The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (31 page)

In the southern and central sectors of the front, the first epidemic wave swept the Wehrmacht in December 1941, shortly after the first Russian counteroffensives.
On a single day
in January, the 6th, 17th, and 11th Armies and the 1st Armored Division reported a total of 560 cases. Vaccines would have been helpful, but even if they’d been available, there was no way to vaccinate with the troops in constant movement. Delousing would also be tough. “
The local difficulties
can’t be resolved through memos from above, and if you don’t improvise and aren’t resourceful, you’ll get nothing done,” said a unit physician.
Some units tried to
delouse by leaving their clothing out in the cold for 24 hours. But most of the soldiers, even those holding static positions, lacked a change of clothing. German doctors struggled to understand the epidemic.
One wrote that
it was “well known” that the Soviet POWs “throw lice at German soldiers, especially officers, in order to cause them to become lousy.” But such accounts of clumsy biological warfare—which were also reported on the Soviet side, implicating German troops—were essentially war propaganda.

Typhus seemed to catch
hold most easily when the troops were on the move, because they brushed up against the civilian population and had no way to keep clean. An adviser with Army Group North noted that during the winter of 1941–42 there were 660 cases and 60 deaths in one division, but 4,900 cases with 700 deaths in another that had fought in the same region. The explanation, he believed, was that the second unit had been forced into retreat and shared dwellings (and perhaps beds) with the civilian population. “Where parts of the army more or less remain in their fixed positions, despite the tense fighting conditions the number of infections have remained relatively low,” agreed Dr. Kurt Lydtin, another physician on the northern front. “Epidemics have occurred only where, as a result of Russian attacks, the fighting has broken out in areas newly occupied by our troops.”

On January 12, 1942
, typhus was diagnosed in the 18th Motorized Division, whose units had taken part in the capture of Tikhvin, south of Leningrad, in November but were driven out in mid-December and found themselves creeping through snowdrifts near the town of Staraya Russa. “Enormous masses of troops passed through this thickly populated area, traveling in powerful columns on narrow streets bordered by heavy snow,” Lydtin reported. “The troops were forced to seek shelter from the cold, and it was impossible to evacuate the civilian population.” The typhus outbreak a few weeks later fit with the expected incubation time, he said. The troops were becoming increasingly lousy. “The majority of the sick I see are in an unbelievable state of filth,” he reported. “Many louse-infected soldiers, in the field with no break for months, have scratched themselves until their leathery skin resembles that of a beggar. It will be difficult to control epidemics in these conditions. Soldiers in a land where there is typhus can’t afford to let their guard down like this. The hygiene situation was better in 1914/15.”

These alarming reports
, filed by the military’s consulting hygienists, landed on the desk of the senior military doctor, at the time General Siegfried Handloser. Like the typhus vaccine expert Hermann Eyer, the consulting hygienists were part of the Army Medical Inspectorate. The urgency of the reporting was intensified by the alarming fact that their medical colleagues were among the most vulnerable to typhus. “A doctor who was generally very calm suddenly became mistrustful,” wrote one physician. “Only after intense pressure from his fellows did he go to the hospital, where he demanded an X-ray for his intense headache. Afterward he became very sad and sobbed, worried that he could have infected someone else.”
Many German doctors
had not seen typhus before and were astonished by the profound symptoms of the disease. “The faces of the soldiers had lost their characteristics, and were limp and swollen. Sometimes they were reddish, often pale,” a physician wrote. “The eyelids were thick, with bags under the eyes, the face was dazed and sometimes shiny.”
The symptoms reminded
them of
Russlandmüde
, “Russia exhaustion,” the German version of the “1,000-yard stare” that afflicted soldiers who had seen too much battle for too long.
In recovery, the patients
did not behave with the stoicism and sense of duty expected of a German soldier. They ignored demands to write letters home, or wrote them but forgot what they’d said. They could not read and complained of powerful pain and thirst. They lost their hair or it turned gray; they became depressed or manic. With uncanny regularity, a soldier in the midst of a raging fever would seek to rise from his bed claiming that the Führer had awarded him the Knight’s Cross, or that he had invented a terrible new weapon that would quickly end the war.

To cope with
the symptoms of the disease, German doctors used strophanthin to stimulate the heart, phenobarbital and scopolamine to control psychosis. Nothing worked very well.
The Weil-Felix reaction
, a crucial but weak diagnostic tool, bedeviled the hygienists as it had confounded typhus experts for decades. The test was reliable only when the patient had been sick for four days, and even then there were false positives.
Not knowing whether
their patients had typhus or not, hygienists ordered unnecessary quarantines, or sent sick soldiers to the rear on freezing truck rides when they would have been more comfortable and more likely to survive if left in place. The Czech Jews Weil and Felix, the former in the hereafter, the latter in British exile, might have chuckled to see the trouble their imperfect tool was giving the doctors of the master race. Even Fleck, in his ghetto laboratory, had developed a better diagnostic.

Many Wehrmacht doctors
experimented with convalescent serum, the blood of cured typhus patients. They injected the material into the sick men with the hope that some antibodies would be transferred in the process. The procedure had been tried and had failed many times in past decades, but the watchword of desperate physicians was “Something has to be done.” At some prison camps, the physicians ran trials to test the efficacy of serum, using Russian POWs, who would be artificially infected with typhus, then injected with sera. In general it had no effect. The Russians died of typhus under medical observation.

The German soldiers’ letters
home that told about the typhus epidemic, describing gruesome deaths and comrades gone out of their heads, began to have an unnerving effect, which spurred Nazi propaganda leaders to suppress them. On January 23, 1942, Joseph Goebbels’s office asked the army to prohibit its soldiers from mentioning typhus in their letters. “The civilian population is already worried enough about the situation in the East and the terrible cold, and it is not necessary to feed these anxieties with reports of this sort from the soldiers,” reads a memo from his office. “Senior officers must be aware that we have only partial remedies for this epidemic, because the [vaccine] is not available in the necessary quantities.”
A memo 12 days
later reported that 235 Germans, 858 foreign workers, and 2,705 Jews had fallen ill of typhus within the Reich. It forbade all reporting on typhus and restricted any information on the disease to doctors specifically requesting it.

To combat typhus at the front
, army troops took harsh measures against civilians. When the Second Army, retreating from the siege of Moscow, came across 32,000 “old and sick civilians” in March 1942, it packed them onto a train that was sent to a no-man’s-land near the front, where they were “given food and abandoned,” according to a doctor’s account. Typhus cases in the army declined, he said, and so his unit had adopted the policy of “deporting superfluous eaters and hygienically inaccessible elements in the direction of the enemy bandits.” This kind of typhus control became one of the brutal scorched-earth policies in Wehrmacht-held territory.

Germany’s failure
to employ effective insecticide powders against the louse is somewhat baffling, though characteristic of Nazi infighting. The government ordered 10,000 tons of DDT powder from the Swiss chemical concern JR Geigy AG in 1942, and IG Farben, without obtaining a license, began producing a powder called Lauseto, which contained 15 percent DDT. But Hitler’s pet doctor, Theodor Morell, touted an insecticide called Russla and told Hitler that DDT might harm Germany’s youth and should be avoided. Because of Morell’s influence on the Führer and IG Farben’s conflicts with business competitors, DDT was little used on the eastern front, though it was eventually sprayed against malarial mosquitoes in Greece. Russla, meanwhile, was not as effective as DDT; and moreover, it stank, which led soldiers to avoid it.
In the winter of 1942
, desperate troop physicians pursued a folk legend that ants could be employed to eat lice and their nits. Experiments showed this was so, but that was of little consolation, since ants hibernate during the winter. Formic acid, originally derived from ants, proved ineffective at killing lice.

The more the Germans retreated
, the lousier they got. By August 1942, nearly 40,000 typhus cases had been reported on the eastern front, with about 4,500 deaths. Good statistics for the remainder of the war are unavailable, with estimates for the entire conflict ranging from 70,000 to 90,000 cases.
During three years
at the eastern front in the First World War, German military hospitals had treated 6,000 cases of typhus, 1,400 of them fatal. Typhus was only one of the illnesses—others included tuberculosis and diarrhea—that plagued the trenches. But the disease meant something more to the Nazis than just the casualties it caused. By January 1942, the German medical services were in a typhus panic. Germany’s soldiers were sickening and dying of the disease. The ghettos were full of Jews with it. And the economy relied upon the labor of millions of slave workers from the East, any of whom could be carrying it.

Despite Nazi Germany’s angst about lice and typhus, or perhaps precisely because of the obsessive and therefore impractical handling of the disease, neither the government nor IG Farben had done much in the interwar period to study typhus or prepare a vaccine. The louse- and typhus-infused rhetoric of medical Nazism was aimed at the Jew and Slav, but the disease had been reported only rarely in Germany during the first four decades of the 20th century. The country’s research focus reflected the latter fact, rather than the dreams of
lebensraum
occupation of the East.
At the outbreak of war
, no German laboratory even possessed a strain of epidemic typhus that could be used in vaccine research. This changed after Eyer set up his laboratory in Kraków. But as the health authorities awoke to the threat of the disease, they addressed it from competing power centers, as was characteristic of institutions in Nazi Germany. The army health inspector Waldmann, and his successor Handloser, entrusted their entire vaccine policy to Eyer in Kraków. Researchers from the German research centers with some knowledge of typhus—in Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Berlin—sent their leading men to Warsaw, where the
Generalgouvernement
funded research. The scientists Eugen Gildemeister and Eugen Haagen of the Koch Institute began trying to create a vaccine that used a related bacteria, known as murine typhus.
Gildemeister would work
in Berlin during the war, while Haagen set up a laboratory at the University of Strasbourg, France, where he experimented on prisoners from the Auschwitz and Natzweiler concentration camps.
Meanwhile, IG Farben
cranked up its own long-neglected typhus vaccine research arm at the Behringwerke laboratories in Marburg, Germany, and later in Lwów.

The leading scientists mistrusted
and deceived one another, and made free use of the Nazi bureaucracy to jockey for influence. Though they had worked side by side for years, Gildemeister and Haagen hated each other. Gerhard Rose, vice president of the Koch Institute and a consultant to the Luftwaffe, constantly fought with Gildemeister, whom he described as “a fearsome bureaucrat, and terribly formal.” All three resented the much younger Eyer, who was virtually the only typhus scientist to whom the army listened. They also mistrusted IG Farben when it became evident that the company, to cut financial corners, was making a vaccine that was too weak to be effective.
The differences were partly
scientific. Eyer was a steadfast defendant of Weigl’s louse intestine vaccine, the only tested product: “When you have the immense responsibility of producing a reliable vaccine in the quickest possible time to protect not some strange people but rather the German soldier, from a dastardly enemy, the complexity of the method is beside the point,” he said. “What is required is the unconditional guarantee that it be effective.”
The louse was the
natural growth medium for typhus, he said. When typhus grew in such “alien cultures” as guinea pig, mouse, rabbit, and eggs, it was subject to unpredictable mutations, and thus less stable and reliable. This was substantially correct, but some of the other scientists felt that Eyer had raised the point to a dogma.

Although Gildemeister
, Haagen, IG Farben, and Wohlrab (in Warsaw) were all working on versions of an egg-based vaccine by 1941, none could persuade the army to use any vaccine other than the Weigl type. This infuriated the other scientists; the Koch Institute forbade its employees to talk to Eyer, although Haagen and Gildemeister had originally trained him. “Eyer was a very capable man, especially in the areas of organization and laboratory technique—but he had blinkers on,” Rose claimed in postwar interrogations. “He’d completely convinced himself of the louse process and didn’t want to let anything else on the table. He wanted the monopoly, in the scientific sense.” Gildemeister, Rose, and Otto saw—correctly—that Eyer could never cover the military’s needs with louse vaccines. (Eyer’s name, which sounds exactly like the German word for eggs—
Eier
—was also a source of confusion.)
The army medical chief
Handloser, who comes across as rather dim-witted in his postwar interviews, placed his trust in Eyer and refused to accept entreaties from the egg men.
Rose, on the other
hand, declared, “The Army wouldn’t take [the egg vaccines], so, more for me.” Rose’s trust in those vaccines was never tested: Luftwaffe troops, being mostly airborne, did not spend much time in trenches where the lice were.