by Arthur Allen
Delousing was so routine in the Nazi realm, in fact, that at Auschwitz it could be used as a pretext to get Jews peacefully to remove their clothes and enter the gas chambers—which were equipped with fake shower heads.
There was no gas chamber at Buchenwald, but there was a crematorium to burn the bodies of the prisoners who died in great numbers every day. Death in the space of several weeks or months claimed the majority of the inmates, who had neither value to the Nazis nor friends to look out for them. But fates could vary tremendously. Nearly every survivor speaks of reaching a breaking point—exhaustion, illness, beating—and then being saved by the intervention of others. Like all the camps, but more than most, Buchenwald was run by an inmate hierarchy, signaled to a degree by the colors of the triangles on their uniforms. For the most part, the hierarchy represented an insidious system that set prisoner against prisoner while reducing German needs for manpower in the camps. A harsh pecking order offered the prisoner leadership better rations, more space, and the power to do favors for friends. But as a result of this structure, there were people in the camp who had the power to save lives. The Blockälteste and the Stubendienst, trustees who ruled the living quarters, and the capos who ran the work details, were sometimes gentle, usually brutal, and were always required to enforce the rules. Those who could not carry out the work, and lacked friends, inevitably became Musulmänner, “Muslims”—the camp term—no one knows why—for the beaten-down, skin-and-bones inmates who were beyond saving.
Professional status meant little in the camps. Blue-collar skills were useful because they could lead to assignment to indoor work, say, in a workshop or a factory. The SS eagerly shattered the will of professional men and women with back-breaking, calorie-depleting outside work—digging trenches, hauling stones and manure. “A few weeks in Buchenwald made it impossible to judge by anyone’s appearance or face what he might have done in civilian life,” wrote Walter Poller, a German labor activist brought to the camp a few months after Erwin Ding arrived. “When they stood in rank and file, the scientists beside the laborer, the clergyman beside the habitual criminal, the teacher beside the craftsman, the artist beside the imbecile, the merchant beside the tramp, it would have been hard to distinguish one from another. . . . Life in the camp nearly always destroyed one’s own values and sense of dignity. Those who knew how to retain their original personalities despite all they went through were the exception, not the rule.”
There were, however, a few professions in the biomedical field that, in the right circumstances, offered an advantage. Some doctors survived as camp physicians, whom the SS and capos required for a variety of reasons. Although the prison hospitals and clinics were often brutal places where mass murder of the weak occurred, at times they could be used to hide threatened prisoners. After a period of numbing work in a rock quarry, political allies placed Poller in the camp hospital. After recovering his strength, he was fortunate enough to be assigned as clerk to the camp doctor, one of the best-protected positions in the camp. Doctor’s clerks, who wore white medical frocks, had unusual freedom of movement, and their postwar testimony would be crucial in describing the anatomy of camp life.
The doctor whom Poller served for a year was Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Erwin Ding. Poller offers us the first detailed picture of his master:
A highly intelligent man, who was well-mannered, of an agreeable disposition, friendly and sometimes actually genial. His features were rather pleasant than stern, his eyes lively and observant. Above all, he was exceptionally self-assured, and I was repeatedly surprised at the ease with which he always found a way out of the most complicated situations. Many a time he sat before me at his writing desk, reading the papers I had prepared, and my eyes would rest on his high, nobly-formed forehead, on the fine line of his nose, on the handsome, regular features so full of character, and often I pondered the puzzle such a man set, his high qualifications and abilities contrasting with his abominable crimes.
Ding ably carried out the two major jobs of an SS doctor in a concentration camp. The first was to forge death certificates to conceal the torture and mistreatment of inmates. The second was outright medical murder. During the year he worked for Ding, Poller witnessed a series of horrible crimes. He saw Ding kill an inmate with an injection of atropine to the heart; saw him browbeat a Jewish “race defiler” into agreeing to be castrated; saw Ding murder an apparently autistic inmate; saw him torture a man to death with shots of apomorphine and electrical shocks. When a typhoid fever epidemic broke out in the camp, Ding killed the sickest patients, rather than spend money for medicine. The Reverend Paul Schneider, an anti-Nazi minister, was brought to Ding in the sick ward in July 1939 after being tied to a cross for several days. Ding restored his health for a couple of weeks, then gave him a fatal injection of strophanthin, and falsified the death certificate. When Schneider’s widow came to pick up the body, Ding shook her hand and gave his condolences.
While carrying out atrocities, Ding, then 26, was also attempting to pad his résumé with journal publications. At one point, he decided to write a treatise on diabetes, using records compiled by three Jewish doctor slaves. Poller wrote up the report, and Ding added his own details, which he had clearly made up. Ding could present an air of knowledgability, Poller states, but it was “mere façade. The splendid head, intended by nature to carry out valuable work for suffering humanity, had been hollowed and refilled with the stench of Nazi doctrine.”
Poller witnessed a particularly revealing episode when a group of Jewish doctors in the camp brought the Austrian radiologist Siegmund Kreuzfuchs before Ding. Kreuzfuchs had invented a method of using X-rays to diagnose ulcers, heart aneurysms, and other ailments. The prisoners hoped that if Ding understood Kreuzfuchs’s importance, he might save the life of this “shriveled, emaciated man, already destined to die.” Ding spoke with the Jewish doctor for a while and afterwards expressed admiration for his knowledge. A few days later, Kreuzfuchs returned to resume his explanations, but Poller could see that Ding was losing patience. Suddenly, he took a drawing that Kreuzfuchs had made, tore it up, crumpled it, and struck him in the face. As Kreuzfuchs turned helplessly and ran out the door, Ding sneered at him, “‘What swine! Such a Jew!’”
“It took me some time,” Poller wrote, “to appreciate what had taken place before my eyes.”
For Poller, Ding represented something far worse than the typical SS guard who dispensed whippings, kicks, and murder. As a doctor, he belonged to an ancient guild whose first principle was “do no harm.” As such, even in his moments of cultured reflection, or during occasional acts of random kindness, he was the embodiment of corruption. The Kreuzfuchs episode revealed something else: Ding’s awkward, unspoken, perhaps unconscious awareness of the fraudulence of an existence that gave him the power of life and death over men like Kreuzfuchs, whose accomplishments he could never match.
Meanwhile, Ding pressed on in his pathetic campaign to get a name change. On May 12, 1939, he wrote confidentially to General Karl Genzken, chief of the medical office of the Waffen-SS, seeking his intervention in the process. “As you know, the name ‘Ding’ inspires everyone to mockery,” he wrote. Within days of arriving at Buchenwald, he had been “given the nickname ‘Dr. Schniepel.’ In the local slang, Schniepel was a word for the male sexual organ. He concluded, “In examining my request, I beg you to consider that the stain of an out-of-wedlock birth has clung to me for my entire life . . . a source of conflict throughout my studies and military service, and one that I would like to spare my children.”
Three months later, Ding was called back to Berlin. The start of the war found him studying infectious disease under Heinz Zeiss. In May 1940, he was mustered into a frontline Waffen-SS unit and joined the invasion of France.
War began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland under the pretext of a phony Polish border attack. Motorized units crushed the Polish cavalry, and within a few days the Nazis had occupied Kraków, the historical center of Polish culture. They ha
d chosen the city to serve as the capital of the newly created Generalgouvernement, the conquered parts of central and eastern Poland that were not absorbed into Germany. Hans Frank, Hitler’s lawyer, took charge of the government and established his residence in the 14th-century Wawel Castle, home to Polish kings and archbishops.
On November 6, two weeks after the occupation of Kraków, SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Bruno Müller, the Gestapo chief, called all the professors of Poland’s most prestigious and oldest institute of higher learning, the Jagiellonian University, to a meeting in the auditorium of the Collegium Novum. Müller was acting under the orders of Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s deputy, who had declared that Poland’s intelligentsia must be “weeded out,” as a potential source of rebellion and resistance. After arriving at the hall, Müller sealed the doors with armed guards and informed the 183 professors and instructors who had responded to the invitation (others smelled a rat and stayed away, or arrived too late) that the university would be shut down. Then he had the lot arrested, packed into trucks, and taken to the Gestapo prison on Montelupich Street, and from there to the Wehrmacht barracks. Many of the academics ended up as inmates in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. Over the next several months, however, more than half were released through the intervention of foreign powers, in particular Mussolini, who was angry because some of the professors had ties to Italy. This “special action” against the professors of the Jagiellonian University, which was preparing its 572nd class year, established the treatment that Polish professionals could expect from the Nazis.
Around this same time, Hermann Eyer, then 33 years old, arrived in Kraków and began setting up a mass-production facility for typhus vaccine to be produced by means of the Weigl method. He occupied the microbiology institute of the Jagiellonian University, and seized apartments confiscated from Jewish faculty on Mickiewicz Street to house his German personnel. Eyer himself took over the flat of the biologist Stanislaus Francis Snieszko, who had fled earlier in 1939 to the United States (where he would go on to pioneer modern fish hatchery techniques). Eyer began searching for Polish biologists to work in the lab. Most of them had been rounded up in the raid on the Jagiellonian, but Robert Kudicke, a 63-year-old German microbiologist who had volunteered to lead the fight against typhus in the Generalgouvernement, alerted Eyer to one of the arrested men, Zdzisław Prybyłkiewic, a 31-year-old adjunct professor in the microbiology institute. The Polish scientist was located at the Wehrmacht barracks and taken to Eyer on November 9. Przybyłkiewicz went from being a condemned man in a Gestapo prison to deputy director of the Wehrmacht’s Institut für Virus und Fleckfieberforschung (Institute for Virus and Typhus Research). Eyer assigned him to lead vaccine production at the Kraków lab.
Years later, there would be speculation about how Przybyłkiewicz had managed to land on his feet in those terrible days. He was not considered a great talent in the scientific realm; he had acquired a reputation as an academic schemer, a womanizer, and a terrible teacher. His expertise on the Weigl method obviously was the salient point, since Eyer was desperately seeking typhus-immune experts. But he was by no means the only typhus expert in Kraków. His former boss and several other Kraków microbiologists were killed at Auschwitz some months later, for plotting to poison German officers by putting typhoid germs in their food.
Eyer had been told, in the days preceding the Polish invasion, that Wehrmacht troops would be occupying Lwów, and that his mission was to take over the Weigl laboratory and expand its production of vaccine for German soldiers. Sent instead to Kraków, he was forced to scramble to set up a typhus vaccine laboratory there on his own. In the first few days in Kraków, Eyer confiscated vaccine from Polish army clinics and used it to immunize 50 German employees. Fifteen of these men, including Eyer, fell ill with typhus over the next six months, but the course of the illnesses was mild. None of the employees died, and only a few suffered petechial rash or hallucinations. The experience, while unpleasant, once again proved the value of the Weigl vaccine. Eyer next needed to enlist louse feeders and other Polish employees; he knew that German lab workers lacked the immunity to handle such jobs. Eyer contacted Friedrich Weigl, Rudolf’s older brother and a leading Polish lawyer in Kraków, to assist him in finding employees. The collaboration was successful, and Eyer managed to get vaccine production going in a short time. He delivered his first batch of typhus vaccine to the Wehrmacht health inspectorate in April 1940. In an update to his boss three months later, Eyer reported that the laboratory was raising 300,000 lice, and infecting 2,500 of them with typhus germs every day. Each infector could inject typhus into 1,000 lice a day, Eyer said, and he had designed a sterile filling machine with which two workers could finish 500 portions of vaccine daily. The Gestapo had arrested one of his employees on suspicion of participation in the resistance, but he was released after a week, Eyer wrote.
In an accompanying pamphlet, Eyer said that the institute was making only enough vaccine to protect endangered military personnel such as delousers, caretakers in military clinics, and officers in frequent contact with the “endemically contaminated civilian population.” A second brochure, prepared for soldiers, warned that typhus was a very serious disease, and urged German troops to steer clear of Poles and the places they lived and gathered, “since contact with lousy clothing and people brings the danger of becoming lousy yourself. . . . Every soldier who finds even one louse on himself must report it immediately.”
Jews, he wrote, had to be isolated in ghettos, because the greatest danger of infection came from “lousy and filthy dwellings of typhus-infected Jews in the Polish interior.” Eyer reiterated such sentiments in a journal article published at this time (the journal’s Jewish editor had fled the Nazis). It is “the unclean people” who spread typhus, he wrote—be they Abyssinian shepherds or ghetto Jews. The only way to stop its spread was “the complete and pitiless enclosure of all known or suspected endemic carrier populations; in Poland, for example, the isolation of the Jewish ghettos that is currently underway.”
In Polish cities, tradition called for students to attend church—or temple, if they were Jews—on the first day of school. On September 1, 1939, Luisa Hornstein was 13 years old and all dressed for synagogue when she heard the sound of airplanes. When the bombing started, she and her family went into the basement, going upstairs only to fetch food and fill pots and tubs with water. They stayed there three weeks.
Hornstein was the youngest of three children in the family of a well-to-do timber merchant in prewar Lwów. The family lived on Bernstein, a leafy street in the Jewish quarter northeast of the Opera House. “I remember hearing Hitler on the radio,” she recalled six decades later in Cincinnati, where she was a pediatrician and her son, Frank, was my elementary school chum. “He was so violent, it was such an awful speech, his voice, and you could hear the masses cheering. My mother was very afraid. ‘This is not going to be a good place to live,’ she said. ‘There is going to be a war.’ My father said it would take him five years to liquidate his business. ‘Then start now!’ my mother said.” But now was too late.
The Nazi bombardment destroyed gas, water, and power lines in many parts of town, and this led to hoarding. The Eastern Trade Fair opened on time, but petered out after a week. On September 2, the first refugees streamed in from western Poland, and soon the stream turned into a river—of cars, carts, and wheelbarrows, anything that went on wheels. Thousands of Lwów inhabitants sought safety with friends and relatives in the country. Thousands fled into Hungary and Romania. By the third day of the bombardment, most shops were closed; by the fourth, there was nothing to buy. Trainloads of wounded Polish soldiers started arriving. And in the third week, the German army took up positions on the outskirts of the city and began shelling. Many of the city’s defenders were Jews—the Bund enlisted 100 men to build trenches. Three weeks of bombing and shelling killed at least 800 people in Lwów.
And then suddenly, on September 20, the fighting stopped. At
first, the Poles thought they had driven the Germans off. Then the Russians arrived. Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, Hitler and Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact with a secret protocol that carved up Poland between them. It called for the invading German forces to withdraw to Przemyl, 60 miles west of Lwów.
The first days of the Soviet invasion were relatively peaceful. Polish soldiers threw down their arms, took off their uniforms, and walked away, unmolested by the arriving Red Army. Stalin’s portrait went up all around town, and Soviet commissars began converting Lwów and the surrounding area into an enclave of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
For many sophisticated Lwowites, the iconic image of the Soviet invasion was the Russian ladies whom they encountered at swimming pools in underwear, or at the theater clad in nightgowns they had purchased from clever shopkeepers who claimed they represented the finest in evening wear. Or perhaps it was the Red Army soldiers with their wrist watches. They bought several at a time, with expressions of joy, and wore all of them at once, whether or not they worked. The Russians were astounded by the abundance of goods in Lwów. A soldier would enter a store to buy a chocolate bar. When he got it, he’d ask if he could buy another. He’d look around to see whether other soldiers were nearby, then in a low voice ask for the whole box. The Russians boasted about how good things were back home. No one believed them. These barbarians blew their noses without handkerchiefs and didn’t give their seats on the trolley to women or old people. The humor of the occupation faded when the secret police, the NKVD, began conducting nighttime raids, packing people into railroad cars bound for Siberia, with no explanation. The first to go were the Red Army’s political enemies, then the rich, then Jewish refugees from the West. Lwów time was set two hours earlier to Moscow time, which meant you went to work while it was still dark. The occupation confirmed what middle-class Poles had always thought of the Russians. Czarist or Communist, they were ignorant and brutal rubes.