The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (32 page)
Authors: Arthur Allen
By the end of 1941
, as typhus began to plague the Wehrmacht, Eyer’s labs in Kraków and Lwów were delivering to the army about 20,000 doses of vaccine per month—enough to vaccinate some 6,500 troops. Eyer produced a small amount of additional vaccine, grown in mouse lungs and lice, in the Polish town of Rabka. More than 5 million troops were by then involved in the eastern campaign. Desperate military, SS, business, and civilian leaders showered Eyer and his military supervisors with requests for vaccine they could not spare. The military suggested that private industry take up the slack.
But Behringwerke
, IG Farben’s main vaccine-producing component, did not produce a typhus preventive until April 1941, and, like all the egg-based vaccines produced by the Germans, it had serious problems. The American Cox vaccine relied on a series of inexplicable but vital techniques to work properly. The vaccine had to be stored in particular solvents at particular temperatures for set time periods during different growth stages. Why? No one knew. This period was called the “empirical phase” of vaccine development. The finer production details were not included in the journal articles Cox had published on his vaccine. Unable to spend time with Herald Cox, the Germans lacked access to the true egg vaccine thought collective—the vaccine as made by flesh-and-blood scientists, rather than as described in books. Their vaccines didn’t work.
The Weigl vaccine
, on the other hand, seemed to be working. It usually protected those lucky enough to have been vaccinated from death, psychosis, and disability. There were failures, however. Army Group Center in early 1942 reported many severe cases and deaths in a division of vaccinated tank troops—although perhaps the report should be taken with a grain of salt, since the reporting physician was a Behringwerke director allied with Eyer’s scientific foes.
Finally, the shortage
of vaccine forced matters to a head. The German doctors decided upon a notorious course of medical experimentation that would echo through medical practice around the world for years to come. These developments would also bring Weigl and Fleck back together, indirectly, when the enemies of Weigl’s wartime chief persuaded the SS to create a rival vaccine—which Fleck would help produce.
At the urging of Gildemeister
, senior Nazi government, academic, and pharmaceutical officials met in Berlin on December 29, 1941, to discuss measures to counter typhus. The top Nazi health officers were represented along with senior IG Farben officers. Eyer was absent, but a Dr. Scholz represented the views of Eyer and his boss, Siegfried Handloser. Scholz began the meeting, held at the interior ministry, with the statement that the army would use only vaccine produced with Weigl’s technique, which “offered a fairly certain protection against a fatal course.”
While restricting the vaccine options meant that no more than a small percentage of army troops could be vaccinated, at least for the time being, Scholz explained that this fit with Hitler’s views. The Führer, he said, was not interested in vaccinating the whole army with a prophylactic that was only partially efficacious. If the men were too sick to fight, they were of no battlefield use to the Reich. “When it was confirmed to him that a complete protection against the disease could not be effected, although certainly some deaths could be prevented by the inoculation, the Führer decided that for the time being there was no question of vaccinating the German Army,” Scholz said. The army’s policy would therefore be to vaccinate only medics and others who treated typhus or otherwise were at constant risk of illness. Hitler’s inhumane judgment on his own soldiers thus vindicated the Wehrmacht’s refusal to accept vaccines that were not made by means of the Weigl method.
However, other German officials
had already decided to ignore the supreme leader’s views. An interior ministry official concluded the conference by stressing the urgent need to increase production everywhere. Although the egg-based vaccine was inferior to Weigl’s, he said, this should be kept quiet so as not to create “bad publicity” for the former. Leaving open the possibility that the army might use egg-based vaccines in the future, he also urged the Behringwerke vaccines to be further tested.
Standartenführer
(Colonel) Joachim
Mrugowsky, chief of the Waffen-SS Hygiene Institute, would be asked to take care of testing the vaccine, the assembled officials agreed. Why a group of senior pharmaceutical and public health experts would ask an SS officer to test a vaccine remains unsaid in the minutes from these meetings. It was a hotly discussed topic at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial. But the explanation is clear: the vaccines were to be tested in the concentration camps, where the usual rules of medical ethics did not apply.
Mrugowsky, who was Erwin
Ding’s superior and one of a handful of top Nazi medical decision makers, was the son of a well-off doctor whose death in World War I plunged the family into poverty. Mrugowsky, who had joined the SS in 1930, was a specialist in public health, which under Nazidom was more about eugenics than public welfare. One could say that Ludwik Fleck and Mrugowsky represented opposing critiques of the bacteriological tradition. Whereas Fleck saw the complex workings of immunity and organism as key elements of the epidemiology of infectious disease, Mrugowsky viewed patterns of infection in terms of race and blood. The only member of the “public” whose health counted was the non-Jewish “Aryan” German. The individual mattered, Mrugowsky wrote in his PhD dissertation, only if he was German and then only in that he was “a small member of his clan and his
Volk
.” As for the Slav and the Jew, they were worthy of notice only as “illness carriers,” “parasites,” or “vermin,” that is to say, something to be avoided at best, or eradicated.
After being named in 1938
to head the new SS Hygiene Institute, whose purpose was to assure the “hygienic conditions” of the eastern lands occupied by Germany, Mrugowsky pushed aside the theosophist Karl Genzken to become chief hygienist on the staff of
Reichsarzt
SS Ernst-Robert Grawitz. This made him the no. 2 health official in the SS.
Mrugowsky’s staff of 200
included Kurt Gerstein, an engineer who had been jailed for opposing the Nazi regime in the 1930s and seems to have joined the SS in order to spy on its activities. He won Mrugowsky’s confidence by designing water filters and arranging the purchase and installation of delousing machinery for Waffen-SS troops. Gerstein would become a peculiar sort of witness (the “spy of God,” as a French author put it) to the Holocaust and the SS death machinery. As an aide to Mrugowsky, Gerstein provisioned the gas chambers at Auschwitz and Majdanek. Bacteriological laboratories in Kiev and Riga and at Auschwitz and Buchenwald formed another facet of Mrugowsky’s expansive domain.
He was responsible
for a series of medical experiments that occurred throughout the concentration camp system.
As the scholar Paul
Weindling has aptly noted, “preventive medicine and genocide were inextricably linked” at the SS Hygiene Institute. In October 1941, Gerhard Peters, general manager of the chemical firm Degesch, wrote to the army inspectorate, touting a new disinfectant called Zyklon B. Already, the chemical had been used to delouse the clothes and housing of 5 million soldiers and prisoners, and special chambers were available to delouse another 5 million. The problem with Zyklon B was that while killing lice very effectively, it was also extremely toxic to humans. In January 1942, Himmler responded through an aide that he was very interested indeed in Peters’s product. His response came the week of the Wannsee Conference, the gathering of senior Nazi officials outside Berlin at which the final solution of European Jewry was sealed. That month, Mrugowsky arranged for Degesch to deliver 1,200–1,500 kilograms of Zyklon B to Auschwitz every three or four months. Ostensibly, the Zyklon B was for delousing, but camp Commandant Rudolf Höss had decided to use it to kill Jews. Gerstein would spend the war carrying out deliveries of Zyklon, while secretly reporting on the Nazi extermination methods to unbelieving or indifferent pastors, diplomats, and others.
IG Farben and the Wehrmacht’s supply office also contacted scientists and health officials in Romania, Denmark, and France in attempts to procure additional typhus vaccine. The overtures to France’s Pasteur Institute were the most important.
The Pasteur scientists Paul
Durand and Hélène Sparrow in Tunis had developed a promising vaccine based on Ruiz Castañeda’s demonstration that
Rickettsia
would grow in mice whose immune systems had been weakened by X-rays. Instead of radiation, Durand and Sparrow exposed the animals to extreme cold and paratyphoid bacteria, then injected
Rickettsia
into their windpipes. The cultures grew quickly in the mouse lungs and, after being harvested, purified, and exposed to formalin, provided a killed-typhus vaccine.
Durand brought the vaccine
to Pasteur’s typhus lab chief, Paul Giroud, in Paris, where the two of them expanded its use to rabbits.
Many tricks were
involved in the production of this vaccine. Giroud once wrote that it was necessary to vary the technique for each rabbit, depending on its size and health status. But the rickettsial cultures derived from the rabbit’s lungs—when the technique worked—were rich and offered a promising alternative to chicken eggs or lice.
For Germany, the only question was how to get hold of the Pasteurian vaccine.
In January 1942
, a potential avenue opened up. In the first week of that month, French officials from the Pasteur Institute and the French health ministry paid calls upon German health and interior ministry officials on behalf of French POWs. The French had learned that approximately 400 of their POWs had fallen ill of typhus, with 90 deaths, after Soviet POWs arrived at Stalag IV-B, a large camp east of the Elbe River in Brandenburg. The disease had spread to the French after their medics treated desperately ill Russians. During the visit to Berlin, the French officials received permission to visit French POW camps regularly over the coming months to administer Giroud’s vaccine. Gildemeister and other German officials pointedly expressed Germany’s interest in gaining access to the vaccine. In effect, a swap was arranged—French know-how and vaccine in exchange for the right to protect French nationals held by the Third Reich.
The Pasteur Institute, rife
with resistance members, would play a cat-and-mouse game with the Wehrmacht and IG Farben throughout the war. German policies toward the French were far more lenient than those in Poland, and this extended to the relationship with vaccine providers. Weigl was, in principle, directly under Nazi command; Giroud and the Pasteurians were independent and could negotiate effectively with the Germans. While they never outright refused a German request, the French seem to have manipulated the Germans’ effort at politesse, offering innumerable excuses and delays in a way that kept vaccine deliveries to a minimum. Meanwhile, the institute established a secret typhus vaccine production laboratory in Laroche-Beaulieu, in Vichy France, which was not occupied by German troops until the end of the war.
To give a flavor
of this relationship: on February 2, 1942, the Wehrmacht supply office contacted the French health ministry with a request to purchase 50,000 doses of Giroud’s vaccine. After consulting with the Pasteur Institute director Jacques Trefouel, the ministry replied that the vaccine was still being tested. In fact, there was plenty of vaccine, but Trefouel had told the ministry he needed it to fight typhus outbreaks in North Africa and among French POWs. The French aim was to vaccinate 1.2 million French POWs and thus prevent them from returning to France with typhus.
By war’s end, Giroud
and his aides had produced about 2.2 million doses—enough to vaccinate roughly 750,000 people. About a tenth of the production had been sold to Germany.
While the typhus vaccine
trade with Germany was small, the Pasteurians did share the technology. Numerous German scientists were invited, or rather invited themselves, to the Pasteur Institute for training. In the words of the writer Céline, who was associated with the Pasteur during the war, the institute “had to concede to periodic visits by one or another ‘Professor Fritz’ in response to German demands for access to technical know-how.”
One of the first
, in the fall of 1942, was Erwin Ding. He spent three months trying to learn Giroud’s difficult method, and returned in December to Buchenwald.
Roll call at Buchenwald, 1938. (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, courtesy of USHMM.)
T
here were really two
Buchenwalds, an upper camp and a lower camp, separated by barbed wire, and within the upper camp there were more divisions. Where some men fought like rats for a piece of bread, it was a constant struggle to maintain a degree of solidarity rather than descend into the primitive state that Himmler and his lieutenants had designed for the prisoners. As the chemist Albert Kirrmann of the University of Strasbourg wrote after the war, “The abyss between the corner tramp and the elegant party-goer who passes by on a Paris night is far less profound than that between the
Lagerälteste
[the senior inmate trustee], strolling through the parade ground in his sumptuous boots, beautiful St. Bernard at his side, and the piteous skeleton of the Little Camp, dressed in rags and staggering with weakness.” The lower camp was a warren of tents and poorly constructed barracks, lying at the bottom of the hill where Buchenwald stood. It was here that the most miserable camp inmates lived—the recent arrivals, mostly Jews, who had been transported in sealed boxcars from other camps and awaited assignment to hard-labor details where most died of overwork, starvation, exposure, and disease.