The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (43 page)

Ivy proposed that certain broad principles be set out on the use of humans as subjects in experimental work. The “Principles and Rules of Experimentation on Human Subjects” that he proffered at the meeting are, in their essentials, the Nuremberg Code:

1.
Consent of the subject is required; i.e. only volunteers should be used.

(a)
The volunteers before giving their consent, should be told of the hazards, if any.

(b)
Insurance against an accident should be provided, if it is possible to secure it.

2.
The experiment to be performed should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation, that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment; that is, the experiment must be useful and be as such to yield results for the good of society.

3.
The experiment should be conducted

(a)
So as to avoid unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury, and

(b)
by scientifically qualified persons.

(c)
The experiment should not be conducted if there is a prior reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur.

The Doctors’ Trial
, U.S. Military Tribunal no. 1, began with an indictment of 22 men and 1 woman on October 25, 1946. The charge was “war crimes and crimes against humanity.” As the British scholar Paul Weindling has pointed out, the American prosecutors were less concerned with criticizing scientific practices than with demonstrating how the depravity of the Nazi system had penetrated even the medical profession. “It is incumbent upon us to set forth with conspicuous clarity the ideas and motives which moved these defendants to treat their fellow men as less than beasts,” the prosecutor Telford Taylor stated. “I do not think the German people have as yet any conception of how deeply the criminal folly that was Nazism bit into every phase of German life, or of how utterly ravaging the consequences were.” The defendants in the Doctors’ Trial were a grab bag of senior and low-ranking Nazis who sometimes had little to do with one another. The chief accused, Karl Brandt, had been Hitler’s personal physician and designed the euthanasia program, the mass murder of German “mental defectives” that established systems for murdering millions of Jews and others. Others on the dock included Karl Genzken, chief of the Waffen-SS medical service; Joachim Mrugowsky; the army medical chief Siegfried Handloser; and the Buchenwald physician Waldemar Hoven. Gerhard Rose, vice president of the Robert Koch Institute, was on the stand representing academic medicine.

For all the defendants, the impulse and strategy was to blame the dead. Himmler, the master deviant, was dead, as were Grawitz and Ding-Schuler. The midlevel officers Mrugowsky and Genzken testified at first that they knew nothing. Yes, there were experiments, but the details were left to Ding-Schuler and Grawitz, who were ambitious and sneaky and concealed information to consolidate their powers, they said. Mrugowsky and Genzken,
par contre
, were upstanding men, and had been deceived, their witnesses said. Hoven—at one point the Americans declared him insane—also blamed Ding-Schuler, though he admitted murdering 150 people. Eugen Kogon, who recognized the services he had performed for the camp underground, pleaded for Hoven’s pardon on the grounds that Germany could not exorcise its demons by laying the blame on a few individuals. Many of Fleck’s colleagues from Block 50 gave powerful testimony on the cruel events at Block 46. Fleck himself did not appear, though he was called to provide testimony at a later Nuremberg trial.

Doctor colleagues of
the accused helped gather evidence for them and testified on their behalf. Gerhard Rose was in fact a rather random choice for prosecution, since his sins were dwarfed by those of colleagues who worked at Auschwitz or in the Warsaw ghetto. Georg Nauck of the Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases supplied documents and publications for Rose’s defense.
The latter defended
the Buchenwald vaccine experiments by stating that the Pasteur Institute’s live typhus vaccine, which the French administered 3.5 million times to combat an Algerian typhus epidemic, led to five or six cases of typhus per thousand vaccinated, and thus had caused 20,000 cases of the disease. If the French could justify using the vaccine on the assumption that the ends justified the risk, Rose testified, then Germans were within their rights to test vaccines in the camps.

Waldemar Hoven at Nuremberg. (National Archives.)

When that line of challenge failed, Mrugowsky brought out another. He argued that the experimenters at Buchenwald were not bound by the Hippocratic oath, because they were not practicing medicine but rather preparing a defensive weapon. The people experimented upon were not patients, he said—they were prisoners of war. “The experiments were research,” Mrugowsky argued in his final defense, “required by an extraordinarily pressing state emergency, and ordered by the highest competent government authorities. . . . Millions of soldiers had to give up their lives because they were called upon to fight by the state . . . in the same way the state ordered the medical men to make experiments with new weapons against dangerous diseases. These weapons were the vaccines.”

Furthermore, Mrugowsky argued, what was the significance of 142 deaths over three years of experiments (a number based on the typhus charts in possession of the prosecution) at Buchenwald, when in the winter of 1942, 15,000 Russian soldiers died of typhus
every day
in German POW camps? He compared the experiments to Emil von Behring’s work at Berlin’s Charité Hospital in the 1890s, which established the value of diphtheria serum. The control subjects in that group died, he said—240 children. But “their sacrifice allowed us to recognize the value of the serum.” Pointing to the unethical practices of non-Nazi medicine might have been an effective argument had the entire enterprise of Nazi medicine not been infused with utter contempt for life and health. In a broader historical perspective, however, Mrugowsky had a point—not one that could be made in his own defense, but an argument in favor of stricter medical ethics worldwide.

In a crowning irony
to the typhus story, it surfaced during the trial that American medics had vaccinated all the Nazi defendants with the Buchenwald rabbit-lung vaccine. At the trial, Mrugowsky, Handloser, and the others learned for the first time that Fleck, Ciepielowski, and Kogon had suckered them for 18 months with a false vaccine. Indeed, it was not clear whether the Americans knew of the deception, and whether they had administered the Doctor’s Trial defendants with good vaccine or the worthless solution that the inmates had prepared for Germany’s troops. Early in his testimony, Mrugowsky boasted that the vaccine produced at Buchenwald “was the best vaccine we had in Germany. The American occupation troops used it at their camps, after the defeat,” he said.

After Kogon and Ciepielowski testified that the vaccine had been bogus, Mrugowsky appeared stunned. He accused them of violating medical ethics. “These are some of the most curious remarks I have heard here,” he said. “Their attitude has nothing in common with the concepts of humanity expressed by the
Herren
here today.”

This was met by laughter in the gallery.

On August 20, 1947, Mrugowsky, Hoven, and five others were sentenced to death by hanging. Seven others were acquitted, while Handloser, Rose, Genzken, and the others received lesser charges and were freed within several years.

Fleck came to Nuremberg
several months later as an expert witness in the sixth U.S. trial,
U.S. v. Carl Krauch
, which involved senior executives of IG Farben. He was given access to prosecution documents, and made a powerful case that IG Farben officials were fully aware that Ding’s vaccine was being tested on artificially infected prisoners in a concentration camp. No scientist of any skill or understanding could have been fooled by the wording of Ding’s typhus papers—which Fleck had helped write—into believing the infections he described were not artificially induced, Fleck testified. One could not determine how long someone had been sick with typhus unless the infection was intentional, because the timing of an infection depended on a number of factors, including the patient’s immune defenses. Yet in Ding-Schuler’s papers, blood draws were described as occurring “one day after infection,” or “three days after infection,” he said. In addition, “there was never a typhus epidemic at Buchenwald.” Rudolf Weigl began experimenting with his vaccine in 1919, Fleck noted. Over 30 years, he vaccinated more than 50,000 people and covered whole typhus-endemic regions. Weigl would never have dreamed of employing the methods used by the SS on behalf of IG Farben, he said. Before the Buchenwald experiments began, Robert Kudicke and Eugen Gildemeister had vaccinated about 6,000 people in Warsaw. Yet Behring had delivered vaccine for testing to Waldemar Hoven. Why? “No specialist would think that Hoven in Buchenwald was better situated than Kudicke in the Warsaw ghetto to test a typhus vaccine,” Fleck said. “It was obvious to all that these were artificial vaccinations.”

Fleck was devastated
by what he’d been shown at Nuremberg, which he described to Ludwik Hirszfeld, in a letter, as a “ghostly theater.” He was stunned that scientists such as Kudicke and Gildemeister had taken part in planning meetings for the Buchenwald experiments without raising objections. “Now they squirm about in a cowardly and miserable way. [The IG Farben doctor Richard] Bieling tries to wash their sins away, and the young doctors who worked at Behring try to make the truth disappear by shamelessly lying,” he wrote. “It was all so nauseating that I was impatient to get out of there.”

Of the 24 indicted IG Farben officials, half were convicted, and most of these were free within a few years. Many implicated company officials were not even charged.

Many other scientists
were troubled by the postwar state of German medicine. The Rockefeller Foundation’s medical chief, Alan Gregg, during a visit in 1947, found the destruction appalling, German physicians’ failure to recognize the enormity of Nazi crimes even worse. “They still seem to me to be strangers to self-reproach and the responsibilities that attend freedom,” he wrote. He felt a huge sense of relief leaving the country. “It isn’t that you can vomit what you have already had to eat—you can’t—but at least you don’t have to sit smilingly and eat more and more.”

Hirszfeld’s prediction, that the German ghetto doctors would pay a price for looking the other way while their patients were murdered, did not come true.
Most went back to their old
lives after a few months or years of Allied investigation. Nauck, who helped create the Polish ghettos, was hired by FIAT to write reports on wartime science. Kudicke returned from Warsaw to the University of Frankfurt, while Richard Haas, head of the Behringwerke in Lwów, landed a post at the University of Freiburg. The
Generalgouvernement
public health chief, Jost Walbaum, became a homeopathic doctor in Lower Saxony; Wilhelm Dopheide, Walbaum’s man in Lwów, lay low as a state medical consultant in the town of Hagen. Hermann Eyer was friendly with several of these men and wrote their obituaries in the medical press in later years. His assessments tended to avoid the “difficult period” of the war. None of the men were ever punished for their wartime activities.

On January 17, 1945
, with the Red Army on the doorstep, Eyer’s staff abandoned the Kraków institute.
In the closing
weeks of the war, he moved what was left of the typhus station from Kraków to Cz
stochowa, Poland, and finally to Roth, Germany, where he surrendered to the U.S. Army in April 1945. A three-member scientific intelligence team led by the virologist Joseph Smadel inspected the station in Roth and interrogated Eyer and 54 members of his staff. Although he was somewhat mystified by aspects of Eyer’s technique, Smadel seemed to take a shine to him. He noted that Eyer’s technicians “denied that Eyer had any Nazi affilitations; in fact they maintained that the Wehrmacht was as non political as is the American Army. In agreement with their expressed statements regarding Eyer it may be noted that his own correspondence that was examined never ended with ‘Heil Hitler’ but that many letters he received from others did.”