The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (22 page)

The crime scene was
in the middle of a well-to-do neighborhood, and there were witnesses. Dr. Zbigniew Stuchly, microbiologist and member of Weigl’s inner circle, awoke to shots that night and watched through his window as the men fell. He could not see their faces, but they made signs of the cross before being shot. The next morning, pale and groggy, he stumbled into his office. “What happened to you?” Weigl asked him. “Are you not sleeping?” When Stuchly began to tell him, Weigl covered his face and begged him to stop. “I can’t listen to this!” he said. “Say nothing more!”

Two days later
, the Wehrmacht doctor and typhus expert Hermann Eyer arrived in a staff car at the laboratory on St. Nicholas Street. He was taking control of the institute, he said, and he wanted Weigl to continue running it. “Finally you’ve come, colleague,” Weigl responded. “What took you so long?”

By this time, Weigl had decided to cooperate with the Nazi occupation. He knew Eyer through the literature, and they probably had been in contact after 1939. The Wehrmacht was clearly a better partner for Weigl than the SS or the Nazi civilians of the
Generalgouvernement
. The extent to which Weigl knew, in advance, that Eyer was coming isn’t clear. But Weigl faced a stark choice: suicide or cooperation. He was a singular man who lived by simple but pragmatic rules. He knew war and hated it, even got angry when marches were played. Weigl became extremely uncomfortable when faced with pain and grief. For this reason, he did not divorce his wife, unable to deal with the conflict, friends say. For the same reason, he offered scientific help to anyone who asked for it, usually without checking references. He decided to cooperate with the Germans, on his own terms. He would continue his work as if nothing had changed.

The assassination of his friends and colleagues came as a powerful shock. At the same time, it was not a surprise. Weigl was 58 years old, a careful observer of the biological world, including his fellow creatures. Having experienced World War I at close proximity, he watched the development of the second catastrophe of his life with terrible foreboding. He knew the Germans well and interpreted Hitler’s plans with remarkable clarity. “
Anyone who witnesses
the atrocities caused by war,” he wrote in a notebook at this time,

must realize that, beyond the terrible destruction, misery and human suffering it causes, war awakens the lowest instincts that lie dormant and slumbering in human beings under the thin coating of civilization and ethical principles consolidated over many generations. During the war [these] instincts awaken in such a hideous form that they would be unrecognizable in the wildest of animals. I can’t believe a single man in his soul thinks humanity should settle its disputes through rape and violence, but unfortunately the law of nations has sanctified war, an essentially mindless, mutual mass-murder and a ghastly monument to wild, ancient times.

German officials who
visited Lwów during the population exchanges late in 1939 had already approached Weigl and invited him to live in Germany, or in German-occupied Poland. After the murder of the Lwów professors, the Nazis made Weigl an offer they assumed he would not refuse—to put his name on the list of
Volksdeutsche
, ethnic Germans whose “blood” entitled them to the privileges of citizenship, including better rations and living quarters, and freedom from persecution. A group of German officers, among them
SS-Gruppenführer
(Lieutenant General) Fritz Katzmann, Himmler’s top henchman in Galicia, invited themselves to Weigl’s office. From behind the door, Weigl’s assisstants heard Katzmann offer Weigl a university chair in Berlin and German sponsorship for the Nobel Prize. Weigl, always polite to visitors, told Katzmann that while he’d never denied his German ancestry and had even thought about moving to Germany at one time, he could not do so now. He had spent so long setting up his laboratory in Lwów, he said. And it would be disloyal to the Polish people: “One chooses one’s nationality only once in life.” Appealing to Katzmann with a bit of antiquated chivalry, he added, “Wouldn’t it be strange for a German officer to offer honors to a Polish professor, when by accepting the German offer the Pole would have dishonored himself?”

Katzmann, the stereotypical Nazi sort—scar-faced, brutal, short-tempered—could not control himself. He began to threaten Weigl with references to his 25 murdered colleagues. “Don’t forget,” Katzmann said, “that the German government is capable of breaking the resistance of its opponents.” Weigl, stroking his beard, responded, “Herr General, life today has become so sad and disappointing that an old man like me has no hope of living in better times. I often think of ending my life, but this would be a tragedy for my family. However, Herr General, if you should give the order for my liquidation, you would only be doing me a favor, and in the process make me a hero.”

When the Nazi invasion began
, Weigl had considered abandoning the institute, but the murder of the professors clarified his mind. When he saw that the lab would function under the direction of Eyer, whom he trusted, he decided to stay, though he would never accept Nazi bribes or pretend that he was one of them. “Weigl did not adhere to the principle of ‘eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth,’” said Henryk Mosing, his chief epidemiologist. “He felt that even with the enemy you needed to look for some common ground that would lead to the general benefit. He saw that if he left his building the Wehrmacht would make it a barracks and destroy its collections, especially the enormous specimen museum created by the great zoologist Benedykt Dybowski. Moreover he quickly saw that the intelligentsia was out of work and needed a livelihood.”

The institute grew quickly
in size and personnel. It soon took over most of the four-story building on St. Nicholas Street, as well as the Potocki Street location established by the Soviets. University staff threatened with death, starvation, or deportation as slave laborers to Germany, students and young people, members of the resistance movement were protected by real or fictitious employment in the institute. Anytime a Pole in Lwów was in trouble—for underground activities, helping Jews, or anything else—the institute was there for protection. “Anyone who needed saving became a louse feeder,” said Stanisława Woyciechowska, an assistant to Weigl. “They got the
Ausweis
, and they were protected.” The orange-paper ID card with the Wehrmacht eagle and the inscriptions
Oberkommando des Heeres
(Army High Command) and
Institut für Fleckfieber und Virus Forschung
(Institute for Typhus and Viral Research) became a ticket to survival for thousands of Poles. Nearly every educated Pole in Lwów sought a job at the institute.

How many Poles
worked there has never been firmly established. In the 1980s, some of Weigl’s former aides put together an incomplete list of more than 500 people. Some estimates go as high as 5,000; the real figure is probably between 1,200 and 3,000. Among those saved by working in the institute were at least 75 men and women who became full professors in Poland and elsewhere after the war. There were also novelists, high school teachers, and musicians: the poet Zbigniew Herbert, the musician Stanisław Skrowaczewski, the sociologist Józef Chałasi
ski. “The activities of Rudolf Weigl,” wrote Tomasz Cieszy
ski, whose father, Antoni, was one of the murdered professors, “were key to the biological and spiritual survival of the Polish nation in the face of ethnic, racial, and class extermination.”

The Poles working
for Weigl would survive because the Nazis feared typhus and lice, and valued the product made from these lice more than they valued human life itself. A simple flash of the
Ausweis
was usually enough to get its holder out of any trouble, especially during the routine stops that often led to murder, enslavement, or deportation. The German guards would hand back the pass with a disgusted shake of the head. “They were human after all, though it was often hard to believe,” said Wacław Szybalski. “As the war went on, most of them were very young or very old, because the rest were at the front. The guards liked being in jobs where they weren’t being shot at.”

The regime created a ghetto
in Lwów in October 1941, ordering Jews to live in an impoverished area located mostly to the north of the main railroad line that splits the city, in the districts of Zamarstynowska and Kleparow. The housing was a mixture of lower middle-class apartments and hovels without running water or electricity.
The Nazis also set up a
forced-labor camp at 134 Janowska Street, on the northwest edge of the ghetto. Janowska would become one of the most wretched torture centers in the Nazi system. It was used as a work camp, a death camp, and a staging area for Jews being shipped from Lwów and other towns to the gas chambers at Belzec and Auschwitz. Janowska was run by spectacularly sadistic officers, each infamous for a particular facet of morbid perversion. An officer named Richard Rokita would walk down a row of saluting inmates on the parade ground and shoot one or two in the nape of the neck. Officer Wepke was known for chopping children in two with an ax. The camp commander, Fritz Gebauer, was generally mild-mannered but occasionally needed to strangle a woman, an action that produced a state of red-faced passion. The worst may have been the deputy commander, Gustav Wilhaus, who enjoyed shooting prisoners from the balcony of his villa. His wife often joined him in demonstrating her marksmanship, firing on Jews standing in a workshop near the house.

For a while, doctors
were one of the only Jewish professional groups whom the Nazis provided any special protection. The
Generalgouvernement
health department branch, directed by a Westphalian Nazi named Wilhelm Dopheide, issued special armbands for registered doctors that supposedly protected them against random arrest or labor details. As the Jews were kicked out of their homes and squeezed into the crumbling north side district, doctors were given slightly larger space allocations and even rooms for receiving patients.
This was probably
a tactical move on the part of Dopheide, who had contacts with the T-4 in Berlin, the euthanasia unit that organized the first mass murders of Eastern Jewry. Dopheide showed little interest in the health of Jews. Some 1,200 mentally ill Jews and Poles starved or froze to death in an asylum under his care. When the building had been emptied of patients, the Wehrmacht used it to house injured troops.

The Nazis confiscated
the Jewish Lazarus Hospital on Rappaport Street, a large red-brick Moorish building, built in the late 19th century, which had served as a teaching hospital and was equipped with the latest equipment and a fine staff. But Lwów had a prosperous, close-knit medical community, and some of its cohesion remained. As the Nazis murdered, starved, and hunted their coreligionists, the Jewish doctors of Lwów, assisted by refugee doctors from Kraków, Warsaw, and other cities, fought for their patients as best they could. They managed to open three ghetto hospitals, including one in the building of a Polish high school on Kuszewic
Street that many of the doctors had attended as youths. The three-story masonry building lay half a block north of the railroad embankment and offered a bird’s-eye view of the Gestapo tortures occurring at the ghetto checkpoints below.