by Arthur Allen
Geomedizin’s suggestion that Jews were “natural” carriers of typhus stemmed from the “proto-idea” that Jews were plague carriers, parasites, and well-poisoners. This was a convenient linkage for the Nazi physicians ostensibly charged with looking out for the health of Jews. It gave a pseudo-scientific gloss to the notion of Jews as insidious, poisonous contaminants in the body politic of the Aryan race, and provided cover for the most heinous crimes. Exposure to this ideology does not excuse their actions, but even the stupidest and most venal acts flow more easily within the confines of a common thought collective.
The Germans were, of course, correct that diseases like typhus were endemic to the East, including some areas of Poland, among the very poor, Jew and Slav alike. And there were legitimate cultural explanations, many of them poverty-related, like the scarcity of running water for washing and few changes of clothing in towns and shtetls where winters were hard and people grew accustomed to their lice. But the public health campaigns in Poland in the interwar period, with the contributions of men like Weigl, Rajchman, and Hirszfeld—the latter two, notably, were Jews by birth—had put Poland on the path to elimination of the disease. Typhus wasn’t an inevitable consequence of belonging to a less-favored culture as long as that “culture” had the resources with which to combat typhus.
Hermann Eyer in uniform. (Courtesy of Peter Eyer.)
Geomedizin was the dominant philosophical turn of mind in the fields of infectious disease and public health in 1930s Germany; it was Nazi medicine. Although he was not an ideologically reliable Nazi, Dr. Hermann Eyer—who would later oversee Rudolf Weigl’s work in a way that paralleled Erwin Ding’s relationship to Fleck—also published within the Geomedizin world.
Compared with Ding or Mrugowsky, Eyer is a morally complex figure. He served the Nazi military efficiently, and his scientific ability and organizational skills doubtless did more to strengthen the German war effort than did the clumsy sadism of the SS doctors. Yet Eyer’s relationship to power remains somewhat opaque. Though his early publications suggest that anti-Semitism was part of his worldview and approach to disease, his wartime actions would demonstrate an unusual degree of civil courage.
Eyer, like Weigl, was a tinkerer and jack-of-all-trades who took a deep interest in many facets of science and technology. Born in 1906, the son of a Mannheim steel salesman, he had begun studies in machine construction before obtaining PhDs in both chemistry and medicine. Like Weigl, Eyer was skilled at fixing household objects and designing machines. He was also a lifelong practicing Catholic who saw no conflict between his scientific research and his faith. As a faculty member at the University of Erlangen in 1935, Eyer felt pressured to join the Nazi Party and became a candidate member that year, though he abandoned his candidacy after joining the military, where he believed he could pursue an academic career without deeper commitment to the Nazi cause. At this time, the Nazis had forced the well-known Jewish serologist Hans Sachs, who had been Eyer’s academic adviser at the University of Heidelberg, to surrender his position; he would eventually emigrate to Ireland. According to his son, Eyer admired and respected Sachs. But the work he published following his adviser’s departure suggests that Eyer had decided to seek Gleichschaltung, or conformity, laced as it was with the nationalistic, eugenic claptrap of the times. Eyer toured the Ostmark, an impoverished region of Bavaria lying on the Czech border, where he measured villagers’ skulls to determine the “Nordic” and “Alpine” attributes of the population, and provided invidious comparisons of Czech and Bavarian “blood.” He praised the anti-Semitic gauleiter (Nazi district chief) of the Ostmark, Hans Schemm, who had stated, among other things, that “a Jew should dangle from every lamppost.” Eyer urged that the health of the area be improved “to build a natural wall on Germany’s border out of responsible, duty-conscious citizens.”*
In 1937, Eyer studied virology in Berlin under Professor Eugen Haagen, a fanatical Nazi who had worked several years at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. After the annexation of Austria in 1938, Eyer served several months’ rotation as a troop doctor in Vienna, while training to become the army’s typhus specialist. Although Germany had been a leader in typhus research in the World War I period, its best laboratory, in Hamburg, at the Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases, had neglected research on the disease since 1920. By the time war broke out in 1939, Richard Otto, an elderly former student of Koch and Ehrlich at Frankfurt’s Institute for Experimental Therapy, was the only senior typhus expert in Germany. The Robert Koch Institute—Germany’s leading scientific institution—did not even mention typhus in its official reports until 1940.
Germany profoundly trailed its European enemies in this field. Poland, of course, had the field-tested Weigl vaccine. France, with its colonial presence in North Africa, where typhus was a constant danger, was also pursuing various vaccination procedures. The Pasteur Institute’s branch in Casablanca, Morocco, developed a vaccine against epidemic typhus that was made from a weakened strain of a related bacteria, Rickettsia mooseri. In 1938–39, physicians there led a mass vaccination campaign to protect Moroccans from the disease. This vaccine was quite toxic, however. At the outbreak of war, Pasteurians in Tunis and Paris were working on another vaccine, one based on the work of the Mexican scientist Maximiliano Ruiz Castañeda, who had demonstrated that it was possible to grow typhus germs in the lungs of immune-compromised mice. Scientists in the United States, meanwhile, had developed an entirely different vaccine production method. Dr. Herald Cox, working at the U.S. Public Health Laboratory in Montana in the late 1930s, found a way to grow typhus in the yolk sac of chicken eggs, which he then chemically neutralized to make a vaccine. Millions of U.S. troops were inoculated with his shot in the early 1940s. The French and U.S. vaccines would prove of some use by the end of the war, but at its outbreak Weigl’s vaccine was the only field-tested prophylactic.
In Germany, the leading scientists with experience of typhus during World War I believed that quarantine and delousing were the best ways to fight the disease. Belatedly, as Germany prepared to invade Poland, a few specialists realized that German troops should have more protection before they invaded the typhus-endemic regions of Poland and the Soviet Union. The health inspectorate of the Wehrmacht was particularly worried. In April 1939, Eyer’s boss sent him to Italian-occupied Ethiopia, instructing him to learn as much as possible about typhus and the Weigl vaccination method. Poland and French North Africa, though further along on typhus vaccination measures, were off limits to a Wehrmacht doctor. At the Red Sea port of Massawa (now in Eritrea), an Italian researcher named Giacomo Mariani had created a typhus laboratory that produced a Weigl-type vaccine he had learned to make in Lwów. When Eyer arrived on the Horn of Africa, Mariani greeted him personally with a syringe full of vaccine. Rudolf Weigl, who would mean so much to Eyer’s military career, had left Ethiopia only a few weeks before the German doctor’s arrival.
In Weigl’s life, the visit to occupied Ethiopia would hold a fateful significance. In December 1938, the Italian government had invited him to spend several months there to help Mariani oversee a typhus vaccination campaign aimed at protecting the Italian occupiers and keeping them from bringing the disease home to Italy. Politically this was a difficult decision. Although the countries were not technically at war, Weigl knew that Germany, Italy’s ally, intended to invade Poland. The same month that Weigl received the offer, the director of the Pasteur Institute in Morocco, Georges Blanc, had declined to host another Italian scientist who wished to study the French vaccine in Casablanca, citing fascist actions that had “darkened the political horizon.”
Typhus was long established in Ethiopia and known as yehadar hasheta, meaning “illness of the month of Hedar,” presumably because Hedar (November), at the start of the cold dry season, was the time when people began huddling for warmth and sharing lice. As Ethiopia slowly industrialized in the early 20th century, there were frequent outbreaks in up-country mines and towns where people lived in c
rowded conditions. Following the Italian occupation in 1935, the governor of Eritrea issued a decree requiring the compulsory inoculation of Italian civil servants and solders in contact with the “native population,” as well as of all persons, “metropolitan or native,” connected with hotels, restaurants, bars, cinemas, brothels, public or private transport. Fear of typhus led to Italian efforts at segregation that are reminiscent of later Nazi ghettoization plans. A September 21, 1938, order prohibited Italians and other Europeans from entering areas reserved for “natives,” and Dr. Mariani argued in a 1939 article that control of the disease must be based on the “absolute and constant” separation of Italians and other foreigners from natives. He urged that the Weigl vaccine be made available to Italians and other at-risk whites, while natives got “the easiest vaccine to prepare.”
In the 1930s, Weigl’s vaccine had been a tool of imperial conquest in the sense that it enabled typhus-naïve missionaries and colonists to penetrate distant interiors, in places such as Manchuria and North Africa, where typhus continued to be endemic and the vaccine provided the only sure protection against death. Now Italy sought the vaccine for a similar purpose. Weigl had always wanted his vaccine to be available to all who needed it. But he could not resist the Italian invitation. In succumbing to it, he displayed characteristic scientific and human curiosity, and political tone-deafness. Weigl’s son would later say of the trip, “He opposed fascism, but he welcomed the opportunity to visit an exotic country, gather new strains of Rickettsia, and save many lives.”
In Lwów, the decision created an uproar in the Weigl household, for Zofia could not decide whether to accompany her husband. They had never been separated for so long, and 17-year-old Wiktor was studying for his Matura, the entrance examinations for medical school. In the end, Zofia decided to stay in Lwów to help Wiktor. Weigl brought along his associate and mistress, Dr. Anna Herzig, who was taking an increasingly important administrative and scientific role in the laboratory, as well as his trusted technician Michał Martynowicz.
In January 1939, Weigl traveled to Stockholm to give a series of lectures summarizing his research to the medical society. The possibility of a Nobel Prize seemed to be in the air, and his colleague Charles Nicolle held a Paris news conference at which he stated that Weigl “has saved the lives of thousands of people, and deserves recognition at the highest level as a leader and tireless worker, a fanatic of science.” In Lwów, the Weiglovian thought collective was growing. Journalists wrote about him in the newspapers; he gave radio talks about science and evolution. The city fathers presented him with the Lwów Prize, 10,000 zlotys with no strings attached. Zofia wanted to visit the World’s Fair in New York, but Weigl spent most of the money refurbishing his lab.
The university authorized a paid vacation for Weigl, Herzig, and Martynowicz from February 1 through April 30, 1939, in order to enable the Ethiopia visit. The three departed in late January from Lwów’s glorious central train station, with its leather-cushioned seats and glass chandeliers. It was a bitter moment, not least because everyone knew that war was coming. Zofia wept. The separation gave everyone in the family a taste of estrangement. “I think that in devoting herself to me Mother made a big mistake,” Wiktor Weigl would say, “and it would reflect negatively on our family life.” Zofia Weigl was ill with cancer, though she did not realize it. For the family, Weigl’s departure represented a rupture that would never really heal.
The party went first to Rome, where Pope Pius XII met Weigl in private to award him the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Gregory for his help in protecting the Belgian missionaries in China. They returned from Ethiopia in early May with bows and arrows, rhinoceros skins, and other paraphernalia and gifts, as well as homemade films to show friends and the family. Some 13,500 inoculations had been given by the end of March 1939, but there was some evidence that the Weigl vaccine was not performing well in Ethiopia. The strains that predominated in the African highlands may have been significantly different from those of Eastern Europe. The Italians reported 259 cases of typhus in the colony in 1941–42, roughly the same rate as in the preceding two years of Italian occupation.
Weigl brought back African strains of lice and Rickettsia that he would incorporate into his vaccine. After the homecoming celebrations, he returned to work with renewed energy. In fact, he was absent from home more than ever. Incorporating the new lice meant more time in the laboratory, with Anna Herzig, and less time at home. War was coming.
* Ding was sometimes known as Ding, sometimes as Ding-Schuler, which was his preferred name until he was able in September 1944 to change it legally to Schuler; I refer to him generally as Ding, but in quotations he is often called Ding-Schuler.
* Friedrich Löffler (1851–1915) developed staining techniques that allowed him to identify diphtheria bacteria.
* Eyer’s son says that an editor inserted the paean to Schemm without his father’s knowledge.
CHAPTER FIVE
WAR AND EPIDEMICS
Erwin Ding obtained his medical degree in 1937 and spent his residency at an SS barracks in Berlin. In November, he married Irene Wrazidlo, the daughter of a Leipzig venereal disease specialist. For his state medical examination, Ding wrote and published a dissertation, a slapdash production that could not have fooled anyone as to the writer’s ignorance of the subject, on pavor nocturnus—night terrors in children. In August 1938, he became the main camp doctor at Buchenwald, a place of constant terror. With his pregnant wife, Ding rented an apartment in Weimar, and bought a motorcycle for the five-mile ride up the mountain each morning.
Buchenwald had been created in July 1937 by German political prisoners, mostly Communists, who hacked it out of an old royal hunting ground in the forest of the Ettersberg. Although 56,000 people would die at Buchenwald, the camp was not established for extermination, unlike the facilities at Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec. Like most of the thousands of other Nazi prison installations, Buchenwald was designed to punish and control the enemies of the Reich while extracting their labor until they died. The SS leader Theodor Eicke had dreamed up this unspeakable system in 1933 at the first Nazi concentration camp, at Dachau. A metal sign reading “Arbeit macht frei”—Freedom through work—hung over the entrance to the Auschwitz and Dachau camps. A rather more mysterious and belligerent phrase, “Jedem das Seine”—To each his own—greeted inmates at Buchenwald.
The first glimpse of the camps has been described in hundreds, perhaps thousands of memoirs of survival—the arrival by boxcar, by truck, or, in the case of Buchenwald, on foot up the steep road from Weimar; sorting by profession, kicks and shouts and beatings administered by SS guards or by camp inmates dressed in striped uniforms with striped cloth hats; the prison uniforms sewn with their peculiar array of colored triangles that one learned, quickly, had slippery meanings—red triangles being political prisoners, though not always ones you could trust, greens common criminals, blacks “asocials” (which could mean alcoholic, or homeless, or vagrant), pinks homosexuals, blues religious dissenters, and yellows, of course, Jews.
The Germans were indifferent to the suffering of the camp inmates, and encouraged death by overwork, beatings, torture, starvation, exposure, dehydration, diarrhea, and other diseases. But there was one illness the Nazis did not want inmates to contract, and that was typhus. They feared that typhus would infect SS men, or Germans outside the camps, and they feared the spread of lice. And so, each incoming load of prisoners passed through disinfection and quarantine. At Buchenwald and other camps, the first rooms seen by new arrivals were the disinfection chambers, where the prisoners stripped and surrendered their clothes, prisoner-barbers shaved every hair from their bodies and heads, and guards chased them into gelatinous baths full of burning chemicals intended to kill any lice remaining upon them. Delousing was a regular occurrence at the camps, especially in periods of typhus epidemic, as described by an Auschwitz inmate:
You took off your shoes and pants and you were stark naked, standing in fro
nt of your barrack. [At the bathhouse] the water was so hot it was almost scalding. . . . And there were some capos, some big shots you know, who took sadistic pride in tripping you when you tried to run out of the shower. If you were able to get out of the bathhouse, now you had to go back in front of your barracks, wet, naked, freezing outside, and wait until your clothing came. And it happened time and time again. . . . I could hear the sound in my ears when people froze to death and fell to the ground. . . . Those were our sanitary facilities.
A single louse under some circumstances provided an excuse for hundreds of prisoners to be stripped naked and bathed in the cold. The resulting cases of pneumonia and other illnesses dwarfed the public health threat of the louse, but this had no impact on camp policy. Prisoners often puzzled at how the SS could allow a starving prisoner to wander the camp being literally eaten by lice, while insisting that certain rooms in the hospital be kept spotless. The answer lay in peculiarly Nazi attitudes toward Jews, dirt, and lice—an obsession that it would have taken a Freud to decode. What we can say is that comparisons of lice and Jews were omnipresent in Nazi literature and propaganda. Himmler himself stated that Jews were exactly the same as lice—and by this he meant that like lice on the body, Jews penetrated the intimate spaces of Europe with their filthy and decadent ideas and practices, that they were disgusting and omnipresent parasites, and that modern, efficient, science-driven Germany knew how to get rid of them.