by Arthur Allen
The dilemma of Weigl’s workers was presented in the 1971 film The Third Part of the Night, by Mirosław uławski’s son, the avant-garde filmmaker Andrzej uławski. The film has elements of surrealism, yet the depiction of life in Lwów and the laboratory is utterly realistic, though hardly comprehensible as such to the typical Western viewer. Toward the close of the grim film, a louse feeder expresses his anguish and frustration at the Nazi atrocities: “The lab assistants should sabotage the vaccine. The vaccines should be made less effective,” he says. “The whole situation should be brought to a conclusion and a breaking point, so that not a trace of submission and baseness is left in us, even if this leads to mass arrests and torture! Perhaps this occupation is like a plague, sent to make people realize the meaning of their lives.”
In practice, the Poles compromised. They were human beings and wanted to survive. The heroic and well-intentioned among them protected a few Jews, but it was a struggle just to save their own skins. “It was understood that the vaccine was barely adequate for the Germans, but good enough,” Szybalski said. “That was the price you had to pay. You had to be careful, because if the Germans didn’t like the vaccine, they’d kill. Every few days I’d be walking down Akademicka Street and see people hanging from the streetlights with signs around their necks. We didn’t want to end up like that. So you compromised to survive. You seldom get 100 percent in life, especially during a Nazi occupation.”
As for Weigl, he continued to focus on his science during the war, with the goal of improving his vaccine. Stuchly worked on the biology and metabolism of lice, Kryski focused on the toxicity of R. prowazekii, and Mosing did epidemiological studies. Little of this work was ever published, and it is clear from postwar memoirs that Weigl’s assistants understood better than he that vaccine, per se, was not their top priority during the war.
Weigl was a bit like the Alec Guinness character in The Bridge on the River Kwai, the imprisoned British officer in the Japanese POW camp who only belatedly understands the need to blow up the bridge he had so lovingly constructed. Weigl regarded his vaccine the same way he shot a bow and arrow: no compromise in quality, it had to be a bull’s-eye. As Wacław Szybalski reported ruefully, “Weigl was a perfectionist and absolutely in love with his vaccine. He believed that it was his legacy. And this is the sad story.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BUCHENWALD: RABBIT STEW AND FAKE VACCINE
If Fleck had passed through a brutal gauntlet to arrive at his lab bench at Auschwitz, the welcome to Buchenwald was more civilized. By the time he arrived at his destination, the SS Hygiene Institute’s Department of Virus and Typhus Research had been operating for six months in Block 50, a three-story masonry building on the edge of the main camp. The work at Block 50 was complex, but the risk of death was more remote than almost anywhere else in the camp, and daily life was relatively comfortable. Unlike the majority of the Buchenwald inmates, who rose from tangled, stinking piles on wooden barrack shelves at 4:30 a.m. to stand for hours in the Appellplatz to be counted each morning, Block 50’s inmates slept in their own beds with sheets and blankets and had no morning or evening roll call. They did not have to fight for their rations, which included a bit of sugar, fat, and extra bread each week, and the tone in their laboratories was usually conversational rather than guttural.
Many of the doctors and scientists in Block 50 were political prisoners, but Erwin Ding, who ran the institute, was not entirely off the mark with his tasteless description of the place. He called it the ultima refugia judaeorum, “last refuge of the Jews.” Ding addressed the inmates with the formal Sie, a rare bit of politesse in the camps. Apart from Ding and Doctor Hoven, SS men steered clear of Block 50. They respected the big black-and-white sign reading Eintritt verboten (Stay out) because they were scientific illiterates who had been warned to avoid anything to do with lice or typhus.
Physically and strategically, Block 50 was squarely at the center of the ghoulish surrealism of Buchenwald in the final years of the Third Reich. At the typhus research station, humanity reached its depraved depths, but some individuals achieved the heights of bravery as well. Block 50 stood half a mile down the mud road from the camp entrance in the last row of buildings within the central grounds. From the windows of Block 50, the inmates could peer across a triple line of barbed wire into the notorious Little Camp.
Mrugowsky from the beginning had been interested in having the Hygiene Institute produce typhus vaccine for Waffen-SS units at the front, but his plans kept being delayed. When British bombers destroyed the institute’s headquarters in Berlin in 1942, he decided to produce the vaccine at Buchenwald. But what kind of vaccine? A large louse farm was out of the question, more so after Behringwerke’s failed experiment at the camp. The Wehrmacht, with Eyer in the lead, was dubious about egg production; besides, where would the chickens for such a laboratory be housed? German civilians, let alone concentration camp inmates, could not be trusted around chickens or their eggs. The Giroud vaccine, made from rabbit lungs, had been tested at Buchenwald and seemed to be roughly as effective as Weigl’s. The SS medical chief Grawitz was impatient for vaccine—as was Himmler. On December 11, 1942, Mrugowsky chose production of the Pasteur rabbit-lung vaccine for Buchenwald. “This vaccine has been tested among concentration camp inmates with excellent results,” he wrote in a memo. Ding made two more visits to the Pasteur Institute in early 1943, and began assembling scientists to produce the vaccine with the help of his new clerk, an imprisoned German intellectual named Eugen Kogon. Ding and Kogon moved themselves and the vaccine production wing of the typhus institute into Block 50 on August 10, 1943.
Even before Ludwik Fleck arrived at Block 50, staffing the vaccine laboratory seemed to be quite easy. There were plenty of doctors in the camp, and others who’d doubled as doctors to save their skins or follow the directives of the camp leadership. (“I had a foot injury and was operated on by a mechanic and a butcher,” one inmate remarked.) Willy Jellinek, a bright young Austrian pastry chef known as Jumbo, was in charge of the tubercular ward for a while, and helped write Hoven’s dissertation on lung disease for the University of Heidelberg. Jellinek came to Block 50 to prepare culture broths for the vaccine; August Cohn, a charismatic former Communist labor leader, was rescued from a death sentence and put in charge of the rabbits. No vaccine experts were imprisoned in Buchenwald at the time, but Ding found an infectious disease specialist, the 36-year-old Marian Ciepielowski, to lead the vaccine production team, though Ciepielowski ended up there more by chance than design. A socialist from the Carpathians near Lwów, he had worked in a Kraków hospital before being arrested for an anti-Nazi conspiracy in April 1941. Ciepielowski spent his first year at Buchenwald working with pick and shovel on a road detail. “Every day, dozens of people around me were suffocated, clubbed, stomped, and shot to death, and we were all mistreated sadistically,” Ciepielowski wrote his sister later. He survived, with a crippled right hand, but was arrested in one of the periodic political bloodlettings in the camp. At this point, friends smuggled Ciepielowski into Block 50. Within the space of a week, he went from the threshold of the gallows to one of the more comfortable positions at Buchenwald. Ciepielowski, handsome and blue-eyed with a well-defined widow’s peak, was extremely crafty when it came to sabotage. Other inmates remarked upon his sangfroid. He was also a dedicated physician and treated many of the experimental typhus patients in Block 46.
Eugen Kogon testifying in April 1947 at the Buchenwald trial. (National Archive.)
Perhaps the most important prisoner in Block 50, however, was neither a scientist nor a doctor. Eugen Kogon, born in 1903, was a resolute Catholic humanist and journalist whom the Nazis had persecuted since the mid-1930s and imprisoned at Buchenwald in 1939. Kogon’s steadfast loyalty and intelligence had enabled him to maneuver past three attempts to send him to death at Auschwitz. He shrewdly sized up Erwin Ding and made himself indispensable to the man, gaining a degree of confidence and independence practically unique in the anna
ls of camp life. His relationship with Ding was most comparable, though, to that of Auschwitz’s chief doctor, Eduard Wirths, and his secretary Hermann Langbein. Like Langbein, Kogon was a non-Communist who had learned to work with the camp Communists while remaining outside their command structure, in itself a remarkable feat. Like Langbein, too, he was a great humanitarian who would become an influential postwar interpreter of the concentration camp system, and a defender of its inmates. Kogon, however, had much more difficult material to work with, for Ding was a darker soul. It was up to Kogon to convert this nearly unscrupulous opportunist into a useful collaborator who committed acts of treason against the SS system. He did this by appealing to the vestiges of Ding’s better nature—and to Ding’s will to save his own skin.
They had long conversations lasting deep into the night in which Kogon told Ding of “our world of the spirit, of morality, of humanitarianism and human grandeur,” Kogon wrote in The Theory and Practice of Hell. “If there is anything of which I am proud during the time of my concentration camp detention it is the fact that I succeeded in this very difficult task which no one else had dared to undertake.” Before long, Kogon had convinced Ding that the Nazis would lose the war, and that his behavior would matter when it ended. Ding grew to trust Kogon so much that Nazi officers visiting him were puzzled by the relationship. They seemed so close that even prisoners working in Kogon’s ward suspected him of being in cahoots with Ding; his network of conspiracy was so compartmentalized that he even appeared on an early UN War Crimes Commission list of Nazi criminals. Kogon maneuvered Ding into allowing Block 50 to become a refuge for persecuted prisoners and a center of conspiracies, though Ding was not aware of the most important ones. He wrote up petitions to the Reich Main Security Office and had Ding sign them, enabling the crew “to enjoy protection from threatening death shipments and other forms of imminent action.” Under Ding’s signature, he also asked SS officers in Berlin to allow specific prisoners to receive letters or packages from home. The vaccine detail swelled to 65 men, including 12 Russians as well as Czechs, Poles, Germans, Austrians, Frenchmen, and one Luxembourgeois. Sometimes, after their discussions, Ding would be full of admiration for Kogon and his idealistic worldview. “Other times,” Kogon wrote, “he’d say, ‘Yes, but you’ve got to admit that the Thousand-Year Reich is a great accomplishment,’ then roar off on his motorcycle.”
Konrad Morgen, the SS judge sent to cleanse Buchenwald of corruption, didn’t know what to make of Kogon. On one visit to Block 50, he noted that whenever Ding needed some fact or documents, at exactly the right moment the door of his office opened “as though by magic, and a man in a white physician’s coat entered and asked in a military-deferential tone, yet with a certain undertone of intimacy, ‘Your orders, Sturmbannführer!’ After several repetitions of this performance which never failed to have a flabbergasting effect on me, I asked Dr. Ding-Schuler whether he was employing a crystal ball gazer as an assistant.” Ding revealed that he had an electric buzzer to summon Kogon from the room next door. Ding told Morgen, “Eugen even answers my love letters.”
Another political prisoner with remarkable privileges was Walter Hummelsheim, a former German diplomat and Princeton University student who had been arrested for plotting against Hitler. Hummelsheim, like Kogon a clerk in Block 50, spoke flawless French and made a powerful impression on French resistance fighters who began arriving in the camp in 1943. While most of the prisoners had shaved heads and stumbled along in filthy clothing, Hummelsheim wore his hair long and combed, with sharply creased trousers and a jacket tailored from the striped camp material. One day, a French prisoner was sick and happened past the Institute of Hygiene as Hummelsheim was leaving. Ding was away from camp that day, and Hummelsheim invited him in to rest. He gave him aspirin and a few mouthfuls of a steaming yellow liquid—rabbit soup. “Typhus rabbit to be exact. Don’t make such a face. It’s been sterilized,” he said. Hummelsheim explained that after the rabbit’s lungs were removed to make vaccine, the rest of the animal was boiled to make soup and meat.
Block 50 had a well-cared-for aspect outside and in, with a balcony and a little garden enclosed in a mesh fence and men in white jackets circulating around it. A door had been cut into the barbed-wire fence behind the block, and pressing an electric button summoned a Russian deportee in an immaculate striped uniform. The staff wore white jackets and pants, rubber gloves, booties, and face masks. They showered every day. In the basement were rabbit cages and dissection rooms, upstairs sterilization, bacteriology and serology departments, a pharmacy, and a well-furnished library. The building was startlingly spotless; the scientists spent an hour or two every morning cleaning it. “Ruining an experiment was less serious than leaving a grain of dust on a door jamb for the Germans,” said the French chemist Albert Kirrmann. “The best way to please the boss was to align all the reagent bottles in a row on the shelf with carefully handwritten labels. He loved showing his house to important visitors, as if he were a museum director.”
As for the vaccine itself, Ding from the beginning was wrestling with problems well beyond his understanding. Leading microbiologists had found it terribly difficult to produce the vaccine at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. If they had been familiar with the philosophical work of Ludwik Fleck, the SS men might have begun to understand the absurdity of expecting slave doctors to create such a vaccine in a concentration camp. Making a vaccine was not a mechanical task like producing pencils or aspirin or even rockets to fire upon London. Vaccines were made from constantly evolving live organisms. The vaccine-making business was a most arcane thought collective, in the sense that Fleck described scientific groups with highly specialized knowledge and technique. To learn how to make the Giroud vaccine would normally require years of hand-to-hand training.
As Fleck wrote, “sciences do not grow as crystals, by apposition, but rather as living organisms, by developing every, or amost every, detail in harmony with the whole.” When one produces a vaccine, each step of the process might need to be altered at the same time in order to accommodate a particular change in the production method. For example, the Rockefeller Institute scientists who developed the yellow fever vaccine in the 1930s found that after a certain number of passages—that is, after the virus had grown in a particular sequence of animal-flesh cultures—for some reason it became weakened enough to be injected into people in a way that provided immunity but not disease. The Nazi medical bureaucracy, of course, had not considered such challenges. Ding pressed the prisoners as soon as they set up Block 50 to produce something. He wanted tangible results. But the prisoners were intelligent enough to realize that this wouldn’t be as easy as Ding hoped. The complexities of Rickettsia prowazekii “allowed us to take the route we wanted to take,” Kogon said after the war.
The route was sabotage—although the team initially hit upon it by accident.
The Block 50 crew worked from a 70-page German instruction manual, apparently translated and modified by Ding or one of his assistants, from Pasteur Institute papers. It described each step of the Giroud vaccine production process. The recipe was not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for the antivivisectionist. It involved transmitting the typhus bacteria through four different species. First, blood from feverish Block 46 “passage people” was injected into guinea pigs. When the animals were successfully infected, technicians ground up their brains or testes—where for some reason the bacteria grew well. After removing most of the host tissue, the remaining liquid was injected into mice. After they sickened, the mice were killed and their lungs ground up and diluted into solutions used to infect the rabbits. These creatures, pure-blood Angoras and mixed chinchilla breeds, were infected at five months of age by stabbing a thick needle through their necks into the tracheal tube. But rabbits were not normally susceptible to typhus. The germ grew in their lungs only after their immune systems had been weakened. To do this, the inmates experimented with ways of making life unpleasant for the rabbits to the point that it ruined
their immune systems. The irony of doing this in a concentration camp cannot have escaped them. They settled on a method that involved shaving the rabbits’ chests and exposing them to freezing temperatures in winter, or dunking them in ice baths in warm weather. For good measure, they injected the rabbits with paratyphoid bacteria or toxins. Then came the tricky part: killing the rabbit when rickettsial growth in the lungs was at its height, but before secondary infections—bactéries banales, Giroud called them—set in. If the process was successful, a single rabbit could provide enough rickettsial bacteria to make vaccine sufficient to immunize 100 people.
The procedure was inexact and subject to multiple misunderstanding and falsification. It took ten different culture preparations to test the bacteria. Microscopic inspections and pH buffering were required, and the Rickettsia took many forms, depending on how the rabbit had been prepared, how severely infected, and other factors. Tests of the vaccine’s efficacy were done on-site, with further examination at the Pasteur Institute. The first samples of the vaccine were not ready until just before Christmas 1943. Ding selected a group of prisoners for the experiment. “If it doesn’t work,” he told Kogon, “I’ll commit suicide.” It did not work, but Ding, instead of killing himself, faked the results.