by Arthur Allen
Hitler had ordered the elimination of the Polish intelligentsia, but more than half the Kraków professors arrested at the Jagiellonian University in 1939 were free within a few months. Some of them even began teaching again, in an underground university that was attended by students such as Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II. This made the German leadership unhappy. “The trouble we had with the Kraków professors was terrible,” said Hans Frank, the Nazi overlord of Poland, in May 1940. “If we’d been responsible for the thing, it’d have gone differently. If someone is suspicious, we liquidate him immediately.”
Things went differently in Lwów. Überführer Eberhard Schöngarth, leader of one of the soon-to-be-notorious SS killing squads, arrived in the city on July 2, 1941, three days behind the Wehrmacht. He brought his unit directly to Saint Brigid’s prison to view the carnage left by the Soviet occupiers. The SS men were told that some of the victims were German pilots, murdered by Jews. Some of the corpses had been dressed in German uniforms. It seemed that even a death squad needed to gin up some moral indignation in order to murder old men.
The next night, the commando raided two dozen apartments and houses in the nicer quarters of Lwów and kidnapped 26 leading university professors from Jan Kasimir University and the Lwów Polytechnical, along with 26 other people who happened to be present—wives, children, relatives, and unlucky house visitors. They were driven to a former school for orphans on the south side of town, in an area called the Wulka Hills. The old professors were shoved against a wall, questioned, and beaten. The violence was at once methodical and random—a mixture of purposeful torture and pure sadism. After a few hours, gunmen herded the first group of 15 out of the building. Among them were the 69-year-old Stanisław Ruff, chairman of the surgery department at the Lazarus Hospital, on Rappaport Street, and his 55-year-old wife, Anna. They carried the body of their 30-year-old son, Adam, whom the Nazis had gunned down while he suffered an epileptic fit. The SS led the group down the street and into a park. Half an hour later came automatic rifle fire. Soon another group was taken, and then two more, the last as the sun was rising. The killers lined their victims up at the edge of a pit dug a few hours earlier by Ukrainians. They ordered the old men to turn around, and shot them so that they fell facedown in the pit.
The pediatrician Franciszek Groër, Weigl’s close friend and Fleck’s boss at the time, was among those arrested that night. After ransacking his house for jewelry, artworks, and cash, however, the SS officer in charge discovered that Groër’s wife, Cecilia Cumming, was a titled British woman. For some reason, this gave him pause. The Nazis released Groër at daybreak and told him to go home. He was the only survivor of the arrests. Afterwards, the SS looted and seized the apartments of the slain professors. A Dutch businessman who had lived in Lwów before the war and knew its social contours led the SS to plunderable artworks and attractive houses. Few of the valuables were ever recovered. The dead included 18 department chairmen, many of them leading national figures in mathematics, engineering, chemistry, and medicine. Włodzimierz Stoek, the barrel-shaped mathematics chair and regular at the Scottish Café, died with his wife and son. The dapper playwright and feuilletoniste Tadeusz Boy-eleski, one of the first prominent Poles to advocate the legalization of abortion, was another victim. Boy-eleski was the voice of French literature in Polish, having translated more than 100 French works. He was a celebrated and beloved anticonformist, left-wing democrat, and tweaker of traditional Polish mores. He had the misfortune that night to have been visiting a doctor on Schöngarth’s list.
The crime scene was in the middle of a well-to-do neighborhood, and there were witnesses. Dr. Zbigniew Stuchly, microbiologist and member of Weigl’s inner circle, awoke to shots that night and watched through his window as the men fell. He could not see their faces, but they made signs of the cross before being shot. The next morning, pale and groggy, he stumbled into his office. “What happened to you?” Weigl asked him. “Are you not sleeping?” When Stuchly began to tell him, Weigl covered his face and begged him to stop. “I can’t listen to this!” he said. “Say nothing more!”
Two days later, the Wehrmacht doctor and typhus expert Hermann Eyer arrived in a staff car at the laboratory on St. Nicholas Street. He was taking control of the institute, he said, and he wanted Weigl to continue running it. “Finally you’ve come, colleague,” Weigl responded. “What took you so long?”
By this time, Weigl had decided to cooperate with the Nazi occupation. He knew Eyer through the literature, and they probably had been in contact after 1939. The Wehrmacht was clearly a better partner for Weigl than the SS or the Nazi civilians of the Generalgouvernement. The extent to which Weigl knew, in advance, that Eyer was coming isn’t clear. But Weigl faced a stark choice: suicide or cooperation. He was a singular man who lived by simple but pragmatic rules. He knew war and hated it, even got angry when marches were played. Weigl became extremely uncomfortable when faced with pain and grief. For this reason, he did not divorce his wife, unable to deal with the conflict, friends say. For the same reason, he offered scientific help to anyone who asked for it, usually without checking references. He decided to cooperate with the Germans, on his own terms. He would continue his work as if nothing had changed.
The assassination of his friends and colleagues came as a powerful shock. At the same time, it was not a surprise. Weigl was 58 years old, a careful observer of the biological world, including his fellow creatures. Having experienced World War I at close proximity, he watched the development of the second catastrophe of his life with terrible foreboding. He knew the Germans well and interpreted Hitler’s plans with remarkable clarity. “Anyone who witnesses the atrocities caused by war,” he wrote in a notebook at this time,
must realize that, beyond the terrible destruction, misery and human suffering it causes, war awakens the lowest instincts that lie dormant and slumbering in human beings under the thin coating of civilization and ethical principles consolidated over many generations. During the war [these] instincts awaken in such a hideous form that they would be unrecognizable in the wildest of animals. I can’t believe a single man in his soul thinks humanity should settle its disputes through rape and violence, but unfortunately the law of nations has sanctified war, an essentially mindless, mutual mass-murder and a ghastly monument to wild, ancient times.
German officials who visited Lwów during the population exchanges late in 1939 had already approached Weigl and invited him to live in Germany, or in German-occupied Poland. After the murder of the Lwów professors, the Nazis made Weigl an offer they assumed he would not refuse—to put his name on the list of Volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans whose “blood” entitled them to the privileges of citizenship, including better rations and living quarters, and freedom from persecution. A group of German officers, among them SS-Gruppenführer (Lieutenant General) Fritz Katzmann, Himmler’s top henchman in Galicia, invited themselves to Weigl’s office. From behind the door, Weigl’s assisstants heard Katzmann offer Weigl a university chair in Berlin and German sponsorship for the Nobel Prize. Weigl, always polite to visitors, told Katzmann that while he’d never denied his German ancestry and had even thought about moving to Germany at one time, he could not do so now. He had spent so long setting up his laboratory in Lwów, he said. And it would be disloyal to the Polish people: “One chooses one’s nationality only once in life.” Appealing to Katzmann with a bit of antiquated chivalry, he added, “Wouldn’t it be strange for a German officer to offer honors to a Polish professor, when by accepting the German offer the Pole would have dishonored himself?”
Katzmann, the stereotypical Nazi sort—scar-faced, brutal, short-tempered—could not control himself. He began to threaten Weigl with references to his 25 murdered colleagues. “Don’t forget,” Katzmann said, “that the German government is capable of breaking the resistance of its opponents.” Weigl, stroking his beard, responded, “Herr General, life today has become so sad and disappointing that an old man like me has no hope of livi
ng in better times. I often think of ending my life, but this would be a tragedy for my family. However, Herr General, if you should give the order for my liquidation, you would only be doing me a favor, and in the process make me a hero.”
When the Nazi invasion began, Weigl had considered abandoning the institute, but the murder of the professors clarified his mind. When he saw that the lab would function under the direction of Eyer, whom he trusted, he decided to stay, though he would never accept Nazi bribes or pretend that he was one of them. “Weigl did not adhere to the principle of ‘eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth,’” said Henryk Mosing, his chief epidemiologist. “He felt that even with the enemy you needed to look for some common ground that would lead to the general benefit. He saw that if he left his building the Wehrmacht would make it a barracks and destroy its collections, especially the enormous specimen museum created by the great zoologist Benedykt Dybowski. Moreover he quickly saw that the intelligentsia was out of work and needed a livelihood.”
The institute grew quickly in size and personnel. It soon took over most of the four-story building on St. Nicholas Street, as well as the Potocki Street location established by the Soviets. University staff threatened with death, starvation, or deportation as slave laborers to Germany, students and young people, members of the resistance movement were protected by real or fictitious employment in the institute. Anytime a Pole in Lwów was in trouble—for underground activities, helping Jews, or anything else—the institute was there for protection. “Anyone who needed saving became a louse feeder,” said Stanisława Woyciechowska, an assistant to Weigl. “They got the Ausweis, and they were protected.” The orange-paper ID card with the Wehrmacht eagle and the inscriptions Oberkommando des Heeres (Army High Command) and Institut für Fleckfieber und Virus Forschung (Institute for Typhus and Viral Research) became a ticket to survival for thousands of Poles. Nearly every educated Pole in Lwów sought a job at the institute.
How many Poles worked there has never been firmly established. In the 1980s, some of Weigl’s former aides put together an incomplete list of more than 500 people. Some estimates go as high as 5,000; the real figure is probably between 1,200 and 3,000. Among those saved by working in the institute were at least 75 men and women who became full professors in Poland and elsewhere after the war. There were also novelists, high school teachers, and musicians: the poet Zbigniew Herbert, the musician Stanisław Skrowaczewski, the sociologist Józef Chałasiski. “The activities of Rudolf Weigl,” wrote Tomasz Cieszyski, whose father, Antoni, was one of the murdered professors, “were key to the biological and spiritual survival of the Polish nation in the face of ethnic, racial, and class extermination.”
The Poles working for Weigl would survive because the Nazis feared typhus and lice, and valued the product made from these lice more than they valued human life itself. A simple flash of the Ausweis was usually enough to get its holder out of any trouble, especially during the routine stops that often led to murder, enslavement, or deportation. The German guards would hand back the pass with a disgusted shake of the head. “They were human after all, though it was often hard to believe,” said Wacław Szybalski. “As the war went on, most of them were very young or very old, because the rest were at the front. The guards liked being in jobs where they weren’t being shot at.”
The regime created a ghetto in Lwów in October 1941, ordering Jews to live in an impoverished area located mostly to the north of the main railroad line that splits the city, in the districts of Zamarstynowska and Kleparow. The housing was a mixture of lower middle-class apartments and hovels without running water or electricity. The Nazis also set up a forced-labor camp at 134 Janowska Street, on the northwest edge of the ghetto. Janowska would become one of the most wretched torture centers in the Nazi system. It was used as a work camp, a death camp, and a staging area for Jews being shipped from Lwów and other towns to the gas chambers at Belzec and Auschwitz. Janowska was run by spectacularly sadistic officers, each infamous for a particular facet of morbid perversion. An officer named Richard Rokita would walk down a row of saluting inmates on the parade ground and shoot one or two in the nape of the neck. Officer Wepke was known for chopping children in two with an ax. The camp commander, Fritz Gebauer, was generally mild-mannered but occasionally needed to strangle a woman, an action that produced a state of red-faced passion. The worst may have been the deputy commander, Gustav Wilhaus, who enjoyed shooting prisoners from the balcony of his villa. His wife often joined him in demonstrating her marksmanship, firing on Jews standing in a workshop near the house.
For a while, doctors were one of the only Jewish professional groups whom the Nazis provided any special protection. The Generalgouvernement health department branch, directed by a Westphalian Nazi named Wilhelm Dopheide, issued special armbands for registered doctors that supposedly protected them against random arrest or labor details. As the Jews were kicked out of their homes and squeezed into the crumbling north side district, doctors were given slightly larger space allocations and even rooms for receiving patients. This was probably a tactical move on the part of Dopheide, who had contacts with the T-4 in Berlin, the euthanasia unit that organized the first mass murders of Eastern Jewry. Dopheide showed little interest in the health of Jews. Some 1,200 mentally ill Jews and Poles starved or froze to death in an asylum under his care. When the building had been emptied of patients, the Wehrmacht used it to house injured troops.
The Nazis confiscated the Jewish Lazarus Hospital on Rappaport Street, a large red-brick Moorish building, built in the late 19th century, which had served as a teaching hospital and was equipped with the latest equipment and a fine staff. But Lwów had a prosperous, close-knit medical community, and some of its cohesion remained. As the Nazis murdered, starved, and hunted their coreligionists, the Jewish doctors of Lwów, assisted by refugee doctors from Kraków, Warsaw, and other cities, fought for their patients as best they could. They managed to open three ghetto hospitals, including one in the building of a Polish high school on Kuszewic Street that many of the doctors had attended as youths. The three-story masonry building lay half a block north of the railroad embankment and offered a bird’s-eye view of the Gestapo tortures occurring at the ghetto checkpoints below.
Fleck spent the first year and a half of the Nazi occupation running the bacteriological lab at the Kuszewicz hospital. In September 1941, Ukrainian militiamen threw the Flecks out of their apartment and robbed them of everything except a bundle of bed linen and kitchen utensils. The Flecks paid 10,000 zlotys (about $20,000 at the time) to a Pole to rent his apartment a few blocks from the ghetto hospital, but after taking the money he remained in the apartment with them, and eventually they were forced to leave. Fleck, his wife, Ernestyna, and son, Ryszard, lived for a while in the hospital itself, under the protection of its director, Dr. Maksymilian Kurzrock. Later they found a room nearby at Wybranowski 4, sharing it with two other families. In a January 1942 Aktion, Fleck lost his sisters, Antonina Fleck-Silber and Henryka Fleck-Kessler, who had been teachers at the Vocational School for Jewish Girls in Lwów. They were murdered with their husbands at Janowska.
It may have been at this point that Weigl intervened on behalf of his former assistant. There is no written record of an interaction, but sometime later in 1942, the Flecks and his assistants were identified as employees of the Lemberg branch of Eyer’s Institut fur Fleckfieber und Virus Forschung. Szybalski has reported that Fleck worked at the Weigl institute as a louse feeder, but Fleck’s postwar writings say nothing of this, and it seems unlikely. Both of the Weigl institute buildings were more than a two-mile walk from the ghetto, and the Wehrmacht prohibited Jews from working in them. However, Fleck did meet with Weigl at least once during this period, and Weigl provided him with vaccines and lab equipment. Fleck’s colleague from his private practice, Olga Elster, joined him in the lab at Kuszewicz Street for a while. Her husband, Edward, ran another ghetto hospital, on Zamarstynowska Street. A while later, another colleague joined them—Anna S
eeman, a Vienna-educated scientist-physician who knew Fleck from the Social Security Hospital. Seeman was a gifted microbiologist who walked with a limp as a result of a childhood case of polio. Her husband, Jakob, an engineer and Hebrew scholar, had injured his hand and was given a job as a laboratory technician for protection. Their 10-year-old son, Bronisław, or Bruno, spent months on top of a water heater in the laboratory, hiding from Gestapo raids. Ryszard Fleck, 16, worked at his parents’ side as a lab technician.
As the weather turned cold in late 1941, typhus broke out in the unheated dwellings of the beaten-down Jewish ghetto. A disease that Fleck knew from the First World War now added its monotonous terror to the other threats of annihilation. A dozen or more people were stuffed into each ghetto apartment room. The possibilities of bathing or cleaning one’s clothes were very limited. Everyone was hungry, and many were starving. “That typhus should quickly spread in these circumstances,” wrote Fleck, “was no wonder.” The outbreak began in a Soviet POW camp the Nazis had created at the Citadel, a 19th-century Austro-Hungarian barracks. That winter, there were thousands of cases; a year later, Fleck estimated that 70 percent of the ghetto residents had been infected with the disease. The German doctors responded to the epidemic with utter perversity.
The pattern had been established in Warsaw, occupied since September 1939, where German public health officials at first tried to fight the disease by requiring Jews to submit to delousing baths and quarantines. These measures were impractical and punitive. Delousing meant standing naked in the freezing cold while one’s apartment was searched and often robbed, and handing over a precious set of clothes likely to be damaged by powerful chemicals. A Warsaw public health official estimated that only a fifth of all typhus cases were being reported to his officers. Frank, the German emperor of Poland, ordered that to prevent spread of the disease, Jews trying to sneak out of the ghetto were to be shot. At a conference of 100 Nazi health officers at a Carpathian spa in October 1941, the issue came to a head with the intervention of Robert Kudicke, who had taken over the Polish Institute of Hygiene from Ludwik Hirszfeld. Speaking “purely academically without making any value judgment,” Kudicke said, “the Jewish population simply breaks out of the ghettos because there is nothing to eat. . . . If one wants to prevent that in the future, then one must use the best means for this, namely provide for more sufficient provisioning.” Jost Walbaum, the medical chief for occupied Poland, gave the following retort: