by Arthur Allen
In 1935, Weigl’s family had moved to new digs, a spacious five-bedroom house at Poniski 31, with one side looking out over the grounds of the Eastern Trade Fair at Stryj Park, the other on undeveloped hills with orchards and meadows. Weigl took the trolley car the two miles to work each day. Once he boarded without any money and explained to the driver that he was Rudolf Weigl and would pay twice when he returned the next day. “Sure, you’re Weigl—and I’m Napoleon,” the conductor said. The tabloids presented him as the mad professor of Lwów, keeping lice and feeding them on himself. Once Wiktor and his father were in an outdoor market in the Jewish quarter, and his father selected some items from the stall of an old man, then walked off absent-mindedly without paying. When he returned apologetically, the man said, “Oh, I knew you’d be good for it, Professor.” As they walked away, Weigl turned to his son and said, “You see, I can’t even steal anything anymore.’”
As vaccine production grew, the institute started to have space problems. Weigl had a certain feline sensitivity to his surroundings, and he didn’t want to abandon the basement offices where he worked. So he decided to raise their ceilings by digging, at great cost, huge holes in the ground to incorporate new sewage, gas, and electric lines. Once the new rooms were finished, Weigl went into the studio, sat down on a chair, got up, and sat down again. He told a laboratory assistant to sit in the chair and asked him, “What do you feel?” The assistant looked puzzled, but then another aide came in and said the ceiling was still too low. At Weigl’s command, the floor was again broken up, and the entire installation rebuilt. The rooms were painted gold and silver. The money Weigl spent on his finicky feng shui came from an award he’d won, and it would have been enough, a tut-tutting aide noted, to build an entirely new, modern facility with good biosecurity.
That the new Polish state had an anti-Semitism problem became clear to the world in late November 1918, with the worst pogrom in Lwów’s history. The slaughter followed a three-week battle for control of the city between Polish and Ukrainian soldiers, a conflict in which Jewish authorities stayed on the sidelines. Armed Poles repaid what they viewed as Jewish disloyalty by allowing the massive destruction of the Jewish quarter. Three days of brutality left 73 dead, 463 injured, and thousands homeless. In 1919, when an American delegation visited Poland to investigate anti-Semitism on behalf of President Woodrow Wilson, none of the Polish newspapers published the statement of goodwill they drew up on arrival. Poles were angry that Wilson had dictated to them the requirement to give minorities equal rights. Both Zionists and Polish nationalists the delegates met described Judaism as a race, not simply a religion. The mixture of optimism and cynicism the delegation detected among Jews, the aggression and grievance of the Poles, were perhaps typical for this time. In Lwów, the delegates found that “the best Poles did not try to excuse the pogrom, but said it was a blot on the name of their city; in other places which we had visited there was always an attempt to deny that anything had taken place, or else it was excused on the ground that the Jews were Bolsheviks.”
In the interwar years, there seemed to be as many facets to Jewish-Polish relations as there were Jews and Poles who lived through them. Wacław Szybalski, the son of a wealthy businessman from an old noble family, said that assimilated Jews were an accepted part of his universe. “I personally didn’t know whether anyone was Polish or Jewish,” he told me during an interview at his lab in Wisconsin in 2010. “We bought our groceries from Friedman. They were Jewish, but my parents never said so, and I didn’t know it. Of course, the working-class people, who spoke Yiddish and had beards and so on, were unknown to me.” Venturing into the Jewish ghetto, beyond the Opera House, “was like visiting a foreign country.”
There were many places in Lwów where Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians assembled together—drinking coffee at the Szkocka and the Załewski, guffawing in the theater, or roaring with laughter by their radios every Sunday over the schlocky slapstick of Toko and Szczepko. In April 1936, during days of riots sparked by the funeral procession of Ukrainian laborers in which police killed eight protesters, the workers marched 10 abreast with militant slogans painted on banners in Polish, Ukrainian, and Yiddish. The violence of that day in central Lwów made a powerful impact on the young people who witnessed it as a harbinger of things to come. Yet the demonstrations were unified across ethnic lines.
The delicate balance between ethnic conflict and normality is exemplified in a May 1929 outburst that began when a Catholic procession passed by a Jewish school. As the Jewish girls craned their necks to get a view, one fell off a stool and started to cry, causing her companions to laugh. People in the procession took the laughter as a Jewish profaning of their faith, and after it was reported in the anti-Semitic press, thugs supporting the anti-Semitic Endeks (National Democratic Party) began smashing windows of Jewish businesses on the thoroughfares of Legionów and Kopernika. When a crowd raided the school and started beating students, police intervened and made 40 arrests. Piłsudski’s interior minister flew into Lwów and quashed the violence, but he refused to meet with the students or their teachers.
Jews and Poles who were polite enough toward each other in public tended not to associate in private—though there were plenty of exceptions to the rule. The causes of this coolness were complex. Frank Stiffel, a Lwowite who would survive both Treblinka and Auschwitz, recalled that as a young man he lived on the same floor as the mathematician Stefan Banach. The two families never greeted each other, which Stiffel attributed to anti-Semitism on Banach’s part. But Banach’s wife was Jewish and what the Stiffels assumed was prejudice was just as likely the distracted behavior of a man with his head in abstract clouds of thought.
For Jews, the interwar period in Lwów and Poland in general was also a period of thriving cultural expression when many great ideologies and movements were born or came of age. Yiddish theater took off, Zionism and the socialist-motivated Bund expanded, and the mainstream Jewish political movement, Agudat Israel, grew in power. Few Jews joined the Polish Communist Party, but the tiny party’s leaders were disproportionately Jewish.
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism in any form has an equally powerful taint. In the Poland of the 1930s, however, anti-Semitism was usually less hate-filled than it was in Nazified Germany. It was more of a symptom of economic competition between two largely segregated communities that viewed prosperity as a zero-sum game. To a large degree, the new Polish state saw ethnic Poles as its sole constituency. It discriminated against Jews as a backlash against the racial tolerance of the empire, which had not favored Poles over other subjects who lived in the lands that were now Poland. Up until the the start of World War I, some 70 percent of the lawyers and 60 percent of doctors in Lwów were Jews, as were many traders and shop owners. During the economic turmoil of the 1930s, nationalists portrayed Jews as outsiders who hogged Polish resources. Especially in the 1930s, the state encouraged them to emigrate to Palestine. Its other actions against the Jews were relatively mild when compared with those of the Germans.
More alarming were the outbreaks of violence, especially on college campuses. Eleven of 600 Jews who applied to the Lwów medical school in 1930 were accepted; by 1937 the quota had shrunk to zero. Members of anti-Semitic student clubs, who displayed their politics with green boutonnieres, menaced the remaining Jewish students in the streets and the halls of the university, armed with razor blades slotted into wooden sticks. Of the many Jewish students beaten and attacked, at least three died. The Lwów rector dealt with such incidents by closing the university. Between October 1931 and November 1938, the university was closed about a third of the time. When a nationalist student died after attacking a Jewish self-defense group, senior university administrators attended his funeral, as if a “great national hero had fallen for God and country,” a witness noted. Yet it is worth pointing out that 12,000 Lwowites, including many non-Jews, showed up in May 1939 for the burial of Markus Landesberg, a murdered Jewish polytechnical student.
> The growth of institutional anti-Semitism hurt Ludwik Fleck. Though thoroughly assimilated into Polish culture, Fleck “looked Jewish.” Nationalists occasionally baited him in the streets, and associates felt that he suffered psychologically from such torments. More to the point, the nationalistic policies put a dent in his professional life. In 1935, the Social Security Hospital fired Fleck, under a new law removing Jews from senior public service. Over the first decade and a half of his career, he had been excluded first from the university, then from any and all official positions. His world, like that of all Polish Jews, was shrinking. Fleck joined an antifascist movement in Lwów and his son, Ryszard, then 11 years old, took part in a Jewish self-defense group. Yet despite the ostracism, the late 1930s were fruitful years for Fleck. His three-room laboratory at Ochronek 8, on a shady street near a busy downtown thoroughfare, was thriving. His lectures on biology and philosophy, given to the Lwów historical society and the Jewish Medical Society, were praised and well attended.
In 1933, Fleck sent a manuscript copy of his new book, The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, to Moritz Schlick, the leader of the Vienna Circle, a prominent group of philosophers who believed that scientific statements were always verifiable, and in that sense ahistorical. This ran counter to Fleck’s thought but he hoped that Schlick would find his book interesting enough to engage with him. Schlick, however, returned the book with the comment that while it was certainly scholarly, the ideas in it were wrong. German publishers had stopped printing books written by Jews around this time. A Swiss publisher released the book in 1935.
As the end of the decade approached, Poland was doing everything wrong for a nation that many could see was on the verge of being plunged into war. The country was in no way prepared to face the might of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. Students drilled on the grounds of the High Castle with 19th-century rifles, while mustachioed legionnaires—Piłsudski’s men from the previous war—marched proudly through the streets or rode on old nags. Meanwhile, the government squeezed the Jews, the only allies it could possibly have counted on to form a wall of solidarity against the Nazis. “Poor Poland, you are too weak to try to imitate Hitler,” wrote Wiktor Chajes, an assimilated, wealthy Jew who was vice president of Lwów’s municipal council.
Weigl may have been absent-minded, but he was by no means oblivious to what was happening. Though he mistrusted politicians and shunned politics, he read the papers, listened to the radio, and predicted long before many others that Hitler would threaten Poland. He hated the bravado of the military, was a radical pacifist, and had no time for the nonsense of racial hatred. In 1937, when the nationalist government passed a law requiring that Jews stand in university classes, Weigl was one of the few professors to reject it. He walked into his lecture hall one day and saw some students standing alone against the wall. “What’s going on here? Why don’t you sit down?” he asked. One of the nationalists explained that the standing students were Jews. “In that case,” Weigl said, “I will stand until they sit.”
It was during this period that Weigl became a fanatic of archery. One day he was visiting his favorite hunting shop and noticed a bow. Before long, Weigl had mastered the sport and started a Lwów archery association. He trained his son and several of his friends, including Jan Reutt, Franek Schramm, and Szybalski, who later became mainstays of Weigl’s wartime laboratory. They set up their first targets in the Botanical Garden, behind his lab, and eventually began practicing on the grounds of the Eastern Trade Fair.
“Weigl was very good,” recalled Szybalski. “He’d shoot from 90 meters away, while I was standing at 30. To shoot 90 meters you have to have a good strong bow. I would be shooting and his arrows would be whistling over my head—‘pffft. pffft’—into the target. And he continued to do this until the end of the war.” Weigl started buying bows from all over the world and began designing and producing his own arrows, which he sometimes grooved so that they shot straighter, like bullets from a threaded barrel. He would collect data on how each type of arrow moved and correct his stance to adjust its flight. Soon Weigl’s archers were among the best in Poland. As his archery skills improved, Weigl began to lose interest in firearms. On duck-hunting trips with friends he would sit in the blind and admire the sky and water and the bugs in the grass, while his friends blasted away with their shotguns. It was as if he had a premonition of what was coming. Later, he would tell a sympathetic German officer, “When I saw the NKVD and Nazis hunting people, I lost any desire to kill things.”
Weigl at play. (Courtesy of National Museum, Przemyl. Photograph of original by S. Kosiedowski.)
CHAPTER FOUR
THE NAZI DOCTORS AND THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
The ethnicity of Fleck and Weigl had meant less when they were both scientists in a peaceful country working on related problems. But, if we were thinking like Fleck, we would say that he and Weigl, Jew and Pole, entered different thought collectives when the war began. Both men conducted work under the profound duress of a Nazi system that viewed them as subservient. But there were gradations in the degree of enslavement. Weigl would produce his vaccine in the service of the German army, whose medical division, though certainly not free of anti-Semitism and other corrupting influences, had as its principal objective the protection of the German fighting man. Fleck would be commandeered by doctors of the SS, whose objectives were racial, genocidal, and confused. Weigl at one point described his German overseer as “my younger colleague.” Fleck’s term for his boss, Erwin Ding, was “dummkopf.”
In 1935, the year that Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact was published, Dr. Ding was working as a spy for the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service), one of the most fearsome of the many police agencies operating under the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler. Ding carried out his missions in the baroque streets of Leipzig, Germany, filing detailed expense accounts for each one—“Streetcar ride, phone calls, investigation case 2145 (Franz)”; “phone discussion of case 2714 (Richter).” He seems to have been diligent in his work, for he earned marks of gut and sehr gut (very good) from his superiors. It is peculiar to think of secret police work as a stepping stone to eminence in medical research, which was Ding’s dream. But work for the higher police units of the SS represented a bona fide in the Nazi medical thought collective. In a Nazi state that practiced mass murder to cleanse “unhealthy” elements from the body politic, the medic’s responsibility was to help cure the Volk—the German race—not the individual patient. When Himmler heard in 1941 that German doctors were caring for prisoners slated for experiments at concentration camps, he wrote, enraged, to the senior SS doctor that medicine should “not keep the sick alive but reduce their numbers.” The very idea of keeping them alive, “would cause a dog to cry,” he added. Thus, Ding’s occupation in 1935 was far from unusual for an SS doctor on the rise. Obersturmbannführer Joachim Mrugowsky, who was later Ding’s boss, also took 1935 off from his medical studies, in order to head the Sicherheitsdienst station in the northern German city of Hanover.
Ding was the type of man whom Himmler wanted to form into an elite class of ardent Nazi professionals. He was born in Bielefeld in 1912, the bastard son of a minor noble of Saxony-Anhalt, Baron Karl von Schuler, a doctor and African explorer who left a host of illegitimate children. Illegitimacy was not an impossible hurdle on the path to success as a Nazi—Adolf Hitler, after all, was, among other things, the son of a bastard—but it was a complicating factor, especially if one’s paternal bloodline could not be fixed beyond doubt. The Wehrmacht, for example, did not generally accept men born out of wedlock into its officer corps. While the SS higher ranks viewed themselves as the Third Reich’s aristocracy, bitterness and social exclusion flung certain ambitious young men, including Ding, into the arms of the SS.
Ding spent the better part of a decade in a passionate attempt to establish his paternity and claim his natural father’s name as his own. The story of his origins was bitter and tawdry. His mother, Else Braun, a se
cretary in a Dessau clothing factory, had had an eight-year love affair with Schuler, resulting in three sons, of whom Erwin was the youngest. During this long relationship, the charming baron constantly promised Else that it was only a matter of time before he would get his divorce and make their liaison legal. He did obtain a divorce, finally, in 1915. But this only led to a final disgrace for poor Else, because instead of marrying her, Schuler took vows with another woman—a local girl long in the tooth but with a nice dowry, the daughter of a rich coal merchant. At this point, Else, lacking other options, put her youngest boy up for adoption. “He’s good child with the best characteristics—attentive, sharp, and extremely intelligent, a lively, healthy little fellow who has already survived measles and whooping cough,” she wrote a prospective family in Berlin. Schuler, she told a friend, had promised to pay 1,200 Reichsmarks (roughly $6,000 in 2013 money) to anyone who would take Erwin off her hands. He lived for a while in the Petersohn family, then in a second household. A short time later, when Erwin was barely four years old, his mother died. After the funeral, the boy was packed off to live with yet another family, that of the Leipzig salesman Heinrich Ding and his wife.
The Dings adopted Erwin and seem to have treated him well enough, securing him a place in a prestigious Leipzig gymnasium—the German high school for profession-bound children. But they also clashed with Erwin, especially when the elder Ding objected to the teenager’s fascination with the Nazi movement. When Heinrich Ding passed away in 1932, Erwin, over the objections of his adoptive mother, immediately joined the Sturmabteilung, the storm troopers, and became Nazi party member no. 1,318,211. That year he also graduated with honors in history and foreign languages (French and English), with notes of praise for his skills in swimming and skiing. After a strife-filled year, his adoptive mother kicked him out of the house; their final quarrel concerned his share of the father’s inheritance. Ding served a year in the military and then began studying medicine. Under circumstances that are unknown, he met Himmler, who singled him out for advancement. Himmler approved of this bright, malleable young man with no ties to family, church, or antiquated moral codes that would interfere with his placement in the new native aristocracy. And now Ding’s future was in the hands of the SS.