The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (29 page)

Smuggling vaccine to Jews
was punishable by death. So was employing Jews. Despite this, Weigl made a concerted effort to protect close Jewish colleagues, sending an aide, Zbigniew Stuchly, to Kraków with an offer to find a place at the institute for Filip Eisenberg, who had been Weigl’s boss at Przemy
l during the Great War. Eisenberg demurred, saying he would remain in his home. He was put on a train to Belzec and gassed with thousands of others. Stuchly also offered protection to Adam Finkel, the hematologist who’d been on Weigl’s PhD committee and studied the immunological profile of lice feeders. Perhaps Finkel was disinclined to leave his relatives. Despite repeated discussions with Stuchly, he decided to remain in the Lwów ghetto and perished. “We couldn’t save anyone but Henryk Meisel,” Stuchly later recalled.

Meisel and his wife, Paula, are the only Jews known for certain to have worked for any length of time at Weigl’s institute during the war. They were well-known bacteriologists, assimilated Jews who had worked for the Polish National Institute of Hygiene since its inception in 1920, and Henryk Meisel was one of Weigl’s oldest colleagues. After the Nazi invasion, Meisel was put to work producing rabies vaccine and examining the sterility of typhus vaccines at the St. Nicholas Street laboratory. For their safety, the Meisels were moved out of the ghetto to Grabszczyzna, the Wehrmacht-occupied villa where the resistance leader Stefania Grabska had grown up. Eyer told his superiors that Meisel’s expertise was vital to the war effort, since the
Clostridia
bacteria he studied often caused wound infections. Every day, an Austrian soldier named Moser accompanied the Meisels to the institute and back. They wore armbands with the Jewish star under the word
Arzt
(doctor, in German).
Moser later recalled
, “I was often asked by the SS men, ‘Where are you going with those Jews?’ I would always answer, ‘Not on a sightseeing trip, and if you want to know more details you can get them from my boss.’” After a while, the Meisels moved into the institute, to gain more certain protection from the Gestapo.
Halina Ogrodzi
ska, an activist
in
egota, an underground resistance group that aided Jews, worked with Meisel in the Weigl laboratory and sometimes gave Polish literature lessons to his daughter, Felicja. Early in the war, each time she visited their home Dr. Meisel’s mother would make scrambled eggs or an omelet, always urging Ogrodzi
ska to “eat, eat.” As pressure grew, Meisel sent his sister to Warsaw, where she survived, and Felicja entered a Catholic orphanage. Meisel had a long discussion with his mother, and “they decided that because she was so old, the best solution would be for her to take poison,” Ogrodzi
ska said later. “They never spoke about this with the rest of the family, and one day she was dead—like that. I was still very young, but Dr. Meisel liked to talk to me, and he badly needed to speak with someone. He told me he had a very heavy heart, but I already knew that.”

Felicja ended up
hiding in 18 places during the war, including the Botanical Garden, behind the institute. Sometimes, when her parents missed her terribly, she would be brought in for a visit for a few hours. Just before New Year’s Day, 1943, Meisel and his wife were deported to Auschwitz. Felicja, who was 14, remained in hiding. One night she slept in the institute basement. “I spent the night with the animals. I heard the guinea pigs singing in the morning. It was beautiful, like bird song.” Several months later, she had to flee the city and was told to meet her contact at the main train station, where Ukrainian, Polish, and German thugs made a living as Jew chasers. To conceal herself, she fell in with a group of Hitler Youth, but she entered the wrong platform and found herself crossing the tracks, with her train about to depart. As she said later, “Someone took me by the scruff of the neck like a dog and said, ‘Not this way!’ And thanks to that, running, I got on my train at the last minute.”

Hermann Eyer walked a tightrope for the years of the war. First and foremost, he was producing a vaccine to protect the Wehrmacht, a job he took with the utmost seriousness. Like other German officers of the time who were less than enthusiastic about Nazism, Eyer saw no contradiction between disdain for the government and support for its agents of global conquest. “
Every physician was
faced with this question,” says his son, Peter Eyer. “Should I help the wounded soldier survive, knowing that if he’s put back together he’ll use his rifle to kill people? Should I help him? The answer is not simple.” After the war, Eyer stood firmly behind his work. “
I estimate quite conservatively
that my efforts and those of my associates saved at least 10,000 people from certain death by typhus. From a moral perspective that’s a contribution few could equal,” he wrote to a colleague. But since the 10,000 were mostly German soldiers, “those in the East saw what we did as worthy of condemnation, because it helped prolong the war.”

The historical record
shows that Eyer demonstrated loyalty to his Polish employees, intervening repeatedly to save men and women who’d been arrested by the Gestapo. Himmler’s agents were not pleased about this. They were under orders not to disturb his enterprise or arrest his employees—there were exceptions, of course—and those facts rankled.
The Gestapo, many of
whom had been working-class cops in civilian life, had only the vaguest idea of what went on at the institute. They understood that its Polish employees were guinea pigs of some sort. But the guinea pigs were happy to volunteer, as a former Kraków Gestapo commander stated after the war, “first, because they got better rations; second, because they were safe from arrest, and third, because the Home Army knew the institute was a safe harbor for its people.”
After the war, these same
Gestapo agents turned their enmity on Eyer, accusing him of conducting unethical medical experiments, a charge that had no evidence behind it but led to Eyer’s being brought in for questioning as late as the 1970s.

Eyer may have been anti-Semitic
, but he showed courage in protecting his Polish workers and in tolerating their subversive activities. Such behavior was rare among the German medical corps. This, perhaps, was the worst crime of the Nazi doctors: while it is unfair to assign collective guilt, it is striking how few of them did anything at all to help. Indeed, Ludwik Hirszfeld, whose work on blood types was twisted into hateful nonsense by Nazi scientists, found the doctors’ betrayal harder to take than any other aspect of Nazism. “When the Germans decided to kill everyone in the [ghetto], none of the German scientists and physicians who were in Warsaw, not even those who knew exactly who I was, warned me or offered me the slightest help. Men like Kudicke and [Kudicke’s assistant Rudolf] Wohlrab visited me in the district hospital and talked with me about science,” he wrote from hiding in 1944. “I see blood on the hands of German scientists, on those who wrote about race hygiene, the Nordic soul, living space, a mission in the East, and in whatever other ways violence was anticipated and motivated. I see blood also on those even more numerous scientists who knew that this was nonsense but kept silent and on the street did not even greet their colleagues who had fallen into disfavor. There are moments in the life of a nation when a man must not keep quiet lest he become an accomplice.”

Of all the German
physicians he dealt with as a ghetto physician, Hirszfeld singled one out for praise: Hermann Eyer. In an interview some years after the war, he said that Eyer had helped fight the typhus epidemic in the Warsaw ghetto by sending precious vaccines. This was an example, he said, “of a German doctor’s great courage and humanist engagement.”

The Nazis tolerated Weigl
because they needed him, but their mistrust grew. For the first year of the German occupation, the official Polish-language newspaper,
Lwowska Gazeta
, ran many articles about typhus. It discussed the symptoms and methods of prevention, the most effective, according to the paper, being the avoidance of contact with Jews. In 1942, it carried the happy news that a new, “superior” German institute was being built to run and perhaps eventually replace the Weigl institute. By this time, German attitudes toward Weigl had soured. When in April 1943 a Marburg newspaper mistakenly hailed Weigl’s vaccine as “a victory of German science,” Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda office put out word that Weigl was a Pole, and possibly a Jew, who should never be mentioned in the press.

In December 1942
, after much ceremony and a great scientific “conference” in the Lwów Opera House, the “Lemberg” branch of the Behringwerke was inaugurated, with plans at the top levels of the German government for it to become a great center of vaccine production.
Reichsmarschall
Hermann Göring had ordered manufacturers to make a priority of supplying the company with everything it needed for the typhus vaccine laboratory. In anticipation of the opening, IG Farben arranged for a new biography to clean up the image of the institute’s namesake, Emil von Behring. This required some work: Behring had earlier been denounced by Nazi publications because his wife was Jewish. Many Nazi publications, following the Führer’s lead, were dubious about vaccines, considering them Jewish science that poisoned Aryan blood. Many of the bigwigs of German typhus research were present at the Behringwerke ceremony: Heinz Zeiss; Joachim Mrugowsky and Erwin Ding from the SS Hygiene Institute; Eugen Gildemeister from Berlin; Rudolf Wohlrab and Robert Kudicke from the
Generalgouvernement
; Albert Demnitz, Rudolf Gönnert, and Richard Haas from IG Farben; and, of course, Hermann Eyer. Zeiss set the tone of the meeting with his lecture, “
Geomedizin
in the Eastern Territories.” Eyer and Mrugowsky gave speeches, as did Haas, who would direct the new laboratory and in doing so, they said, create a sparkling new center for German science in the East. The
Generalgouvernement
leader Hans Frank, the Galicia SS chief Fritz Katzmann, and a murderer’s row of their accomplices politely applauded.