be assigned as clerk to the camp doctor, one of the best-protected positions in the camp. Doctor’s clerks, who wore white medical frocks, had unusual freedom of movement, and their postwar testimony would be crucial in describing the anatomy of camp life.

The doctor whom Poller served for a year was
Hauptsturmführer
(Captain) Erwin Ding. Poller offers us the first detailed picture of his master:

A highly intelligent man, who was well-mannered, of an agreeable disposition, friendly and sometimes actually genial. His features were rather pleasant than stern, his eyes lively and observant. Above all, he was exceptionally self-assured, and I was repeatedly surprised at the ease with which he always found a way out of the most complicated situations. Many a time he sat before me at his writing desk, reading the papers I had prepared, and my eyes would rest on his high, nobly-formed forehead, on the fine line of his nose, on the handsome, regular features so full of character, and often I pondered the puzzle such a man set, his high qualifications and abilities contrasting with his abominable crimes.

Ding ably carried
out the two major jobs of an SS doctor in a concentration camp. The first was to forge death certificates to conceal the torture and mistreatment of inmates. The second was outright medical murder. During the year he worked for Ding, Poller witnessed a series of horrible crimes. He saw Ding kill an inmate with an injection of atropine to the heart; saw him browbeat a Jewish “race defiler” into agreeing to be castrated; saw Ding murder an apparently autistic inmate; saw him torture a man to death with shots of apomorphine and electrical shocks. When a typhoid fever epidemic broke out in the camp, Ding killed the sickest patients, rather than spend money for medicine.
The Reverend Paul Schneider
, an anti-Nazi minister, was brought to Ding in the sick ward in July 1939 after being tied to a cross for several days. Ding restored his health for a couple of weeks, then gave him a fatal injection of strophanthin, and falsified the death certificate. When Schneider’s widow came to pick up the body, Ding shook her hand and gave his condolences.

While carrying out atrocities, Ding, then 26, was also attempting to pad his résumé with journal publications. At one point, he decided to write a treatise on diabetes, using records compiled by three Jewish doctor slaves. Poller wrote up the report, and Ding added his own details, which he had clearly made up. Ding could present an air of knowledgability, Poller states, but it was “mere façade. The splendid head, intended by nature to carry out valuable work for suffering humanity, had been hollowed and refilled with the stench of Nazi doctrine.”

Poller witnessed a particularly revealing episode when a group of Jewish doctors in the camp brought the Austrian radiologist Siegmund Kreuzfuchs before Ding. Kreuzfuchs had invented a method of using X-rays to diagnose ulcers, heart aneurysms, and other ailments. The prisoners hoped that if Ding understood Kreuzfuchs’s importance, he might save the life of this “shriveled, emaciated man, already destined to die.” Ding spoke with the Jewish doctor for a while and afterwards expressed admiration for his knowledge. A few days later, Kreuzfuchs returned to resume his explanations, but Poller could see that Ding was losing patience. Suddenly, he took a drawing that Kreuzfuchs had made, tore it up, crumpled it, and struck him in the face. As Kreuzfuchs turned helplessly and ran out the door, Ding sneered at him, “‘What swine! Such a Jew!’”

“It took me some time,” Poller wrote, “to appreciate what had taken place before my eyes.”

For Poller, Ding represented something far worse than the typical SS guard who dispensed whippings, kicks, and murder. As a doctor, he belonged to an ancient guild whose first principle was “do no harm.” As such, even in his moments of cultured reflection, or during occasional acts of random kindness, he was the embodiment of corruption. The Kreuzfuchs episode revealed something else: Ding’s awkward, unspoken, perhaps unconscious awareness of the fraudulence of an existence that gave him the power of life and death over men like Kreuzfuchs, whose accomplishments he could never match.

Meanwhile, Ding pressed on
in his pathetic campaign to get a name change. On May 12, 1939, he wrote confidentially to General Karl Genzken, chief of the medical office of the Waffen-SS, seeking his intervention in the process. “As you know, the name ‘Ding’ inspires everyone to mockery,” he wrote. Within days of arriving at Buchenwald, he had been “given the nickname ‘Dr. Schniepel.’ In the local slang,
Schniepel
was a word for the male sexual organ. He concluded, “In examining my request, I beg you to consider that the stain of an out-of-wedlock birth has clung to me for my entire life . . . a source of conflict throughout my studies and military service, and one that I would like to spare my children.”

Three months later
, Ding was called back to Berlin. The start of the war found him studying infectious disease under Heinz Zeiss. In May 1940, he was mustered into a frontline Waffen-SS unit and joined the invasion of France.

War began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland under the pretext of a phony Polish border attack. Motorized units crushed the Polish cavalry, and within a few days the Nazis had occupied Kraków, the historical center of Polish culture. They had chosen the city to serve as the capital of the newly created
Generalgouvernement
, the conquered parts of central and eastern Poland that were not absorbed into Germany. Hans Frank, Hitler’s lawyer, took charge of the government and established his residence in the 14th-century Wawel Castle, home to Polish kings and archbishops.

On November 6, two weeks
after the occupation of Kraków,
SS-Obersturmbannführer
(Lieutenant Colonel) Bruno Müller, the Gestapo chief, called all the professors of Poland’s most prestigious and oldest institute of higher learning, the Jagiellonian University, to a meeting in the auditorium of the Collegium Novum. Müller was acting under the orders of Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s deputy, who had declared that Poland’s intelligentsia must be “weeded out,” as a potential source of rebellion and resistance. After arriving at the hall, Müller sealed the doors with armed guards and informed the 183 professors and instructors who had responded to the invitation (others smelled a rat and stayed away, or arrived too late) that the university would be shut down. Then he had the lot arrested, packed into trucks, and taken to the Gestapo prison on Montelupich Street, and from there to the Wehrmacht barracks. Many of the academics ended up as inmates in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. Over the next several months, however, more than half were released through the intervention of foreign powers, in particular Mussolini, who was angry because some of the professors had ties to Italy. This “special action” against the professors of the Jagiellonian University, which was preparing its 572nd class year, established the treatment that Polish professionals could expect from the Nazis.

Around this same time
, Hermann Eyer, then 33 years old, arrived in Kraków and began setting up a mass-production facility for typhus vaccine to be produced by means of the Weigl method. He occupied the microbiology institute of the Jagiellonian University, and seized apartments confiscated from Jewish faculty on Mickiewicz Street to house his German personnel. Eyer himself took over the flat of the biologist Stanislaus Francis Snieszko, who had fled earlier in 1939 to the United States (where he would go on to pioneer modern fish hatchery techniques). Eyer began searching for Polish biologists to work in the lab. Most of them had been rounded up in the raid on the Jagiellonian, but Robert Kudicke, a 63-year-old German microbiologist who had volunteered to lead the fight against typhus in the
Generalgouvernement
, alerted Eyer to one of the arrested men, Zdzisław Pr
ybyłkiewic
, a 31-year-old adjunct professor in the microbiology institute. The Polish scientist was located at the Wehrmacht barracks and taken to Eyer on November 9. Przybyłkiewicz went from being a condemned man in a Gestapo prison to deputy director of the Wehrmacht’s Institut für Virus und Fleckfieberforschung (Institute for Virus and Typhus Research). Eyer assigned him to lead vaccine production at the Kraków lab.

Years later, there
would be speculation about how Przybyłkiewicz had managed to land on his feet in those terrible days. He was not considered a great talent in the scientific realm; he had acquired a reputation as an academic schemer, a womanizer, and a terrible teacher. His expertise on the Weigl method obviously was the salient point, since Eyer was desperately seeking typhus-immune experts. But he was by no means the only typhus expert in Kraków. His former boss and several other Kraków microbiologists were killed at Auschwitz some months later, for plotting to poison German officers by putting typhoid germs in their food.

Eyer had been told
, in the days preceding the Polish invasion, that Wehrmacht troops would be occupying Lwów, and that his mission was to take over the Weigl laboratory and expand its production of vaccine for German soldiers. Sent instead to Kraków, he was forced to scramble to set up a typhus vaccine laboratory there on his own. In the first few days in Kraków, Eyer confiscated vaccine from Polish army clinics and used it to immunize 50 German employees. Fifteen of these men, including Eyer, fell ill with typhus over the next six months, but the course of the illnesses was mild. None of the employees died, and only a few suffered petechial rash or hallucinations. The experience, while unpleasant, once again proved the value of the Weigl vaccine. Eyer next needed to enlist louse feeders and other Polish employees; he knew that German lab workers lacked the immunity to handle such jobs. Eyer contacted Friedrich Weigl, Rudolf’s older brother and a leading Polish lawyer in Kraków, to assist him in finding employees. The collaboration was successful, and Eyer managed to get vaccine production going in a short time.
He delivered his first batch
of typhus vaccine to the Wehrmacht health inspectorate in April 1940. In an update to his boss three months later, Eyer reported that the laboratory was raising 300,000 lice, and infecting 2,500 of them with typhus germs every day. Each infector could inject typhus into 1,000 lice a day, Eyer said, and he had designed a sterile filling machine with which two workers could finish 500 portions of vaccine daily. The Gestapo had arrested one of his employees on suspicion of participation in the resistance, but he was released after a week, Eyer wrote.

In an accompanying pamphlet
, Eyer said that the institute was making only enough vaccine to protect endangered military personnel such as delousers, caretakers in military clinics, and officers in frequent contact with the “endemically contaminated civilian population.” A second brochure, prepared for soldiers, warned that typhus was a very serious disease, and urged German troops to steer clear of Poles and the places they lived and gathered, “since contact with lousy clothing and people brings the danger of becoming lousy yourself. . . . Every soldier who finds even one louse on himself must report it immediately.”