The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (33 page)

Conditions improved
at the upper camp of Buchenwald after 1942, when the political prisoners, the “Reds,” emerged triumphant from a fierce conflict with the common criminals, the “Greens.” As in all the concentration camps, day-to-day power in Buchenwald was wielded by the inmates themselves. The worst capos and block leaders used the system to exploit and torture those beneath them, but the Communists and other Reds (most but not all “Reds” were leftists; a minority were Christian or conservative opponents of the Nazis) brought a degree of humanitarian purpose when they took over key positions. The Greens, being violent, irrational, and opportunistic, were a good temperamental fit with the Nazis and the camp motto, “To each his own.” But though brutal and pitiless, the Greens were generally incapable of organizing factory work. As Himmler began to demand more production from the camps, midlevel SS found the Reds to be better partners. They may have been the Reich’s mortal enemies, but they offered a solid cadre of bright, well-organized workers and tradesmen. Inmates of Buchenwald and its subsidiary camps built machine guns, V-1 and V-2 rockets, and their guidance systems.
The work required skill
and discipline. By the end of the war, the cream of European communism was confined at Buchenwald. German leftists had been in the camps for 12 years; solidarity, street fighting, and a tough working-class upbringing had equipped them better than most for camp life. When the Reds kept things running smoothly—with a minimum of obvious sabotage—camp SS officers were less likely to be reprimanded for shoddy performances that might have ended their sinecures. A degree of symbiosis developed between the Reds and the SS, and that benefited the camp inmates in general.

At times, it went
beyond mere coexistence. After Ding left Buchenwald for the first time in 1939, he was replaced as camp doctor by Waldemar Hoven, a 36-year-old SS man from a well-off farming family in the Black Forest. Hoven had quit high school and wandered the world for 14 years, spending three of them on a Minnesota farm.
Given his erratic behavior
, Hoven may have had a dissociative disorder of some kind. After graduating from medical school in 1939, he caught Himmler’s eye by sending the SS supremo an original Friedrich Schiller letter purchased in Paris. Not long afterwards, the new sycophant was put in charge of the Buchenwald hospital. Dedicated Communists staffed some of the top inmate medical positions, and soon Hoven was a regular part of their intrigues.

Hoven was a rakish
, impetuous fellow, a would-be Rudolf Valentino known for theft, drinking, womanizing, and homosexual rape. Among his conquests was the camp commandant’s wife, Ilse Koch, who would enter history as an axiomatic figure of female perversity—“the Bitch of Buchenwald.”
Inmates would sometimes
look up from their shovels to see Frau Koch standing above them, riding whip in hand, in a skirt with no underwear. She periodically ordered the murder of prisoners she had tired of looking at. Others were poisoned and their skins harvested. At the camp pathology laboratory, a Communist capo and his assistants surgically removed Ilse Koch’s favored tattoos and converted them into book covers, lampshades, wallets, and other keepsakes. She had shrunken heads made as toys for her children.
None of this seemed
to bother her husband, the commandant Karl-Otto Koch, who stole thousands of marks budgeted for feeding prisoners and stocked his villa with cured meats and champagne. When he got wind of his wife’s affair with Hoven, though, he demanded a share of the latter’s loot.

Hoven was also known
for his characteristic style of murder—via injections of sodium evipan or phenol. He’d give death shots to a whole row of prisoners, then stroll from the operating room, cigarette in hand, merrily whistling “A Perfect Day.” He admitted at Nuremberg to having killed 150 patients this way, but they were “traitors,” he said, who had to be done away with to protect the camp prisoner government for which he was working. Such statements were obviously self-serving, but there was an element of uncomfortable truth to them, for Hoven employed his wickedness effectively in the struggle against the Greens. Ernst Busse, a top German Communist in the camp, once even stated, “Waldemar is crazy, you would almost think he were one of our men.” Through his control of the hospital, Hoven could protect Red inmates in danger and kill unfriendly Greens, and thus was key to the breaking of Green power in the camp. “
And what supremacy
of the professional criminals in the Buchenwald camp would have meant,” one inmate later testified, “can only be appreciated by someone who has anything to do with professional criminals.”

As the Reds consolidated their control over the hospitals, medical training became a prized asset, as is evident in the preponderance of doctors in the Buchenwald survival literature. But placement in a medical job was not always an unmitigated plus, because some positions were morally compromised.
Arthur Dietzsch
, the German inmate chosen in January 1942 to head the new block for medical experiments, is a case in point. Dietzsch was an unexceptional man with exceptionally bad luck, even by the sorrowful standards of Germany in the first half of the past century. The Kafkaesque turns of his life led the nationalist writer Ernst von Salomon to portray Dietzsch as the ur-German everyman in a 1960 metabiography,
Das Schicksal des A.D.
(translated as
The Captive
). Born in 1901, Dietzsch was good-looking in a somewhat frightening way, with sharp, triangular features, piercing blue eyes, and a square jaw. He possessed many of the “secondary virtues” of the good Prussian citizen—diligence and truthfulness and cleanliness and discipline—and beautiful handwriting. From the time he joined the army in 1920, each of his steps led to trouble. Convicted of espionage after being drawn into a web of military intrigue, he was thrown into prison in 1924 and remained there for all but one of the next 27 years. Dietzsch came to Buchenwald in 1938 and was made an assistant to Walter Krämer, a Communist carpenter and former member of the German parliament who had learned some medicine during his lengthy sojourn through the camps.

In November 1941
, Koch, the Buchenwald commandant, had the Gestapo seize Dietzsch, Krämer, and two other medical aides in an effort to conceal the fact that Krämer had treated Koch for syphilis. Dietzsch survived six weeks of torture and starvation, but upon his release from the Gestapo bunker, found himself in an exposed place—“on the wire,” in the camp lingo—because he had learned unwholesome secrets about a Nazi commander. Another medical secretary suggested that Dietzsch go to work in a new facility—the typhus station of the Waffen-SS Hygiene Institute, headed by Erwin Ding, who was returning to Buchenwald.

Ding had studiously courted
higher-ups in the SS medical hierarchy, and he was known among colleagues in Berlin as a consummate office politician. He’d spent several months as a doctor at the Dachau concentration camp, then joined the invasion of France as adjutant to a division physician. From France, Ding sent home boastful letters to his wife in Berlin, claiming feats he had never achieved. His bosses watched their backs, while colleagues were often disgusted by his braggadocio. “He had an extraordinary need for recognition,” was how one officer put it. The typhus station at Buchenwald, with its ostensible importance to the German war effort, seemed to Ding like an excellent place to get it.

Ding had left
Buchenwald as a camp doctor. He returned as a “scientist” in charge of a “research station.” While still responsible for aspects of camp hygiene, Ding’s main mission was to conduct human experiments testing the efficacy of antibiotics and vaccines that might protect the Wehrmacht from typhus on the eastern front. He opened an isolation unit for typhus research in January 1942, and moved it to its permanent home in Block 46 the following June. The nature of Block 46 had been established in the protocol of the December 29, 1941, meeting in Berlin, where Nazi health authorities had hurriedly sought a way to combat the eastern typhus epidemics: “
Since animal experiments
cannot provide adequate evaluation [of typhus vaccine],” it read, “experiments must be conducted on people.”

Shortly after Block
46 opened, Ding gathered Dietzsch and the other inmates and warned them that they were subject to a special military law and would be killed if they disclosed anything they saw.
As the nature of
the job began to dawn on Dietzsch, he pleaded with the inmate big shots to get him out of it, but Ding insisted that he required a political prisoner, not a Green, in the position, and the Communists didn’t want one of their own to work in such a morally compromised location. They insisted that Dietzsch, a fellow traveler but not a cadre, remain there.

Ding opened Block 46 with no clear sense of how to proceed scientifically. The indicated way to test the efficacy and safety of a vaccine against a typhus was to vaccinate patients entering an epidemic area, and to measure their rates of disease and death against an unvaccinated control group. An ethical experimental design would have provided the control group a “standard-of-care” prophylactic, in this case the Weigl vaccine. Theoretically, the SS could have tested the vaccine on a group of Jews in any of the vast, typhus-ridden ghettos it controlled. But that seems never to have crossed anyone’s mind. Ding would test the typhus vaccines on inmates, who would then be intentionally exposed to the disease. Not only was this approach horribly wrong; it was physically impractical. Typhus was not a regular visitor at Buchenwald, because both the SS and the internal camp leadership worked hard to keep it out. Every inmate at the camp had his or her story of the brutal initiatory body shave and bath in caustic soap, the waits in freezing cold for deloused clothing to dry, the deaths by exposure and pneumonia.
The sight of a single louse
in a barracks was enough to send everyone to quarantine for a week. In fact, the men sometimes purchased lice from others in order to get a few days off a work detail. “The Germans could care less if we were sick but they were very afraid of epidemics, and above all they feared typhus,” recalled a French inmate.

Since there was no
typhus in the camp, Ding sought out the Robert Koch Institute, whose director, Gildemeister, brought down a container of
Rickettsia
cultures grown in egg yolk sac. On March 3, 1942, Gildemeister and Ding injected the material into 145 patients. Most of them became sick, and so did Ding, who mistakenly jabbed himself with a needle. His illness was severe, and it derailed him and the typhus vaccine project for several months.
After recovering, Ding
spent his three months of training at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
In November 1942
, perhaps in some vestigial hope of obtaining meaningful data from Buchenwald, Mrugowsky arranged for the Behringwerke in Lwów to send typhus-infected lice to Ding. The idea was that infection by lice, even if intentional, would provide a more “natural” experimental basis to judge the value of the vaccines that were being tested. Richard Haas, Behring’s man in Lwów, had his own reasons for sending the lice. Chronically short of feeders, he hoped that Buchenwald inmates might become a new lice farm for vaccine production. Neither Mrugowsky nor Haas would get his wish, however.

On November 30, 1942
, Haas shipped to the camp 200 boxes, each containing 150 lice infected with typhus. Ding was not in Buchenwald when the lice arrived, and Hoven, who was nominally in charge of the typhus station in Ding’s absence, was leery of introducing lice to the camp. “Now they’ve really gone crazy,” Hoven said; he and Dietzsch burned all 30,000 lice in their boxes. To conceal the real reason for their action, Hoven wrote to Haas that the paraffin wax used to seal the boxes had melted during transport, that the lids were insecure and some lice had escaped. This was all nonsense. In their primitive wisdom, Dietzsch and Hoven recoiled at the idea of bringing contaminated vermin into the camp, after so much time and human suffering had gone to keeping them out.

Haas, sensing
that something was amiss, sent a second consignment a few days later. This time, the lice were accompanied by a Behring biologist, Dr. Rudolf Gönnert, who had instructions to unpack the lice boxes and supervise their application to patients. But the Behring men could not compete with the scheming minds of an SS doctor and a capo. After learning that the visitor needed to get home on a particular train, Hoven and Dietzsch delayed preparations as long as they could. The 19 homosexual prisoners chosen for the experiment were stripped naked, buckled to hospital chairs, and covered with white sheets. But just after the lice boxes were strapped to their legs, an SS man arrived at the laboratory door to inform the visitor that a car was waiting for him. He had to hurry, the messenger said, or he would miss his train in Weimar. As soon as Gönnert was gone, Hoven and Dietzsch removed the lice boxes and again burned them all. None of the men fell ill, and the report was falsified.

While convalescing at home
in Berlin, Ding hit upon his own crazy idea for how to maintain a steady supply of typhus germs. In 1916, a Turkish doctor had injected prisoners with the blood of feverish patients. This seemed to Ding like an outstanding way to conduct his experiments with a minimum of uncertainty. While a real typhus epidemic could not be arranged, it would be easy enough to keep a few sick patients in Block 46, their blood available to infect test subjects whenever needed. Lice were inconvenient, but human beings were a dime a dozen. Decades earlier, Rudolf Weigl had figured out how to use laboratory lice as a reservoir of typhus. Ding’s idea was to use human beings for the same purpose.

It would take some “tinkering” before this strategy produced any results. In the first set of experiments, the injections produced such massive infections that nearly all the patients died, whether vaccinated or not.
Later subjects were
injected with a smaller amount, 0.5 to 1 cubic centimeters of blood drawn from a “passage person,” a typhus carrier usually in the fifth or sixth day of infection. When the test subjects were infected with this quantity of typhus, prior vaccination seemed to offer them some degree of protection.
Ding and Dietzsch
injected some inmates with the blood of patients suffering naturally occurring typhus, usually brought in from Buchenwald-dependent subcamps, miserable slave labor enclosures where typhus abounded. Each new “wild” strain was injected into at least two patients. If new strains weren’t available, the disease was transmitted by injection from carrier to carrier.
The many vaccines
tested at Buchenwald included yolk sac–based vaccines from Berlin, Frankfurt, Marburg, and Lwów, dog-lung vaccines from Romania, and mouse- and rabbit-lung vaccines from the Pasteur Institute. Mrugowsky wanted the human test subjects to resemble the German fighting man, which ruled out Eastern Europeans who might already be immune to typhus as a result of childhood or other exposure. Starting in December 1943, Himmler ordered police in Berlin to send test subjects culled from prisons holding common criminals.
In practice, though, many of
the subjects continued to be Buchenwald inmates, including Russians, Poles, and Frenchmen who were selected to undergo the meaningless torment for reasons related to internal camp politics, or because they had, in fact, volunteered.