The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (34 page)
Authors: Arthur Allen
To get the Block 46
inmates into a state of health resembling that of the German soldier, Dietzsch and his nurses fattened the prisoners on mugs full of milk, white bread with butter, eggs and honey, soup with oats, pasta and flour, tea and real coffee with sugar. None of these foods were available in the camp, where the typical daily ration was a chunk of dark bread and a quart of thin rutabaga soup. Hungry inmates sometimes took the calculated risk of enduring typhus in exchange for three months in the experimental block with good nourishment. “They chose a means of suicide that had a certain chance of survival,” a French physician said.
The prisoners were “stuffed
like turkeys in preparation for their utilization,” as one witness put it.
Said a prisoner who
survived the tests, “They made us pretty sick, but they fed us well.” Less than 15 percent of the test subjects died of typhus, though others were executed after leaving the typhus hospital.
Having already stuck
himself once to bad effect, Ding seldom performed the injections, leaving Dietzsch in control of the experimental block. Waldemar Hoven occasionally came by, but only to supervise the tailor, shoemaker, and tanner who were working for him illegally in a couple of attic rooms of Block 46.
Stranded in the building
without any friends, Arthur Dietzsch found himself with hellish responsibilities. The criminal patients whom he had to nourish and sacrifice posed an immense challenge. Some were stool pigeons, some smugglers, thugs, or murderers. They hated the politicals like Dietzsch, whom they blamed for putting them in the experimental block in the first place. These patients or their Green allies tried to kill him at least four times, Dietzsch claimed after the war.
He could more
than defend himself, and in doing so used care-giving techniques that resembled those of a medieval madhouse. He yelled at patients and beat them for trifling offenses, such as urinating on a toilet seat or noisily closing a door. He withheld food from disruptive inmates and sometimes ordered the seriously ill to be chained to their beds with a urine flask taped to their thighs to keep them from wetting sheets.
But he also
nursed the inmates, in his fashion, for the experimental block was well-stocked with strophanthin, caffeine, glucose, and the other state-of-the-art typhus treatments, whose therapeutic effect was to strengthen the patient and his heart. Some prisoners testified later that Dietzsch took a sadistic pleasure inflicting pain on the test subjects. On the other hand, it cannot have been easy to maintain order in a 90-bed infirmary filled with criminals and other patients in the throes of feverish hysteria. Dietzsch would claim that he tied down patients only to keep them from committing suicide, attacking others, or smashing everything in sight. Given what we know about the behavior of typhus patients, this may have been true.
Dietzsch became a big shot—well fed and well dressed, with enough extra rations to keep an enormous Newfoundland dog.
And before long, everyone
in the camp—SS and inmates alike—had heard enough about Block 46 to dread the place. Survivors, when they talked, brought forth gruesome images.
One day in the fall
of 1943, a Czech political prisoner named Willy Bahner got a white slip of paper from his block master telling him to report to the prisoners’ hospital, where he found about 65 other prisoners. “We didn’t know what it was all about, since we hadn’t reported sick.” Dietzsch escorted them on the short walk over to Block 46, where they were given baths and clean clothes and taken to a dormitory on the second floor. On the third day, Dietzsch called them down and gave each an injection. Two weeks later, with prisoners moaning and yelling all around him, Bahner began to run a fever. He saw at least eight men die.
Dietzsch at the Buchenwald trial. (National Archives.)
By the time the camp
was liberated, Ding had supervised 24 test series, involving around 1,000 patients. If the 150–200 “passage people” are included, between 300 and 400 people died there of intentional infection with typhus. Survivors suffered lifelong disabilities, including memory loss, epileptic fits, impotence, and chronic headaches.
Ding knew
the work was immoral, and kept his paperwork in order to show any future judges that he was not ultimately responsible for it. This strategy was useful, for in May 1943, an SS judge named Konrad Morgen arrived at Buchenwald and remained for six months while conducting an investigation on Himmler’s orders. The Morgen episode was surely one of the weirdest at Buchenwald. The judge’s mission was to winkle out corruption and abuse, but in a highly selective way that reflected his status as an SS cat’s-paw.
He had already
been sent to the eastern front once for conducting an overly vigorous investigation at Auschwitz. Morgen appears to have been taken in by Ding, who posed as a real typhus expert conducting humane, scientific experiments.
Nothing could have
been further from the truth. As Eugen Kogon wrote in his masterful account of Buchenwald,
The Theory and Practice of Hell
, “The scientific value of these tests was either nil or else of but insignificant proportions.”
Despite this, the German
military luminaries who knew about the tests made no effort to stop them—with one exception. Gerhard Rose, a tropical medicine expert, protested acerbically at a May 1943 conference of military surgeons after Ding presented some data there. But later he had a change of heart and sent a Danish-made typhus vaccine to be tested at Buchenwald. Ding gloated over this to Kogon. “See,” he said, “Rose has come along as well.”
The vaccine tests
were inconclusive, but Ding’s career was advancing. In early November 1942, he wrote to one of his former guardians that he had been promoted to
Oberstabsarzt
—a senior military rank—and to
SS Sturmbannführer
(major). “I was stunned and overjoyed about it, because to be
Oberstabsarzt
at the age of 30 is already a nice career!” He was attending the Behringwerke inauguration in Lwów and just back from a big conference in Berlin, where scientists from the government, the Robert Koch Institute, and IG Farben were lining up to work with him, Ding said. He attached a copy of his “latest major work,” an article about typhus serodiagnosis published in 1943. Like each of Ding’s six wartime typhus papers, it had been written by slave doctors on his staff.
Typhus was not the only
test subject at Block 46. In one experimental series, apparently conducted to determine the value of different treatments for typhoid—the food- and water-borne bacterial illness—60 inmates were brought into the block, fed amply on porridge, oatmeal, and fruit for two days, then forced to fast for 24 hours. When Dietzsch produced bowls of potato salad, the young inmates fell upon them like hungry wolves. They were unaware that the salad had been liberally spiked with typhoid cultures. “Within two hours I stroked my hair and it hurt, and we started to get fever. Then we realized that there was a little more to it than a late supper,” said Henry Mikols, a Pole who had been brought to Buchenwald as a “red triangle” a few weeks earlier.
Everyone got angry and someone hit the capo, and he gave that man a shot and he stiffened. . . . Other people screamed, had diarrhea, high temperature. I heard music playing in my ears, didn’t know where it was coming from unless they were playing Strauss to keep us happy. . . . When the doctor came I said I wanted to write a letter to my mother and father. He took a pencil and piece of paper. I said, “Dear mother and father, I don’t feel good, but since I am Catholic, I have turned to my God for help.” He looked at me, “
Nein, nein, du stirbst nicht
[No, you’re not going to die].” Then I see two other white jackets and they give me two injections in my chest. I felt a burning sensation and when they woke me up an hour or two later, my health was coming back.
Out of 60 people who entered the block, Mikols said, “only eight of us left through the gate.” The nurses took samples of his feces to send for testing in Berlin. “I said to my friend, ‘I hope they serve this to Adolf on a platter.’”
For some of the prisoners
, Block 46 was an even more humiliating experience. The Dutchman Peter Schenk, who was only 17 when he came to Buchenwald, got a job as a tailor in Block 46, but found that in exchange for the job he was sexually assaulted. According to Schenk, he was “chosen a couple times a month” to be tied up and raped in a room next to the crematorium. In taped testimony given in 1996, Schenk accused Ding of being the rapist, but circumstancial evidence suggests he was more likely referring to the camp physician Hoven, who was accused of homosexual rapes by other inmates, and in whose tailor shop Schenk worked.
Ding also tested
drugs for IG Farben. Its conglomerate subsidiary Hoechst had an antibiotic candidate, acridine, that it had shelved in 1938 when the drug failed animal tests. The war gave Hoechst a chance to try to resuscitate it as a typhus treatment; company executives’ hearts quickened when they thought of potential sales to the Wehrmacht. The company began communications with Mrugowsky about testing the drug in 1941, and in November 1942, 1,000 tablets were sent to
SS-Obersturmführer
[First Lieutenant] Helmuth Vetter, a contract researcher with IG Farben and doctor at Auschwitz associated with its Hygiene Institute station. Vetter wrote a few months later that patients tolerated the drug very poorly; almost all suffered terrible vomiting and diarrhea and unrelenting burning sensations in the mouth. It was “worthless” as typhus treatment, Vetter said, but Hoechst refused to be dissuaded so easily. Sure they vomited, Hoechst officer Rudolf Fussgänger wrote back, but the mortality of typhus patients who took the pills was 30 percent, compared with 34 percent of the controls, which he considered significant. Hoechst then sent batches of the drug to Buchenwald. In April, Ding paid a visit to Hoechst’s Leverkusen headquarters, and 10 days later began testing the drug, with the company’s approval. Fifty percent of the patients in his experiment died, with no significant difference between those who received acridine and the controls—except that those who got the drug vomited an average of seven times a day.
As the Block 46
capo Dietzsch noted after the war, “You could only have tested such an unacceptable preparation in a concentration camp, where you didn’t have to ask permission, where there was no free will.”
The main Auschwitz gate with the sign “Arbeit macht frei.” (USHMM.)
T
o 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.”