The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (36 page)

Yet even as the gassings
intensified, the hundreds of other camps built since 1933, large and small, were being modified to make better use of able-bodied Jews and other prisoners. Among other things, the concentration camps were useful locations at which to conceal factories to replace the production lost in Allied bombing of Germany’s cities and industrial areas. Though “death through exhaustion,” as Himmler called it, marked no change of heart from the main Nazi goal, the focus on labor sometimes improved daily life for the prisoners who were not immediately killed. In December 1942 and again the following month, Pohl ordered all camp commandants to lower the mortality rates in the camps. This order opened a small wedge between the Gestapo and the camp doctors, whose job, theoretically, was to preserve health.
Hermann Langbein
, a German political prisoner who was secretary to Edward Wirths, the main camp doctor at Auschwitz, described the situation this way: “Since the instructions to lower the mortality rate were primarily directed at the SS doctors, some of whom could, on the basis of their profession, more easily be persuaded at least to limit the mass murders, the resistance movement of the prisoners in several camps attempted to influence physicians on duty there.”

Langbein, a former
Spanish Civil War revolutionary and political prisoner, developed a close relationship with Wirths, a Bavarian country doctor. Though Wirths played his part in the murder of Jews and experiments on prisoners, he had a genuinely troubled conscience, Langbein said, and “was capable of being influenced.”
The camp commander
Höss stated after the war, “Wirths frequently complained to me that he could not reconcile the killings demanded of him with his medical conscience and that this caused him suffering.” Wirths was especially soft on imprisoned doctors, Höss wrote. “I often gained the impression that he treated them as colleagues.”

The experience of Louis J. Micheels, a Dutch Jewish medical student, indicates how some prisoner physicians could benefit from Wirths’ humane side.
Arriving at the ramp
at Auschwitz in 1943, Micheels saw a “tall, impressive looking SS man” with a Hippocratic insignia on his coat.” I stepped up to him, clicked my heels and said, something like, ‘Herr
Oberarzt
, I have to report to you 20 patients, elderly, seriously ill, who came with me in this transport here.’” That day, Wirths was “working a shift” as an angel of death. That is, he was deciding which arrivals were assigned work and which went straight to their deaths. He told Micheels to stand by a chest with a red cross on it, where he watched the Nazis drag elderly people from the cars and toss them into a truck. “I saw a woman with two little children—she had loaned me a copy of
Candide
that I read with great pleasure. The image is still very much with me, seeing her run toward her place in lineup,” Micheels said. “I didn’t know at the time but it was a lineup for the gas chamber.”

Micheels ended up in the camp hospital, where nurses and other doctors “addressed you with your name. You were almost a person again.” Langbein’s influence on Wirths had vastly improved conditions there. Whereas Wirths’s predecessor had “fought typhus by having the lice gassed together with the patients,” Wirths relieved the SS men and the capo at the hospital who routinely beat to death patients seeking treatment.
Langbein was working
closely with Władysław Fejkel, the Polish doctor—“cultivated and humane, [who] had succeeded,” in the words of another inmate, “at the tour de force of being on good terms at the same time with both the prisoners and the SS.”

Wirths wrote detailed
and frank reports about conditions at the camp to Pohl and to Grawitz, the chief SS medical officer.
The reports may have
contributed to a change in leadership at the camp that occurred after Himmler sent Judge Konrad Morgen to investigate thefts of the valuables of slain Jews. A few SS were executed. Arthur Liebehenschel replaced Rudolf Höss as camp commandant in November 1943.

Toward the end of 1942, a fifth of the Jews who were not gassed on arrival at Auschwitz died each month. By July and August 1943, the monthly death rate among those who received a tattoo declined to 3.5 percent. The number of inmates working at Auschwitz swelled from 88,000 in December 1942 to 224,000 in August 1943. Overcrowding increased disease, but it also heightened the chaos and gave the resistance more room in which to operate. As defeats at the front increased the demand for German manpower to serve there, many of the most sadistic camp guards shipped out, and were replaced by less zealous, older men and ethnic Germans from the Slavic lands. This also improved conditions.

On May 5, 1943, Weber’s
research institute moved from Block 10 to the Auschwitz subcamp Rajsko, built in a confiscated Polish village of the same name.
Inmates were already
growing fruits and vegetables for the SS and raising farm animals at Rajsko, where in 1942, the SS scientist Joachim Caesar had established an agricultural research station. The focus of his research was dandelions—special Ukrainian dandelions,
Taraxacum kok-saghyz
, whose roots were used by the Soviets as a source of latex to make rubber. Himmler had become obsessed with
kok-saghyz
and thought he could improve German self-sufficiency in rubber by cultivating the plant massively in Ukraine, France, and Romania. He visited Caesar’s operations twice.

The United States was
also interested in
kok-saghyz
. In exchange for U.S. jeeps, aircraft, food, and other support, the Soviets sent the U.S. Agriculture Department seeds from the plant, portraying it as having revolutionary potential for wartime rubber production. About 200 American and Canadian scientists worked on the
kok-saghyz
project, trying different soils and fertilizers to improve the latex yield. About two years and millions of dollars later, having shown the Soviet hype to be overblown, they gave up.
Himmler and Caesar
, however, persevered. At its height, the Auschwitz-Rajsko dandelion battalion had 150 inmates, but it never produced enough rubber to put tires on a single car. “The soil in Auschwitz is, after all, terrible, nothing but clay,” one prisoner noted.

At Monowitz
, another Auschwitz subcamp, the Italian chemist Primo Levi and thousands of other inmates slaved for more than a year to erect an enormous artificial rubber plant for IG Farben. Like Rajsko, Monowitz produced nothing tangible.
But while the
human toll at Monowitz was ghastly, Rajsko was one of the most pleasant workplaces in the camp system. The word Rajsko, as it happens, means “heavenly” in Polish. Compared with the main camp, it was heaven. Food rations were technically the same in both places, but the German SS woman in charge of the food at Rajsko, while anti-Semitic and rude, insisted on strict adherence to the distribution rules. In most of the camp, SS stole the rations or gave them to favored prisoners. Rajsko prisoners could supplement their rations with vegetables stolen from the gardens and the flesh of guinea pigs and rabbits from the experimental station. There were no selections for the gas chambers at Rajsko, and the morning roll call was only five or ten minutes long—in the main camp, it could go on for hours. Many of the inmates at Rajsko worked in warmed greenhouses. They ate at tables, slept in their own beds, and could take showers—an unheard-of luxury in a concentration camp. The only showers they had experienced at Auschwitz were part of the terrifying delousing process, or the false showers where their friends, mothers, and brothers had been suffocated with Zyklon gas.

The women in the
Rajsko
kok-saghyz
commando lived at first in the women’s camp at Birkenau, which was frequently plagued by typhus.
In October 1942, Caesar
and his wife fell ill with the disease, and she died. When the widowed commander returned from his convalescence, he decided that, to keep Rajsko free of lice and typhus, his women would have to live in a dormitory at the outcamp. The inmates were thrilled. Now they had their own beds and could bathe when they wanted. Soon all the women at Birkenau dreamed of coming to Rajsko. At Birkenau, there was no water. Women drank off the eaves when it rained. The toilets were far from the barracks, the rooms covered in human waste.

The leaders of the
kok-saghyz
detail were French and Polish Communists, and they were past masters in sabotage. Orders called for the women to grow the dandelions and cut their flowers, delicately collecting each seed and gathering the roots, which were cooked down and tested for latex production. “Those dandelion seeds, gee, they certainly do tend to float away,” recalled Simone Alizon, a French resistance fighter who ended up at Rajsko. “And when we blew on them—well they flew away even faster. So the data from the seed collection were false. In the lab, different cooking methods gave contradictory or random results [on the latex weight]. The calculations based on these inexact data were also false. And each of us played his part with utter gravity. I doubt that our experiments would ever have allowed our executioners to develop a rubber industry, but the dandelions saved my life!”

She concluded, “It’s not a good idea to depend on the work of slaves.”

Fleck and the other
Hygiene Institute workers walked to Rajsko every day from Block 20 in the main Auschwitz camp. Weber had moved the Hygiene Institute into a large building, across the road from Caesar’s greenhouses on a triangular block of land surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers. SS men with machine guns manned the towers and accompanied the scientists to and from work each day. The scientists carried a patch with a black diamond sewn into it on their left arm, with the initials HKB (Häftlings Krankenbau—prisoner hospital) painted on it. The capos and other leaders had yellow armbands with the lettering “Laboratorium Rajsko.”
The walk took
about an hour, and if the weather was not too bad it could be almost pleasant. After waking at 4:30 a.m. for roll call, the captive scientists’ column followed the banks of the Sola River past the agricultural station, where women inmates looked up from their fieldwork to wave at them. They passed a row of colorful peasant farmhouses. “In the morning the sky was sometimes a beautiful red, setting aglow the fields to the left across the river,” Micheels, the Dutch student, wrote later. “In the distance, on the right, we could see the chimneys of the crematoria in Birkenau.” The Rajsko inmates often remarked on this contrast. It was difficult to describe the emotions it stirred in them—sorrow, terror, hope, guilt.

The prisoner scientists were a cosmopolitan mixture of Jews and non-Jews from Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia, Holland, and France. Weber and the other SS doctors who ran these institutions put on dumb shows of the international scientific style. But the establishments were all form and no substance. They had spotless, well-equipped laboratories where specialists in different fields were instructed to carry out the mechanical actions characteristic of scientific technique. But their actions did not really constitute science, since freedom of inquiry was restricted to matters that were out of date, senseless, unethical, or impractical. It was as if a drunken squad of football players had locked the university’s tenured staff in a laboratory and ordered them to
do some science
.

Arriving at the institute
, the scientists passed through a gate and entered the three-story building. The ground floor had a large bacteriological laboratory, with incubators, driers, refrigerators, centrifuges, and microscopes stolen from laboratories in France and Poland. In a smaller lab across the hall, a Polish scientist did entomological and water research, while a technician prepared culture media for the bacteriological and serological labs. On the next floor was a chemical lab that spanned the length of the building. Although it had a fabulous microscope and a tomograph for making fine-grained microscopic sections, the lab’s primary purpose was to distill alcohol for the SS.
After Josef Mengele
arrived at Auschwitz and became the chief doctor of the Gypsy camp in mid-1943, he began sending samples from his infamous twin experiments to the lab for analysis. Mengele treated twin children brought to Auschwitz as if they were a collection of living dolls, performing hundreds of surgeries to conjoin twins, change eye color, amputate limbs, and remove kidneys, always without anesthesia. The heads of two of Mengele’s Gypsy children, who had suffered from a malnutrition-related disease causing terrible ulcerations on their small faces, were encased inside jars there. The open eyes of the children stared out through the formalin and glass at the prisoners working in the lab.

On the same floor
, Fleck and his team conducted serological examinations. The work, Fleck said, was similar to what he’d done at his private lab in Lwów—examinations of samples for syphilis, typhus, typhoid, and other diseases. “If the patients in the hospital had not been ceaselessly selected for extermination,” Fleck wrote, “one might have thought that these blood, urine, and stool tests served the purpose of healing the sick. That was just another facet of the demonic nonsense that made up life in the Auschwitz camp.” After the war, several witnesses would say that Fleck was working on his typhus vaccine while at Auschwitz. Bruno Seeman recalled that Fleck obtained “great volumes of urine” from the prisoner hospital, although “nothing ever came of it.”
The dandelion scientist
Caesar stated that Weber had asked him to provide eggs for a typhus vaccine. Yet though Fleck seems to have been selected by Weber because of his vaccine work, there is no other evidence that Fleck was involved in making a vaccine at Auschwitz.

A general state of
befuddlement surrounded the purpose of the Hygiene Institute. Weber showed no particular interest in the results of the serological research. Yet at its peak, in 1944, the scientists conducted more than 110,000 separate analyses. Most were performed on inmates who were going to die no matter the results, though there were also samples from SS men with tuberculosis or syphilis.