Arthur Allen is eHealth editor at POLITICO.

In late 1942, German troops were dying of typhus at the Eastern Front, and the SS medical chief Ernst-Robert Grawitz was impatient for vaccine—as was Heinrich Himmler himself. Typhus terrified the Nazis more than the allied armies did at the time. Nazi ideology had identified typhus, which is spread by lice, as a disease characteristic of parasitic, subhuman people—the Jews—and the Nazi medical profession was taking outrageous measures ostensibly to combat it. This included walling in or closing off Jewish ghettos in cities like Warsaw, Krakow and Lviv, assuring that the disease would indeed spread widely among Jews. That result didn’t bother the Nazis in the least. They had no concern about typhus and its terrifying burden of pain, high fever, psychosis and death—not until the germ began afflicting the German forces locked in battle with the Russians.

But the vaccine production plans of Joachim Mrugowsky, the head of the SS Hygiene Institute in Berlin, kept getting delayed. When British bombers destroyed Mrugowsky’s headquarters in 1942, he decided to produce the vaccine at Buchenwald, thinking that allied bombs would not fall there. Jewish inmates of the concentration camp—those whom the Nazis condemned to death as mere human lice—would be employed to manufacture it, thereby saving the German troops at the front.


The question was: What kind of vaccine should they make? Rudolf Weigl, a famous zoologist credited with creating the first effective typhus vaccine, was employing thousands of Poles in the city of Lviv (Lemberg, the Germans called it; the Polish name was Lwow) in the production of a vaccine made from typhus germs that grew in the intestines of lice after they had fed on human blood. Weigl’s product was approved for the Wehrmacht, but there was no way to create a louse farm at Buchenwald. It would mean introducing millions of lice into a concentration camp, and the SS were terrified of lice. Another approved method—a vaccine produced in chicken eggs— was also impossible at Buchenwald. German civilians, let alone concentration camp inmates, could not be trusted around chickens or their eggs.

So on Dec. 11, 1942, Mrugowsky decided to produce a third type of typhus vaccine, which French scientist Paul Giroud and others had developed at the Pasteur Institute. The vaccine was produced from typhus bacteria grown in the lungs of immune-compromised rabbits. “This vaccine has been tested among concentration camp inmates with excellent results,” Mrugowsky wrote in a memo. Dr. Erwin Ding-Schuler, an ambitious but callow Nazi officer and Mrugowsky’s deputy, was chosen to lead production, and began assembling captive scientists with the help of his new clerk, an imprisoned German intellectual named Eugen Kogon. Among those drafted was a gentle Jewish biologist named Ludwik Fleck, who was a former assistant of Dr. Weigl whom Weigl had protected during the Nazi occupation of Lviv.

Dr. Ludwik Fleck, the Jewish biologist who master-minded the vaccine scheme in Buchenwald. | Credit: Archiv fur Zeitgeschichte, Zurich

Thus began one of the most effective but least-known deceptions of World War II, one that is wondrously thick with irony: For 16 months, working under the noses of his clueless Nazi overseers—in particular Ding-Schuler, whom Fleck described as a “ dummkopf”—a Jewish doctor managed to send fake typhus vaccine to the Nazi soldiers at the front, even as he provided the real thing to inoculate his fellow condemned Jews in a concentration camp.

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The deception began on Aug. 10, 1943, when Ding-Schuler and Kogon moved themselves into Block 50, a three-story masonry building at Buchenwald. Block 50 stood half a mile down the hill on the mud road from the camp entrance, in the last row of buildings within the central grounds. From the windows of Block 50, the inmates could peer across a triple line of barbed wire into the notorious Little Camp, where the most hopeless among the concentration camp inmates were brought to die, or to be shipped out to terrible work details where they perished of starvation, disease and exposure.

Staffing the vaccine laboratory seemed to be quite easy. There were plenty of doctors at Buchenwald, and others who’d posed as doctors to save their skins or to follow the directives of the camp leadership. (“I had a foot injury and was operated on by a mechanic and a butcher,” one inmate remarked.) Willy Jellinek, a bright young Austrian pastry chef known as Jumbo, was in charge of the tubercular ward for a while and helped write the SS doctor Waldemar Hoven’s dissertation on lung disease for the University of Heidelberg. Jellinek came to Block 50 to prepare culture broths for the vaccine. August Cohn, a charismatic former communist labor leader, was rescued from a death sentence and put in charge of the rabbits. Ding-Schuler found a doctor with some infectious disease experience, the 36-year-old Marian Ciepielowski, to lead the vaccine production team. Ciepielowski had spent his first year at Buchenwald working with pick and shovel on a road detail. “Every day, dozens of people around me were suffocated, clubbed, stoned and shot to death, and we were all mistreated sadistically,” Ciepielowski wrote later. Handsome and blue-eyed with a well-defined widow’s peak, Ciepielowski was extremely crafty when it came to sabotage. Other inmates remarked upon his sangfroid. He was also a dedicated physician and treated many of the experimental typhus patients in Block 46.

But making the vaccine was hard—much harder than the Nazis would ever realize. In fact, Ding-Schuler from the beginning was wrestling with problems well beyond his understanding. Leading microbiologists had found it terribly difficult to produce the vaccine at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Now, Ding-Schuler was trying to do it with a group that included a baker, a physicist, a politician and a gym coach.

Even in the best of circumstances, making vaccines is a very subtle trial-and-error process, one that requires deep specialized knowledge and years of hand-to-hand training. When producing a vaccine, each step in the process might need to be altered at the same time to accommodate a particular change in the production method. For example, the Rockefeller Institute scientists who developed the yellow fever vaccine in the 1930s found that after a certain number of passages—that is, after the virus had grown in a particular sequence of animal-flesh cultures—for some reason it became weakened enough to be injected into people in a way that provided immunity but not disease. The Nazi medical bureaucracy, of course, had not considered such challenges. Ding-Schuler pressed the prisoners as soon as they set up Block 50 to produce something. He wanted tangible results.

Ding-Schuler would get results, but not what he expected. The Block 50 crew worked from a 70-page German instruction manual, apparently translated from Pasteur Institute papers. The recipe was not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for the anti-vivisectionist—it involved transmitting the typhus bacteria through four different animals.

Normally, typhus germs grow only in lice and people. To get them to grow outside those species, the germs had to be modified by serial passage through animals—a rather mysterious process, but the only way, at the time, to produce the flourishing typhus cultures required to make a vaccine.

Lice cages on a subject's leg. | Credit: Emil-von-Behring Bibliothek, Philipps-Universität Marburg

First, blood was injected into guinea pigs after being taken from feverish Block 46 “passage people”—inmates whom Ding-Schuler had purposely infected with typhus so they could serve as reservoirs for the experimental bacteria. When the guinea pigs were infected, technicians ground up their brains or testes, where for some reason the bacteria grew well. After removing most of the host tissue, the remaining liquid was injected into mice. After they sickened, the mice were killed and their lungs ground up and diluted into solutions used to infect the rabbits. These creatures, pure-blood Angoras and mixed chinchilla breeds, were infected at five months of age by stabbing a thick needle through their necks into the tracheal tube.

Rabbits were not normally susceptible to typhus. The germ grew in their lungs only after their immune systems had been weakened. To do this, the inmates experimented with ways of making life unpleasant for the rabbits to the point that it ruined their immune systems. The irony of doing this in a concentration camp cannot have escaped them. They settled on a method that involved shaving the rabbits’ chests and exposing them to freezing temperature in winter, or dunking them in ice baths in warm weather. For good measure they injected the rabbits with paratyphoid bacteria or toxins. Then came the tricky part: killing the rabbit when the growth of rickettsial bacteria, which causes typhus, in the lungs was at its height, but before secondary infections set in. If the process succeeded, a single rabbit could provide enough rickettsial bacteria to make vaccine sufficient to immunize 100 people.

The first samples of the vaccine were not ready until just before Christmas 1943. Ding-Schuler selected a group of prisoners for the experiment. “If it doesn’t work,” he told Kogon, “I’ll commit suicide.”

It did not work, but Ding-Schuler, instead of killing himself, faked the results.

It was at this moment that the SS brought Ludwik Fleck to Block 50 from Auschwitz. Kogon remembered Fleck as a “somewhat dreamy scholar, always friendly.” The biologist was slightly stooped, gaunt, bespectacled, calm and reserved, Kogon said later, “an oddly lovable, friendly person.” What neither Ding-Schuler, Kogon or anyone else realized at the time was that Fleck, thanks to his rigorous training under Dr. Weigl in Lviv, was the only scientist there who really knew what he was doing. And when Fleck arrived, he immediately detected a huge error made by the other inmates. For reasons that weren’t entirely clear, the methods used by the amateur vaccine makers had not produced a real vaccine. The particles they identified as typhus germs under a microscope were actually rabbit white blood cells.

When Fleck discovered the mistake and described it to his colleagues, the other inmates convinced him not to tell Ding-Schuler. Eventually, with Fleck’s help, they were able to make a real vaccine.

As Kogon, Ding-Schuler’s inmate assistant, later wrote, under Fleck’s guidance, the team began to produce two types of vaccine: “one that had no value and was perfectly harmless, and went to the front”—that was for the German soldiers—“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 learned 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.”

As Fleck later wrote, the Nazi doctors at Buchenwald, lacking any specialist in infectious disease or vaccinology to help them, “looked into their microscopes and continuously misunderstood what they saw…. There was no individual author of the error. The error grew out of the collective atmosphere.”

Ding-Schuler, in short, was a “ dummkopf who earned a dissertation only on the basis of his services for the party,” as Fleck later told investigators for the Nuremberg War Trials. “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. … [Ding-Schuler], the illiterate, didn’t realize what was going on.”

When German soldiers sickened at the front, and their commanders asked questions, the inmates gave Ding-Schuler samples of the real vaccine, which he sent to Berlin and the Pasteur Institute for testing. It was not unusual for soldiers to sicken even after receiving a vaccine like the typhus prophylactic—no version of it was 100 percent effective. Somehow, no one caught on.

The charade continued until the Americans liberated Buchenwald in April 1945.

In fact, it isn’t clear even that the Americans realized the scope of the fraud—for they appear to have believed that the vaccine was a real product. That, in turn, resulted in the crowning irony of the typhus vaccine story, which occurred when the Nazi doctors who had created such suffering throughout the concentration camp system learned, just before their deaths, that they had been duped.

Before the Nuremberg trial of leading Nazi doctors in 1947, American medics vaccinated all the defendants, in prison camps, with the Buchenwald rabbit-lung vaccine—the fake one . At the trial, Joachim Mrugowsky, Waldemar Hoven and the other defendants heard for the first time that Fleck, Kogon and Ciepielowsky had suckered them for 18 months with a false vaccine.

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—a man who had provided Zyklon-B to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and had run a network of cruel medical experiments—appeared stunned and indignant. He accused the inmates 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 [gentlemen] here today.”

This was met by laughter in the gallery.

Mrugowsky and Hoven would hang for their crimes. As for Ding-Schuler, he did finally kill himself, by hanging himself in an American prison camp north of Munich before the trial. In his final letter, Ding-Schuler asked Kogon to look out for his wife, Irene, who was living in the Soviet sector with their three children. But it was not to be.

Irene Ding-Schuler died in a hospital a year later—of typhus.

Dr. Rudolf Weigl, the zoologist under which a young Ludwik Fleck studied. | Credit: National Museum, Przemysl

After the war, Dr. Weigl—Fleck’s mentor in Lviv—lost a rivalry with younger Polish colleagues who toadied up to the new communist regime. Weigl, who was not the toadying type, was unjustly accused of being a Nazi informer, though he had protected thousands of vulnerable Poles and smuggled tens of thousands of doses of vaccines to the Jewish ghettos and concentration camps. He died in 1957, forgotten and unrewarded.

Fleck returned to Poland, working as a researcher and professor of immunology at the universities of Lublin and Warsaw. In 1957, amid a wave of anti-Semitic rabble-rousing in Poland, Fleck and his wife emigrated to Israel to be with their son, who had emigrated in 1948. Fleck spent his last years working in the secretive Israeli biological weapons facility at Ness Ziona. He died of cancer in 1961; the epidemiology building at the research center bears his name.