This episode contains brief discussions of genocide, racism, prejudice, and imprisonment. If any of these topics are triggers for you, this may be a good episode to skip. Also, apologies for mispronouncing any of the Polish words in this episode. I am not a speaker of Polish, and I did my best to research how to pronounce them, but they still might not be quite right.
Special thanks to Anna, who helped me with the Polish pronunciations in this episode. I hope I did you proud. Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so the mysterious and unsolved. Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity, and it has gripped millions of people throughout the ages.
I am one of those people. My name is Hallie, and this is the Morbid Curiosity Podcast. Nazi's research was utilized to protect people from great harm. All of these cases occurred during World War II, and were carried out by physicians doing their best to protect those targeted by the Third Reich, also known as the Nazis.
The Nazis controlled Germany from 1933 to 1945, led by dictator Adolf Hitler. The central ideological features of the regime were racism against anyone who wasn't of white Germanic descent, eugenic deletion of anyone who wasn't of Germanic descent, including other so-called undesirables, such as homosexuals, liberals, socialists, communists, Freemasons, Romani peoples, and differently abled people, and anti-Slavism, meaning hatred and discrimination of Slavic peoples, especially Jewish people, which is called anti-Semitism. Genocide, mass murder, and large-scale forced labor were the hallmarks of this regime. Some six million Jewish people were murdered by the Nazis between 1941 and 1945, a genocide referred to as the Holocaust.
The murders were committed through mass shootings and poison gas chambers in extermination camps, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka, both in occupied Poland. Millions of non-Jewish civilians and prisoners of war, or POWs, were also murdered in these camps. The Nazis conquered most of Europe, but were not a coordinated cooperating body, instead being a collection of factions struggling to amass power at any cost. In the end, this was their downfall, as well as the refusal to admit defeat, resulting in the complete destruction of German infrastructure, and massive additional war-related deaths.
Throughout the war, many deaths were due to the intense spread of disease, both in the concentration camps and among soldiers in army camps. Both the concentration camps and army camps were crowded, close-quartered and unhygienic, the perfect breeding ground for epidemics of typhus, a flea-borne bacterial infection that causes fevers, rashes, and eventually neurological damage and organ failure. While the Nazis feared such unclean diseases, they needed defenses against them, vaccines. However, as they had few of their own intellectuals and physicians due to imprisoning or killing them for resisting the regime, they relied on forcing the physicians they conquered to produce them.
All of the people I'm going to discuss in this episode come from this group. All of them found ways of defending themselves and others with disease. The first case I'm going to discuss of a disease defending people has been making rounds in news outlets and on social media since the 1980s, and blew up around 2006. During World War II, the Third Reich invaded many European nations.
They occupied Poland from 1939 to 1945. On top of their well-known anti-Semitic beliefs, the Nazis also believed Polish people were subhuman and sent millions to forced labor camps. They destroyed entire communities, neighborhoods, and cities through restrictions, captivity, purposeful neglect, and violence. In the Polish town of Stanowawola in the suburb of Roswodów, two Polish physicians stealthily came up with a plan to keep the Third Reich out.
They created a fake typhus fever epidemic, a disease that at the time had no easy treatment, causing the whole suburb to be quarantined. No one could leave, which saved many from being moved to work or death camps. At the time, typhus was spreading across the country, killing an average of 750 people a day. With intense fears surrounding contamination and contagion, the Nazis were attempting to contain the disease through quarantine and execution, and also through vaccine production, which I'll get to in a moment.
Doctors Yopgeniusz Wazowski and Stanisław Matulewicz were both practicing in Roswodów in 1939. Wazowski had joined the Polish Red Cross, but was forbidden by the Nazis from treating Jewish patients. He did so anyway, sneaking into the Jewish ghetto under the cover of night. One day a Polish soldier on leave begged Wazowski and Matulewicz to help him avoid returning to the war front.
In an attempt to help the young soldier fake a life-threatening illness, the doctors came up with an ingenious idea. Years earlier, Arthur Felix and Edward Weill had created the first rapid test for typhus infection. I'm going to do my best to explain how it works, but I'm not a biologist, so bear with me. First described in 1916, the Weill-Felix reaction is a test to diagnose rickettsial infections like typhus.
It's a rapid test, like the modern rapid COVID test, that detects the presence of typhus antibodies in the blood, the cells that the human immune system creates, to mark pathogens for neutralization. Each individual antibody recognizes one or more specific pathogens and are generated when the immune system detects a potentially hazardous pathogen. The Weill-Felix test relies on a strain of Proteus vulgarus bacteria called OX19. This bacteria, which is often the culprit behind urinary tract infections but is otherwise mostly harmless, causes the immune system to produce the same antibodies as it would for typhus.
Because of this reaction, the bacteria were used to create a nonspecific agglutination reaction test. This type of test detects antigens or antibodies in a sample by using inert particles such as dead strains of Proteus bacteria. When mixed with a patient's blood sample, the sample will agglutinate or clump together as the immune cells in the sample create antibodies or antigens. If the sample agglutinates, the test is positive for the pathogen.
If not, it's negative. Matulevich proposed they inject the soldier with a dead strain of Proteus OX19 and see if it would fool the typhus test into a fake positive result, which would exclude him from returning to the front. It worked. The two physicians quickly realized that this bit of trickery could be used as a defense against the Nazis.
In the winter of 1942, they began widely distributing the Proteus strain disguised as a vaccine. Within two months, the vast number of positive typhus tests successfully convinced the Nazis that an epidemic was raging in Roslatov. In response, the Nazis quarantined the areas with typhus cases. In Roslatov and 12 other villages, there were now safe havens within the quarantine zones.
When the war ended, Lozowski continued to practice medicine in Poland. He kept quiet about his exploits out of fear of retaliation from Nazi sympathizers within the communist government of Poland. He and his family eventually fled Poland and settled in Chicago, where Lozowski earned a medical degree from the University of Illinois. In the 1970s, Lozowski published the medical details of the hoax in a journal, but he didn't tell the full story until the 1990s when he and Dr.
Matulewicz published a memoir, Privatna Voina or My Private War. It quickly became a bestseller in Poland. Since the publication of their book, Lozowski has received awards from the Polish government and the American Medical Association. Quote, I was not able to fight with a gun or a sword, but I found a way to scare the Germans.
End quote. Lozowski told the Chicago Sun-Times in an article where they compared him to Oscar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved thousands of Jewish lives by employing them in his ammunitions factories, made famous by the 1993 film about him called Schindler's List. In 2001, Ryan Bank, a cinema photography major at SIUC, began work on a documentary about Lozowski. However, there's no evidence that the film was ever completed or released.
It's possible this is because the Rozlatov story has been exaggerated over the years. Many recent articles and online posts about Lozlatov state that he saved 8,000 Jewish lives over three years with the ruse. However, there were 8,000 Jews in the region at the time. Most were rounded up and deported to concentration and extermination camps in July of 1942, so at the time of the ruse in the winter of 1942, there were few Jews left in Rozlatov.
The number 8,000 was the creation of Art Golab, writer of the newspaper article entitled Chicago's Schindler, which made the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times on August 31, 2001. He later stated that, quote, nobody would have been interested in the story if there had only been Poles saved, end quote. He had adapted the story to some more papers. Lozlatov admitted that he wasn't the hero depicted in the pages of the Chicago Sun-Times.
He was embarrassed and angry that he had been portrayed that way. In his book, he states that he secretly cared for Jewish patients, but he hadn't been able to save them with the ruse. Any Jewish people that tested positive for typhus would have been executed, not quarantined. Still, the ruse saved thousands of Polish people from being deported to forced labor camps.
The disease defended them from the Nazis. Another case of disease defending the lives of innocent people actually resulted in the first mass-produced vaccine for typhus. Rudolf Weigl, a Polish biologist and parasitologist, was able to save the lives of many Polish and Jewish people by involving them in his vaccine research. Weigl, who was born in Austria, had been drafted during World War I into the Austro-Hungarian Army Medical Division to study typhus.
After Poland regained its independence, Weigl was hired in 1920 as a professor of biology at Jan Kanemersk Universitet in Lwów at the Institute for the Study of Typhus and Virology, where he had a breakthrough. He developed a technique for producing a typhus vaccine, which involved growing lice, infecting them with bacteria, then crushing them into a paste. He developed the first version of this vaccine in 1918 and began testing it on guinea pigs, and then even volunteers. In 1930, Weigl began refining this technique.
In 1933, he started large-scale experiments for cultivating the bacteria and using a micro-infection strategy on the lice. The method had four major steps, growing healthy lice for about 12 days, injecting them with typhus, growing them for five more days, then extracting the mid-gut of the lice and grinding them into a paste, which was then the vaccine. Growing lice meant feeding them blood. First, he tried using guinea pigs, but for the vaccine to be effective, human blood was required.
Therefore, by 1933, Weigl was using human volunteers as louse feeders. The lice were allowed to feed on human legs through a fine screen. After the lice were infected with typhus, they still needed blood, which put the human feeders at risk of being infected as well. Weigl reduced this risk by vaccinating the louse feeders before any louse ever fed on them.
This worked for the most part, although some of them, including Weigl himself, developed the disease. None of the lice feeders died, however. Weigl and his wife, Zofia, were among the earliest lice feeders. After the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and its allies in 1939, Weigl's research attracted the attention of the Nazis.
Initially, the Nazis put the Soviets in control of Poland and the University of Lwów. Thousands of ethnic Poles were deported to gulags in Kazakhstan, Siberia, and other areas deep within the Soviet Union. During this period, Weigl's institute continued to function. As the only creator of an effective typhus vaccine, Weigl carefully used his prestige to secure the release of several Polish would-be deportees, and managed to obtain permission for several who had already been exiled to return.
He employed them at the institute as either nurses, interpreters, or louse feeders. The jobs protected them from persecution by Soviet authorities. In June of 1941, after the Nazis turned on the Soviet Union, Mwów University was taken over by the Nazi authorities. Weigl's institute was allowed to carry on its research because, much like the Soviets, the Nazis were interested in the creation of a typhus vaccine for their soldiers, as typhus was still a huge problem in army camps as well as concentration camps.
Nazi-run typhus research using human subjects purposefully infected with the disease was already being carried out in concentration camps such as Buchenwald, with little success. More on this later. The Nazis converted a building from a former grammar school into Weigl's new laboratory, and ordered a steep rise in production of the vaccine. They wanted all of it for their armed forces.
The institute became directly subordinate to the German military, which happened to give its employees significant protection against Nazi soldiers and secret police. Not long before this order, many distinguished professors had been arrested and sent to concentration camps. There was real danger that the same thing could happen at Lavew University. To try and avoid this, Weigl began hiring prominent Polish intellectuals who might be in danger for his institute in July of 1941.
Weigl also managed to convince the Nazi authorities to give him full discretion as to whom he hired for his experiments and refused to relocate to Berlin. Association with the institute offered a measure of protection. Employees, both researchers and louse feeders, were issued a special pass which noted both that they might be infected with typhus and that they worked for an institution of the German military. As a result, they could move freely about the occupied city, and if stopped by the police or Gestapo, were quickly released.
They also received extra rations and typhus vaccinations. When the Nazis began the systematic murder of the Jewish population of Lavew, Weigl frantically began hiring as many Jewish people as he could. With numerous academics gathering in one place under the pretense of medical research, other underground activities also took place. The actual feeding only took about an hour a day, leaving plenty of time for other scientific discourse and conspiratorial activity.
Due to his special position, Weigl was allowed to have a radio at the institute, which was punishable by death for other Polish people. This radio was used to gather up-to-date news of the war that was otherwise censored by Nazi propaganda. Weigl soon began employing members of the home army, the Polish anti-Nazi resistance, providing them with protection and sufficient cover to carry out their underground activities. All of the vaccines produced by the institute during this time were supposed to go to the German army, however, a portion was smuggled out by the employees associated with the home army, and shipped to partisan units of the home army, underground movements in the Lavew and Warsaw Gettos, and even in the Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps.
According to Wadislaw Spielman, the Polish Jewish pianist and diarist made famous by the 2002 movie The Pianist, Weigl had become a symbol of hope in the Warsaw Gettos. After the Soviet Red Army, now on the sides of the Allies, recaptured Lavew in July of 1944 during Operation Tempest, Weigl's institute was disbanded. Weigl moved to central Poland, along with most other Polish inhabitants of Lavew. He continued his research in Krakow at Jagiellonian University.
For a while he was accused of being a Nazi collaborator by his peers, who knew nothing of his work during the war. Weigl died on the 11th of August, 1957. In total about 4,000 people, louse feeders, technicians, and nurses were protected by Weigl's institute, of whom about 500 are known by name. A half-century after his death, Weigl's research, work, and service were made public.
In 2003 he was honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust remembrance institution. Before I discuss several other physicians who were able to protect people through their work with diseases, an ad must play. If you find these ads, annoying you can get ad-free episodes by becoming a patron on patreon at the lowest tier two dollars a month at higher tiers you can also get outtakes quizzes my bibliography and resources and a look behind the scenes patrons also help choose episode topics enjoy early youtube video releases and many other extras remember these episodes are all researched and performed by me no ai is used in the process of creating any of them go to bit.ly slash morbid patron that's bit.ly slash morbid patron to sign up and support us every little bit helps you'll have our eternal gratitude another unsung hero who worked with weigel is ludwig fleck fleck was a polish jewish and israeli physician and biologist who worked with weigel at levov university as a student he went on to become director of the bacteriological laboratory at the love of social security authority in 1935 he founded and worked at a private bacteriological laboratory when the nazis occupied levov he and his family were sent to the city seattle where he continued his research in a hospital there he developed a new procedure for creating a typhus vaccine from the urine of infected patients the nazis became interested and arrested fleck and his family in 1942 sending them to la akun pharmaceutical factory and ordering fleck to produce a typhus serum for them they were moved to auschwitz on february 7 1943 with orders for fleck to work at the camp diagnosing and treating those with syphilis typhus and other diseases he was moved again in december of 1943 to buchenwald concentration camp where he was ordered to produce a working typhus vaccine at buchenwald fleck worked with mayan chieplowski a polish scientist who had been arrested by gestapo on suspicion of being part of the home army after being injured during hard labor at the camp chieplowski was sent to work in the hygiene department in april of 1943 the nazis wanted an alternative to the lice method of typhus vaccine production as they didn't want to chance a typhus outbreak at the camp therefore chieplowski had been working with rabbits as hosts for the bacteria he and others working in the hygiene department were forced to test their vaccines on the inmates of the camp in all 729 inmates were used as test subjects of whom 154 died when fleck arrived he saw the flaws in the study and thought of a way to subvert the whole procedure to create two variants of the vaccine one for the inmates which was effective against the disease and one for the nazi troops which was completely ineffective as the nazi staff at the camp had achieved their positions through loyalty instead of education they were unable to recognize what fleck and chieplowski were doing the two men were liberated along with the rest of the camp by american soldiers on april 11 1945 fleck returned to poland and continued his research publishing 87 medical and scientific articles between 1946 and 1957 he branched out into the philosophy of science as well in 1951 he was awarded the national prize for scientific achievements after suffering a heart attack in 1956 fleck moved to israel and worked at the israel institute for biological research he died in 1961 japlowski worked for the red cross and then in the exhumation and identification department of the international tracing service trying to find and identify the bodies of those prisoners who had died at concentration camps he was also involved in the nuremberg trials the international court proceedings against the nazis after the war during one of these trials called the doctor's trial it was finally revealed that the nazis had received fake typhus vaccines he wrote a full account in may of 1946 he then moved to the united states in 1951 with his wife and worked at roosevelt hospital in new york he died in 1973 the final case i'm going to talk about comes not from poland but from italy in september of 1943 benito mussolini's fascist regime once an ally to the nazis was taken over by nazi forces anti-semitic laws intensified things were especially bad in rome where residents of the jewish ghettos were captured in large numbers and sent to concentration camps 10 000 people were sent over the two-year occupation of italy fatte bene fratelli catholic hospital in rome at the time run by dr giovanni borromeo sat on an island in a tiber river about 300 meters away from a ghetto established in 1585 the hospital was built on the site of a roman temple to asclepius the god of medicine it was known as a haven for the poor and less fortunate who needed medical care at the time of the nazi invasion fatte bene fratelli hospital had just been converted from a hospice to a modern hospital by dr borromeo and father maurizio bialik on october 16 1943 nazi forces raided the nearby jewish ghetto fleeing for their lives many jewish residents crossed the tiber river bridge and sought sanctuary at the hospital thinking quickly dr borromeo took in the refugees and put them in quarantine like wazowski dr borromeo and the hospital staff knew that the nazis were terrified of infectious disease they needed a good medical disguise for the jewish refugees one of the physicians a jewish man named dr vittorio sacerdoti who was secretly employed there under false papers came up with the name il morbo di kappa or syndrome k the idea was that the nazis would assume the k stood for coke's disease another name for tuberculosis which was running rampant at the time in reality the name was inspired by two of the worst perpetrators of violence against the roman jews ss military commander in rome albert kesselring and the head of the nazi police in rome herbert kapler from then on the label syndrome k was put on the medical charts of the jewish refugees the physicians knew that the symptoms of syndrome k needed to be intimidating to keep the nazis at bay the list of symptoms that they attributed to syndrome k were terrifying ranging from a terrible cough to paralysis dementia and death by asphyxiation the refugees were told to cough deeply act lethargic and breathe heavily if any nazi inspectors came to investigate the hospital rooms holding syndrome k sufferers were officially designated as dangerously infectious dissuading nazi inspectors from entering at all in the beginning fate beni fratelli hospital didn't draw much attention from nazis the plan was working to aid more jewish patients dr sacerdoti asked if they could start secretly transferring patients from the jewish hospital to fate beni fratelli dr borromeo and father bialik agreed and he slowly began to transfer the jewish patients over with a constant influx of refugees the hospital was in danger of running out of space in their syndrome k quarantine to combat this the staff worked together to move refugees to safer locations hopefully out of reach until the end of the war when one of these safer locations was found a fake death certificate was issued with the cause of death being syndrome k this further perpetuated the ruse father bialik and dr borromeo also installed an illegal radio transmitter in the hospital basement and made contact with general roberto lordy of the italian royal air force unfortunately in may of 1944 the nazis raided the hospital they discovered five polish jews who were trapped on a balcony all five were taken away despite this setback the syndrome k ruse was incredibly successful while exact numbers vary it's thought that the doctors and staff of fate beni fratelli hospital managed to save around 100 jewish lives survivor testimonies gathered by yad vashem confirmed this and the five refugees that were taken away italy was liberated about a month later and all five survived after world war ii dr borromeo was lauded by the government of italy for his work and recognized as a righteous among nations by yad vashem he died in the hospital on the 24th of august 1961 on june 21st 2016 fate beni fratelli hospital was honored as a house of life by the raul wallenberg foundation a u.s organization dedicated to honoring heroic acts during the holocaust all of these physicians were in danger some were forced to do terrible things but in the end they did what they could to help others using their specialist skills they couldn't save everyone but they did what they could that's all any of us can do when faced with such circumstances often a little goes a long way and so it was that these physicians were able to protect thousands using what they knew best disease and that my friends sparks our curiosity the morbid curiosity podcast is produced by h lloyd if you'd like to get in touch or suggest a morbid topic you can do so on facebook and instagram at morbid curiosity podcast or on our website www.morbidcuriositypodcast.com if you like the podcast please share it with your friends and give us a rating on whatever podcast app you use this helps the mcp reach new listeners and expand this wonderfully creepy community thank you to everyone who 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