by Arthur Allen
Waldemar Hoven at Nuremberg. (National Archives.)
When that line of challenge failed, Mrugowsky brought out another. He argued that the experimenters at Buchenwald were not bound by the Hippocratic oath, because they were not practicing medicine but rather preparing a defensive weapon. The people experimented upon were not patients, he said—they were prisoners of war. “The experiments were research,” Mrugowsky argued in his final defense, “required by an extraordinarily pressing state emergency, and ordered by the highest competent government authorities. . . . Millions of soldiers had to give up their lives because they were called upon to fight by the state . . . in the same way the state ordered the medical men to make experiments with new weapons against dangerous diseases. These weapons were the vaccines.”
Furthermore, Mrugowsky argued, what was the significance of 142 deaths over three years of experiments (a number based on the typhus charts in possession of the prosecution) at Buchenwald, when in the winter of 1942, 15,000 Russian soldiers died of typhus every day in German POW camps? He compared the experiments to Emil von Behring’s work at Berlin’s Charité Hospital in the 1890s, which established the value of diphtheria serum. The control subjects in that group died, he said—240 children. But “their sacrifice allowed us to recognize the value of the serum.” Pointing to the unethical practices of non-Nazi medicine might have been an effective argument had the entire enterprise of Nazi medicine not been infused with utter contempt for life and health. In a broader historical perspective, however, Mrugowsky had a point—not one that could be made in his own defense, but an argument in favor of stricter medical ethics worldwide.
In a crowning irony to the typhus story, it surfaced during the trial that American medics had vaccinated all the Nazi defendants with the Buchenwald rabbit-lung vaccine. At the trial, Mrugowsky, Handloser, and the others learned for the first time that Fleck, Ciepielowski, and Kogon had suckered them for 18 months with a false vaccine. Indeed, it was not clear whether the Americans knew of the deception, and whether they had administered the Doctor’s Trial defendants with good vaccine or the worthless solution that the inmates had prepared for Germany’s troops. Early in his testimony, Mrugowsky boasted that the vaccine produced at Buchenwald “was the best vaccine we had in Germany. The American occupation troops used it at their camps, after the defeat,” he said.
After Kogon and Ciepielowski testified that the vaccine had been bogus, Mrugowsky appeared stunned. He accused them of violating medical ethics. “These are some of the most curious remarks I have heard here,” he said. “Their attitude has nothing in common with the concepts of humanity expressed by the Herren here today.”
This was met by laughter in the gallery.
On August 20, 1947, Mrugowsky, Hoven, and five others were sentenced to death by hanging. Seven others were acquitted, while Handloser, Rose, Genzken, and the others received lesser charges and were freed within several years.
Fleck came to Nuremberg several months later as an expert witness in the sixth U.S. trial, U.S. v. Carl Krauch, which involved senior executives of IG Farben. He was given access to prosecution documents, and made a powerful case that IG Farben officials were fully aware that Ding’s vaccine was being tested on artificially infected prisoners in a concentration camp. No scientist of any skill or understanding could have been fooled by the wording of Ding’s typhus papers—which Fleck had helped write—into believing the infections he described were not artificially induced, Fleck testified. One could not determine how long someone had been sick with typhus unless the infection was intentional, because the timing of an infection depended on a number of factors, including the patient’s immune defenses. Yet in Ding-Schuler’s papers, blood draws were described as occurring “one day after infection,” or “three days after infection,” he said. In addition, “there was never a typhus epidemic at Buchenwald.” Rudolf Weigl began experimenting with his vaccine in 1919, Fleck noted. Over 30 years, he vaccinated more than 50,000 people and covered whole typhus-endemic regions. Weigl would never have dreamed of employing the methods used by the SS on behalf of IG Farben, he said. Before the Buchenwald experiments began, Robert Kudicke and Eugen Gildemeister had vaccinated about 6,000 people in Warsaw. Yet Behring had delivered vaccine for testing to Waldemar Hoven. Why? “No specialist would think that Hoven in Buchenwald was better situated than Kudicke in the Warsaw ghetto to test a typhus vaccine,” Fleck said. “It was obvious to all that these were artificial vaccinations.”
Fleck was devastated by what he’d been shown at Nuremberg, which he described to Ludwik Hirszfeld, in a letter, as a “ghostly theater.” He was stunned that scientists such as Kudicke and Gildemeister had taken part in planning meetings for the Buchenwald experiments without raising objections. “Now they squirm about in a cowardly and miserable way. [The IG Farben doctor Richard] Bieling tries to wash their sins away, and the young doctors who worked at Behring try to make the truth disappear by shamelessly lying,” he wrote. “It was all so nauseating that I was impatient to get out of there.”
Of the 24 indicted IG Farben officials, half were convicted, and most of these were free within a few years. Many implicated company officials were not even charged.
Many other scientists were troubled by the postwar state of German medicine. The Rockefeller Foundation’s medical chief, Alan Gregg, during a visit in 1947, found the destruction appalling, German physicians’ failure to recognize the enormity of Nazi crimes even worse. “They still seem to me to be strangers to self-reproach and the responsibilities that attend freedom,” he wrote. He felt a huge sense of relief leaving the country. “It isn’t that you can vomit what you have already had to eat—you can’t—but at least you don’t have to sit smilingly and eat more and more.”
Hirszfeld’s prediction, that the German ghetto doctors would pay a price for looking the other way while their patients were murdered, did not come true. Most went back to their old lives after a few months or years of Allied investigation. Nauck, who helped create the Polish ghettos, was hired by FIAT to write reports on wartime science. Kudicke returned from Warsaw to the University of Frankfurt, while Richard Haas, head of the Behringwerke in Lwów, landed a post at the University of Freiburg. The Generalgouvernement public health chief, Jost Walbaum, became a homeopathic doctor in Lower Saxony; Wilhelm Dopheide, Walbaum’s man in Lwów, lay low as a state medical consultant in the town of Hagen. Hermann Eyer was friendly with several of these men and wrote their obituaries in the medical press in later years. His assessments tended to avoid the “difficult period” of the war. None of the men were ever punished for their wartime activities.
On January 17, 1945, with the Red Army on the doorstep, Eyer’s staff abandoned the Kraków institute. In the closing weeks of the war, he moved what was left of the typhus station from Kraków to Czstochowa, Poland, and finally to Roth, Germany, where he surrendered to the U.S. Army in April 1945. A three-member scientific intelligence team led by the virologist Joseph Smadel inspected the station in Roth and interrogated Eyer and 54 members of his staff. Although he was somewhat mystified by aspects of Eyer’s technique, Smadel seemed to take a shine to him. He noted that Eyer’s technicians “denied that Eyer had any Nazi affilitations; in fact they maintained that the Wehrmacht was as non political as is the American Army. In agreement with their expressed statements regarding Eyer it may be noted that his own correspondence that was examined never ended with ‘Heil Hitler’ but that many letters he received from others did.”
The U.S. Army held Eyer at a military prison in Augsburg and Mannheim until November, when he was released and immediately became chief of the microbiology department at the University of Bonn. A year later, he was arrested again, this time by British officials at the request of the Poles, who accused Eyer of having mistreated Polish employees and stolen or wrecked Polish equipment. The Brits held Eyer in four different military prisons for nearly a year while his case was investigated. His wife collected positive affidavits from 20 people, mostly
former German subalterns but also a few Poles and Ukrainians who had worked under him in Kraków. In late 1947, the British allowed him to return to Bonn. His wartime work had been clean, it seems, in every sense except that it had supported history’s most genocidal force. Unlike too many of his colleagues, Eyer had stood up for Polish colleagues, had stuck out his neck to do the right thing. Would he have performed differently if he had overseen wretched ghettos, like Walbaum and Kudicke, rather than directing what was essentially a pharmaceutical laboratory? Perhaps. The German federal chancellor Helmut Kohl once acknowledged the moral failure of Germany when he spoke of his own gratitude for “the mercy of a late birth”—the fact that his generation was too young to have been called upon to kill unjustly. Eyer’s fortunate record must have owed something to the mercy of a less freighted military assignment. “My father was proud,” Peter Eyer stated during a long interview in 2011, “that during the Nazi years he did not have to commit any injustice.” Eyer felt intense remorse for the fate of the Jews after the war. But it would be his good deeds that made trouble for him. The friendship he showed Poles, Rudolf Weigl in particular, would be turned against both men, in a shabby story of Cold War politics.
Poland is a country cursed by a difficult past in which historical figures tend to be tarred with the brush of treason or, if they die, gilded in overly bright halos. As a flawed, flesh-and-blood man of science, Weigl found no place in the romantic narrative of sacrifice that dominated postwar Polish culture. Ryszard Wójcik, a journalist who has done much to bring Weigl posthumous acclaim, explains this in his book Pact with the Devil. Here, he quotes a former louse feeder who, having become an important postwar scientist, spoke in the late 1970s on condition of anonymity:
You ask about how far a compromise can be stretched. I’ll tell you frankly. In this country, in which for the last two hundred years its citizens have been doomed to have their dignity violated and where there is a permanent divide between fruitless steadfastness and rational collaboration in the name of survival, there has been for a long time a place for those in the steadfast category: The sweet and cozy sands of the cemetery. All the steadfast, flawless people lie in the cemeteries. They were executed, shot, freed by suicide.
Weigl had lent his assistance to the Germans in a concrete way during the three years of the occupation. He oversaw the production of millions of vaccines designed to protect an army bent on the mass murder and subjection of Poles among others. By Hermann Eyer’s postwar estimate, the production of the Weigl vaccine in Kraków and Lwów during World War II saved the lives of 10,000 Wehrmacht soldiers. The vaccine did not keep the soldiers entirely well, but it kept them from dying. And thus it bolstered, to a small extent, the fighting capacity of Germany, thereby extending the war, the killing, and the misery of the Jews and other subject peoples behind German lines. Weigl saw a way for his life’s work to provide two kinds of protection—to those who took the vaccine, and those who made it. We do not know whether he questioned the ethics of producing a vaccine that protected those who killed his friends. We do know that the thousands of people saved by his vaccine included the scientific and artistic intelligentsia of Lwów, and that his laboratory smuggled thousands of vaccines to the desperate ghettos of Poland, while providing a haven for the Polish resistance movement. The Weigl lab was a force for good. It could not achieve moral perfection.
The postwar years were difficult for Weigl, politically and professionally. As the Soviets approached Lwów in April 1944, he packed some of his equipment and retreated to the mountain town of Krocienko, while the Germans took the rest and headed west. Several months later, a squad of Soviet soldiers accompanied by an NKVD officer arrived at his house in Krocienko and took him to Kraków. In 1945, he was offered a position as a professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, but was required to teach at least five hours of lectures and two hours of laboratory courses each week—a heavy load for any professor, especially a famous one who preferred to teach as little as possible. Weigl lacked the energy and disposition to engage in the kind of politicking that would have been required to maintain his status. During the first four years after the war, an NKVD colonel lived on the same floor of his apartment building and kept constant watch on his comings and goings. The colonel was amazed, a friend of the Weigls named Henryk Gaertner said, that the professor kept refusing Soviet offers to make his vaccine in Moscow. “He’d say, “You could have your own apartment, your own driver, a good salary,’” recalled Gaertner. Weigl, as always, refused the offers. Meanwhile, his position worsened as he lost a power play with a younger scientist who wanted his place.
Weigl found himself tangling with Zdzisław Przybyłkiewicz, a microbiologist whom he had trained in the late 1930s and who went on to become Eyer’s top Polish assistant in Kraków during the war. Weigl did not think much of Przybyłkiewicz’s work, and in 1946 refused to approve the latter’s Habilitationsschrift, calling it second-rate. Przybyłkiewicz managed to win Habilitation anyway because the second committee member who might have vetoed it (Ludwik Hirszfeld, as it happened) excused himself on the grounds of unfamiliarity with the subject. Having received his Habilitation, Przybyłkiewicz became a full professor, and he had powerful allies in Kraków. The influx of Lwów professors into the city had led to feelings of insecurity and resentment among academics at the Jagiellonian University. In this atmosphere, it was easier for Przybyłkiewicz to rally support to his side of the conflict.
Colleagues over the years would accuse Przybyłkiewicz of requesting bribes to treat patients, of fathering children out of wedlock, of sleeping with students and driving away competent scientists—including Jan Starzyk, Weigl’s former assistant—if he saw them as competition. He was a mediocre scientist and a terrible teacher, they said, and by the early 1960s he’d become a police informer, according to his secret police file. Sofia Bujdwid, who had protected Przybyłkiewicz in the final months of the war by giving him a job at her father’s lab, claimed that he later orchestrated the confiscation of her lab, house, and other property. In a letter she left for posterity, Bujdwid described Przybyłkiewicz as a callow, scheming ignoramus loaded with hatred for his betters—“a louse,” she called him.
But a louse, if that’s what he was, with influence. Przybyłkiewicz became director of the Department of Public Hygiene at the Jagiellonian University medical school in 1946, and a short time later the government sent him to Munich to retrieve Polish lab equipment. Among the materials, he found a signed portrait of Weigl, with the caption, “to my young friend Hermann Eyer.” Przybyłkiewicz accused Eyer of stealing Polish property—it was this accusation that lay behind Eyer’s arrest in the British sector. Przybyłkiewicz used the photograph to stigmatize Weigl as a collaborator, though he himself had worked more closely with Eyer than had any other Polish scientist.* He also claimed (falsely) that Weigl had met Eyer in Ethiopia in 1939, and had at that point begun cooperating with the Germans.
Weigl’s name started to fall into ill repute. Most of his old associates made themselves scarce and stopped using his name as a reference. In late 1940s Poland, it was poisonous to be associated with the career of a collaborator. It did not help that many members of the Lwów circle, including Weigl’s son, Wiktor, were increasingly antagonistic toward Weigl’s second wife, Anna Herzig who, some claimed, jealously guarded access to him.
Most of Weigl’s students were searching for their own places in postwar Poland. Perhaps the most loyal among them, the epidemiologist Henryk Mosing, remained in Lwów and led rickettsial research that helped end typhus’s reign in the Soviet Union. Mosing did much to keep his mentor’s work from slipping into obscurity. He studied the mechanisms by which typhus persisted in nonepidemic periods, and used a test designed by Weigl to diagnose unsymptomatic carriers. In the immediate postwar years, a certain moral ambiguity colored many survivors’ memories of the Weigl laboratory. The Soviet line on Polish “collaborators” muddied the distinction between those who had shown great bravery in difficu
lt circumstances and those fortunate enough to have avoided imperfect choices. Andrzej uławski’s powerful 1971 film, The Third Part of the Night, presented a somewhat jaded version of life at the institute. The mood of the young lab workers and louse feeders living reluctantly in Weigl’s safekeeping is somber, morbid, and full of self-loathing.
Weigl with his second wife, Anna Herzig, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren, in Kraków, 1950s. (Courtesy of National Museum, Przemyl. Photograph of original by S. Kosiedowski.)
In March 1948, Weigl was transferred to the medical university in Pozna, but he rarely showed up for his lectures and soon retired. Next, he set up a small research center in Kraków, but it was subject to state control, and the vaccine made there was labeled as if it had been produced by the National Institute of Hygiene. Each autumn, Weigl and his staff worried that the health ministry would cut their contract. His nephew, Fryderyk Weigl, summed up Weigl’s treatment in the postwar era thus: “The Germans had offered him a chair in Berlin, the Russians an institute in Moscow. The Poles gave my uncle a small appartment on Sebastian Street and a lot of political headaches. This is a difficult thing. Very sad.”
Eyer felt disappointment rather than anger toward Przybyłkiewicz, who he suspected was simply a weak man trying to make a career for himself in a difficult situation. Eyer wrote to a friend, “The world is bad. It was bad what the Germans did during the war, and bad what the Poles are doing now to me and my Polish colleagues. Why is the world so bad?”
