by Arthur Allen
Ding had studiously courted higher-ups in the SS medical hierarchy, and he was known among colleagues in Berlin as a consummate office politician. He’d spent several months as a doctor at the Dachau concentration camp, then joined the invasion of France as adjutant to a division physician. From France, Ding sent home boastful letters to his wife in Berlin, claiming feats he had never achieved. His bosses watched their backs, while colleagues were often disgusted by his braggadocio. “He had an extraordinary need for recognition,” was how one officer put it. The typhus station at Buchenwald, with its ostensible importance to the German war effort, seemed to Ding like an excellent place to get it.
Ding had left Buchenwald as a camp doctor. He returned as a “scientist” in charge of a “research station.” While still responsible for aspects of camp hygiene, Ding’s main mission was to conduct human experiments testing the efficacy of antibiotics and vaccines that might protect the Wehrmacht from typhus on the eastern front. He opened an isolation unit for typhus research in January 1942, and moved it to its permanent home in Block 46 the following June. The nature of Block 46 had been established in the protocol of the December 29, 1941, meeting in Berlin, where Nazi health authorities had hurriedly sought a way to combat the eastern typhus epidemics: “Since animal experiments cannot provide adequate evaluation [of typhus vaccine],” it read, “experiments must be conducted on people.”
Shortly after Block 46 opened, Ding gathered Dietzsch and the other inmates and warned them that they were subject to a special military law and would be killed if they disclosed anything they saw. As the nature of the job began to dawn on Dietzsch, he pleaded with the inmate big shots to get him out of it, but Ding insisted that he required a political prisoner, not a Green, in the position, and the Communists didn’t want one of their own to work in such a morally compromised location. They insisted that Dietzsch, a fellow traveler but not a cadre, remain there.
Ding opened Block 46 with no clear sense of how to proceed scientifically. The indicated way to test the efficacy and safety of a vaccine against a typhus was to vaccinate patients entering an epidemic area, and to measure their rates of disease and death against an unvaccinated control group. An ethical experimental design would have provided the control group a “standard-of-care” prophylactic, in this case the Weigl vaccine. Theoretically, the SS could have tested the vaccine on a group of Jews in any of the vast, typhus-ridden ghettos it controlled. But that seems never to have crossed anyone’s mind. Ding would test the typhus vaccines on inmates, who would then be intentionally exposed to the disease. Not only was this approach horribly wrong; it was physically impractical. Typhus was not a regular visitor at Buchenwald, because both the SS and the internal camp leadership worked hard to keep it out. Every inmate at the camp had his or her story of the brutal initiatory body shave and bath in caustic soap, the waits in freezing cold for deloused clothing to dry, the deaths by exposure and pneumonia. The sight of a single louse in a barracks was enough to send everyone to quarantine for a week. In fact, the men sometimes purchased lice from others in order to get a few days off a work detail. “The Germans could care less if we were sick but they were very afraid of epidemics, and above all they feared typhus,” recalled a French inmate.
Since there was no typhus in the camp, Ding sought out the Robert Koch Institute, whose director, Gildemeister, brought down a container of Rickettsia cultures grown in egg yolk sac. On March 3, 1942, Gildemeister and Ding injected the material into 145 patients. Most of them became sick, and so did Ding, who mistakenly jabbed himself with a needle. His illness was severe, and it derailed him and the typhus vaccine project for several months. After recovering, Ding spent his three months of training at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. In November 1942, perhaps in some vestigial hope of obtaining meaningful data from Buchenwald, Mrugowsky arranged for the Behringwerke in Lwów to send typhus-infected lice to Ding. The idea was that infection by lice, even if intentional, would provide a more “natural” experimental basis to judge the value of the vaccines that were being tested. Richard Haas, Behring’s man in Lwów, had his own reasons for sending the lice. Chronically short of feeders, he hoped that Buchenwald inmates might become a new lice farm for vaccine production. Neither Mrugowsky nor Haas would get his wish, however.
On November 30, 1942, Haas shipped to the camp 200 boxes, each containing 150 lice infected with typhus. Ding was not in Buchenwald when the lice arrived, and Hoven, who was nominally in charge of the typhus station in Ding’s absence, was leery of introducing lice to the camp. “Now they’ve really gone crazy,” Hoven said; he and Dietzsch burned all 30,000 lice in their boxes. To conceal the real reason for their action, Hoven wrote to Haas that the paraffin wax used to seal the boxes had melted during transport, that the lids were insecure and some lice had escaped. This was all nonsense. In their primitive wisdom, Dietzsch and Hoven recoiled at the idea of bringing contaminated vermin into the camp, after so much time and human suffering had gone to keeping them out.
Haas, sensing that something was amiss, sent a second consignment a few days later. This time, the lice were accompanied by a Behring biologist, Dr. Rudolf Gönnert, who had instructions to unpack the lice boxes and supervise their application to patients. But the Behring men could not compete with the scheming minds of an SS doctor and a capo. After learning that the visitor needed to get home on a particular train, Hoven and Dietzsch delayed preparations as long as they could. The 19 homosexual prisoners chosen for the experiment were stripped naked, buckled to hospital chairs, and covered with white sheets. But just after the lice boxes were strapped to their legs, an SS man arrived at the laboratory door to inform the visitor that a car was waiting for him. He had to hurry, the messenger said, or he would miss his train in Weimar. As soon as Gönnert was gone, Hoven and Dietzsch removed the lice boxes and again burned them all. None of the men fell ill, and the report was falsified.
While convalescing at home in Berlin, Ding hit upon his own crazy idea for how to maintain a steady supply of typhus germs. In 1916, a Turkish doctor had injected prisoners with the blood of feverish patients. This seemed to Ding like an outstanding way to conduct his experiments with a minimum of uncertainty. While a real typhus epidemic could not be arranged, it would be easy enough to keep a few sick patients in Block 46, their blood available to infect test subjects whenever needed. Lice were inconvenient, but human beings were a dime a dozen. Decades earlier, Rudolf Weigl had figured out how to use laboratory lice as a reservoir of typhus. Ding’s idea was to use human beings for the same purpose.
It would take some “tinkering” before this strategy produced any results. In the first set of experiments, the injections produced such massive infections that nearly all the patients died, whether vaccinated or not. Later subjects were injected with a smaller amount, 0.5 to 1 cubic centimeters of blood drawn from a “passage person,” a typhus carrier usually in the fifth or sixth day of infection. When the test subjects were infected with this quantity of typhus, prior vaccination seemed to offer them some degree of protection. Ding and Dietzsch injected some inmates with the blood of patients suffering naturally occurring typhus, usually brought in from Buchenwald-dependent subcamps, miserable slave labor enclosures where typhus abounded. Each new “wild” strain was injected into at least two patients. If new strains weren’t available, the disease was transmitted by injection from carrier to carrier. The many vaccines tested at Buchenwald included yolk sac–based vaccines from Berlin, Frankfurt, Marburg, and Lwów, dog-lung vaccines from Romania, and mouse- and rabbit-lung vaccines from the Pasteur Institute. Mrugowsky wanted the human test subjects to resemble the German fighting man, which ruled out Eastern Europeans who might already be immune to typhus as a result of childhood or other exposure. Starting in December 1943, Himmler ordered police in Berlin to send test subjects culled from prisons holding common criminals. In practice, though, many of the subjects continued to be Buchenwald inmates, including Russians, Poles, and Frenchmen who were selected to under
go the meaningless torment for reasons related to internal camp politics, or because they had, in fact, volunteered.
To get the Block 46 inmates into a state of health resembling that of the German soldier, Dietzsch and his nurses fattened the prisoners on mugs full of milk, white bread with butter, eggs and honey, soup with oats, pasta and flour, tea and real coffee with sugar. None of these foods were available in the camp, where the typical daily ration was a chunk of dark bread and a quart of thin rutabaga soup. Hungry inmates sometimes took the calculated risk of enduring typhus in exchange for three months in the experimental block with good nourishment. “They chose a means of suicide that had a certain chance of survival,” a French physician said. The prisoners were “stuffed like turkeys in preparation for their utilization,” as one witness put it. Said a prisoner who survived the tests, “They made us pretty sick, but they fed us well.” Less than 15 percent of the test subjects died of typhus, though others were executed after leaving the typhus hospital.
Having already stuck himself once to bad effect, Ding seldom performed the injections, leaving Dietzsch in control of the experimental block. Waldemar Hoven occasionally came by, but only to supervise the tailor, shoemaker, and tanner who were working for him illegally in a couple of attic rooms of Block 46. Stranded in the building without any friends, Arthur Dietzsch found himself with hellish responsibilities. The criminal patients whom he had to nourish and sacrifice posed an immense challenge. Some were stool pigeons, some smugglers, thugs, or murderers. They hated the politicals like Dietzsch, whom they blamed for putting them in the experimental block in the first place. These patients or their Green allies tried to kill him at least four times, Dietzsch claimed after the war. He could more than defend himself, and in doing so used care-giving techniques that resembled those of a medieval madhouse. He yelled at patients and beat them for trifling offenses, such as urinating on a toilet seat or noisily closing a door. He withheld food from disruptive inmates and sometimes ordered the seriously ill to be chained to their beds with a urine flask taped to their thighs to keep them from wetting sheets.
But he also nursed the inmates, in his fashion, for the experimental block was well-stocked with strophanthin, caffeine, glucose, and the other state-of-the-art typhus treatments, whose therapeutic effect was to strengthen the patient and his heart. Some prisoners testified later that Dietzsch took a sadistic pleasure inflicting pain on the test subjects. On the other hand, it cannot have been easy to maintain order in a 90-bed infirmary filled with criminals and other patients in the throes of feverish hysteria. Dietzsch would claim that he tied down patients only to keep them from committing suicide, attacking others, or smashing everything in sight. Given what we know about the behavior of typhus patients, this may have been true.
Dietzsch became a big shot—well fed and well dressed, with enough extra rations to keep an enormous Newfoundland dog. And before long, everyone in the camp—SS and inmates alike—had heard enough about Block 46 to dread the place. Survivors, when they talked, brought forth gruesome images. One day in the fall of 1943, a Czech political prisoner named Willy Bahner got a white slip of paper from his block master telling him to report to the prisoners’ hospital, where he found about 65 other prisoners. “We didn’t know what it was all about, since we hadn’t reported sick.” Dietzsch escorted them on the short walk over to Block 46, where they were given baths and clean clothes and taken to a dormitory on the second floor. On the third day, Dietzsch called them down and gave each an injection. Two weeks later, with prisoners moaning and yelling all around him, Bahner began to run a fever. He saw at least eight men die.
Dietzsch at the Buchenwald trial. (National Archives.)
By the time the camp was liberated, Ding had supervised 24 test series, involving around 1,000 patients. If the 150–200 “passage people” are included, between 300 and 400 people died there of intentional infection with typhus. Survivors suffered lifelong disabilities, including memory loss, epileptic fits, impotence, and chronic headaches. Ding knew the work was immoral, and kept his paperwork in order to show any future judges that he was not ultimately responsible for it. This strategy was useful, for in May 1943, an SS judge named Konrad Morgen arrived at Buchenwald and remained for six months while conducting an investigation on Himmler’s orders. The Morgen episode was surely one of the weirdest at Buchenwald. The judge’s mission was to winkle out corruption and abuse, but in a highly selective way that reflected his status as an SS cat’s-paw. He had already been sent to the eastern front once for conducting an overly vigorous investigation at Auschwitz. Morgen appears to have been taken in by Ding, who posed as a real typhus expert conducting humane, scientific experiments.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. As Eugen Kogon wrote in his masterful account of Buchenwald, The Theory and Practice of Hell, “The scientific value of these tests was either nil or else of but insignificant proportions.” Despite this, the German military luminaries who knew about the tests made no effort to stop them—with one exception. Gerhard Rose, a tropical medicine expert, protested acerbically at a May 1943 conference of military surgeons after Ding presented some data there. But later he had a change of heart and sent a Danish-made typhus vaccine to be tested at Buchenwald. Ding gloated over this to Kogon. “See,” he said, “Rose has come along as well.”
The vaccine tests were inconclusive, but Ding’s career was advancing. In early November 1942, he wrote to one of his former guardians that he had been promoted to Oberstabsarzt—a senior military rank—and to SS Sturmbannführer (major). “I was stunned and overjoyed about it, because to be Oberstabsarzt at the age of 30 is already a nice career!” He was attending the Behringwerke inauguration in Lwów and just back from a big conference in Berlin, where scientists from the government, the Robert Koch Institute, and IG Farben were lining up to work with him, Ding said. He attached a copy of his “latest major work,” an article about typhus serodiagnosis published in 1943. Like each of Ding’s six wartime typhus papers, it had been written by slave doctors on his staff.
Typhus was not the only test subject at Block 46. In one experimental series, apparently conducted to determine the value of different treatments for typhoid—the food- and water-borne bacterial illness—60 inmates were brought into the block, fed amply on porridge, oatmeal, and fruit for two days, then forced to fast for 24 hours. When Dietzsch produced bowls of potato salad, the young inmates fell upon them like hungry wolves. They were unaware that the salad had been liberally spiked with typhoid cultures. “Within two hours I stroked my hair and it hurt, and we started to get fever. Then we realized that there was a little more to it than a late supper,” said Henry Mikols, a Pole who had been brought to Buchenwald as a “red triangle” a few weeks earlier.
Everyone got angry and someone hit the capo, and he gave that man a shot and he stiffened. . . . Other people screamed, had diarrhea, high temperature. I heard music playing in my ears, didn’t know where it was coming from unless they were playing Strauss to keep us happy. . . . When the doctor came I said I wanted to write a letter to my mother and father. He took a pencil and piece of paper. I said, “Dear mother and father, I don’t feel good, but since I am Catholic, I have turned to my God for help.” He looked at me, “Nein, nein, du stirbst nicht [No, you’re not going to die].” Then I see two other white jackets and they give me two injections in my chest. I felt a burning sensation and when they woke me up an hour or two later, my health was coming back.
Out of 60 people who entered the block, Mikols said, “only eight of us left through the gate.” The nurses took samples of his feces to send for testing in Berlin. “I said to my friend, ‘I hope they serve this to Adolf on a platter.’”
For some of the prisoners, Block 46 was an even more humiliating experience. The Dutchman Peter Schenk, who was only 17 when he came to Buchenwald, got a job as a tailor in Block 46, but found that in exchange for the job he was sexually assaulted. According to Schenk, he was “chosen a couple times a month”
to be tied up and raped in a room next to the crematorium. In taped testimony given in 1996, Schenk accused Ding of being the rapist, but circumstancial evidence suggests he was more likely referring to the camp physician Hoven, who was accused of homosexual rapes by other inmates, and in whose tailor shop Schenk worked.
Ding also tested drugs for IG Farben. Its conglomerate subsidiary Hoechst had an antibiotic candidate, acridine, that it had shelved in 1938 when the drug failed animal tests. The war gave Hoechst a chance to try to resuscitate it as a typhus treatment; company executives’ hearts quickened when they thought of potential sales to the Wehrmacht. The company began communications with Mrugowsky about testing the drug in 1941, and in November 1942, 1,000 tablets were sent to SS-Obersturmführer [First Lieutenant] Helmuth Vetter, a contract researcher with IG Farben and doctor at Auschwitz associated with its Hygiene Institute station. Vetter wrote a few months later that patients tolerated the drug very poorly; almost all suffered terrible vomiting and diarrhea and unrelenting burning sensations in the mouth. It was “worthless” as typhus treatment, Vetter said, but Hoechst refused to be dissuaded so easily. Sure they vomited, Hoechst officer Rudolf Fussgänger wrote back, but the mortality of typhus patients who took the pills was 30 percent, compared with 34 percent of the controls, which he considered significant. Hoechst then sent batches of the drug to Buchenwald. In April, Ding paid a visit to Hoechst’s Leverkusen headquarters, and 10 days later began testing the drug, with the company’s approval. Fifty percent of the patients in his experiment died, with no significant difference between those who received acridine and the controls—except that those who got the drug vomited an average of seven times a day. As the Block 46 capo Dietzsch noted after the war, “You could only have tested such an unacceptable preparation in a concentration camp, where you didn’t have to ask permission, where there was no free will.”