by Arthur Allen
It was at this moment that Ludwik Fleck arrived in Block 50. Kogon remembered Fleck as a “somewhat dreamy scholar, always friendly.” Slightly stooped, gaunt, bespectacled, calm, and reserved, Kogon said later, “an oddly lovable, friendly person.” Kogon knew nothing of Fleck’s philosophical work, and their discussions concerned only matters of the laboratory and vaccine. Kogon was involved in many conspiracies and didn’t want to complicate his life by bringing new colleagues into them. “Fleck never initiated such discussions; he wasn’t the conspiratorial type and didn’t have lots of contacts with the camp organization,” Kogon said. “But without him, the fake vaccine couldn’t have been made.”
Fleck befriended Willy Jellinek, the young Austrian pastry cook, who came to regard Fleck as a second father. Jellinek remembered Fleck as a thoughtful, intelligent older man shuffling quietly but deliberately through the war. They discussed Fleck’s life in Lwów and his trips to Vienna, his experiences in Auschwitz. Both were relieved that the bacterial cultures prepared for the Buchenwald laboratory involved sheep and other animals, rather than human flesh. From the beginning, Jellinek said, Fleck walked a thin line with Ding. He considered the SS man a “little swindler” who knew that the work they were doing was pointless, but hoped that people like Fleck would give him something with which to impress his bosses. Ding employed Fleck in writing journal articles: also on each assignment, Fleck dragged out the task as long as possible, assuring Ding that the work was almost complete but had to be “just so” in order for Ding to win his Habilitation. In fact, Fleck worried that if he ever finished the work Ding needed, he’d be killed.
In 1939, Mrugowsky had been appointed to a full professorship in Berlin on the basis of a half-serious Habilitationsschrift, the postdoctoral publication that German universities require of their senior faculty members. Ding, who was scheming to take Mrugowsky’s position, wanted his own Habilitation and hoped to earn it with a series of publications on the experiments at Buchenwald. He ordered Fleck, Ciepielowski, and Kogon to help him write scientific publications and prepare for his examinations on bacteriology. Fleck managed to teach Ding quite a bit but did so diplomatically, careful not to humiliate him, Jellinek said. Ding was not a good student. For example, in order to help him classify Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, a fairly basic delineation in microbiology, Fleck had to use different-colored inks for the names of bacteria belonging to the two types.
Fleck’s authority on medical issues was recognized in the block. Kogon often spoke with the vaccine chef Ciepielowski—they slept in the same cell—and when they were discussing science, Ciepielowski would frequently say, “I’ll ask Fleck.” Kogon claimed that Fleck was in possession of a special protective letter issued and signed by Himmler himself. Kogon had never seen anything like it, he said, and he believed the letter had enabled Fleck to protect his wife and son. No one else in Block 50 mentions the letter, nor does Fleck. Possibly, Kogon was referring to the protective letter provided to Fleck by the Lwów Gestapo to do his work at the Laokoon factory.
Fleck described the moment of his arrival at Block 50 in his first postwar publication, in 1946, an essay titled “Problems of the Science of Science.” In a sense, the experience at Block 50 confirmed for Fleck his philosophy of how science worked. He structured the essay as a debate between Simplicius, who believes that science is equivalent to progress, and Sympatius, who sees the cultural construct. The debate is modeled, a bit grandiloquently, on Galileo’s Dialogue, in which Simplicius represents the perspective of those who believe the sun revolves around the earth.
The wise Sympatius states that science is not just a system of thoughts but a complex phenomenon that includes many institutions and events. It is expressed in writing, in unwritten customs involving a variety of methods and traditions, in specific mental preparation and manual dexterity. It has its various structures and hierarchies, means of communication and cooperation, within scientific groups and with the public. “I had a very rare opportunity,” he continues, “of watching, for nearly two years, the scientific work of a collective composed of laymen only. . . . The collective worked on complex problems from the field of typhus; they had at their disposal fully equipped laboratories, plenty of experimental animals and an extensive specialist literature. This was in the Buchenwald concentration camp. . . .”
The collective, he writes, consisted of eight members, some trained in sciences, but none in the special field of vaccinology. The identities of the team members cannot be deciphered definitively, but they include a “young Polish physician, without any specialist preparation”—Ciepielowski; an “eminent Austrian political figure,” who may be Kogon; a young Czech physician, with rudiments of bacteriological preparation” (Karl Makovicka); a Dutch biology student; a Viennese confectioner (Jellinek); a rubber factory worker; and two others. The workers were looking for Rickettsia in the lungs of mice and rabbits; despite Giroud’s painstaking description of the many forms these bacteria could take, the nonspecialists didn’t know what they were looking at. As Fleck had written in Genesis, “you have to be taught how to see.” To identify bacteria and cellular structures on the basis of written descriptions and illustrations, he said, was “to pass, so to say, backwards along the path normally chosen for knowledge.” Using descriptions and illustrations provided by Giroud and the German scientist Hilda Sikora, the Buchenwald team looked into their microscopes and continuously misunderstood what they saw. That is, they “found” all the stages of Rickettsia that the two masters described, although there were, in fact, no germs at all in the cultures. Perhaps the rabbits had withstood their tortures too well. Fleck writes,
From the dyestuff precipitates, fat globules, various bacteria and cellular remnants they managed to [see] the entire developmental cycle [of the typhus bacteria.] . . . This construction grew slowly, in the atmosphere of a mutual stimulation and strengthening of opinions. The collective mood, which became the motor of this fantastic synthesis, was composed of a tense expectation of the effect, of the desire to be the first to establish something, not to be too late with the confirmation that something had been established, and to satisfy the boss who had been urging them along all the time.
Fleck reports the following conversation among the boss (Ding), the Dutch biology student, and his assistant:
Biologist: What can be these shining, uniformly pink bodies? We have not seen them thus far. Is it possible?
Assistant: I have noticed them, too; their presence struck me at once. Perhaps these are those corps homogènes rouges according to Giroud?
Biologist: This is what I was thinking.
Boss: Yes, they might be that.
Assistant: Of course, what else could they be?
Biologist: At last, we’ve got them.
Boss: And it’s high time, too. At last something positive.
“There was no individual author of the error,” Fleck wrote. “The error grew out of the collective atmosphere.” He called this “the harmony of self-delusion,” it might also be described as groupthink. Despite what the group believed, the corps homogènes rouges it found were not typhus germs but rabbit white blood cells. Yet the collective “was thirsting for a positive result,” and so the good news was passed along—“at long last, Rickettsia has been found in the preparations obtained from rabbits’ lungs. When the joyful tidings spread among the collective, the certainty of the result became doubtless. . . . The confectioner and the rubber-factory worker, who represented ‘common sense,’ popularized the discovery. . . .”
The records of experiments, the summaries of results, the suggested modifications of methods were sent to the world outside the camp to genuine German specialists, men well-known in the world of science, and returned with words of praise. The German boss got a high decoration. So great is the persuasive power of a harmonious system, and so limited is the value of testing the inner harmony of the system.
An interesting shock occurred only when rabbits’ lungs with typhus germs arr
ived from a genuine scientific institute. . . . But he would err who believed that a single direct contact with scientific reality would bring about the downfall of the entire edifice. . . . The collective failed even to admit in private that its entire construction was faulty; quite on the contrary, it created a synthesis of the old theory with the new facts. . . .
. . . [There arrives] a characteristic moment at which the worker or the collective body assume that no further verification is required. The opinion becomes rounded, systematized, limited; in short it becomes mature. . . .
Here, Fleck referred to an episode in which Dr. Combiescu, a Romanian typhus expert, challenged the lab’s method of making the vaccine, saying there was no way it could work. Ciepielowski—who by then had been informed by Fleck that there were no Rickettsia in the rabbit lungs—was able to convince Ding that Combiescu was wrong, however, and even wrote up a paper that Ding intended to publish in the Zeitschrift für Hygiene und Infektionskrankheiten.
It is not that there is no difference between truth and illusion, says Sympatius:
What I want to do is to say that scientific results and views are basically determined exclusively as single historical events at successive development stages of the scientific thought-style. . . . Neither a Robinson Crusoe, nor a group of Robinsons, even if equipped with technical means, will glide automatically onto the tracks of science, if they are isolated from the scientific community. . . . Every thought-collective considers that the people who do not belong to it are incompetent. Practical applicability is not a touchstone, for due to the harmony of illusions even a false view is applicable. The alchemists’ gold allegedly did enrich many people, and even the cost of wars was paid for by alchemists’ gold.
In his lyrical riff on the functioning of a concentration camp thought collective, Fleck of course omits the fact that the duress of the surroundings played its own implacable part in shaping the collective’s capacity for credulity and mutual conviction. The thought collective in Block 50 may in fact not have been convinced it had found Rickettsia in the lungs of rabbits—but it needed to convince Ding and his bosses that this was so. Their lives hung in the balance; it was produce or perish. In another publication, Fleck wrote explicitly that when he arrived at Block 50, “none of the other prisoners had experience in culturing microorganisms and it was from me that they learned they were making a fully valueless anti-typhus vaccine.” This is also the authoritative version of Eugen Kogon:
When Ludwig Fleck came to Block 50 in Buchenwald, he told us, after seeing the typhus germs, that what we had produced in the rabbit lungs was not Rickettsia, but some other type of bacteria. We asked him not to say anything about what he’d seen to Ding-Schuler, but to experiment with us, to try to allow us to find a good way out of the difficulty. He worked with us, and he kept the secret. It was only after the Kraków Institute [Eyer’s operation] furnished us with mouse lungs and infected material from mouse intestine that we could be sure our animal material contained the Rickettsia. After that we could produce a vaccine that was, without a doubt, very efficacious, but it could only be produced in small quantities. . . .
Since Ding-Schuler demanded large quantities of vaccine, we produced two types: one that had no value and was perfectly harmless, and went to the front; and a second type, in very small quantities, that was very efficacious and used in special cases like for comrades who worked in difficult places in the camp. Ding-Schuler never heard about these arrangements. Since he was entirely lacking in bacteriological knowledge, he never penetrated the production secret. He depended entirely on the reports that the experts of Block 50 provided him. When he was able to send thirty or forty liters of vaccine to Berlin, he was happy. . . . The inefficacy of our vaccine could have been revealed, and there were outside experts that the SS had at its disposition who could have investigated and discovered that it wasn’t real. Nothing like that happened. The adventure continued until March 1945.
Ding, in short, was “a dummkopf who earned a dissertation only on the basis of his services for the party,” as Fleck testified later. “The scientists and doctors who were conducting work at Buchenwald could employ his cluelessness and scientific illiteracy for our own purposes. . . . We made a vaccine that did not work. For controls we sent a sample that did work. Ding-Schuler, the illiterate, didn’t realize what was going on [italics added].”
Block 50 produced a total of 600 liters of fake vaccine, enough to fully vaccinate about 200,000 people. It was used by SS men in the camps and also German fighting units. About six liters of good, “red-dot” vaccine (the labels got secret markings) were produced and administered to people in the camp, or used to pull the wool over the eyes of the SS health authorities. On a few occasions, fake-vaccinated troops fell ill, and the SS suspiciously requested control vaccine from the Buchenwald group. “We of course sent it to them,” Fleck said. “The control vaccine was naturally a completely valid vaccine.” The SS had no other way to test whether the typhus patients had been vaccinated with an ostensibly effective product. No vaccine was expected to be 100 percent effective.
The secret was held close to the vest. Most of the scientists in Block 50 did not know what was going on. The French chemist Kirrmann, for example, who worked in the same building, gave no indication in his postwar memoirs that the vaccine was fake. Even Fleck’s son, who arrived at the camp in 1945 on a transport from Auschwitz, seems to have gotten an inexact version of events. According to Ryszard Fleck’s testimony at Yad Vashem in 1971, sabotage was already going on when his father arrived. “On the first day of work at the institute two prisoners with knives in their hands approached my father, stuck knives up to his chest and let him in on the secret that this vaccine didn’t work, meaning the Rickettsia were not growing in the rabbit lungs and that in general the vaccine was fake. The Germans, they said, didn’t know anything about it, and Father was not allowed to tell them about it. Father obeyed, of course.” While the brandishing of knives is certainly plausible, it may have occurred after Fleck informed the other inmates that they were producing a worthless vaccine. Ryszard Fleck arrived at Buchenwald more than a year after this event would have occurred.
The bold act of vaccine sabotage gave heart—and palpitations—to the inmates who were in on it. Most of the inmates at Buchenwald, however, cared little about the vaccine. For them, the crucial product of Block 50 was not the vaccine but the broth and flesh of the rabbits cooked after they were used to make it. Once the lungs of the animals had been removed to harvest the (real or nonexistent) Rickettsia, protocol called for the remainder of the animal to be burned in a small crematorium inside Block 50. But concentration camp inmates, of course, did not destroy something as precious as rabbit flesh. Every week, the inmates brought 70 dead rabbits to Hans Baermann, the young German Jew who prepared the precious nutrient by boiling the hares for three hours over a coal fire. The men in the block ate some of the rabbit, divvied up the rest, and smuggled it to needier parts of the camp. August Cohn, a German-Jewish inmate who went into Weimar to buy rabbits every week with a benevolent SS guard, distributed the cooked flesh to Jewish inmates in the Little Camp and to a group of British POWs. Hummelsheim, the bilingual German resistance member, took rabbit to French inmates.
After the war, British and French inmates would seize the narrative of what happened in both typhus blocks. Thanks to their nationalities, links to British and French intelligence agencies and prestigious institutions like the Pasteur, their voices established the world’s understanding of events. But not everything they said was exactly true. The Jews and Slavs who had been there were mostly living in displaced-person camps, or struggling with the new realities of Cold War life and thus unable to speak out. One central figure in the history of Block 50 was Alfred Balachowsky, who led a British spy network in France during the war and worked at the Pasteur Institute afterward. Following the liberation of Buchenwald, France’s information minister—the writer André Malraux—sent Balachowsky on a tour of the United States
to give a French account of life the camps. His testimony was featured in the International Military Tribunal, the first trial held at Nuremberg. Balachowsky was audacious and brilliant in his way, but he was a chronic exaggerator, and for some reason he despised Fleck.
Born in Russia and brought to France as a child, Balachowsky was an entomologist of prodigious talent and work habits; at the age of 32, he copublished a 2,000-page monograph on the harmful insects of the world, and was a pioneer in the field of biological pest control. During the war, he led a unit of the British Special Operations Executive, or SOE, arranging secret landings of spies and matériel. The Gestapo rolled up the network in July 1943 and sent Balachowsky to Buchenwald the following February. From there, he was transported to Dora, the notorious and secretive underground prison factory where Wernher von Braun oversaw the building of the V-1 and V-2 rockets that terrorized Britain. After learning of Balachowsky’s fate, Hummelsheim got Ding to rescue the Frenchman. Balachowsky was skeletal and sick upon arrival at Buchenwald in April—“like one of the tragic caricatures of Goya,” a friend said, but after a few weeks of rabbit soup he had recovered. Balachowsky’s diaries from Buchenwald, which begin April 11, 1944, and end April 3, 1945, are among the few written documents remaining from Block 50. They suggest that he lived reasonably well after being saved from Dora. Frenchmen at Buchenwald could receive packages, and Balachowsky got a generous measure—about two parcels every week. The Red Cross, his mother, and his wife sent him dozens of books, milk, sugar, and oranges. In his spare time, he read, strolled around the camp, and took tea with French and British spies. For Christmas, a horse was slaughtered for dinner.