by Arthur Allen
CHAPTER TEN
“PARADISE” AT AUSCHWITZ
The main Auschwitz gate with the sign “Arbeit macht frei.” (USHMM.)
To be sent to Auschwitz could, in extremely rare instances, be almost a stroke of good luck. In the case of Ludwik Fleck, his family, and associates, it provided what would turn out to be their best chance at survival. The deportation of the Fleck scientific team in February 1943 was a tiny piece of the sweeping bureaucratic response to Germany’s failures on the eastern front, which heightened the need to put the Reich’s economic and technological resources to good use. As part of this shift, Himmler decided to employ captive scientists and instructed Obergruppenführer (General) Oswald Pohl, chief of the new SS Main Economic and Administrative Office, to set up a research station at a suitable concentration camp. Pohl chose Auschwitz—plenty of “research” was already going on there—and delegated the task to Mrugowsky, head of the Waffen-SS Hygiene Institute.
Mrugowsky, in turn, selected Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Bruno Weber, a 28-year-old Rhinelander, to lead a bacteriological institute at Auschwitz. Weber had spent a semester at the University of Chicago in 1937 and was working as an SS hygienist in Munich. In November or December 1942, he visited several Jewish ghettos and concentration camps, interviewing bacteriologists, pathologists, chemists, and other prospective staff. As job searches go, it was a relatively painless process for Weber. As he wrote to Mrugowsky, “I am undertaking the arrest by the Gestapo of the most eminent specialists of all the European faculties. Many of them are already assembled at the Institute of Hygiene.”
Weber may have learned about Fleck’s urine-extract vaccine through Kudicke or other Generalgouvernement officials. In the weeks before the SS began the final destruction of the Lwów ghetto, Weber paid a visit to the Jewish hospital on Kuszewicz Street. According to one account, by an Auschwitz inmate who knew Fleck, a negotiation process followed in which Weber offered Fleck a “position”—the alternative being death in the ghetto. Fleck accepted on the condition that his son, wife, and close associates be included. The ten members of Fleck’s party—his family, the Umschweifs and Seemans and their children, and Abramowicz—were registered at Auschwitz on the night of February 7 after arriving in regular passenger cars guarded by two German soldiers.
At this point, however, the SS plans for the scientists seem to have grown muddled. After going to the trouble of bringing them to Auschwitz in their own train compartment, camp officials allowed Fleck and his team members to be abused and exposed to typhus, so that they barely survived long enough to report to the research station. Perhaps Weber wanted to give the Jews a taste of camp life, or some other Nazi officer was annoyed at Weber’s interesting assignment and decided to take it out on “Weber’s Jews”—a common occurrence in SS circles. Or, since Nazis typically considered Fleck and his colleagues to be tools more than human beings, Weber was simply neglectful of them at a time when he was busy equipping his research institute with looted equipment. The institute was not ready when the Lwów team arrived, nor were the scientists’ “quarters” prepared. Weber had to park them somewhere. Auschwitz was a concentration camp and not a pharmaceutical company or a university, and they got the usual treatment.
Fleck’s group was initially housed in a large bathroom in “Canada,” the warehouse in the main camp where mountains of clothing, jewelry, and other items confiscated from the murdered Jews of Europe were sorted, stolen, or sent back to Germany. Children were routinely gassed and murdered on arrival at Auschwitz, and there was nowhere else where families could live together. On February 11, the camp assigned numbers 100965–100969 to five male “employees of the Weigl institute”: Abramowicz, Ryszard Fleck, Ludwik Fleck, Jakob Seeman, and Bernhard Umschweif. The wives, Anna Seeman, Natalia Umschweif, and Ernestyna Fleck received numbers 34965–34967. The children did not get their numbers immediately, which was worrisome. Everyone knew that a tattoo meant at least a short-term reprieve from the gas chambers. According to the Auschwitz logbook, it was not until February 20 that Bronisław (“Bruno”) Seeman, who was 10 years old, and Karol Umschweif, 5, got their tattoos. In an interview in 1997, Bruno Seeman recalled the nine-day period as going on for two or three months.
The women and children were taken to a building at Birkenau, the section of Auschwitz that had women’s barracks as well as the large gas chambers and crematoria. They were not physically mistreated there, but got little food and were exposed to the brutal Silesian winter. “There was roll call every morning,” Bruno Seeman remembered. “You had to stand in the cold for what seemed like forever. If you collapsed they took you to the terminal block.”
The men entered the domain of a notorious capo, the Polish political prisoner Mieczysław Paszczyk of Kraków. He had been at Auschwitz since June 1940 and bragged that he had killed more than 10,000 prisoners “with my own hands,” usually with a hypodermic full of poison. In March, Fleck and Ryszard, then 19 years old, worked as corpse haulers. Decades later Ryszard Fleck still remembered the special instructions he got on the procedure: “The first time I wanted to grab the dead person by the arms to carefully remove him from the bed. Friends taught me to pull him out by his legs and throw him on the floor. Then you’d strip him from his gown and spit on his chest to write his number on his chest with a carbon pencil. We put the corpses in a corner of the hall and arranged them with one head facing the right and the other facing the left, so the pile didn’t come apart. I was startled the first time I saw a patient sitting on the pile of corpses, drinking tea.”
Ludwik and Ryszard Fleck both came down with typhus. Their cases were relatively minor, which Fleck attributed to the protective effects of his vaccine, although it is also conceivable that his exposures during years of work with typhus germs provided him a measure of immunity. “Since the concentration camp administration liquidated any prisoner who got sick with typhus, I concealed my illness with the help of other prisoners, including doctors who secretly treated me,” Fleck wrote. “My son spent only one day in bed.” However, Ryszard was so weak that he narrowly escaped being selected for the gas, the routine treatment for prisoners too sick to work. Meanwhile, the capo Paszczyk broke two of Fleck’s ribs by stomping on him, which led to a pleural infusion, a weakened heart, and an inflammation of the gall bladder. Fleck entered the camp hospital semi-conscious; in addition to his other injuries, he had an ugly skin infection and limbs swollen from hunger. Fleck’s prewar reputation may have been what saved him at the Auschwitz infirmary, where inmate doctors from the Polish underground were in control. A Pole who had studied under Hirszfeld, and the hospital director, Władysław Fejkel, a Kraków bacteriologist at Auschwitz since 1940, looked after him.
On April 8, two months after Fleck’s team arrived at Auschwitz, Weber opened his research station, the Hygienische-Bakteriologische Untersuchungsstelle der Waffen-SS und Polizei Süd-Ost, Auschwitz, Oberschlesien. Informally, it was known as the Hygiene Institute, and it was initially based in a three-story brick building, Block 10, next to the execution block. The scientists were housed in Block 20, nearby, and worked near their wives, who lived in Block 10 itself. Fleck took over the serology laboratory. The Lwów scientists’ arrival at Block 10 coincided with some of the most notorious Nazi medical experiments, gruesome events that displayed the decadent depths to which German professionals could fall under Nazism. On April 1, Camp Commandant Rudolf Höss placed Block 10 under the command of SS Brigadier General Professor Carl Clauberg, who set up an experimental station to continue the sterilization experiments he had begun in the women’s camp in Birkenau in December 1942. About 20 women of different nationalities were brought to Block 10 to work as slave doctors and medical orderlies in Clauberg’s service. The doctors performed sterilizations in a suite of rooms separated by thin wooden walls from Fleck’s lab. Without antiseptics or anesthesia, Clauberg injected a chemical irritant into the women’s wombs, causing inflammation that blocked the fallopian tubes. If the woman did not die of infection
, she was usually murdered in order to be autopsied. At least 400 died this way. In June 1943, Clauberg wrote to Himmler, “The non-surgical method of sterilizing women that I have invented is now almost perfected.” He promised that a single physician with 10 assistants “will be able to carry out in the course of a single day the sterilization of hundreds, or even 1,000 women.”
The women—French, Belgian, Greek, Dutch, and Slovak—were crammed into a windowless room. No one explained the procedures to them, and some of the women came to the horrified conclusion that they were undergoing artificial insemination. “What kind of monsters will we give birth to?” they wondered. One of the Nazi physicians, Horst Schumann, sterilized with X-rays, while Bruno Weber, Fleck’s boss, injected the women with nonmatching blood types, which caused terrible pain, shock, kidney failure, and death. Even had such wretched experiments been morally justified, they had no scientific value, since it was impossible to know whether sterility was due to the interventions or the terrible nutrition and stress of the camp.
Fleck witnessed these terrible occurrences from his laboratory next door, where he and other scientists conducted experiments with the women’s blood aimed at improving immunoglobulin for front-line troops. The blood draws killed many of the more undernourished prisoners. A German-Jewish physician named Maximilian Samuel, supposedly a genetics expert—“a crazy old man,” Fleck called him—conducted experiments side by side with the SS doctors until they tired of him and sent him to the gas chambers. During this time, Fleck befriended Adelaide Hautval, a non-Jewish French resistance member. Clauberg had brought her into Block 10 as a physician, but she bravely refused his requests to assist in experimental surgeries on the other women prisoners. Hautval survived, apparently, only because the chief camp doctor, Eduard Wirths, felt sympathy for her.
“It was strictly forbidden to have meetings in this lab,” Hautval recalled after the war:
Naturally, I ignored the orders and frequently visited my friends. There was a nice, warm atmosphere provided by Dr. Fleck and Dr. Anna Seeman. It was a somewhat calming atmosphere, with a lot of human understanding. Fleck was a calm but spiritual man, didn’t speak much and yet there was much feeling in his presence. His sense of humor was colored with deep pessimism. Once he told us that he saw our names written in the sky with smoke from the crematoria chimneys. But he had a sense of humor too. One day I noticed there were two mirrors in the room and joked that they must be for Jews and Aryans. I said, “Come on, let’s commit Rassenschande” [illegal race mixing] and pulled him in front of the two mirrors where we could see each other together.
Nazi SS doctors and other officers at Auschwitz, 1944. (Anonymous donor to the USHMM.)
From time to time, Dr. Hautval brought experimental samples to Fleck. Whenever a patient’s sample came up positive for typhus or diphtheria, Fleck would equivocate in his report. “His team was always helpful to us. They were always ready to examine my patients, and they knew to falsify the results in the official documents, since the real results could lead to death.”
The windows of Block 10 were closed with boards, but the inmates could peek into the courtyard next door through the cracks. Every day or two, the Gestapo brought in groups of up to 50 prisoners, lined them against the wall and shot them. Sometimes blood ran under the door of Block 10. The victims were political prisoners. Jews, by then, were mostly killed by gas. One day, Fleck saw two SS men kill dozens of prisoners with 8-cc shots of carbolic acid to the heart. “The victims stood naked on the floor without understanding what awaited them. They were told they would be vaccinated and get showers and were led one by one into the bathroom. Later, other prisoners hauled a mountain of corpses to the crematorium.”
At night, Block 10 was locked, which gave the children a feeling of relief, said Seeman: “It meant we’d live until the morning.”
To understand the bizarre, terrifying world Fleck and his group had entered, it may be helpful to take a step back. During the winter of 1941–42, the Nazis were forced to reckon with the shortage of economic and military resources for the eastern campaign. In March 1942, Himmler reorganized the concentration camps and made Pohl, the top SS economic official, their boss. At the same time, the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 had crystallized plans for the total extermination of European Jewry. The use of gas to murder Jews had begun at Chelmno in late 1941, and industrial-scale murder began at Belzec in March, followed by Sobibor and Treblinka. The capacity of these death camps wasn’t sufficient, so Himmler ordered the construction of an enormous complex of gas chambers and crematories at Auschwitz.
Yet even as the gassings intensified, the hundreds of other camps built since 1933, large and small, were being modified to make better use of able-bodied Jews and other prisoners. Among other things, the concentration camps were useful locations at which to conceal factories to replace the production lost in Allied bombing of Germany’s cities and industrial areas. Though “death through exhaustion,” as Himmler called it, marked no change of heart from the main Nazi goal, the focus on labor sometimes improved daily life for the prisoners who were not immediately killed. In December 1942 and again the following month, Pohl ordered all camp commandants to lower the mortality rates in the camps. This order opened a small wedge between the Gestapo and the camp doctors, whose job, theoretically, was to preserve health. Hermann Langbein, a German political prisoner who was secretary to Edward Wirths, the main camp doctor at Auschwitz, described the situation this way: “Since the instructions to lower the mortality rate were primarily directed at the SS doctors, some of whom could, on the basis of their profession, more easily be persuaded at least to limit the mass murders, the resistance movement of the prisoners in several camps attempted to influence physicians on duty there.”
Langbein, a former Spanish Civil War revolutionary and political prisoner, developed a close relationship with Wirths, a Bavarian country doctor. Though Wirths played his part in the murder of Jews and experiments on prisoners, he had a genuinely troubled conscience, Langbein said, and “was capable of being influenced.” The camp commander Höss stated after the war, “Wirths frequently complained to me that he could not reconcile the killings demanded of him with his medical conscience and that this caused him suffering.” Wirths was especially soft on imprisoned doctors, Höss wrote. “I often gained the impression that he treated them as colleagues.”
The experience of Louis J. Micheels, a Dutch Jewish medical student, indicates how some prisoner physicians could benefit from Wirths’ humane side. Arriving at the ramp at Auschwitz in 1943, Micheels saw a “tall, impressive looking SS man” with a Hippocratic insignia on his coat.” I stepped up to him, clicked my heels and said, something like, ‘Herr Oberarzt, I have to report to you 20 patients, elderly, seriously ill, who came with me in this transport here.’” That day, Wirths was “working a shift” as an angel of death. That is, he was deciding which arrivals were assigned work and which went straight to their deaths. He told Micheels to stand by a chest with a red cross on it, where he watched the Nazis drag elderly people from the cars and toss them into a truck. “I saw a woman with two little children—she had loaned me a copy of Candide that I read with great pleasure. The image is still very much with me, seeing her run toward her place in lineup,” Micheels said. “I didn’t know at the time but it was a lineup for the gas chamber.”
Micheels ended up in the camp hospital, where nurses and other doctors “addressed you with your name. You were almost a person again.” Langbein’s influence on Wirths had vastly improved conditions there. Whereas Wirths’s predecessor had “fought typhus by having the lice gassed together with the patients,” Wirths relieved the SS men and the capo at the hospital who routinely beat to death patients seeking treatment. Langbein was working closely with Władysław Fejkel, the Polish doctor—“cultivated and humane, [who] had succeeded,” in the words of another inmate, “at the tour de force of being on good terms at the same time with both the prisoners and the SS.”
W
irths wrote detailed and frank reports about conditions at the camp to Pohl and to Grawitz, the chief SS medical officer. The reports may have contributed to a change in leadership at the camp that occurred after Himmler sent Judge Konrad Morgen to investigate thefts of the valuables of slain Jews. A few SS were executed. Arthur Liebehenschel replaced Rudolf Höss as camp commandant in November 1943.
Toward the end of 1942, a fifth of the Jews who were not gassed on arrival at Auschwitz died each month. By July and August 1943, the monthly death rate among those who received a tattoo declined to 3.5 percent. The number of inmates working at Auschwitz swelled from 88,000 in December 1942 to 224,000 in August 1943. Overcrowding increased disease, but it also heightened the chaos and gave the resistance more room in which to operate. As defeats at the front increased the demand for German manpower to serve there, many of the most sadistic camp guards shipped out, and were replaced by less zealous, older men and ethnic Germans from the Slavic lands. This also improved conditions.
On May 5, 1943, Weber’s research institute moved from Block 10 to the Auschwitz subcamp Rajsko, built in a confiscated Polish village of the same name. Inmates were already growing fruits and vegetables for the SS and raising farm animals at Rajsko, where in 1942, the SS scientist Joachim Caesar had established an agricultural research station. The focus of his research was dandelions—special Ukrainian dandelions, Taraxacum kok-saghyz, whose roots were used by the Soviets as a source of latex to make rubber. Himmler had become obsessed with kok-saghyz and thought he could improve German self-sufficiency in rubber by cultivating the plant massively in Ukraine, France, and Romania. He visited Caesar’s operations twice.
