The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (38 page)

In practice, the Poles
compromised. They were human beings and wanted to survive. The heroic and well-intentioned among them protected a few Jews, but it was a struggle just to save their own skins. “It was understood that the vaccine was barely adequate for the Germans, but good enough,” Szybalski said. “That was the price you had to pay. You had to be careful, because if the Germans didn’t like the vaccine, they’d kill. Every few days I’d be walking down Akademicka Street and see people hanging from the streetlights with signs around their necks. We didn’t want to end up like that. So you compromised to survive. You seldom get 100 percent in life, especially during a Nazi occupation.”

As for Weigl, he continued to focus on his science during the war, with the goal of improving his vaccine. Stuchly worked on the biology and metabolism of lice, Kry
ski focused on the toxicity of
R. prowazekii
, and Mosing did epidemiological studies. Little of this work was ever published, and it is clear from postwar memoirs that Weigl’s assistants understood better than he that vaccine, per se, was not their top priority during the war.

Weigl was a bit like the Alec Guinness character in
The Bridge on the River Kwai
, the imprisoned British officer in the Japanese POW camp who only belatedly understands the need to blow up the bridge he had so lovingly constructed. Weigl regarded his vaccine the same way he shot a bow and arrow: no compromise in quality, it had to be a bull’s-eye. As Wacław Szybalski reported ruefully, “Weigl was a perfectionist and absolutely in love with his vaccine. He believed that it was his legacy. And this is the sad story.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

B
UCHENWALD:
R
ABBIT
S
TEW AND
F
AKE
V
ACCINE

I
f Fleck had passed through a brutal gauntlet to arrive at his lab bench at Auschwitz, the welcome to Buchenwald was more civilized. By the time he arrived at his destination, the SS Hygiene Institute’s Department of Virus and Typhus Research had been operating for six months in Block 50, a three-story masonry building on the edge of the main camp. The work at Block 50 was complex, but the risk of death was more remote than almost anywhere else in the camp, and daily life was relatively comfortable. Unlike the majority of the Buchenwald inmates, who rose from tangled, stinking piles on wooden barrack shelves at 4:30 a.m. to stand for hours in the
Appellplatz
to be counted each morning, Block 50’s inmates slept in their own beds with sheets and blankets and had no morning or evening roll call. They did not have to fight for their rations, which included a bit of sugar, fat, and extra bread each week, and the tone in their laboratories was usually conversational rather than guttural.

Many of the doctors
and scientists in Block 50 were political prisoners, but Erwin Ding, who ran the institute, was not entirely off the mark with his tasteless description of the place. He called it the
ultima refugia judaeorum
, “last refuge of the Jews.” Ding addressed the inmates with the formal
Sie
, a rare bit of politesse in the camps.
Apart from Ding
and Doctor Hoven, SS men steered clear of Block 50. They respected the big black-and-white sign reading
Eintritt verboten
(Stay out) because they were scientific illiterates who had been warned to avoid anything to do with lice or typhus.

Physically and strategically, Block 50 was squarely at the center of the ghoulish surrealism of Buchenwald in the final years of the Third Reich. At the typhus research station, humanity reached its depraved depths, but some individuals achieved the heights of bravery as well. Block 50 stood half a mile down the mud road from the camp entrance in the last row of buildings within the central grounds. From the windows of Block 50, the inmates could peer across a triple line of barbed wire into the notorious Little Camp.

Mrugowsky from the
beginning had been interested in having the Hygiene Institute produce typhus vaccine for Waffen-SS units at the front, but his plans kept being delayed. When British bombers destroyed the institute’s headquarters in Berlin in 1942, he decided to produce the vaccine at Buchenwald. But what kind of vaccine? A large louse farm was out of the question, more so after Behringwerke’s failed experiment at the camp. The Wehrmacht, with Eyer in the lead, was dubious about egg production; besides, where would the chickens for such a laboratory be housed? German civilians, let alone concentration camp inmates, could not be trusted around chickens or their eggs.
The Giroud vaccine
, made from rabbit lungs, had been tested at Buchenwald and seemed to be roughly as effective as Weigl’s. The SS medical chief Grawitz was impatient for vaccine—as was Himmler. On December 11, 1942, Mrugowsky chose production of the Pasteur rabbit-lung vaccine for Buchenwald. “This vaccine has been tested among concentration camp inmates with excellent results,” he wrote in a memo.
Ding made two
more visits to the Pasteur Institute in early 1943, and began assembling scientists to produce the vaccine with the help of his new clerk, an imprisoned German intellectual named Eugen Kogon. Ding and Kogon moved themselves and the vaccine production wing of the typhus institute into Block 50 on August 10, 1943.

Even before Ludwik Fleck arrived at Block 50, staffing the vaccine laboratory seemed to be quite easy.
There were plenty of doctors
in the camp, and others who’d doubled as doctors to save their skins or follow the directives of the camp leadership. (“I had a foot injury and was operated on by a mechanic and a butcher,” one inmate remarked.) Willy Jellinek, a bright young Austrian pastry chef known as Jumbo, was in charge of the tubercular ward for a while, and helped write Hoven’s dissertation on lung disease for the University of Heidelberg.
Jellinek came to
Block 50 to prepare culture broths for the vaccine; August Cohn, a charismatic former Communist labor leader, was rescued from a death sentence and put in charge of the rabbits.
No vaccine experts were
imprisoned in Buchenwald at the time, but Ding found an infectious disease specialist, the 36-year-old Marian Ciepielowski, to lead the vaccine production team, though Ciepielowski ended up there more by chance than design. A socialist from the Carpathians near Lwów, he had worked in a Kraków hospital before being arrested for an anti-Nazi conspiracy in April 1941. Ciepielowski spent his first year at Buchenwald working with pick and shovel on a road detail. “Every day, dozens of people around me were suffocated, clubbed, stomped, and shot to death, and we were all mistreated sadistically,” Ciepielowski wrote his sister later. He survived, with a crippled right hand, but was arrested in one of the periodic political bloodlettings in the camp. At this point, friends smuggled Ciepielowski into Block 50. Within the space of a week, he went from the threshold of the gallows to one of the more comfortable positions at Buchenwald.
Ciepielowski, handsome
and blue-eyed with a well-defined widow’s peak, was extremely crafty when it came to sabotage. Other inmates remarked upon his sangfroid. He was also a dedicated physician and treated many of the experimental typhus patients in Block 46.

Eugen Kogon testifying in April 1947 at the Buchenwald trial. (National Archive.)

Perhaps the most
important prisoner in Block 50, however, was neither a scientist nor a doctor. Eugen Kogon, born in 1903, was a resolute Catholic humanist and journalist whom the Nazis had persecuted since the mid-1930s and imprisoned at Buchenwald in 1939.
Kogon’s steadfast
loyalty and intelligence had enabled him to maneuver past three attempts to send him to death at Auschwitz. He shrewdly sized up Erwin Ding and made himself indispensable to the man, gaining a degree of confidence and independence practically unique in the annals of camp life. His relationship with Ding was most comparable, though, to that of Auschwitz’s chief doctor, Eduard Wirths, and his secretary Hermann Langbein. Like Langbein, Kogon was a non-Communist who had learned to work with the camp Communists while remaining outside their command structure, in itself a remarkable feat. Like Langbein, too, he was a great humanitarian who would become an influential postwar interpreter of the concentration camp system, and a defender of its inmates. Kogon, however, had much more difficult material to work with, for Ding was a darker soul. It was up to Kogon to convert this nearly unscrupulous opportunist into a useful collaborator who committed acts of treason against the SS system. He did this by appealing to the vestiges of Ding’s better nature—and to Ding’s will to save his own skin.

They had long conversations lasting deep into the night in which Kogon told Ding of “our world of the spirit, of morality, of humanitarianism and human grandeur,” Kogon wrote in
The Theory and Practice of Hell
. “If there is anything of which I am proud during the time of my concentration camp detention it is the fact that I succeeded in this very difficult task which no one else had dared to undertake.”
Before long
, Kogon had convinced Ding that the Nazis would lose the war, and that his behavior would matter when it ended. Ding grew to trust Kogon so much that Nazi officers visiting him were puzzled by the relationship. They seemed so close that even prisoners working in Kogon’s ward suspected him of being in cahoots with Ding; his network of conspiracy was so compartmentalized that he even appeared on an early UN War Crimes Commission list of Nazi criminals.
Kogon maneuvered Ding
into allowing Block 50 to become a refuge for persecuted prisoners and a center of conspiracies, though Ding was not aware of the most important ones. He wrote up petitions to the Reich Main Security Office and had Ding sign them, enabling the crew “to enjoy protection from threatening death shipments and other forms of imminent action.” Under Ding’s signature, he also asked SS officers in Berlin to allow specific prisoners to receive letters or packages from home.
The vaccine detail
swelled to 65 men, including 12 Russians as well as Czechs, Poles, Germans, Austrians, Frenchmen, and one Luxembourgeois. Sometimes, after their discussions, Ding would be full of admiration for Kogon and his idealistic worldview. “Other times,” Kogon wrote, “he’d say, ‘Yes, but you’ve got to admit that the Thousand-Year Reich is a great accomplishment,’ then roar off on his motorcycle.”

Konrad Morgen, the SS
judge sent to cleanse Buchenwald of corruption, didn’t know what to make of Kogon. On one visit to Block 50, he noted that whenever Ding needed some fact or documents, at exactly the right moment the door of his office opened “as though by magic, and a man in a white physician’s coat entered and asked in a military-deferential tone, yet with a certain undertone of intimacy, ‘Your orders,
Sturmbannführer
!’ After several repetitions of this performance which never failed to have a flabbergasting effect on me, I asked Dr. Ding-Schuler whether he was employing a crystal ball gazer as an assistant.” Ding revealed that he had an electric buzzer to summon Kogon from the room next door. Ding told Morgen, “Eugen even answers my love letters.”

Another political prisoner
with remarkable privileges was Walter Hummelsheim, a former German diplomat and Princeton University student who had been arrested for plotting against Hitler. Hummelsheim, like Kogon a clerk in Block 50, spoke flawless French and made a powerful impression on French resistance fighters who began arriving in the camp in 1943. While most of the prisoners had shaved heads and stumbled along in filthy clothing, Hummelsheim wore his hair long and combed, with sharply creased trousers and a jacket tailored from the striped camp material. One day, a French prisoner was sick and happened past the Institute of Hygiene as Hummelsheim was leaving. Ding was away from camp that day, and Hummelsheim invited him in to rest. He gave him aspirin and a few mouthfuls of a steaming yellow liquid—rabbit soup. “Typhus rabbit to be exact. Don’t make such a face. It’s been sterilized,” he said. Hummelsheim explained that after the rabbit’s lungs were removed to make vaccine, the rest of the animal was boiled to make soup and meat.