The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis by Arthur Allen

Author:Arthur Allen [Allen, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-07-21T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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