The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (30 page)
Authors: Arthur Allen
Richard Haas, chief of the Behring vaccine plant in Lwów, speaks with Nazi officers attending its ceremonial opening in December 1942. Hans Frank, the Nazi leader of Poland, stands with hands hanging loose. (Emil-von-Behring-Bibliothek, Philipps-Universität Marburg.)
Weigl was invited
to the ceremony, but declined. The idea of sitting with Frank nauseated him. “I will not shake the hand of a man who has murdered my friends,” he told Gildemeister, who had come to his office to urge him to attend. Gildemeister, who was testing vaccines on prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp at the time, nodded sympathetically.
Weigl did, however
, give Behringwerke assistance in producing his vaccine. Under a September 1942 agreement, the Weigl institute began training Behringwerke louse feeders by adding one box of lice after another, up to six at one session, to desensitize their skin to louse bites. After training, the feeders began work in the new Behringwerke lab, which occupied the same Zielona (Ukrainian: Zelena) Street building that had been Ludwik Fleck’s workplace during the Soviet occupation. A large piece of land was purchased to create an egg farm and grow food for the institution and its animals. The plan was for the institute to produce 20,000 vaccines with the Weigl method and 20,000 egg yolk sac vaccines each month.
Much as the Germans
despised Weigl, they continued to depend upon him, especially to recruit lice feeders and other employees. A contract that survives in the files of the Behringwerke states that Weigl was to be paid 900 zlotys a month in return for his cooperation. The less experienced German staff of the Behringwerke arrogantly viewed Weigl’s methods as obstacles to be overcome. But when problems arose, the only solution was to ask for his help. At one point, the Behringwerke decided to replace the wooden lice cages, which sometimes warped, with metal ones. Most of the lice escaped, and the institute scientists had to come begging to Weigl for a new seed colony. He agreed. Weigl never refused help to a scientific colleague. When the first several batches of vaccine had little efficacy, Weigl sent over a deputy to straighten out the production process. Though the work was similar, social conditions at the Behringwerke lab were different from those at the Weigl institute. Some Polish employees had tried to sabotage the vaccine work, the Berhringwerke chief Haas wrote to his colleagues in Marburg in 1943, but “when the SS shot a worker who had stolen material from the plant, it had a good result.”
Across town, in the ghetto, the terror was reaching a climax.
On February 4, 1943
, Gestapo cars pulled up in front of the Laokoon factory, where Fleck was working. The officers ordered Fleck and Bernard Umschweif, along with Ernestyna and Ryszard Fleck, Umschweif’s wife, Natalia, and five-year-old son, Karol, to get in. From the factory, they headed west along the park lying below the High Castle and skirting the railroad tracks that separated the ghetto from central Lwów. This road led to Janowska and certain death. But at a crucial moment, the truck crossed under the railroad embankment and pulled up at the Jewish hospital on Kuszewicz Street, amid streets that smoked and smelled of burning flesh during yet another
Aktion
. An SS officer entered the bacteriological laboratory, where the remainder of Fleck’s staff were still working, and ordered everyone out onto the street. Perhaps acting with Dr. Fleck’s assistance, the SS instructed Dr. Owsiej Abramowicz, one of Fleck’s assistants, to board the truck, along with Jakob Seeman. And then there was Anna Seeman, limping toward the truck. The SS officer told her to stay put, but Fleck, who had been told the scientists were being taken to work somewhere, spoke up. He sensed that anyone left off the truck was doomed.
“Eine Tänzerin brauchen Sie im Labor nicht,” he told the SS man.
A laboratory doesn’t need ballerinas
.
The SS man shrugged
, and Anna Seeman climbed aboard the truck, grasping her husband’s outstretched arm. Their son, Bruno, was still inside the lab bathroom. Two and a half years later, at the age of 13, he was interviewed in Warsaw by a committee of Jewish remembrance. His mother, Seeman said, hadn’t been sure whether the truck represented death or life. Initially, he said, “mom asked the SS men if she could leave me behind, and they agreed. But an hour later she came back to the laboratory and took me with her. She told me that we were all going to the Reich, where we would work in a chemical factory.”
Thus Fleck saved
not only Anna Seeman but her son as well. “Few people would have had the courage to behave the way he did in those evil circumstances,” she told an interviewer later. “Fleck refused to be dehumanized.” For three days, Fleck and the 10 other members of his entourage were held at Ł
cki Street prison. Most of the time, the prevailing view of the group was that they would all be killed. But on February 7, a horse-drawn cart took them to the Lwów railway station. They were given bread and marmalade for a journey, and put in two closed compartments—“railroad cars for humans,” as Bruno Seeman testified. “Not like the other prisoners in the animal wagons. But there we learned, because they told us, that we were not going to the Reich, but to the camp in Auschwitz.”
German soldiers at the Battle of Stalingrad. (Superstock.)
I
n the ghetto in Lwów, Poland, in February 1943, there was only one reason the Gestapo would spare the life of a little Jewish doctor and his underfed, crippled assistant, let alone their children. The German war effort needed them. The specialized knowledge Fleck and his colleagues possessed took on growing value in light of the abysmal news from the eastern front. The month that Fleck was sent to Auschwitz, the German Sixth Army surrendered at Stalingrad, marking a key turning point in the war. After that, the Nazis were in more or less permanent retreat.
Even by the end of 1941, Operation Barbarossa was shaping up not to be the heroic cakewalk Hitler had expected. Stalin’s troops were overrun, slaughtered, and captured by the millions in the first months of the operation, as the Germans pushed deep into Ukraine and Russia. But the Soviets regrouped; by September, Red Army resistance and the fall rains had combined to slow the advance of the Germans, who suffered terrible casualties and the loss of much of their armor.
Hitler’s war plan
required the fall of Moscow before the start of winter. In early December, after the Wehrmacht advanced to as close as ten miles from the Kremlin, a Soviet counterattack drove back the Germans. Operation Barbarossa was not designed for retreat. As the Germans lost their strategic initiative and began moving from trench to trench, the diseases of earlier wars found them.
Much has been written concerning the arrogance and hubris of Hitler and his generals. Having whipped the formidable French army in a six-week blitzkrieg, they assumed that the demoralized, less-than-human soldiers of the Red Army would quickly abandon the fight. Convinced that the German boys could “live off the land” by confiscating what they needed from the Russians, military quartermasters had failed to assure good supply lines to the quick-moving front. The lack of winter clothing in the troop packs was one of the most obvious signs of German miscalculation. German propaganda had made much of the typhus threat in the Soviet lands, but the army’s provisioners had failed to take heed, perhaps assuming that German troops would have little contact with their racial inferiors. This was a grievous mistake. The winter of 1941 was one of the coldest on record, with temperatures in western Russia dropping to minus 42 degrees Fahrenheit. Within a few months of the start of Barbarossa, German troops became lousy and were ordered to boil their clothes instead of washing them, which was entirely impractical. Delousing stations had served Germany well during World War I, but in this war, engineering battalions were not provisioned with adequate equipment to begin with, and most of what they had was lost during the first retreat. This might not have been quite as critical if Germany had vaccinated its troops against typhus, but it had not. By late 1941, only a small percentage of Wehrmacht doctors, let alone other medical staff, had received the three shots of Weigl vaccine required for a year of protection. Common soldiers had not been vaccinated at all. Hitler had not only failed to provide warm clothing for his men. Their protection against disease was frankly inadequate.
To be sure, Germany
was not the only country that lacked typhus vaccine. Britain had decided early in the war to forgo vaccination in favor of delousing measures; the British army paid for this decision with outbreaks in North Africa, although according to one published report, only 11 British service members died in 1943–44.
By the time
the United States entered the war, Herald Cox’s egg-grown vaccine was available, and medics vaccinated millions of American troops headed for the European and North African theaters. But the typhus threat U.S. and British troops faced in sun-drenched North Africa, or even, later, in Italy, did not compare with that of the frozen steppes of the eastern front. The Soviet army also lacked vaccine.
But there was
one thing Soviet soldiers had that their German enemies lacked: warm winter coats. These quickly became a primary means for the spread of typhus to the Wehrmacht, for shivering German troops routinely robbed the lousy Soviet POWs of their clothes. With those men, typhus must have seemed like a distant threat.
By November 1941, the Wehrmacht had seized 3.8 million Soviet POWs, and held them in vast encampments across half of Europe. German labor officials, who had been told to make free use of the POWs as forced laborers in the Reich, were discovering that this figure was something of an illusion.
The number of
living
Soviet prisoners by November was about 1.58 million, according to labor officials, and an additional 15,000 were dying of typhus every day.
Thousands more
died daily of starvation and cold. By the time the war ended, 5.7 million Soviet soldiers had fallen into German hands, and 3.3 million died. If cold, chaotic retreat, and lousiness were the dry tinder for typhus, the POW camps provided the spark, for the Soviet troops brought the disease with them.
Like German soldiers
, Russian recruits were given baths in caustic chemicals and shaved before putting on their first uniforms, but they quickly became lousy again.
In their propaganda
, the Soviets countered Nazi claims of Slavic slovenliness with their own attacks on the tendency of “Aryan culture” to “spread epidemics.” In reality, the Red Army couldn’t kill all the lice in Russia, and too many soldiers from godforsaken villages brought the germs with them when they enlisted.
German military doctors began reporting typhus outbreaks in the POW camps in October. At three camps clustered near the Baltic in northwest Poland, 90 German guards also fell ill that month. “The number of sick Russians is assumed to be high,” the physician on the scene reported, “but it can’t be known precisely, because diagnosis is impossible in their dark crowded quarters. Of course not all the deaths are caused by typhus—many Russians die of hunger edema.” Germany in general did not feed Soviet POWs.
At a POW camp
on the Elbe River in northeast Germany in January 1942, the death rate was 2 percent per day. A Wehrmacht health inspector there, a Dr. Büttner, witnessed cannibalism. “A man who [Büttner’s] translator said was Azerbaijani ate the raw flesh of a dead prisoner right out in public without causing a stir,” he wrote. Büttner refused to accept the explanation that German-imposed starvation had caused this behavior. He had been told the Russian men got warm meals twice a day. No, he said, “it must be some kind of cultish custom.” Only someone infused with Nazi racial prejudice could have believed this. Soviet prisoners often resorted to cannibalism. Even more frequently, witnesses came upon ravenous Soviet work details, the prisoners ripping open dead animals with their fingernails or stuffing themselves with raw potatoes, grass, or dung.