The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (41 page)

That night
, despite the deaths of hundreds of inmates, a huge celebration was held in Block 50. There was typhus rabbit for everyone.

In Kraków, Eyer’s
production of the army’s typhus vaccine had expanded throughout 1943 and early 1944, coming to employ 1,500 Polish lice feeders and other workers. Most of Eyer’s waking hours were dedicated to producing protective vaccines for the Wehrmacht, but he spent a smaller share of it protecting his Polish workers and their families from Nazi repression. Eyer found himself frequently seeking assistance from unsavory men like Fritz Katzmann, the Lwów-based SS commander for Galicia. “I knew him all too well,” Eyer recalled later, “for I was so often in that lion’s den trying to help one or another poor soul.”
Weigl’s older brother
, Friedrich, a federal prosecutor and member of the resistance in Kraków, was arrested and taken to Auschwitz in March 1944. Friedrich’s daughter Olga, who worked as a louse feeder in the Kraków institute, recalled in a postwar letter to Eyer, “It was a rainy day, and you came to me from the city, wet as a frog. You asked me if I had any news of my father. I said that if we had a friend among the Germans, perhaps we could help him. You said, ‘Dear child, you have one.’ And you proved it to us.” Friedrich Weigl was freed a few weeks later.

After the Warsaw
Uprising broke out in August 1944, the Gestapo began to fear that a similar insurrection would occur in Kraków, and on a Sunday afternoon it preventively rounded up thousands of Poles, including 30 of Eyer’s employees. They were all taken south of the city to Plaszów, the Auschwitz satellite camp run by the infamous Amon Goeth. After bitter negotiations with the SS, Eyer was able to win the release of his employees, and 5 others besides. Three days later, trucks picked them up at the camp and returned them to the institute. As they walked into the building, the workers exploded with cheers and sobs of relief.

The war was not easy
for Eyer’s family. His apartment in Berlin was destroyed by bombing in 1942, and his wife, Gertrud, and son, Peter, moved to Munich. A year later, the carpet bombing of Munich forced them to relocate to Freiburg, where they lived with Eyer’s sister and her two children. After they’d been in Freiburg for about a year, Eyer suddenly got a bad feeling about the place. It wasn’t strategically located and had no major heavy industry, but for some reason he felt it was going to be bombed. In November 1944, Gertrud and Peter returned to Munich on a train that was repeatedly attacked, forcing them to run into the bushes twice. But Hermann Eyer’s gut had been correct. On November 20, 1944, American bombers attacked Freiburg for the first time, destroying the house where the family had been living. Eyer’s sister and her children died.

Just before
the bombing raid at Buchenwald in August 1944, 43 members of the French resistance arrived in the camp and, after delousing, entered Block 17, a mostly French ward. The group was led by a British citizen named Forest Frederick Edward Yeo-Thomas, a legendary escape artist known to the Germans as “the White Rabbit.” Yeo-Thomas, a senior commander of the British Special Operations Executive, or SOE, had fought with the Poles against the Soviet Union in 1920, then retired to Paris to run a fashion house. The SOE called him up at the beginning of the war, and he parachuted three times behind enemy lines in France before being captured in February 1944.

On September 9, 16 of Yeo-Thomas’s men were called to the Buchenwald gate and did not return. Their colleagues learned a short time later that they had been hanged in the Gestapo bunker.
Balachowsky sought help
from Kogon, Ding’s inmate confidant, and a plot was hatched. Kogon figured that the best way to save the SOE men was to arrange for their identities to be switched with dead inmates. Earlier that week, 15 French slave laborers suffering from typhus had arrived from Cologne and entered Block 46 for treatment. Several of them appeared to be hopeless cases. The scheme, as Dietzsch and Kogon developed it in consultation with the SOE agents, was to wait until the French laborers died, then switch their identities with the SOE agents.
The secrecy
surrounding Block 46, the horror of typhus, and the awful way it was spread and treated there, had earned Dietzsch a fearsome reputation, even among the SS. That reputation could sometimes be put to good use.

To start the plan
rolling, Dietzsch gave Yeo-Thomas a shot that produced fever but no lasting illness, and ordered him to report next morning to his block leader with complaints of violent headache and heaviness of limbs—the typical first stage of typhus. As planned, Yeo-Thomas’s block leader sent him to the infirmary, where the inmate doctor, suspecting typhus, called Dietzsch to come pick him up. Dietzsch pretended not to know Yeo-Thomas but took him to Block 46 for treatment. While Yeo-Thomas waited for his body double to die, Dietzsch gave him a job as a temperature plotter on the upper floor of the typhus ward. Next, Yeo-Thomas inveigled Dietzsch into admitting two of his comrades, an English pilot, Harry Peulevé, and the German-French agent Stéphane Hessel, a member of De Gaulle’s personal staff. They entered the ward by means of the same scheme employed for Yeo-Thomas. As the charade proceeded, Dietzsch worried constantly that his nurses, who were criminal Greens, would catch wind of what was happening and turn him in to the Gestapo.

On October 5, the Gestapo called out the names of 21 more members of the group; 20 were taken to the Gestapo bunker and shot. The 21st was Peulevé, a supposed typhus case in Block 46.
Ding, whom Kogon
had let in on the secret, came by and met Yeo-Thomas at this point; the Englishman recalled later that Ding spoke French perfectly. “Knowing that Dr. Ding-Schuler was a gentleman, like a good many of these SS types, who was a bit afraid of his skin, we played on his feelings for his wife and children,” Yeo-Thomas said. “I told him when the time came for him to be tried I would at least be able to say one good word for him before he was strung up.” Ding agreed to save as many of the SOE men as possible, and promised to save his laboratory records for the Allied forces to examine. Then he left the block in Dietzsch’s hands.

The Gestapo telephoned
Dietzsch soon thereafter, demanding that Peulevé be sent up the hill, but Dietzsch said the patient was too sick to be executed. Two men with a car came to pick him up, but Dietzsch, knowing the Gestapo’s fear of the typhus ward, menacingly invited them in to retrieve Peulevé themselves. Dietzsch had given Peulevé an injection of milk that made him sick; the terrified Gestapo agents took one look at him and excused themselves on the grounds that they lacked a stretcher. A few hours later, the infirmary chief sent over an alcoholic SS corporal to give Peulevé a death shot in the heart, but the corporal asked Dietzsch to take care of it. Dietzsch took the hypodermic needle into the ward and pretended to inject Peulevé. Ding, meanwhile, called the camp commander, saying it made no sense to execute a dying man.

At this point
, according to Yeo-Thomas, Dietzsch and the spies decided to hasten the death of Marcel Seigneur, one of the genuinely sick French laborers, “knowing that he was going to die whatever happened.” They were spared the implementation of that morally fraught decision when Seigneur died a natural death at the last minute. Dietzsch rushed the corpse to the crematorium with Peulevé’s name written on the inside thigh. From this point, Peulevé lived under the name of Marcel Seigneur.

The other two cases
took even longer to resolve. As a memento of the experience, Yeo-Thomas kept a medical report, signed by Ding, that detailed his fictional typhus agony, with each imaginary rash, headache, hallucination, and serum reaction. All the fakery that characterized the typhus institute was put to use protecting him. On October 14, Ding entered the ward to congratulate Yeo-Thomas on his “death” the day before, informing him that the order for his execution had just arrived. One of the painful things Yeo-Thomas had to do when the war ended was to visit the widow and two children of the sick Frenchman, police officer Maurice Chouquet, whose body had entered the crematorium with Yeo-Thomas’s name written on it. Yeo-Thomas had to sign various forms and affidavits in order for Mme. Chouquet to receive a pension.

That left Hessel
, waiting anxiously in his room on the top floor of Block 46. He spoke as much as he could with his double, Michel Boitel, trying to learn the details of his life before Boitel passed away. It was a terrible circumstance under which to get to know someone. On October 20, Boitel died, leaving Hessel with heavy guilt—over Boitel, and the
resistants
who died while he lived. “Why me?” he wrote. “Because Yeo-Thomas wanted to keep a French officer alive? Because I speak German? Who knows?” Hessel became a French UN official after the war and helped write the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At age 93, in 2010, he published an internationally best-selling call to activism entitled
Indignez-vous!
(Time for outrage).

Yeo-Thomas remained
in Block 46 until November 9. Typhus experiments were going on all the while, and Yeo-Thomas busied himself with making charts, his new camp job. “Being dead, I thought I might as well occupy myself.” By the time he left, only Hessel, Peulevé, and three of the other original SOE agents remained alive. Yeo-Thomas was sent to a Jewish work detail where about 15 men were beaten to death every day, from which he again escaped. For all his ingenuity and cunning, though, Yeo-Thomas never caught on to the fact that the men in Block 50 were making a fake vaccine.

On January 17
, 1945, the SS began evacuating Auschwitz, forcing 30,000 inmates to march west on foot through the snow in. The temperature was 16 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Rajsko was evacuated along with the rest of the camp. Among the survivors still working there were Fleck’s wife, Ernestyna, his son, Ryszard, and the other members of the Lwów microbiology team who had entered Auschwitz two years earlier. They were joined by Henryk and Paula Meisel, who had worked, protected, in Weigl’s laboratory, before being shipped to the camp.

In the beginning
, they walked on foot in groups of several hundred. An SS man stood at the gate of the camp and systematically gave everyone a kick in the ass as they passed by. They walked on side roads because the Germans feared Russian patrols, and sometimes the Germans fired into the forests on the side of the road, spooked by the fear of partisans, who never materialized. Those who could not walk anymore were shot. The Rajsko inmates were luckier than most: their nutrition had been better than that of other prisoners at Auschwitz, which gave them more stamina.

When the snow grew deep, Anna Seeman, being lame, was put on a cart, and her son, Bruno, got on with her, but it was so cold that he got out and started walking. After more than 40 kilometers, they were put on an open railcar with no water and no food and taken to Frankfurt an der Oder. The dead were tossed out of the car. Early March found them in at Malchow, a camp attached to an underground weapons factory that no longer operated. There was little to eat, and it was here that the first member of Fleck’s group, Nusia Umschweif, succumbed to disease and hunger. When the Russians approached Malchow, the prisoners were forced to return to the road, and Bruno had to abandon his mother, Anna, in an empty hut. On May 2, they encountered Russians, who fed and helped them. A few days later, Bruno was reunited with his mother.

The men, separated
from the women and children, suffered on on their own. Bernard Umschweif and another medical colleague, Stefan Blankenheim, died after eating grass. Henryk Meisel had to carry Ryszard Fleck on his shoulders, until they were put on a transport to Buchenwald in open cars. At Buchenwald, Jews arrived from Auschwitz by the thousands, and there was nowhere to house them.
They died by the hundreds
every day in the Little Camp, their suffering met mostly with scorn in the established barracks. “I hesitate to write this: the atrocious misery of the Jews of Auschwitz did not elicit feelings of pity in the camp,” wrote one Frenchman.

Alfred Balachowsky’s diary
from this period, with its nasty anti-Semitism, bears this out. In a January 20, 1945, entry, he wrote, “Large convoy of Jews (5,000) arrive from Auschwitz . . . small degenerate beings with filmy sore eyes, a completely dazed race characterized by its minuscule size.” A few days later, he speaks of another convoy of “dirty, half-witted, repellent Jews, physically ugly, small degenerates with abnormal eyes, thin and bony, huge ears, prominent noses, awful.”

The French, sustained
by food packages from home, wondered why the Jews had not fled during the trip to Buchenwald. They were lightly guarded, and the Russians were close behind. The apparent passivity of the Jews in the Little Camp, and the epidemics they brought with them, unleashed a wave of anti-Semitic feeling. About 2,000 men died at the camp in January, another 5,600 in February, and 5,000 in March. Fat rats feasted on huge piles of corpses as the crematorium ran out of coal to burn them.

Again, Fleck was
lucky. Somehow he managed to learn of Ryszard’s arrival in the Little Camp, and persuaded Ding to have him brought to Block 50. Ryszard arrived at Buchenwald in terrible shape—a sickly, undernourished 20-year-old with damaged lungs and severe frostbite on his feet and hands. Fleck did what he could to nurse him back to health, giving him most of his food.

On February 9, Erwin Ding
was in Weimar with his family when a bomb destroyed an orphanage nearby, killing 30 children. Leaping into the ruins to rescue survivors, Ding tore a ligament in his left knee, and spent the rest of the war on crutches or limping.
Increasingly he was plotting
with Kogon, attempting to hasten the end of the Buchenwald camp in a way that would enable him to survive. He burned all his papers and demanded that Kogon burn the diary of experiments in Block 46. But the tables were turned now, and the inmates knew it. “The next day I told Ding-Schuler I hadn’t burned the journal,” Kogon said. “He was surprised and demanded to know whether it was not a terrible weapon against him. I responded that if he could show before a court that he had saved the journal, this would show that his intentions were honest.”