This story is little known, yet the ramifications are truly astounding. It begins in 1942, in Buchenwald, a German concentration camp. German troops were dying of typhus, a disease brought about by lice, which terrified the Nazis. Thus, the Nazis attempted to create a vaccine, using the Jewish inmates as test subjects. On December 11, 1942, Joachim Mrugowsky, the head of the SS Hygiene Institute in Berlin, decided to create a vaccine that would be made using the typhus bacteria found in the lungs of rabbits.
Mrugowsky’s assistant, Dr. Erwin Ding-Schuler was in charge of creating this vaccine. He gathered Jewish scientists held captive in the camp to assist him. In Buchenwald, there were many Jewish doctors, as well as people who pretended to be doctors in order to save their lives. For example, Willy Jelinek, who was actually an Austrian pastry chef, was responsible for the tubercular ward and assisted writing SS doctor Waldemar Hoven’s dissertation on lung disease. August Cohn was a communist labor leader and was placed in charge of the rabbits that would be used to develop the typhus vaccine. Marian Ciepielowski, a doctor who had some familiarity with the infectious disease also joined the team. The Nazis did not realize how difficult it would be to create such a vaccine—let along with a group of ‘biologists’ who in reality consisted of a baker, a politician, a gym coach, and just one doctor.
Right before Christmas of 1943, the Nazis brought Ludwik Fleck, a Jewish biologist, to the group; he was brought from Auschwitz. Fleck had been an assistant to Dr. Weigl. Dr. Weigl was a Polish biologist who had developed a typhus vaccine and had protected Fleck during the Nazi occupation of Lviv. As such, Fleck was the only scientist on the team who fully understood the biology of the vaccine and how to develop it.
When Fleck came to Buchenwald, he discovered a major mistake made in the production of the vaccine which resulted in a dysfunctional vaccine.The microscopic organisms that the team had determined to be the typhus bacteria were in actuality none other than the white blood cells of a rabbit. Upon this discovery, the team convinced Fleck not to tell Ding-Schuler about this misunderstanding, and with Fleck’s assistance, the group developed a real vaccine.
This team of “biologists” was able to trick the Nazis for 16 months—until liberation—while working within the concentration camps. Fleck sent the fake typhus vaccine to the German soldiers while he gave the real one to the Jewish inmates—thereby providing the Jews with typhus inoculation.
When the Germans realized that their soldiers were still dying they accused Fleck of sending them the wrong vaccine, so they ordered Fleck to send them a sample of the vaccine. Fleck sent the real vaccine to this group of Germans and they realized that the vaccine was completely functional. This completely confused the Germans and they assumed that their soldiers had to be dying by chance; they did not fathom that their prisoners were scheming against them.
During the Nuremberg trials, Kogon and Ciepielowski testified that in fact they had deceived the Nazis. Ironically, Mrugowsky accused them of acting in against basic medical ethics. (Mrugowsky had provided the Zyklon-B for the Auschwitz gas chambers as well as spearheaded a number of medical experiments performed on the inmates.)
It is also ironic to note that Irene Ding-Schuler, wife of Ding-Schuler, died of typhus around a year after the Nuremberg trials. Ding-Schuler committed suicide in an American prison camp right before the Nuremberg trials.
Unfortunately, Dr. Weigl, after the war, was accused of being an informer for the Nazis, despite the fact that he had protected thousands of Poles as well as slipped tens of thousands of vaccine doses into the Jewish ghettos and concentration camps. In 1957, he passed away, unrewarded and ignored.
In 1957, Fleck and his wife immigrated to Israel where Fleck spent the rest of his years working for the Israeli biological weapons facility. In 1961, he passed away from cancer.