The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (40 page)

. . . [There arrives] a characteristic moment at which the worker or the collective body assume that no further verification is required. The opinion becomes rounded, systematized, limited; in short it becomes mature. . . .

Here, Fleck referred
to an episode in which Dr. Combiescu, a Romanian typhus expert, challenged the lab’s method of making the vaccine, saying there was no way it could work. Ciepielowski—who by then had been informed by Fleck that there were no
Rickettsia
in the rabbit lungs—was able to convince Ding that Combiescu was wrong, however, and even wrote up a paper that Ding intended to publish in the
Zeitschrift für Hygiene und Infektionskrankheiten
.

It is not that there is no difference between truth and illusion, says Sympatius:

What I want to do is to say that scientific results and views are basically determined exclusively as single historical events at successive development stages of the scientific thought-style. . . . Neither a Robinson Crusoe, nor a group of Robinsons, even if equipped with technical means, will glide automatically onto the tracks of science, if they are isolated from the scientific community. . . . Every thought-collective considers that the people who do not belong to it are incompetent. Practical applicability is not a touchstone, for due to the harmony of illusions even a false view is applicable. The alchemists’ gold allegedly did enrich many people, and even the cost of wars was paid for by alchemists’ gold.

In his lyrical riff on the functioning of a concentration camp thought collective, Fleck of course omits the fact that the duress of the surroundings played its own implacable part in shaping the collective’s capacity for credulity and mutual conviction. The thought collective in Block 50 may in fact not have been convinced it had found
Rickettsia
in the lungs of rabbits—but it needed to convince Ding and his bosses that this was so.
Their lives hung
in the balance; it was produce or perish. In another publication, Fleck wrote explicitly that when he arrived at Block 50, “none of the other prisoners had experience in culturing microorganisms and it was from me that they learned they were making a fully valueless anti-typhus vaccine.”
This is also the
authoritative version of Eugen Kogon:

When Ludwig Fleck came to Block 50 in Buchenwald, he told us, after seeing the typhus germs, that what we had produced in the rabbit lungs was not
Rickettsia
, but some other type of bacteria. We asked him not to say anything about what he’d seen to Ding-Schuler, but to experiment with us, to try to allow us to find a good way out of the difficulty. He worked with us, and he kept the secret. It was only after the Kraków Institute [Eyer’s operation] furnished us with mouse lungs and infected material from mouse intestine that we could be sure our animal material contained the
Rickettsia
. After that we could produce a vaccine that was, without a doubt, very efficacious, but it could only be produced in small quantities. . . .

Since Ding-Schuler demanded large quantities of vaccine, we produced two types: one that had no value and was perfectly harmless, and went to the front; and a second type, in very small quantities, that was very efficacious and used in special cases like for comrades who worked in difficult places in the camp. Ding-Schuler never heard about these arrangements. Since he was entirely lacking in bacteriological knowledge, he never penetrated the production secret. He depended entirely on the reports that the experts of Block 50 provided him. When he was able to send thirty or forty liters of vaccine to Berlin, he was happy. . . . The inefficacy of our vaccine could have been revealed, and there were outside experts that the SS had at its disposition who could have investigated and discovered that it wasn’t real. Nothing like that happened. The adventure continued until March 1945.

Ding, in short
, was “a dummkopf who earned a dissertation only on the basis of his services for the party,” as Fleck testified later. “The scientists and doctors who were conducting work at Buchenwald could employ his cluelessness and scientific illiteracy for our own purposes. . . .
We made a vaccine that did not work
. For controls we sent a sample that did work. Ding-Schuler, the illiterate, didn’t realize what was going on [italics added].”

Block 50 produced
a total of 600 liters of fake vaccine, enough to fully vaccinate about 200,000 people. It was used by SS men in the camps and also German fighting units. About six liters of good, “red-dot” vaccine (the labels got secret markings) were produced and administered to people in the camp, or used to pull the wool over the eyes of the SS health authorities. On a few occasions, fake-vaccinated troops fell ill, and the SS suspiciously requested control vaccine from the Buchenwald group. “We of course sent it to them,” Fleck said. “The control vaccine was naturally a completely valid vaccine.” The SS had no other way to test whether the typhus patients had been vaccinated with an ostensibly effective product. No vaccine was expected to be 100 percent effective.

The secret was held close to the vest. Most of the scientists in Block 50 did not know what was going on. The French chemist Kirrmann, for example, who worked in the same building, gave no indication in his postwar memoirs that the vaccine was fake.
Even Fleck’s son
, who arrived at the camp in 1945 on a transport from Auschwitz, seems to have gotten an inexact version of events. According to Ryszard Fleck’s testimony at Yad Vashem in 1971, sabotage was already going on when his father arrived. “On the first day of work at the institute two prisoners with knives in their hands approached my father, stuck knives up to his chest and let him in on the secret that this vaccine didn’t work, meaning the
Rickettsia
were not growing in the rabbit lungs and that in general the vaccine was fake. The Germans, they said, didn’t know anything about it, and Father was not allowed to tell them about it. Father obeyed, of course.” While the brandishing of knives is certainly plausible, it may have occurred
after
Fleck informed the other inmates that they were producing a worthless vaccine. Ryszard Fleck arrived at Buchenwald more than a year after this event would have occurred.

The bold act of vaccine sabotage gave heart—and palpitations—to the inmates who were in on it. Most of the inmates at Buchenwald, however, cared little about the vaccine. For them, the crucial product of Block 50 was not the vaccine but the broth and flesh of the rabbits cooked after they were used to make it. Once the lungs of the animals had been removed to harvest the (real or nonexistent)
Rickettsia
, protocol called for the remainder of the animal to be burned in a small crematorium inside Block 50. But concentration camp inmates, of course, did not destroy something as precious as rabbit flesh. Every week, the inmates brought 70 dead rabbits to Hans Baermann, the young German Jew who prepared the precious nutrient by boiling the hares for three hours over a coal fire.
The men in the block
ate some of the rabbit, divvied up the rest, and smuggled it to needier parts of the camp. August Cohn, a German-Jewish inmate who went into Weimar to buy rabbits every week with a benevolent SS guard, distributed the cooked flesh to Jewish inmates in the Little Camp and to a group of British POWs.
Hummelsheim, the bilingual
German resistance member, took rabbit to French inmates.

After the war, British and French inmates would seize the narrative of what happened in both typhus blocks. Thanks to their nationalities, links to British and French intelligence agencies and prestigious institutions like the Pasteur, their voices established the world’s understanding of events. But not everything they said was exactly true. The Jews and Slavs who had been there were mostly living in displaced-person camps, or struggling with the new realities of Cold War life and thus unable to speak out. One central figure in the history of Block 50 was Alfred Balachowsky, who led a British spy network in France during the war and worked at the Pasteur Institute afterward.
Following the liberation
of Buchenwald, France’s information minister—the writer André Malraux—sent Balachowsky on a tour of the United States to give a French account of life the camps. His testimony was featured in the International Military Tribunal, the first trial held at Nuremberg. Balachowsky was audacious and brilliant in his way, but he was a chronic exaggerator, and for some reason he despised Fleck.

Born in Russia
and brought to France as a child, Balachowsky was an entomologist of prodigious talent and work habits; at the age of 32, he copublished a 2,000-page monograph on the harmful insects of the world, and was a pioneer in the field of biological pest control. During the war, he led a unit of the British Special Operations Executive, or SOE, arranging secret landings of spies and matériel. The Gestapo rolled up the network in July 1943 and sent Balachowsky to Buchenwald the following February.
From there, he was
transported to Dora, the notorious and secretive underground prison factory where Wernher von Braun oversaw the building of the V-1 and V-2 rockets that terrorized Britain.
After learning of Balachowsky’s
fate, Hummelsheim got Ding to rescue the Frenchman.
Balachowsky was skeletal
and sick upon arrival at Buchenwald in April—“like one of the tragic caricatures of Goya,” a friend said, but after a few weeks of rabbit soup he had recovered.
Balachowsky’s diaries
from Buchenwald, which begin April 11, 1944, and end April 3, 1945, are among the few written documents remaining from Block 50. They suggest that he lived reasonably well after being saved from Dora. Frenchmen at Buchenwald could receive packages, and Balachowsky got a generous measure—about two parcels every week. The Red Cross, his mother, and his wife sent him dozens of books, milk, sugar, and oranges. In his spare time, he read, strolled around the camp, and took tea with French and British spies. For Christmas, a horse was slaughtered for dinner.

After the war
, Balachowsky assumed great moral authority because of his stature as a resistance leader, a Pasteurian, and ultimately, a rescuer of British spies. Balachowsky’s version was the existential heroic account of Buchenwald, the kind of narrative that Malraux, author of
Man’s Hope
and
Man’s Fate
, could celebrate without hesitation. Fleck, on the other hand, was an outsider, a downtrodden Jew trying not to attract attention. Polish Jews received no packages from the Red Cross and no letters from home, because home no longer existed. It was probably easier to be a conspirator on a full stomach. Fleck and Balachowsky had political differences—Fleck was grateful to the Communists, who had protected him, while Balachowsky, he said, had “fascistic views.” They often fought.

In Block 50
, where Ciepielowski managed vaccine production, Balachowsky was put in charge of infecting the rabbits, and also filled vaccine ampules with the final product.
Fleck conducted bacteriological
examinations to determine the concentration of
Rickettsia
in the vaccine (and falsified the result, unless it was a “good” batch destined for camp inmates) and searched for contamination that could sicken the vaccinated troops.
On one occasion
, Balachowsky and Fleck got into a furious argument when Fleck returned a 10-liter flask of vaccine that was not sterile. Balachowsky, he said, did not understand that it was one thing to give the Germans a useless vaccine, another to poison them. If some vaccinated German soldiers got typhus, the authorities wouldn’t assume the vaccine had been sabotaged. If they died of bacterial contamination, on the other hand, the investigation of the disaster could easily get everyone in Block 50 killed.

The mistrust would
spill over after the war, when Balachowsky denounced Fleck in testimony submitted to Nuremberg, accusing him of having informed Ding about immunological reactions to vaccine in a way that led the Nazi doctor to order a new, fatal experiment. Fleck did not become aware of this accusation until 1958. He responded angrily, pointing out that Balachowsky spoke no German, misunderstood the vaccine production problems, and had no understanding of how Fleck and other “initiated” prisoners had to maneuver around Ding and other German officers.

Kogon, who admired
Balachowsky, nonetheless said on several occasions after the war that his friend had spoken of things he knew nothing about, and exaggerated the part he’d played in the conspiracy.
Bizarrely, Balachowsky’s
scurrilous accusations against Fleck were rehashed by a Swedish scholar in 2006.

By the summer
of 1944, the war was taking a dramatic turn. When the camp loudspeakers announced the Normandy invasion in June, the French scientists immediately jumped up and started singing the “Marseillaise,” and Fleck enthusiastically joined in. August Cohn, the German Communist, said, “Now we can begin to rebuild our Fatherland.” Fleck said, “I’m a Pole and want to go home.” Paris was liberated on August 24; the same day, the massive Allied bombing raid hit the outskirts of the camp, destroying two enormous munitions factories and setting fire to many camp buildings. The washroom, the storage warehouses, and the SS barracks were severely damaged, and dozens of SS men, their wives, and children were crushed to death.
The bombs slightly damaged
Block 50, which was adjacent to the burning storage warehouse, and put the vaccine enterprise out of commission for several days. A bomb struck Ding’s rooms and destroyed everything he owned (his wife and children were in Weimar).

As night fell
, the inmates of Block 50 and their neighbors were mustered into a bucket brigade to try to save the laundry building. They watched as the Goethe oak burned. By then, the tree was long dead—a solid gray silhouette that bore no leaves in the summer and was never visited by birds. On the night of the raid, though, it came alive once more, like a gigantic torch with thousands of candles, the carbonized branches tumbling to the ground one by one. Little by little, the fire advanced toward the center of the tree, and as it consumed it, the drums of defeat beat at Germany’s doors. “
Even today
when I close my eyes,” Fleck wrote, “I can still see the roof of the washroom burning, the naked skeleton of the oak with its crest in flames. I hear the crackling of the fire, I see the sparks rising, the burning limbs falling like pieces of asphalt, tattered and rolled. I smell the smoke, and I see the prisoners forming a large chain, passing the buckets of water from the tank to the fire. They save the washroom, but they don’t extinguish the flames on the oak. And in their faces there is a secret happiness, a silent triumph: Legend has become reality!”