The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (39 page)

Block 50 had a well-cared-for
aspect outside and in, with a balcony and a little garden enclosed in a mesh fence and men in white jackets circulating around it. A door had been cut into the barbed-wire fence behind the block, and pressing an electric button summoned a Russian deportee in an immaculate striped uniform. The staff wore white jackets and pants, rubber gloves, booties, and face masks. They showered every day. In the basement were rabbit cages and dissection rooms, upstairs sterilization, bacteriology and serology departments, a pharmacy, and a well-furnished library.
The building was startlingly
spotless; the scientists spent an hour or two every morning cleaning it. “Ruining an experiment was less serious than leaving a grain of dust on a door jamb for the Germans,” said the French chemist Albert Kirrmann. “The best way to please the boss was to align all the reagent bottles in a row on the shelf with carefully handwritten labels. He loved showing his house to important visitors, as if he were a museum director.”

As for the vaccine itself, Ding from the beginning was wrestling with problems well beyond his understanding. Leading microbiologists had found it terribly difficult to produce the vaccine at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. If they had been familiar with the philosophical work of Ludwik Fleck, the SS men might have begun to understand the absurdity of expecting slave doctors to create such a vaccine in a concentration camp. Making a vaccine was not a mechanical task like producing pencils or aspirin or even rockets to fire upon London. Vaccines were made from constantly evolving live organisms. The vaccine-making business was a most arcane thought collective, in the sense that Fleck described scientific groups with highly specialized knowledge and technique. To learn how to make the Giroud vaccine would normally require years of hand-to-hand training.

As Fleck wrote
, “sciences do not grow as crystals, by apposition, but rather as living organisms, by developing every, or amost every, detail in harmony with the whole.” When one produces a vaccine, each step of the process might need to be altered at the same time in order to accommodate a particular change in the production method. For example, the Rockefeller Institute scientists who developed the yellow fever vaccine in the 1930s found that after a certain number of passages—that is, after the virus had grown in a particular sequence of animal-flesh cultures—for some reason it became weakened enough to be injected into people in a way that provided immunity but not disease. The Nazi medical bureaucracy, of course, had not considered such challenges.
Ding pressed the
prisoners as soon as they set up Block 50 to produce something. He wanted tangible results. But the prisoners were intelligent enough to realize that this wouldn’t be as easy as Ding hoped. The complexities of
Rickettsia prowazekii
“allowed us to take the route we wanted to take,” Kogon said after the war.

The route was sabotage—although the team initially hit upon it by accident.

The Block 50 crew
worked from a 70-page German instruction manual, apparently translated and modified by Ding or one of his assistants, from Pasteur Institute papers. It described each step of the Giroud vaccine production process. The recipe was not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for the antivivisectionist. It involved transmitting the typhus bacteria through four different species. First, blood from feverish Block 46 “passage people” was injected into guinea pigs. When the animals were successfully infected, technicians ground up their brains or testes—where for some reason the bacteria grew well. After removing most of the host tissue, the remaining liquid was injected into mice. After they sickened, the mice were killed and their lungs ground up and diluted into solutions used to infect the rabbits. These creatures, pure-blood Angoras and mixed chinchilla breeds, were infected at five months of age by stabbing a thick needle through their necks into the tracheal tube. But rabbits were not normally susceptible to typhus. The germ grew in their lungs only after their immune systems had been weakened. To do this, the inmates experimented with ways of making life unpleasant for the rabbits to the point that it ruined their immune systems. The irony of doing this in a concentration camp cannot have escaped them. They settled on a method that involved shaving the rabbits’ chests and exposing them to freezing temperatures in winter, or dunking them in ice baths in warm weather. For good measure, they injected the rabbits with paratyphoid bacteria or toxins. Then came the tricky part: killing the rabbit when rickettsial growth in the lungs was at its height, but before secondary infections—
bactéries banales
, Giroud called them—set in. If the process was successful, a single rabbit could provide enough rickettsial bacteria to make vaccine sufficient to immunize 100 people.

The procedure was inexact and subject to multiple misunderstanding and falsification. It took ten different culture preparations to test the bacteria. Microscopic inspections and pH buffering were required, and the
Rickettsia
took many forms, depending on how the rabbit had been prepared, how severely infected, and other factors. Tests of the vaccine’s efficacy were done on-site, with further examination at the Pasteur Institute.
The first samples
of the vaccine were not ready until just before Christmas 1943. Ding selected a group of prisoners for the experiment. “If it doesn’t work,” he told Kogon, “I’ll commit suicide.” It did not work, but Ding, instead of killing himself, faked the results.

It was at this moment
that Ludwik Fleck arrived in Block 50. Kogon remembered Fleck as a “somewhat dreamy scholar, always friendly.” Slightly stooped, gaunt, bespectacled, calm, and reserved, Kogon said later, “an oddly lovable, friendly person.” Kogon knew nothing of Fleck’s philosophical work, and their discussions concerned only matters of the laboratory and vaccine. Kogon was involved in many conspiracies and didn’t want to complicate his life by bringing new colleagues into them. “Fleck never initiated such discussions; he wasn’t the conspiratorial type and didn’t have lots of contacts with the camp organization,” Kogon said. “But without him, the fake vaccine couldn’t have been made.”

Fleck befriended
Willy Jellinek, the young Austrian pastry cook, who came to regard Fleck as a second father. Jellinek remembered Fleck as a thoughtful, intelligent older man shuffling quietly but deliberately through the war. They discussed Fleck’s life in Lwów and his trips to Vienna, his experiences in Auschwitz. Both were relieved that the bacterial cultures prepared for the Buchenwald laboratory involved sheep and other animals, rather than human flesh. From the beginning, Jellinek said, Fleck walked a thin line with Ding. He considered the SS man a “little swindler” who knew that the work they were doing was pointless, but hoped that people like Fleck would give him something with which to impress his bosses. Ding employed Fleck in writing journal articles: also on each assignment, Fleck dragged out the task as long as possible, assuring Ding that the work was almost complete but had to be “just so” in order for Ding to win his
Habilitation
. In fact, Fleck worried that if he ever finished the work Ding needed, he’d be killed.

In 1939, Mrugowsky
had been appointed to a full professorship in Berlin on the basis of a half-serious
Habilitationsschrift
, the postdoctoral publication that German universities require of their senior faculty members. Ding, who was scheming to take Mrugowsky’s position, wanted his own
Habilitation
and hoped to earn it with a series of publications on the experiments at Buchenwald.
He ordered Fleck
, Ciepielowski, and Kogon to help him write scientific publications and prepare for his examinations on bacteriology. Fleck managed to teach Ding quite a bit but did so diplomatically, careful not to humiliate him, Jellinek said. Ding was not a good student. For example, in order to help him classify Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, a fairly basic delineation in microbiology, Fleck had to use different-colored inks for the names of bacteria belonging to the two types.

Fleck’s authority
on medical issues was recognized in the block. Kogon often spoke with the vaccine chef Ciepielowski—they slept in the same cell—and when they were discussing science, Ciepielowski would frequently say, “I’ll ask Fleck.” Kogon claimed that Fleck was in possession of a special protective letter issued and signed by Himmler himself. Kogon had never seen anything like it, he said, and he believed the letter had enabled Fleck to protect his wife and son. No one else in Block 50 mentions the letter, nor does Fleck. Possibly, Kogon was referring to the protective letter provided to Fleck by the Lwów Gestapo to do his work at the Laokoon factory.

Fleck described
the moment of his arrival at Block 50 in his first postwar publication, in 1946, an essay titled “Problems of the Science of Science.” In a sense, the experience at Block 50 confirmed for Fleck his philosophy of how science worked. He structured the essay as a debate between Simplicius, who believes that science is equivalent to progress, and Sympatius, who sees the cultural construct. The debate is modeled, a bit grandiloquently, on Galileo’s
Dialogue
, in which Simplicius represents the perspective of those who believe the sun revolves around the earth.

The wise Sympatius states that science is not just a system of thoughts but a complex phenomenon that includes many institutions and events. It is expressed in writing, in unwritten customs involving a variety of methods and traditions, in specific mental preparation and manual dexterity. It has its various structures and hierarchies, means of communication and cooperation, within scientific groups and with the public. “I had a very rare opportunity,” he continues, “of watching, for nearly two years, the scientific work of a collective composed of laymen only. . . . The collective worked on complex problems from the field of typhus; they had at their disposal fully equipped laboratories, plenty of experimental animals and an extensive specialist literature. This was in the Buchenwald concentration camp. . . .”

The collective, he writes, consisted of eight members, some trained in sciences, but none in the special field of vaccinology. The identities of the team members cannot be deciphered definitively, but they include a “young Polish physician, without any specialist preparation”—Ciepielowski; an “eminent Austrian political figure,” who may be Kogon; a young Czech physician, with rudiments of bacteriological preparation” (Karl Makovicka); a Dutch biology student; a Viennese confectioner (Jellinek); a rubber factory worker; and two others. The workers were looking for
Rickettsia
in the lungs of mice and rabbits; despite Giroud’s painstaking description of the many forms these bacteria could take, the nonspecialists didn’t know what they were looking at. As Fleck had written in
Genesis
, “you have to be taught how to see.” To identify bacteria and cellular structures on the basis of written descriptions and illustrations, he said, was “to pass, so to say, backwards along the path normally chosen for knowledge.” Using descriptions and illustrations provided by Giroud and the German scientist Hilda Sikora, the Buchenwald team looked into their microscopes and continuously misunderstood what they saw. That is, they “found” all the stages of
Rickettsia
that the two masters described, although there were, in fact, no germs at all in the cultures. Perhaps the rabbits had withstood their tortures too well. Fleck writes,

From the dyestuff precipitates, fat globules, various bacteria and cellular remnants they managed to [see] the entire developmental cycle [of the typhus bacteria.] . . . This construction grew slowly, in the atmosphere of a mutual stimulation and strengthening of opinions. The collective mood, which became the motor of this fantastic synthesis, was composed of a tense expectation of the effect, of the desire to be the first to establish something, not to be too late with the confirmation that something had been established, and to satisfy the boss who had been urging them along all the time.

Fleck reports the following conversation among the boss (Ding), the Dutch biology student, and his assistant:

Biologist:
What can be these shining, uniformly pink bodies? We have not seen them thus far. Is it possible?

Assistant:
I have noticed them, too; their presence struck me at once. Perhaps these are those
corps homogènes rouges
according to Giroud?

Biologist:
This is what I was thinking.

Boss:
Yes, they might be that.

Assistant:
Of course, what else could they be?

Biologist:
At last, we’ve got them.

Boss:
And it’s high time, too. At last something positive.

“There was no individual author of the error,” Fleck wrote. “The error grew out of the collective atmosphere.” He called this “the harmony of self-delusion,” it might also be described as groupthink. Despite what the group believed, the
corps homogènes rouges
it found were not typhus germs but rabbit white blood cells. Yet the collective “was thirsting for a positive result,” and so the good news was passed along—“at long last,
Rickettsia
has been found in the preparations obtained from rabbits’ lungs. When the joyful tidings spread among the collective, the certainty of the result became doubtless. . . . The confectioner and the rubber-factory worker, who represented ‘common sense,’ popularized the discovery. . . .”

The records of experiments, the summaries of results, the suggested modifications of methods were sent to the world outside the camp to genuine German specialists, men well-known in the world of science, and returned with words of praise. The German boss got a high decoration. So great is the persuasive power of a harmonious system, and so limited is the value of testing the inner harmony of the system.

An interesting shock occurred only when rabbits’ lungs with typhus germs arrived from a genuine scientific institute. . . . But he would err who believed that a single direct contact with scientific reality would bring about the downfall of the entire edifice. . . . The collective failed even to admit in private that its entire construction was faulty; quite on the contrary, it created a synthesis of the old theory with the new facts. . . .