by Arthur Allen
Meisel and his wife, Paula, are the only Jews known for certain to have worked for any length of time at Weigl’s institute during the war. They were well-known bacteriologists, assimilated Jews who had worked for the Polish National Institute of Hygiene since its inception in 1920, and Henryk Meisel was one of Weigl’s oldest colleagues. After the Nazi invasion, Meisel was put to work producing rabies vaccine and examining the sterility of typhus vaccines at the St. Nicholas Street laboratory. For their safety, the Meisels were moved out of the ghetto to Grabszczyzna, the Wehrmacht-occupied villa where the resistance leader Stefania Grabska had grown up. Eyer told his superiors that Meisel’s expertise was vital to the war effort, since the Clostridia bacteria he studied often caused wound infections. Every day, an Austrian soldier named Moser accompanied the Meisels to the institute and back. They wore armbands with the Jewish star under the word Arzt (doctor, in German). Moser later recalled, “I was often asked by the SS men, ‘Where are you going with those Jews?’ I would always answer, ‘Not on a sightseeing trip, and if you want to know more details you can get them from my boss.’” After a while, the Meisels moved into the institute, to gain more certain protection from the Gestapo. Halina Ogrodziska, an activist in egota, an underground resistance group that aided Jews, worked with Meisel in the Weigl laboratory and sometimes gave Polish literature lessons to his daughter, Felicja. Early in the war, each time she visited their home Dr. Meisel’s mother would make scrambled eggs or an omelet, always urging Ogrodziska to “eat, eat.” As pressure grew, Meisel sent his sister to Warsaw, where she survived, and Felicja entered a Catholic orphanage. Meisel had a long discussion with his mother, and “they decided that because she was so old, the best solution would be for her to take poison,” Ogrodziska said later. “They never spoke about this with the rest of the family, and one day she was dead—like that. I was still very young, but Dr. Meisel liked to talk to me, and he badly needed to speak with someone. He told me he had a very heavy heart, but I already knew that.”
Felicja ended up hiding in 18 places during the war, including the Botanical Garden, behind the institute. Sometimes, when her parents missed her terribly, she would be brought in for a visit for a few hours. Just before New Year’s Day, 1943, Meisel and his wife were deported to Auschwitz. Felicja, who was 14, remained in hiding. One night she slept in the institute basement. “I spent the night with the animals. I heard the guinea pigs singing in the morning. It was beautiful, like bird song.” Several months later, she had to flee the city and was told to meet her contact at the main train station, where Ukrainian, Polish, and German thugs made a living as Jew chasers. To conceal herself, she fell in with a group of Hitler Youth, but she entered the wrong platform and found herself crossing the tracks, with her train about to depart. As she said later, “Someone took me by the scruff of the neck like a dog and said, ‘Not this way!’ And thanks to that, running, I got on my train at the last minute.”
Hermann Eyer walked a tightrope for the years of the war. First and foremost, he was producing a vaccine to protect the Wehrmacht, a job he took with the utmost seriousness. Like other German officers of the time who were less than enthusiastic about Nazism, Eyer saw no contradiction between disdain for the government and support for its agents of global conquest. “Every physician was faced with this question,” says his son, Peter Eyer. “Should I help the wounded soldier survive, knowing that if he’s put back together he’ll use his rifle to kill people? Should I help him? The answer is not simple.” After the war, Eyer stood firmly behind his work. “I estimate quite conservatively that my efforts and those of my associates saved at least 10,000 people from certain death by typhus. From a moral perspective that’s a contribution few could equal,” he wrote to a colleague. But since the 10,000 were mostly German soldiers, “those in the East saw what we did as worthy of condemnation, because it helped prolong the war.”
The historical record shows that Eyer demonstrated loyalty to his Polish employees, intervening repeatedly to save men and women who’d been arrested by the Gestapo. Himmler’s agents were not pleased about this. They were under orders not to disturb his enterprise or arrest his employees—there were exceptions, of course—and those facts rankled. The Gestapo, many of whom had been working-class cops in civilian life, had only the vaguest idea of what went on at the institute. They understood that its Polish employees were guinea pigs of some sort. But the guinea pigs were happy to volunteer, as a former Kraków Gestapo commander stated after the war, “first, because they got better rations; second, because they were safe from arrest, and third, because the Home Army knew the institute was a safe harbor for its people.” After the war, these same Gestapo agents turned their enmity on Eyer, accusing him of conducting unethical medical experiments, a charge that had no evidence behind it but led to Eyer’s being brought in for questioning as late as the 1970s.
Eyer may have been anti-Semitic, but he showed courage in protecting his Polish workers and in tolerating their subversive activities. Such behavior was rare among the German medical corps. This, perhaps, was the worst crime of the Nazi doctors: while it is unfair to assign collective guilt, it is striking how few of them did anything at all to help. Indeed, Ludwik Hirszfeld, whose work on blood types was twisted into hateful nonsense by Nazi scientists, found the doctors’ betrayal harder to take than any other aspect of Nazism. “When the Germans decided to kill everyone in the [ghetto], none of the German scientists and physicians who were in Warsaw, not even those who knew exactly who I was, warned me or offered me the slightest help. Men like Kudicke and [Kudicke’s assistant Rudolf] Wohlrab visited me in the district hospital and talked with me about science,” he wrote from hiding in 1944. “I see blood on the hands of German scientists, on those who wrote about race hygiene, the Nordic soul, living space, a mission in the East, and in whatever other ways violence was anticipated and motivated. I see blood also on those even more numerous scientists who knew that this was nonsense but kept silent and on the street did not even greet their colleagues who had fallen into disfavor. There are moments in the life of a nation when a man must not keep quiet lest he become an accomplice.”
Of all the German physicians he dealt with as a ghetto physician, Hirszfeld singled one out for praise: Hermann Eyer. In an interview some years after the war, he said that Eyer had helped fight the typhus epidemic in the Warsaw ghetto by sending precious vaccines. This was an example, he said, “of a German doctor’s great courage and humanist engagement.”
The Nazis tolerated Weigl because they needed him, but their mistrust grew. For the first year of the German occupation, the official Polish-language newspaper, Lwowska Gazeta, ran many articles about typhus. It discussed the symptoms and methods of prevention, the most effective, according to the paper, being the avoidance of contact with Jews. In 1942, it carried the happy news that a new, “superior” German institute was being built to run and perhaps eventually replace the Weigl institute. By this time, German attitudes toward Weigl had soured. When in April 1943 a Marburg newspaper mistakenly hailed Weigl’s vaccine as “a victory of German science,” Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda office put out word that Weigl was a Pole, and possibly a Jew, who should never be mentioned in the press.
In December 1942, after much ceremony and a great scientific “conference” in the Lwów Opera House, the “Lemberg” branch of the Behringwerke was inaugurated, with plans at the top levels of the German government for it to become a great center of vaccine production. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring had ordered manufacturers to make a priority of supplying the company with everything it needed for the typhus vaccine laboratory. In anticipation of the opening, IG Farben arranged for a new biography to clean up the image of the institute’s namesake, Emil von Behring. This required some work: Behring had earlier been denounced by Nazi publications because his wife was Jewish. Many Nazi publications, following the Führer’s lead, were dubious about vaccines, considering them Jewish science that poisoned Aryan blood. Many of the bigwigs of G
erman typhus research were present at the Behringwerke ceremony: Heinz Zeiss; Joachim Mrugowsky and Erwin Ding from the SS Hygiene Institute; Eugen Gildemeister from Berlin; Rudolf Wohlrab and Robert Kudicke from the Generalgouvernement; Albert Demnitz, Rudolf Gönnert, and Richard Haas from IG Farben; and, of course, Hermann Eyer. Zeiss set the tone of the meeting with his lecture, “Geomedizin in the Eastern Territories.” Eyer and Mrugowsky gave speeches, as did Haas, who would direct the new laboratory and in doing so, they said, create a sparkling new center for German science in the East. The Generalgouvernement leader Hans Frank, the Galicia SS chief Fritz Katzmann, and a murderer’s row of their accomplices politely applauded.
Richard Haas, chief of the Behring vaccine plant in Lwów, speaks with Nazi officers attending its ceremonial opening in December 1942. Hans Frank, the Nazi leader of Poland, stands with hands hanging loose. (Emil-von-Behring-Bibliothek, Philipps-Universität Marburg.)
Weigl was invited to the ceremony, but declined. The idea of sitting with Frank nauseated him. “I will not shake the hand of a man who has murdered my friends,” he told Gildemeister, who had come to his office to urge him to attend. Gildemeister, who was testing vaccines on prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp at the time, nodded sympathetically. Weigl did, however, give Behringwerke assistance in producing his vaccine. Under a September 1942 agreement, the Weigl institute began training Behringwerke louse feeders by adding one box of lice after another, up to six at one session, to desensitize their skin to louse bites. After training, the feeders began work in the new Behringwerke lab, which occupied the same Zielona (Ukrainian: Zelena) Street building that had been Ludwik Fleck’s workplace during the Soviet occupation. A large piece of land was purchased to create an egg farm and grow food for the institution and its animals. The plan was for the institute to produce 20,000 vaccines with the Weigl method and 20,000 egg yolk sac vaccines each month.
Much as the Germans despised Weigl, they continued to depend upon him, especially to recruit lice feeders and other employees. A contract that survives in the files of the Behringwerke states that Weigl was to be paid 900 zlotys a month in return for his cooperation. The less experienced German staff of the Behringwerke arrogantly viewed Weigl’s methods as obstacles to be overcome. But when problems arose, the only solution was to ask for his help. At one point, the Behringwerke decided to replace the wooden lice cages, which sometimes warped, with metal ones. Most of the lice escaped, and the institute scientists had to come begging to Weigl for a new seed colony. He agreed. Weigl never refused help to a scientific colleague. When the first several batches of vaccine had little efficacy, Weigl sent over a deputy to straighten out the production process. Though the work was similar, social conditions at the Behringwerke lab were different from those at the Weigl institute. Some Polish employees had tried to sabotage the vaccine work, the Berhringwerke chief Haas wrote to his colleagues in Marburg in 1943, but “when the SS shot a worker who had stolen material from the plant, it had a good result.”
Across town, in the ghetto, the terror was reaching a climax.
On February 4, 1943, Gestapo cars pulled up in front of the Laokoon factory, where Fleck was working. The officers ordered Fleck and Bernard Umschweif, along with Ernestyna and Ryszard Fleck, Umschweif’s wife, Natalia, and five-year-old son, Karol, to get in. From the factory, they headed west along the park lying below the High Castle and skirting the railroad tracks that separated the ghetto from central Lwów. This road led to Janowska and certain death. But at a crucial moment, the truck crossed under the railroad embankment and pulled up at the Jewish hospital on Kuszewicz Street, amid streets that smoked and smelled of burning flesh during yet another Aktion. An SS officer entered the bacteriological laboratory, where the remainder of Fleck’s staff were still working, and ordered everyone out onto the street. Perhaps acting with Dr. Fleck’s assistance, the SS instructed Dr. Owsiej Abramowicz, one of Fleck’s assistants, to board the truck, along with Jakob Seeman. And then there was Anna Seeman, limping toward the truck. The SS officer told her to stay put, but Fleck, who had been told the scientists were being taken to work somewhere, spoke up. He sensed that anyone left off the truck was doomed.
“Eine Tänzerin brauchen Sie im Labor nicht,” he told the SS man. A laboratory doesn’t need ballerinas.
The SS man shrugged, and Anna Seeman climbed aboard the truck, grasping her husband’s outstretched arm. Their son, Bruno, was still inside the lab bathroom. Two and a half years later, at the age of 13, he was interviewed in Warsaw by a committee of Jewish remembrance. His mother, Seeman said, hadn’t been sure whether the truck represented death or life. Initially, he said, “mom asked the SS men if she could leave me behind, and they agreed. But an hour later she came back to the laboratory and took me with her. She told me that we were all going to the Reich, where we would work in a chemical factory.”
Thus Fleck saved not only Anna Seeman but her son as well. “Few people would have had the courage to behave the way he did in those evil circumstances,” she told an interviewer later. “Fleck refused to be dehumanized.” For three days, Fleck and the 10 other members of his entourage were held at Łcki Street prison. Most of the time, the prevailing view of the group was that they would all be killed. But on February 7, a horse-drawn cart took them to the Lwów railway station. They were given bread and marmalade for a journey, and put in two closed compartments—“railroad cars for humans,” as Bruno Seeman testified. “Not like the other prisoners in the animal wagons. But there we learned, because they told us, that we were not going to the Reich, but to the camp in Auschwitz.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
ARMIES OF WINTER
German soldiers at the Battle of Stalingrad. (Superstock.)
In the ghetto in Lwów, Poland, in February 1943, there was only one reason the Gestapo would spare the life of a little Jewish doctor and his underfed, crippled assistant, let alone their children. The German war effort needed them. The specialized knowledge Fleck and his colleagues possessed took on growing value in light of the abysmal news from the eastern front. The month that Fleck was sent to Auschwitz, the German Sixth Army surrendered at Stalingrad, marking a key turning point in the war. After that, the Nazis were in more or less permanent retreat.
Even by the end of 1941, Operation Barbarossa was shaping up not to be the heroic cakewalk Hitler had expected. Stalin’s troops were overrun, slaughtered, and captured by the millions in the first months of the operation, as the Germans pushed deep into Ukraine and Russia. But the Soviets regrouped; by September, Red Army resistance and the fall rains had combined to slow the advance of the Germans, who suffered terrible casualties and the loss of much of their armor. Hitler’s war plan required the fall of Moscow before the start of winter. In early December, after the Wehrmacht advanced to as close as ten miles from the Kremlin, a Soviet counterattack drove back the Germans. Operation Barbarossa was not designed for retreat. As the Germans lost their strategic initiative and began moving from trench to trench, the diseases of earlier wars found them.
Much has been written concerning the arrogance and hubris of Hitler and his generals. Having whipped the formidable French army in a six-week blitzkrieg, they assumed that the demoralized, less-than-human soldiers of the Red Army would quickly abandon the fight. Convinced that the German boys could “live off the land” by confiscating what they needed from the Russians, military quartermasters had failed to assure good supply lines to the quick-moving front. The lack of winter clothing in the troop packs was one of the most obvious signs of German miscalculation. German propaganda had made much of the typhus threat in the Soviet lands, but the army’s provisioners had failed to take heed, perhaps assuming that German troops would have little contact with their racial inferiors. This was a grievous mistake. The winter of 1941 was one of the coldest on record, with temperatures in western Russia dropping to minus 42 degrees Fahrenheit. Within a few months of the start of Barbarossa, German troops became lousy and were ordered to boil their clo
thes instead of washing them, which was entirely impractical. Delousing stations had served Germany well during World War I, but in this war, engineering battalions were not provisioned with adequate equipment to begin with, and most of what they had was lost during the first retreat. This might not have been quite as critical if Germany had vaccinated its troops against typhus, but it had not. By late 1941, only a small percentage of Wehrmacht doctors, let alone other medical staff, had received the three shots of Weigl vaccine required for a year of protection. Common soldiers had not been vaccinated at all. Hitler had not only failed to provide warm clothing for his men. Their protection against disease was frankly inadequate.
To be sure, Germany was not the only country that lacked typhus vaccine. Britain had decided early in the war to forgo vaccination in favor of delousing measures; the British army paid for this decision with outbreaks in North Africa, although according to one published report, only 11 British service members died in 1943–44. By the time the United States entered the war, Herald Cox’s egg-grown vaccine was available, and medics vaccinated millions of American troops headed for the European and North African theaters. But the typhus threat U.S. and British troops faced in sun-drenched North Africa, or even, later, in Italy, did not compare with that of the frozen steppes of the eastern front. The Soviet army also lacked vaccine. But there was one thing Soviet soldiers had that their German enemies lacked: warm winter coats. These quickly became a primary means for the spread of typhus to the Wehrmacht, for shivering German troops routinely robbed the lousy Soviet POWs of their clothes. With those men, typhus must have seemed like a distant threat.
