Gas Chamber
Controversy

Typhus and the Jews

by Friedrich Paul Berg

    At the end of this introductory discussion I have included two articles from the German technical literature which discuss those remarkable gas chambers in some detail. Those articles are only two among many that can be found in the German literature of that period.

Delousing Tunnels

The history of large gas chambers (more than 200 cubic meters in volume) goes back to at least the early 1920's when tunnels were used by the British to fumigate railroad trains in Russia and Poland when the British had a military presence there during the chaotic post World War I period.

The standard procedure then was to fumigate an entire railroad train at one time within a sealed tunnel with hydrocyanic acid (also referred to simply as cyanide or cyanide gas). Zyklon-B had not yet been invented and so the cyanide had to be introduced into the tunnels either from gas-filled tanks or else generated within the tunnels by the dropping of cyanide salt into barrels filled with sulfuric acid (the so-called "barrel method").

The British experience with typhus in Poland and Russia during that period was described many years later in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine as follows:1

Administrative Measures of Control of Widespread Epidemics
Though the measures taken are not likely to be applicable to Great Britain it may be of interest to outline the broader administrative steps we took when dealing with widespread epidemics of typhus fever.
 
The personnel of a number of units was established, including doctors, nurses, and subordinate medical auxiliaries. All were young and all were protected by the use of special clothing. Arrangements were made for the regular disinfestation of the garments and for bathing the personnel. The stores required included portable baths and showers, fuel for heating water, soap, hair clippers and scissors, nail brushes, towels, &c., in addition to as good rations as it was possible to obtain. Units were sent into the various regions and were administered centrally in Poland from Warsaw, in Russia from Moscow and Kuibyshev, and, two years ago, in China from Chungking and Sian.
 
The next step was to put a cordon round healthy areas, with the aid of the military and barbed wire, to prevent the ingress of infected refugees. This was in many cases done locally, though eventually a cordon had to be established right across Europe, from North Poland to Rumania. Refugees were only allowed to enter this "clean" zone at certain points established on the roads and railways. Patrols watched the open country and brought stragglers into the disinfesting points. At each such point were arrangements for bathing and disinfestation, and all persons passing the cordon were thoroughly 'de-loused' with their belongings. The size of the work may be gathered from the fact that at one centre alone--Baranowice, on the Polish-Russian frontier in 1921--we were for a long time disinfesting each day 10,000 refugees returning to Poland from Russia. The method of disinfestation varied according to the country and the apparatus available. In Poland, steam and cyanide were both used, the latter being employed on an extensive scale on the frontiers. At Baranowice, where the refugees arrived chiefly by train, a tunnel was built, into which hydrocyanic gas could be introduced. On the arrival of each train, all the passengers were given a blanket and told to strip, leaving their garments and all their belongings on the train. Each person was then bathed in hot water with soft soap and paraffin, while the train was backed into the tunnel, the engine uncoupled, and cyanide gas liberated in the tunnel. When the bathing of the refugees was completed, the train was pulled out of the tunnel by means of a rope attached to a locomotive and was allowed to air. In due course the passengers dressed, gave up their blankets, and continued on their journey. In Mesopotamia, we used a locomotive with waggons attached, into which steam, first saturated and superheated, could be passed. The train included accommodation for personnel and thus constituted a unit which could be moved to any point where typhus broke out.
 
In Russia, we utilized the Russian baths, with which every village is equipped. These are log huts in which fires are made under heaps of stones, which are thus heated to a high temperature. Buckets of water are thrown on the stones, the water immediately evaporating into clouds of steam. The population was first bathed and de-loused in the bath, and then the amount of heat and steam were increased so as to deal with the bedding and clothing. Subsequently, no further water was thrown on the stones, and the heat of the hut was allowed to dry out the material.
 
For furs, which are very readily infested with lice and which do not lend themselves to the ordinary methods of disinfestation, crude naphthalene was used. A large box or chest was constructed at the entrance to the house and half-filled with crude naphthalene. Into this all furs and outer garments were dropped on entry to the house and left there until the following morning. I should mention that in winter in a cold country it is, of course, sufficient to hang one's garments in the open for the night for every louse to be destroyed. Whether the nits survive or not depends on the degree of cold, but there is in any case no evidence that these can transmit the disease.
 
In China, where padded garments have to a great extent superseded furs, brick ovens were used. . . .

In spite of the difficulties, the delousing of entire railroad trains was absolutely essential to prevent the spread of typhus from infested areas to non-infested areas. Railroads could otherwise carry typhus-infected lice throughout all of Europe within a few days. Not only the railroad trains themselves but even the railroad stations were important sources of contagious disease, particularly typhus, because it was there that people would spend hours and even days in close contact, often huddled together--an ideal environment for the spreading of lice from "lousy" persons to clean persons. By contrast, busses, trucks and automobiles were still relatively unimportant for public transportation.

    The invention of Zyklon-B in 1923 was a major step forward because delousing methods employing this product could handle furs and leather goods without damage as easily as they could handle all other types of clothing. By the late 1930's (see Appendix A), the delousing of railroads had been greatly improved with specially-constructed delousing tunnels or gas chambers. These facilities were subsequently improved even further with blowers and ductwork to circulate air and gas, and with space heaters to raise interior temperatures above the boiling point of hydrocyanic acid (78.6o F).2 Heating was especially necessary during winter--precisely the time of the year when typhus was generally most severe and when delousing was most needed--in order to be sure that all of the hydrocyanic acid from Zyklon-B would evaporate and fill the chamber interiors.

DEGESCH as an Information Source
for a Technology of Mass-Murder

The technology which was employed for fumigating entire railroad trains was hardly a secret. On the contrary, before the war and throughout most of the war, the DEGESCH company had placed large advertisements for its products and technical expertise in many technical journals which were distributed throughout the entire world. Many of these advertisements clearly showed large gas chambers for fumigating railroad trains and trucks with Zyklon-B.

    The half-page advertisement which follows appeared in dozens of issues of Der praktische Desinfektor just as an example.3

Figure 1: Typical advertisement (half size) by the DEGESCH Company showing large gas chambers, including one for railroads in the lower left corner.4

Any German official seriously interested in using Zyklon-B for almost any purpose would have been well aware of this superb technology. The people responsible for the "Final Solution," about whom it is generally conceded that they were otherwise intelligent and in many cases well-educated, would have surely read the German technical literature also. Any German official responsible for the purchase of large quantities of Zyklon-B would have surely seen the DEGESCH advertisements, not just once but many times, showing large, well-designed gas chambers about which numerous technical discussions could be easily found.

    The importance of circulation and heat are clearly emphasized in the relevant German literature and much of the English language literature as well. The absence of any means for circulating and heating the air-gas mixture in cellar rooms which were supposedly used for mass-murder in Auschwitz is strong and clear evidence that the extermination claims, at least with regard to Zyklon-B, are sheer nonsense.5

Disease in War and its Aftermath

A standard feature of the Holocaust story is the reliance upon photographs of thousands of dead bodies found in some of the German concentration camps at the end of World War 2. For people who are unfamiliar with the horrors of war, which includes most of us fortunately, those photographs are more than sufficient proof of a genocidal policy on the part of the German regime. Even for many veterans from the Western Allied armies who may have spent years reading the generally available literature, those photographs constitute convincing evidence of genocide. The claims of revisionists that the bodies were the result of catastrophic epidemics of typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis, dysentery, etc., are readily scoffed at as the foolish ravings of Nazi apologists. After all, how could disease alone have possibly caused such misery as one sees in those photographs? The bitter reality is that the photographs tell only a small part of the horrors of modern warfare.

    How many Americans have any idea that for every Union soldier who died during the American Civil War from combat, including those who died from wounds and injuries, there were approximately two Union soldiers who died from disease. Despite all that has been written and said in a hundred years about the Civil War and shown on film, it would be surprising if one American in a hundred has any idea as to the relative size of these numbers even though the Civil War was fought on American soil and is a major part of America's history.

    Out of a total of 359,528 Union deaths from all causes, 110,070 were from combat but 224,586 were from disease.6 Of the deaths from disease, 44,000 were from "diarrhea and dysentery, acute and chronic" and 34,883 were from "typhoid, typho-malarial, and continued fevers."7 By contrast, the total number of deaths arising from combat at the Battle of Gettysburg for the Union army is only 3,155 and for the Confederate army is only 3,903.8

    Conditions in the Confederate armies were probably worse generally than those for the Union army but the statistics were apparently destroyed in a fire in Richmond.9 As to civilian casualties from disease during the Civil War, especially in the South where most of the fighting occurred--no one seems to know.

    In a well-written and moving book entitled Civil War Medicine, the author Stewart Brooks wrote:

Surprising perhaps to the layman but not to the student of history, disease was the great killer of the war. As one soldier wrote, "These Big Battles is not as Bad as the fever." Of the Federal dead, roughly three out of five died of disease, and of the Confederates, perhaps two out of three. During the first year, a third of the Union army was on sick call, and probably an even higher figure obtained South. Intestinal infections, such as typhoid and "chronic diarrhea," and "inflammation of the lungs" headed the list. Indeed, diarrhea and dysentery became more vicious as the fighting progressed.10

A major cause of the high incidence of disease was the failure to take hygiene and sanitation seriously. Prison camps were, of course, terrible but apparently the camps where regular soldiers, i.e. not prisoners, spent months in the field were not that much better. Brooks gives us the following description of conditions in the camps generally.

In the beginning, and to an unhealthy extent throughout the war, the typical inductee on arriving in camp felt as free as a bird and lived like one. Few recruits bothered to use the slit-trench latrines (and those who did usually forgot to shovel dirt over the feces) and most urinated just outside the tent--and after sundown, in the street. Garbage was everywhere, rats abounded, and dead cats and dogs turned up in the strangest places. The emanations of slaughtered cattle and kitchen offal together with the noxious effluvia from the seething latrines and infested tents produced an olfactory sensation which has yet to be duplicated in the Western Hemisphere.
 
As for water--and seldom was there enough--any source would do in the early camps. Frequently, it was so muddy and fetid the men held their noses when they drank the stuff. In many instances, the heavy rains washed fecal material directly into the supply with disastrous consequences. However, in time, water came to be regarded generally as a source of disease and attempts were made to secure wholesome supplies. The better outfits even progressed to the point of boiling befouled water--visibly befouled of course.
 
The United States Sanitary Commission was not long in recognizing these deplorable conditions as a threat to the Cause and dedicated itself to their eradication. By placing the matter squarely before the public and military, it paved the way for the institution of corrective measures relating to sanitation and hygiene. The Commission insisted that the bulk of sickness stemmed from filthy army installations and in no uncertain terms held the regimental brass responsible. Above all, it carried through with its proposals and admonitions via publications and workers and inspectors in the field. Nothing of such force was operative among the Southern armies, nevertheless some improvement was to be noted when conditions permitted. Although the camps tended to improve, it is open to question whether the same can be said of personal hygiene. The shortage of water and soap notwithstanding, this was mainly a case of poor education, carelessness, ignorance or, perhaps more to the point, the rural ways of the time. Among the officers, who usually represented the aristocracy, the rate of sickness ran, one-half that of the enlisted men. Again, the sickness rate for the Western theater--among the men of the frontier--tended to run double that of the Eastern.
 
The salutary effects of good sanitation and hygiene are severely compromised in the face of poor nutrition, and bad food was the rule. . . .11

It is hardly a surprise that Americans know even less about a foreign war, albeit one in which America had a major role, but where Americans were generally far removed from the areas of greatest misery except at the very end.

    Those who moralize about the piles of dead at Bergen-Belsen and Dachau should consider Andersonville where 7,712 men died in six months out of an average of only 19,453 held. The Northern prison camps were also terrible. The "average number" of Confederates held in prisons by the North is 40,815 of whom 18,784 died.12 Only 252 Confederates held in Northern prisons died from wounds whereas 5,965 died from diarrhea and dysentery.13

    For the Mexican War (1846-48), the ratio of fatalities from disease to fatalities from wounds is even worse. 1,549 were killed or died from their wounds; 10,951 died of disease.14

    During the Crimean War (1854-56), 12,604 men in the French army died from wounds whereas 59,815 died from sickness. For the English, 4,602 died from wounds whereas 17,225 died from sickness. By contrast, although 35,671 Russians died from wounds, only 37,454 died from sickness.15

    Unfortunately, when war has ended, the misery of disease and its full extent is quickly forgotten. Medals for diarrhea and fever will not inspire new generations of young men to risk their lives for their country.

    Diarrhea and dysentery, as well as typhoid, are all spread through contaminated water. Revisionists have generally not been aware of the importance of water contamination except for typhoid. In reality, all three of these diseases are extremely dangerous, especially in wartime when large numbers of people often live in camps with primitive sanitation and water supplies. During peacetime, one can afford the luxury of burial in sealed caskets or perhaps even the kind of watertight "body bags" that were used in the Vietnam War. However, in World War 2 this was a luxury which the Germans could not afford as a rule, even for their own people. As a preventive measure, the cremation of the dead was entirely appropriate to protect against all three of these deadly diseases.

    In addition, elaborate water purification measures were employed at Birkenau, for example, where one can still see nine large water treatment tanks within 200 yards of Kremas 2 and 3. The life-saving purpose of these tanks is deliberately misrepresented by the Auschwitz Museum authorities today by a nearby placard stating that these facilities were "intended to produce driving gas from human excrements." The seriousness of any such intent on the part of the Nazis is refuted by the absence of roofs over these tanks either today or during the war as well as by the elaborate internal structures for filtering and settling of solids within the tanks.

    The bodies of men who have died or are near death from diarrhea or dysentery do not look any different if they were in a German concentration camp or in a Civil War prison camp or were part of a disease ridden army under Grant or Lee or Napoleon. They are not a pleasant sight. There are, unfortunately, relatively few pictures of sick soldiers from before World War II but they are available if one searches, even for the Civil War, and they are every bit as awful as anything from Bergen-Belsen.

Typhus

Typhus during the Civil War was apparently not the great problem that it has been historically in Europe.

    To get some idea as to the historical importance of typhus, one should read Prinzing's Epidemics Resulting from Wars16 or some of the French or German works of the last century about Napoleon's Russian campaign.

    One discussion which is particularly meaningful for this analysis is by Dr. Wilhelm Pfannenstiel, who accompanied Kurt Gerstein to Belzec and Treblinka in August of 1942. Pfannenstiel was Director of the Institute for Hygiene at the University of Marburg an der Lahn and a major (Obersturmbannfuehrer) in the SS. According to the "Statement of Kurt Gerstein," Pfannenstiel made a speech while in Treblinka in which he said the staff had performed "a great duty, a duty so useful and necessary" and "Looking at the bodies of these Jews one understands the greatness of your good work!"

    That Pfannenstiel made a speech complementing the staff at Treblinka is hardly surprising. However, the meaning and content of his speech in Treblinka was probably quite similar, to the speech he gave only a year and a half later in Bremen on January 10, 1944 from which the following is an excerpt.17

The accounts which we have about the spread of pestilence as a result of the Napoleonic wars are shocking: Because of the massive movements of troops through Germany, because of the quartering of the troops in houses of the civilian population and because of the economic consequences of the continental blockade, the groundwork after 1800 was especially well-prepared for the spread of epidemics. Russian troop masses brought what was at the time called 'war-typhoid'--which included paratyphoid, dysentery and similar diseases, but above all typhus--to Eastern Germany. The French contaminated not only Western Germany but all of Western Europe including Spain with 'war-typhoid.' Even in Sweden there were terrible epidemics. Only England remained untouched by the epidemics because of her position as an island.

   The catastrophe which befell the army of Napoleon, which had originally numbered 500,000 men, was completely sealed with pestilence. During the initial advance, in one battle, four-fifths of the men became casualties from disease. In Moscow, which was rich in provisions, the soldiers recovered again. But then, after the burning of Moscow when the 80,000 men of the French army had to return over the infested military roads, they were almost totally wiped out from dysentery, typhoid and typhus. In Smolensk, the number of troops who had to remain behind from typhoid and dysentery rose to 15,000. In Wilna of 30,000 captured French troops, 25,000 had succumbed to disease. Among the civilian population in Wilna at that time, 55,000 fatalities were reported in half a year.

   The massing of troops before Leipzig brought new heavy outbreaks of epidemic. A report from Reils to Freiherr vom Stein describes the terrible conditions which arose primarily from the lack of medical care and military hospitals:

Leipzig, October 1813 -- Your Excellency has assigned me to submit an account about my findings regarding the military hospitals for the Allied armies on this side of the Elbe . . . I found approximately 20,000 wounded and sick warriors of all nations in Leipzig. The wildest imagination could not invent so lurid a picture of misery as I found in the reality before me . . . The wounded were lying either in gloomy dens in which amphibians would not have found enough oxygen or in schools with windows which had no glass and in high ceiling churches in which the chill in the air increased proportionally as the foulness diminished . . .
  In those places they lie in layers like so many tons of herring, all still in the bloody garments in which they had been carried from the heat of battle. Of the 20,000 wounded not a single one has a shirt, bedsheet, blanket, cover, straw sack or bedstead. . . . Wounded who can not raise themselves to an upright position must discharge feces and urine under themselves and putrefy in their own excrement. For those who can get up, open tubs are available but these overflow on all sides because they are not carried outdoors. In Petri street there was one such tub next to another which was used to deliver the midday soup. This neighborliness between food and human wastes must certainly produce such nausea that it can only be overcome by the fiercest hunger. The most hideous example of this occurred at the clothing market. The loading platform was covered with a row of such overflowing tubs whose stagnant contents were slowly oozing over the steps. It was impossible to bring oneself through this cascade of slops and force oneself to the entrance from the streetside . . .
  I close my account with the most horrible scene which drove chills through my limbs and shattered my spirit. On the open field of the public school, I found a mountain consisting of garbage and the corpses of my compatriots. There they lay, naked and being eaten by dogs and rats as if they had been lawbreakers and homicidal arsonists.
  I appeal to your excellency's humanity and to your love of my king and his people--help our brave ones, help soon, for every wasted minute is an act of murder.

   We do not wish to deny that in this war on the enemy's side, for instance, in that hell which we inflicted upon the Poles in the pocket of Kutno, conditions in the Polish emergency hospitals were not very much different.

   In all war until the middle of the 19th century, fatalities from disease were on the average six times as high as those inflicted by weapons. It was only in the War of 1870/71 that, for the first time in world history, the number of fatalities from disease was smaller. It was only half the total number killed. In the world war of 1914/18 the fatalities from disease were only one-tenth the number killed by weapons.

   The recently deceased tropical hygiene specialist Muehlens comments: 'If there were any victors in this war, then it was the doctors and hygienists and those who faithfully assisted them. They saved thousands upon thousands through efforts from disease and death from epidemics.'

   During the First World War the German army and above all the German people remained almost totally protected from larger epidemics. The reason for this astounding fact is to be found in the fact that even before the war, thanks primarily to the scientific work of mainly German researchers, especially Robert Koch (whose 100th birthday we already celebrated on December 11, 1943) and his students, who discovered and brought to public attention the most important disease carriers, their means of transmission and the possible ways to combat them. During the campaign it developed, thanks to the scientific work which was conducted in the field examinaing stations as well as in the epidemiological branch, an additional series of discoveries was made in the area of causative agents of disease and their modes of transmission. So it was that Paul Uhlenhuth, the recipient of the first Behring Prize, discovered the carrier which occurs with jaundice, namely the often fatal Weil disease (a waterborne spirochete which is infected through rat feces and carried to humans in the hot summer months.) The Vohlynian disease again gave us trouble in southern France where it afflicted soldiers who had been bathing in rivers even though they had been warned by the civilian population that to bathe there in the hot season would make them sick. Also it was established once and for all that humans were infected by the classical typhus as well as the Vohlynian or five-day fever only through the feces of infested clothes lice. Consequently an urgent need to construct appropriate delousing facilities was recognised to work as a filter and effectively prevent the spreading of this wartime disease into the territory of the Reich. While studying typhus, many a scientist--for instance, the Marburg student of Emil von Behring, Paul Roemer--came to his death. The recognition that European relapsing fever is also transmitted by lice and can be treated with Salvarsan, which is also effective against syphilis, saved the lives of thousands of Turkish soldiers in the Dardanelles campaign. They were treated by our present tropical hygienist in the military medical academy, surgeon general Prof. Dr. Rodenwaldt.

   During World War 1, a number of germs were discovered in the feces as well as the soil which (if transmitted into open wounds) would cause gasodemia and other equally serious wound infections. Without any doubt, war has here furthered the bacteriological research as well. The new discoveries were of utmost importance for the armies.

   However, there still were epidemics and illnesses which one could not master. Foremost among them was the bacillus dysentery which must be regarded as the "primary war epidemic of the world war." This disease increased rather than decreased and retained its high mortality rate. Even amoebic dysentery caused considerable casualties which were so great among the English at Gallipoli that they contributed to the abandonment of this Churchill-inspired campaign.

   Typhus and dysentery are the diseases which give us the most trouble in this war in addition to the venereal diseases and malaria. In peace time, we did not have to fear the outbreak of major epidemics. But, the moment we crossed the borders with our armies, we entered areas in which (as for example in Poland) there was little trace of a prepared peacetime practice of defensive hygiene. It was only there that the first contact with the disease pathogens was made. And with the increase in the number of people who remained healthy, but who carried the germs, the introduction of diseases into the Reich was assured.

   Therefore, above anything else we must prevent any contact with foreign disease material through hygienic and prophylactic measures. Above all else, we must inoculate our soldiers and all medical personnel as widely as possible against all likely disease germs so that as far as possible, no casualties from illness will occur. How many millions of lives of recently wounded soldiers have been saved through prophylactic serum inoculation against tetanus cannot be measured. Today we even have vaccines which (for example, upon conscription into the Wehrmacht) could probably give lifelong immunity against tetanus. Also, in the development of vaccines against typhus and against dysentery this war has once again brought great progress. Vaccines against typhus from lice intestines, from chicken eggs, from rabbit lungs and from mice lungs are produced in gigantic quantities in large, newly constructed institutes, for example, in Cracow and Lemberg (Lvov). The inoculated cannot be protected completely against contracting the disease but they are protected against death from the typhus. The other kinds of typhus which are occasionally observed in the south of Greece, such as the so-called "murine" typhus which is carried by the feces of rats including their other parasites, or the so-called "tick typhus" from the brown dog tick are, despite the high fever, far less harmful to people than the "classical" louseborne typhus. The vaccinations against the classic typhus have been effective against the rare rat typhus but not against the tick typhus. Here one can protect oneself best by prohibiting troops in tick fever infested areas from keeping dogs, which can be carriers of other tropical diseases as well.

   German hygienic science is also in the process of developing effective vaccines against dysentery. To control dysentery it is of the utmost importance to make human waste products harmless and to not give flies any opportunity to carry dysentery bacillus from feces to food. This is an especially important consideration in the construction of latrines. The East African campaign taught us in this regard about the very useful smoke latrines, the present war about the drill hole latrines which makes the transfer of disease from feces practically impossible.17

Germany at War's End--the Wild West and the Hordes of Genghis Khan

Although great progress had been made in military medicine as well as medicine in general between the American Civil War and World War 2, what use was all that amidst the chaos which reigned on the territory of the loser, particularly in Eastern Europe, near the end of the war? Should anyone be surprised that after years of intense bombardment of civilian targets, to the extent that journalists agreed that Germany's cities looked like the face of the moon, the conditions to which people had been reduced were comparable to those from which the world had supposedly advanced in only eighty years?

    Perhaps the best discussion of conditions at the end of World War 2 in Germany is by John E. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology at the Harvard University School of Public Health. I hesitate to give so many details about an author but it is probably necessary to establish the fact that the excerpts which follow are not from someone who can be easily branded as another pro-German revisionist. The passages which follow were published in 1948 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science:18

(5) Foreigners in the Rhineland. . . .
 
The whole area seethed with foreign peoples, conscript laborers moving this way and that and in all directions, hoping to reach their homes, in search of food, seeking shelter. Most of the typhus was within this group and they carried the disease with them. They moved along the highways and in country lanes--now a dozen Roumanians pulling a cart loaded with their remaining belongings; here a little band of Frenchmen working their way toward France, there some Netherlanders, or perhaps Belgians; and everywhere, the varied nationalities of the East--Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Russians. They moved mostly on foot, halted, then gathered in great camps of sometimes 15,000 or more, extemporized, of primitive sanitation, crowded, and with all too little sense of order or cleanliness.
 
These were the people where typhus predominated, more than a half million of them in the Rhineland, wearied with the war, undernourished, poorly clothed and long inured to sanitary underprivilege and low level hygiene. Add to this shifting population the hundreds of released political prisoners, often heavily infected with typhus but happily far fewer in numbers; the German refugees, first moving ahead of our troops and then sifting back to their homes through the American lines. Rarely if ever has a situation existed so conducive to the spread of typhus.
 
Typhus fever in a stable population is bad enough. It has demonstrated its potentialities in both war and peace. The Rhineland in those days of March, 1945, could scarcely be believed by those who saw it--it is beyond the appreciation of those who did not. It was Wild West, the hordes of Genghis Khan, the Klondike gold rush, and Napoleon's retreat from Moscow all rolled up into one. Such was the typhus problem in the Rhineland.

The Epidemiologic Situation

The great assault of the Rhine River got under way on March 24, the British 21st Army Group and the U. S. Ninth Army to the north, the First and Third Armies in the center, and somewhat later the U. S. Seventh Army and the First French Army to the South. All found typhus fever; the British scarcely any, the Ninth some, the First and Third a great deal, while in the south the U. S. Seventh and the First French Armies again encountered relatively little.
 
The first really serious condition appeared when Buchenwald concentration camp was occupied by the Third Army on April 12th. The British soon uncovered Belsen camp, with still more typhus and misery. Then followed in order Dachau, Flossenburg and finally Mauthausen, all with hundreds of cases of typhus fever and sometimes thousands.
 
These concentration camps with their political prisoners and their typhus fever would have been problem enough. Added to the situation were millions of conscript laborers suddenly released from employment and from camps that were many times typhus infested. They scattered throughout the country. Many were gathered in large improvised camps. They spread typhus widely. . . .
 
. . . Germany in the spring months of April and May was an astounding sight, a mixture of humanity travelling this way and that, homeless, often hungry and carrying typhus with them.

Special Epidemiological Problems

The outbreaks in concentration camps and prisons made up the great bulk of typhus infection encountered in Germany. Each presented an individual epidemiologic problem. That of Dachau is illustrative. The Dachau camp, located in Bavaria about 5 kilometers north of Munich, was one of the largest and certainly one of the most notorious of the Nazi installations housing political prisoners. It was liberated by units of the U. S. Seventh Army on May 1, 1945.
 
An estimated 35,000-40,000 prisoners were found in the camp, living under conditions bad even for a German camp of this kind and worse than any other that came into American hands. Extreme filthiness, louse infestation and overcrowding prevailed throughout the camp buildings. Several car-loads of human bodies were found packed in box cars in the railroad yards adjacent to the camp, the vestiges of a shipment of prisoners from camps farther north who were transferred to Dachau in the late days of the war to escape the advancing United States troops.
 
The number of patients with typhus fever at the time the camp was first occupied will never be known. Days passed before a census of patients could be accomplished. Several hundreds were found in the prison hospital, but their number was small compared with the patients who continued to live with their comrades in the camp barracks, bedridden and unattended, lying in bunks 4 tiers high with 2 and sometimes 3 men to a narrow shelf-like bed; the sick and the well; crowded beyond all description; reeking with filth and neglect--and everywhere the smell of death.
 
During the first few days little more could be done with the limited staff that was available than make the rounds of the barracks, pulling out the dead and the dying...
 
Available records failed to demonstrate how many of the 4,032 patients of the Dachau epidemic were actually ill with typhus at the time the camp came under American jurisdiction, how many developed the disease within the succeeding 14-day incubation period, . . .
 
Even the appreciable figures cited fail to include all who contracted typhus fever in Dachau concentration camp. Freed from the sort of existence they had been living, it was no wonder that those strong enough should attempt to escape. Many did, and scattered widely through the nearby country, especially to the region south of Munich. Some were actually in the clinical stages of typhus fever and many were incubating the disease. They were later found with typhus fever in other areas.
 
The camp was promptly quarantined. Hospitals were moved in to augment the small prison hospital. Case finding teams initiated control work through survey of the surrounding area for former inmates developing typhus after leaving. The dusting of prisoners with DDT powder was started May 3, 1945, and completed May 8.

Summary and Conclusions

Conditions in Western Europe in many respects favored a much greater spread of typhus fever than actually occurred. Germany was in chaos. The destruction of whole cities and the path left by advancing armies produced a disruption of living conditions contributing to the spread of the disease. Sanitation was low grade, public utilities were seriously disrupted, food supply and food distribution were poor, housing was inadequate and order and discipline were everywhere lacking. Still more important, a shifting of populations was occurring such as few countries and few times have experienced.
 
Native Germans, dislodged from their homes and often moving long distances to escape the enemy, were finding their way back to their native lands. The roads, the countryside, were full of released German prisoners of war who lacked transportation and were their to their homes on foot. . . .
 
Two important factors served to limit the extent of the outbreak. The most significant was the time of the year that allied troops entered Germany. Had this been December instead of March, as would have happened except for disrupted military plans, the problem would have been much more serious. Von Rundstedt's Battle of the Bulge, although of serious import militarily, had the favorable aspect of postponing contact with typhus until the spring months.
 
Spring brought a lower potential of louse infestation, it permitted life outdoors instead of crowding within existing habitations, and the movement of displaced persons and refugees was facilitated, with consequent greater dispersal. Dispersal of course, had advantages and disadvantages. It tended to disseminate infection broadly--it limited concentrated outbreaks.
 
Early repatriation of all Russian nationals, both prisoners of war and conscripted labor, was undertaken in May and completed in June. A large part of available American transport was turned to this end, with the result that thousands of Russians were repatriated every day. They were the population groups with the heaviest incidence of typhus.
 
Under any interpretation of governing circumstances, much credit must be given to the efficiency of recently developed methods of typhus control. The value of delousing through dusting with DDT, and the usefulness of typhus vaccine were tried and tested on a scale greater than ever before and under conditions epidemiologically more conducive to extensive and continued spread of the disease. The results attained in the Naples epidemic were confirmed and extended.
 
No single factor contributed more to the satisfactory end of the outbreak than that never in the course of the epidemic were the fundamental supplies of DDT powder and vaccine lacking. Occasional difficulties arose in local distribution, but the supply system was such and the stock piles so great that they were promptly remedied.
 
The middle of July saw Western Europe return to a satisfactory situation of low grade typhus endemicity.18

Because of their overwhelming air power, the Western Allies had been able to wreak enormous havoc upon Germany, particularly her cities, long before any ground troops were engaged near those cities. Cities which had taken a thousand years to build were destroyed in a few hours long before a single Allied tank or infantryman appeared.

    In a recent best-selling book by the first man to break the sound barrier entitled Yeager: An Autobiography the author described how in the Fall of 1944 his fighter group was

...assigned an area fifty miles by fifty miles and ordered to strafe anything that moved. . . . We weren't asked how we felt zapping people. It was a miserable, dirty mission, but we all took off on time and did it. . . . We were ordered to commit an atrocity, pure and simple, but the brass who approved this action probably felt justified because wartime Germany wasn't easily divided between 'innocent civilians' and its military machine. The farmer tilling his potato field might have been feeding German troops.19

This occurred, incidentally, at a time when there was no reasonable doubt about the eventual outcome of the war nor any danger to the United States. The farmer tilling his potato field might have also been feeding concentration camp inmates or prisoners of war--how could one possibly tell the difference? How can Americans condemn Germans for not giving enough food to prisoners when they themselves were deliberately killing farmers growing potatoes in their fields?

    One can well imagine that during the last months of the war--when entire German cities were destroyed almost daily--many German medical or supply personnel, who would have otherwise gone to perform assigned duties at concentration camps, simply felt that Germany's enemies could fend for themselves. How can anyone realistically blame them? How can anyone imagine that they would risk their lives under almost constant air attack to get to the camps, there to face death from disease and, sooner or later, the vindictiveness of the inmates and the liberators who had a major part, at the very least, in bringing about the atrocious conditions in the first place?

    As far as conditions essential for the health and survival of large populations are concerned, the clock had been turned back--in some respects, as far back as the Middle Ages. By the Winter and early Spring of 1945 in Germany, tens of millions of people were fleeing into an area so small that, even in the best of times, enough food could not be produced to sustain the normal population. Casualties were in the millions. All major cities were in ruins. The fact that Germans facing extinction in these circumstances neglected the health and nutrition of many of their most bitter enemies in concentration camps should not be at all surprising.

Typhus in Eastern Europe

Typhus in recent centuries has afflicted primarily the countries of Eastern Europe during wartime, especially during cold weather when soldiers and civilians are least inclined to endure the brief discomfort of bathing or cleaning their clothing. The misery that arises from such personal behavior is, of course, compounded by the social upheaval and movement of large masses of people that war tends to bring with it.

    The misery is probably unimaginable to a Western European or an American. Some idea may be derived, however, from the following text from the same British doctor who described the makeshift delousing tunnels:20

Predisposing Conditions

Louse-borne typhus fever is an acute infectious disease lasting from twelve to sixteen days and characterized by a continued temperature, a generalized maculopapular rash which may become haemorrhagic, severe toxaemia, and marked nervous manifestations. The disease is carried by lice and spreads with extreme rapidity especially through a badly nourished population. Thus in Russia during the period 1919 to 1922 the estimated number of cases was 10,000,000, with 3,000,000 deaths, in a population of 120,000,000. These are stupendous figures. Their scale can be realized to some extent by recalling that in the much-described typhus epidemic in London in 1856 only 1,062 cases were recorded as treated in the London Fever Hospital out of a population of 3,000,000 whereas in Russia in the year 1921 alone there were 4,000,000 cases in a population of 120,000,000. These figures can, of course, only be approximate, as many cases diagnosed as typhus were in reality instances of relapsing fever; on the other hand a vast number of cases of typhus were never admitted to hospital and so remained unrecorded. Of the cases admitted to hospital very many were never notified by the Russian medical officers owing to pressure of work. So uncertain were the statements that when we went into a new district to survey the amount of typhus present we found it more useful to base our estimate on the number of women with recently shaved heads seen in the streets, than to rely upon notification figures. All cases on admission to hospital for typhus were closely shaved and consequently it was possible to sit in a cafe and determine the proportion of women with closely cropped heads to the general population and so to estimate roughly the amount of typhus in the region.
 
Epidemic typhus fever, is, classically, associated with famine and overcrowding, but there is a third factor which, to my mind, is perhaps of even greater importance, namely, widespread movements of military or civilian populations bringing non-immunes into a district where the disease is endemic or carrying the disease into a typhus-free region. A third possibility is that such movements may introduce into an endemic region either a new strain of the disease or one of enhanced virulence. The first mode of infection I saw well demonstrated in the epidemic in North China two years ago which was due to the introduction of masses of non-immunes with the Army into areas where the disease was endemic. The second method occurred on the return of Polish prisoners of war to Poland from Siberia in 1919-1922. These men, women and children had been heavily infected with typhus in Russia, and passed into Poland at the rate of tens of thousands a day, going to regions in which the disease either was already endemic or did not exist previously; in both cases widespread epidemics resulted.
 
Apart from mass movements of the kinds instanced above, a striking feature of epidemics is the amount of local movements of the population that they initiate. Once typhus is really established in a district, fear of contracting the disease, combined with terror of the appearance and acts of delirious patients, is soon widespread. Transport of food and fuel quickly breaks down, starvation threatens, the sick are abandoned, often in the roads, the houses are deserted and the terrified population flees from the infected area into a neighboring village or another part of the town as the case may be, carrying the disease with them. Too often the hospital staffs may flee with the others. 20

But there is even more horror. In Russia during the early 1920's conditions had deteriorated so badly that even cannibalism had become widespread. Mothers murdered and then ate their children; adults murdered and then ate their parents. 26 people who had resorted to cannibalism and 7 others who had sold human flesh were identified by one Russian doctor alone on the basis of his own personal observations. In the town of Samara, the entire mental hospital was set aside for people who had committed cannibalism. The German doctor who reported such incidents in 1923 wrote that such acts were not unusual and attributed the practice to the psychological deterioration of people suffering from protracted hunger and disease. One mother, for example, had gone into a rage as her murdered child was taken away from her and had cried out that it was her child, she had borne it, and that no one had the right to eat it except for her. Interestingly enough, the German doctor thought it significant that the people who had committed such acts were all native Russians from the lower social strata and that "there were no German colonists, no Jews and no members of any other nationality among them."21

    As I write this, there are reports in the press of mass starvation in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. A UN relief official has just explained that the people are already eating cats, dogs and rats but that they have not yet resorted to cannibalism. Her remarks suggest that to people who deal with famine, incidents of cannibalism are not unusual.

    One hesitates to write about such behavior for fear of sensationalizing an already morbid subject, but it is probably necessary to convey the depths to which human beings can be brought by the conditions which must have existed, at least in some places, in Germany and Poland at the end of World War 2.

Typhus Vaccine

One interesting fact which Pfannenstiel discussed in the text quoted earlier was that in 1944, the Germans still did not have a totally effective anti-typhus vaccine but only a vaccine which "protected against death from the typhus"--in other words, they only had a vaccine which reduced the severity of typhus when a vaccinated person contracted the disease. American troops were repeatedly inoculated against typhus which suggests that the American vaccine was not totally effective either. The major line of defense against typhus, for the Americans as well as for the Germans, was thorough and repeated delousing.

    The SS personnel records for Dr. Josef Mengele show that he contracted typhus while at Auschwitz even though he, as a doctor, would certainly have been given preferred access to any available vaccine. There were probably some bad experiences with the German anti-typhus vaccine which is illustrated by the fact that even after the war at Belsen where a German Army medical team had been put to work caring for the sick at the "human laundry," at least one German doctor had refused to let himself be vaccinated by the British against typhus and had apparently told the German nurses not to take the vaccine either. About a month later, 32 of the 48 German nurses were in bed with typhus.22

    The German wartime medical literature abounds with articles about German research into the development of anti-typhus vaccines and treatment. No doubt, there were many experiments upon concentration inmates in this regard which did provide a basis for some atrocity stories after the war. The principal beneficiaries of this research, however, were the inmates themselves since it was they who were in the greatest danger from typhus.

Typhus and the Jews

The German wartime medical literature makes it quite clear that many Germans in positions of authority regarded the Jews as a major source of typhus infestation in Poland. The articles by Zimmermann and Ruppert (Appendices C & D) are typical of material that can be found in the German literature. Of course, because these articles are highly critical of Jews as a group and were written by Germans living under Nationalsocialism, many readers will simply dismiss them as anti-Semitic propaganda. The charge of racial bias certainly comes to mind when one reads Ruppert's colorful descriptions of Polish Jews, their primitive personal habits and their abhorrence of simple hygiene. The Zimmermann article is, however, much more difficult to dismiss in this manner. In any event, regardless of the motivations of the two German authors, confirmation of many of their observations can be found in credible non-Germans sources.

    In a lengthy article published by the Royal Society of Medicine, E. W. Goodall, one of Britain's most highly regarded epidemiologists, described his experiences in Poland in the Summer of 1919:23

The city of Warsaw had at the time of the epidemic a population of about 700,000 persons. I understood that this figure did not include any of the German troops, but represented the civil, Polish, population only. The epidemic started in the Jewish quarter of the city, and at first spread chiefly amongst the Jews. According to Dr. Trenkner the same thing happened at Lodz, of which city he was medical officer before he was appointed to Warsaw in 1917, and in many other places in Poland. Dr. Janiszewski confirms this statement. In the Warsaw epidemic, 73 per cent. of the cases occurred amongst the Jews, and 23 per cent. of these in one particular part of the Jewish quarter where the population was most dense. In the other quarters the number of cases was in proportion to the number of Jews amongst the inhabitants. The Jews form 30 per cent. of the population of Warsaw. Roughly, the number of cases in the different districts was in proportion to the density of population, and the density is highest in the parts of the city inhabited by Jews.

Since the epidemic of 1917-18 typhus has become more widely diffused through Warsaw, but the 1919 epidemic, if it can be called such, was comparatively slight. Lately (1919) the Christians have been attacked in larger numbers than the Jews. The attack-rate of the 1917-18 epidemic was between 3 per cent. and 4 per cent., and the fatality was about 9 per cent. It is a curious fact that the fatality amongst the Jews was half that of the Christians, 7 per cent. as against 14 per cent. Dr. Trenkner accounted for this difference by the greater care and attention the Jews bestowed upon their sick. They also called in medical advice earlier than did the Christians, so that their patients came under treatment sooner.

As regards age-incidence I was supplied with the following figures relating to 5,747 consecutive cases occurring at the end of 1917:--

Age	Cases	Deaths	% Dead
0 - 10 10 - 20 20 - 30 30 - 40 40 - 50 50 - 60 60 - 70 70 - 80	908 2,407 1,035 717 513 112 50 5	7 29 43 71 86 59 19 3	0.7 1.2 4.1 10.0 16.7 52.6 38.0 60.0
Total	5,747	317	5.5

It is evident that these figures relate to a period of the epidemic when the fata1ity [rate] was below the mean. . . .

Zawiercie

At the time of this epidemic the population of Zawiercie was about 44,000, so that the attack-rate was about 3 per cent. From official figures which were given to me it appears that the Jews formed 19 per cent. of the population. According to Dr. Ryder the Christians were attacked in a larger proportion than the Jews, as shown in the following table, which deals with about three-quarters of the epidemic and with the first six months of 1919: . . .
 
The Jews were said to be less cleanly than the Christians, and from what I saw of them I should say that this was true. But there were reasons for thinking that there was more concealment of cases amongst the Jews; the authorities had had some trouble in getting certain of the Jewish medical attendants to notify...

Causes of the Prevalence of Typhus

It is not difficult to account for the wide prevalence of typhus in Poland since the beginning of the war on general grounds. Constant warfare, the movements of troops, the influx of refugees from the districts which were the actual scenes of fighting, the return of prisoners of war, especially since the armistice, in both directions across the country, the lack of soap and clothing and of medical and surgical necessities in the country districts and in many of the towns the difficulty of obtaining sufficient water, would be factors conducing to the prevalence and dissemination of lice, that is to say of typhus, in a country where the disease had been endemic before the war. Medical men and nurses have been very scarce, and there has been a deficiency of food for the poorer classes, especially in the East and South-east. The figures I gave at the commencement of this paper showed that typhus had been especially prevalent since the armistice. There is no doubt that when the Germans and Austrians established themselves in Poland in 1915, they both, and especially the former, used their utmost endeavours to keep infectious diseases under control, not from any love they bore to the Poles, but with the object of keeping their armies free from sickness. There can also be little doubt that to a certain extent, especially in the country and smaller towns, they succeeded. In spite however of their efforts there was the large epidemic in Warsaw in 1917-18. Dr. Trenkner attributed the epidemic chiefly to the action of the Jews. Much smuggling, especially of food, went on from outside into the city. The smugglers, who were chiefly Jews, hid and slept together in little groups in sheds and barns. Members of the groups became infected with typhus and carried the disease into the city. Dr. Trenkner on various occasions traced fresh cases to group infection in this way. Overcrowding and want of cleanliness did the rest. In Zawiercie the action by the Germans seems to have had more effect, and there was not any great prevalence of disease before they left. In that part of Poland which I visited--viz., the county of Bendzin, typhus had become especially rampant since the armistice, as was exemplified in the Zawiercie epidemic. Directly the Germans left there was an unrestrained movement of population to and fro between the town and surrounding country; released and escaped prisoners of war began to return, especially from the East; and refugees flocked to the West from the devastated Eastern districts. . . . The Germans had been severely thorough in their sanitary measures. They set up de-lousing stations and forced the inhabitants to be de-loused at the point of the bayonet. When they left compulsion ceased and personal cleanliness diminished.
 
. . . . Although in Warsaw and other places the Jews suffered more severely than the Christians, it is doubtful, in my opinion, that they so suffered because they were Jews: the more probable reason is because they were more densely crowded together, for, as has been mentioned, the Jews were less attacked in Zawiercie than the Christians, and as far as I could see from inspection of houses in different quarters of the town, amongst the poorer classes, there was as much overcrowding amongst Christians and Jews.
 
Adverse, however, as the circumstances have been in Poland, during and since the war, it must not be supposed that the authorities have not attempted to deal with the epidemic. As far back as April, 1918, that is to say, six months before the Germans quitted Warsaw, Dr.Trenkner made a great effort to cleanse the houses and their inhabitants in the worst and most crowded parts of the city, a proceeding to which the Germans offered no objections, as of course such a measure was conducive to keeping their army free from infection. But the task was a very difficult one as the people were by no means anxious to help the authorities. If the inhabitants of a certain square for instance got wind that their houses were going to be visited by the sanitary squad, they cleared out and locked their rooms up. However, this obstacle was overcome by making unexpected visits very early in the morning, taking the passports away from the inhabitants, who were sent off to the de-lousing station, with the instruction that they would not receive their passports back again until they produced the certificate that they had been deloused. Meanwhile, their homes were disinfected and cleaned. . . .23

The percentages given above for the incidence of typhus among Jews are actually quite close, almost identical in some instances, to those given by Zimmermann (see Appendix C) a generation later. It is, therefore, more than likely that the German authors were accurate also.

    A possible explanation for the high incidence of typhus among Jews may be their role as merchants of old clothing. For example, in Prinzing's classic work Epidemics Resulting from Wars, the author discusses the possible cause for the spread of bubonic plague and typhus in Eastern Europe during the Russo-Turkish War of 1769-72. After every trace of the pestilence had disappeared except for military hospitals, the reemergence of the plague later on was traced to the purchase by a Jew of a fur coat in a military hospital in Jassy.24 Later again, in Transylvania during the same war, "Jewish pedlars, who purchased clothes, furs, and war-booty in the Russian camp, likewise helped to spread the disease."25 At the end of Napoleon's Russian campaign, Prinzing tells us about the typhus epidemic in Vilna in 1812-13 which "In a short time spread throughout the city, not so much because the soldiers were quartered in private houses, as because the Jews got possession of the clothes of the dead. Of some 30,000 Jewish inhabitants, no less than 8,000 died."26

Jewish Resistance and the Torture of Bathing

The intense resistance by the local population, by Poles as well as Jews, to the public health measures that responsible authorities intended for their welfare is also evident in a remarkable, recent book entitled Typhus and Doughboys about the American military experience in post World War 1 Poland. The book is based largely upon the internal correspondence of the American Polish Typhus Relief Expedition from 1919 to 1921. The book deals at great length with the difficulties American troops encountered when they tried a variety of methods to induce people simply to bathe and have their clothes deloused either with steam or cyanide.

    The difficulties are illustrated by the following passage about the efforts of one American officer in what appears from the context to have been a predominantly Jewish community.27

The school children were next bathed and deloused, Gorman observing that 'if the older people were as enthusiastic as these children, typhus would no longer be a dread in Poland.' Unfortunately, the older people were content to live in the unimaginable dirt and filth, one old woman having been heard to cry out, 'death here in my hovel rather than the torture of bathing.'

The book is quite valuable for its insights based upon the actual correspondence of American officers. However, one should recognize that the book was written recently in an age when the foulest rubbish can be written about Poles, Germans, Austrians and even Americans with almost no hesitation at all but when criticism of Jews is almost inevitably accompanied with deep apologies. The following passage is informative nonetheless.

Dixon pointed out some difficulties with the Jews, revealing his own anti-Semitic bias. In the town of Busko, which he inspected, he reported 'there is considerable Typhus in the town particularly among the Jews. They are afraid to go to the hospital and use all means to keep the disease among them hidden.' They believed, in fact, 'that at the hospital they would not be able to live according to their religion--that they would be required to eat what the others ate--that they could never eat with their hats on and that if one of them died there he could not be buried according to his religion. This belief is being overcome and the hospital now has ten Jews as patients.' Dixon also induced local authorities in Busko to impose a fine of 500 rubles on anyone who hid or attempted to hide a case of typhus. But, he recorded, 'it did not prove very effective as the Jews, who were afraid of the hospital bribed the police and kept their sick hidden.'28

Except for Dixon's charge that Jews bribed the police, there seems no reason to believe he was biased; he seemed to be simply reporting what he saw.

    The same intense resistance to the most minimal measures which any civilized society can impose for its own survival--the simple act of accurately reporting cases of a highly contagious disease--is evident in Lucy Dawidowicz's The War Against The Jews for 1939-42 for the Warsaw ghetto:<P9B^>29<P255D>

In the Warsaw ghetto alone, epidemic typhus was believed to have affected between 100,000 and 150,000 persons, though the official figures were barely over 15,000. The spread of disease was concealed from the Germans. Hospital cases of typhus were recorded as 'elevated fever' or pneumonia. Mainly, the stricken were treated in their homes in a massive clandestine operation, covering up the presence of the disease from German inspection teams who periodically threatened to seal off the affected areas.

The intensity of the Jewish resistance to the simple act of bathing, for the 1920's at least, is illustrated in Typhus and Doughboys by the following passage about American efforts in the town of Wlodowa:30

. . . further difficulties were in the form of considerable resistance among the population to bathe. The town's officials also vacillated, whereupon the police had to be used to compel the people to do so. Soon the town officials devised a plan whereby those persons who had been bathed were provided with a ticket and only those who possessed one could buy bread and potatoes in the stores. However, this was rather ineffective as forged tickets soon appeared and also, as Gillespie [an American first lieutenant] contemptuously charged, 'The Jews would get their tickets, alter the name on them and sell them to some other person.' Theft was not unheard of, and the Poles hired to assist the operations proved the worst offenders. This necessitated daily searches by the police.

Another passage tells us just how often the people in a largely Jewish community took baths even under American administration.

It went without saying that none of the houses had any modern sanitary conveniences. All refuse was poured into the gutters at the front door, two latrines were provided by the town but were little used. Snidow [an American first lieutenant] noted that 'in almost all of the house areas would be found after much search an open latrine which they jealously guarded from us by all kinds of disguises and camouflage as the product therefrom would be used after the harvest to put on their small patches in the outskirts of the town.' Most of the drinking water was obtained from a sluggish creek at the edge of the town, which a mill dam rendered more sluggish and sometimes covered the yards of some of the houses, turning them into 'reeking swamps.' The people were inclined to wade in the creek, as were the cattle and geese. There were a few wells, 'but all of them drained directly from the nearby latrines.' Moreover, as Snidow recounted, 'in the first preliminary council we were assured by the priest, the rabbi and mayor and later confirmed by two doctors that not a soul in the town had had a bath for over a year. This statement we considered conservative and I personally doubt if water had touched the persons of most of them since the departure of the Germans during whose occupation they were required to bathe at least once a week, when they could be caught.' There was a good community bathhouse, but the people had 'formed a horror of it' from being compelled to bathe there by the Germans, and would not use it. 31

Confirmation of the general filthiness of the Polish Jews was even given by the Jewish Chairman of the Warsaw Judenrat, Adam Czerniakow. In his diary, which has been highly praised by Raul Hilberg among others, Czerniakow wrote for May 29, 1942:

I have been going through the streets with Brodt issuing reprimands or dispensing money awards to the janitors. Considering the level of civilization in this community, the ghetto cannot be kept clean. People, unfortunately, behave like pigs. Centuries of slovenliness bear their fruit. And this is compounded by the utter misery and dire poverty. 32

After World War 2, General George S. Patton described Jews living under his military authority in southern Germany. Martin Blumenson the editor of The Patton Papers regarded these remarks as indicative of a growing anti-Semitic attitude. For September 17, 1945--five months after the liberation of the last of the German concentration camps--Patton wrote:

We drove for about 45 minutes to a Jewish camp . . . established in what had been a German hospital. The buildings were therefore in a good state of repair when the Jews arrived but were in a bad state of repair when we arrived, because these Jewish DP's or at least a majority of them, have no sense of human relationships. They decline, where practicable, to use latrines, preferring to relieve themselves on the floor . . .
 
This happened to be the feast of Yom Kippur, so they were all collected in a large wooden building which they called a synagogue. It behooved General Eisenhower to make a speech to them. We entered the synagogue which was packed with the greatest stinking bunch of humanity I have ever seen. When we got about half way up, the head rabbi, who was dressed in a fur hat similar to that worn by Henry VIII of England and in a surplice heavily embroidered and very filthy, came down and met the General. . . .
 
However, the smell was so terrible that I almost fainted and actually about three hours later lost my lunch as the result of remembering it.33

Clearly, on the basis of the preceding passages as well as Appendices C and D, there was some agreement among German doctors, British doctors, Polish doctors, American military officers and even some Jews as to the incredible filthiness of Jews in and from Poland. To some extent, the backwardness of the Polish Jews may be explained by poverty and persecution. But, whatever the cause, it is still difficult to comprehend the hysterical resistance to minimal standards of hygiene and civilized living when a modest amount of common sense should have persuaded them that it was necessary for their own survival. An attachment to a traditional lifestyle going back centuries, if not millennia, may have been regarded as vital to their religious and ethnic identity.

    In any event, it should be understood that Jews from Western countries were generally quite different in their personal habits. When these Jews were placed in camps with Polish Jews, they were as appalled as any other Westerners would have been. It does not seem fair to attribute the behavior of the Polish Jews to religion alone--but, religion may be important, nonetheless.

    Although medicine had made great progress in the years between the world war, not much progress had been made with regard to typhus. There was still no truly effective vaccine or treatment. The means for detection of typhus had been improved but that in itself did not go very far in preventing catastrophic epidemics except to alert authorities to be more stringent in their delousing of people, or of contaminated areas or trains coming from or passing through those areas. The real breakthrough came only near the end of the war with the availability of enormous quantities of DDT from the Americans for delousing.

    Regardless of the true extent of the Jewish contribution to the spread of typhus, it is certainly safe to say that the Germans authorities were absolutely sincere in their statements that the Polish Jews were a major contributing factor in the spreading of the disease. They had not only the evidence of their own doctors to support this view but that of British and Polish doctors as well. They can hardly be blamed for applying severe measures to the Jews in order to control the epidemic. The severe measures included restrictions on the movements of Jews and eventually to the construction of a wall around the entire Warsaw ghetto. These measures during wartime were entirely reasonable to control the spread of typhus, and to prevent catastrophes like those which had already occurred in Poland and Russia during and after World War 1.

    In any event, it is quite clear that the high incidence of typhus among Jews was not simply the result of persecution by the Germans, or of the confinement of Jews first in ghettoes and then in concentration camps. One of the main objectives of the camps was to maintain strict enough control upon the inmates so that typhus would at least subside if not disappear altogether. During the last months of the war, however, when typhus reappeared with a vengeance, the Germans had no choice but to maintain as tight control as they possibly could upon the inmates, to keep any of them from escaping, even if they could do little to help them. When the British took Bergen-Belsen at the request of the SS, they were appalled at what they found and considered simply moving the inmates out of the camp into neighboring dwellings.34 They quickly realized, however, that that would have only compounded the disaster.

Delousing as a Cover for Mass-Murder?

It is often claimed in the Holocaust literature that the Germans disguised their extermination facilities as delousing stations with showers and barbers and laundries in order to lull Jews into the gas chambers. From the material I have already quoted, it should be obvious that a more unlikely arrangement to lull Polish Jews into doing anything would be hard to imagine. The prospect of bathing could have only had the opposite effect. In addition to their fear of showers and bathing generally, it was inevitable that there would have also been many false rumors which could have only compounded the Jewish resistance.

    Was the visit of a highly respected professor of hygiene, Professor Pfannenstiel, to Belzec and Treblinka only for the sake of putting on a convincing disguise? His visit makes no real sense unless the purpose of these camps was to do precisely what all other Durchgangslager or transit camps were intended to do, i.e., to delouse and medically examine and possibly quarantine people who were being moved to a new location. Although specific details about Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor may no longer be available, the planning and organization in general was not a secret. The planning and organization was thoroughly described in German wartime technical journals such as Gesundheits-Ingenieur and Arbeitseinsatz und Arbeitslosenhilfe.35

    Basically, each transit camp or Durchgangslager was divided into a "clean" zone and a "dirty" zone with a strictly enforced barrier between the two zones. A delousing station straddled the boundary between the two zones at some point. Each camp was arranged so that new arrivals could only enter the "dirty" zone. To get over to the "clean" zone, they had to pass through the delousing station. Inside the delousing station, each person had to remove all of their clothing and belongings which would then be fumigated with cyanide, or steamed, or else heated with hot air while they took a shower and underwent a thorough medical examination which might include X-rays to determine their state of health and whether or not they had any contagious diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis. If they failed the exam, they might be sent back to wherever they had come from originally or they might simply be kept in a quarantine area for several weeks. If they passed, they would eventually be sent on, usually to another camp and put to work.

    Some additional details as to how people riding the trains in Eastern Europe were processed were given by a German doctor:

The large delousing facilities worked in the last years according to the following principle: The train arrives at the unclean side of the railroad station. All passengers then give their baggage on the unclean side to the baggage handlers. They are then led into the unclean changing rooms where specially constructed iron clothes hangers and linen sacks which can be boiled with valuables and flammable objects are available. After giving up the clothes hangers with their clothing, they each each receive a control token. Now they go with their boots and the sack with valuables to a short medical examination, for the sorting out (selection) of persons sick with infection, and after receiving a handtowel and soap to the showers. Here even the boots are disinfected with 5% creosol soap solution. After showering, one receives a linen suit. In the dressing room of the clean side, they wait for the calling of their control token number and then the deloused clothing is put on again. Upon leaving the delousing facility one receives a certificate and can then, after picking up one's baggage on the clean side of the baggage area, get on to the train which is waiting on the clean side of the railroad station for continuation of the trip. The entire facility is so constructed that it is impossible to go directly from an arriving train into a departing train without passing through the delousing facility. In all rooms of the facility there are, of course, medical personnel who, among other things, see to it that all flammable objects are taken out of the pockets and that all pieces of clothing and pockets are turned inside out before being hung on the hangers.

The drawings that one occasionally sees in the Holocaust literature of Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor and which we are told were drawn from memory, usually by "survivors," do bear some resemblance to the drawings in the German technical literature, especially with regard to the separation of dirty and clean zones and some kind of facility with gas chambers stradling the boundary between the two zones.

    What has apparently happened over the years is that a certain amount of truth has filtered its way through the lies and nonsense. For example, when it was claimed that the Jews were killed at Treblinka with steam--at least until the Diesel method was supposedly developed-- there was probably some truth to that story. The truth is that steam was used, but for delousing of clothing and not for murder. When the Germans referred to Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor as Durchgangslager, it was precisely because those places actually were Durchgangslager in the sense in which the Germans always used that term; the Durchgangslager were places which people had to "pass through" on their journey to some other destination.

Were the trains for the deportation of Jews fumigated?

As bad as hygienic and sanitary conditions were in the Jewish ghettoes, conditions on the trains carrying Jews must have been even worse. We are assured of this by the Holocaust literature itself. That literature abounds with stories of misery and filth on crowded railroad cars, in many cases freight cars, which were indeed used to move many Jews to the East. On the return trips back to the West, these same railroad cars would logically have been used to transport freight and people, German troops, prisoners and Eastern European workers.

    Is it conceivable that railroad cars used on one occasion to transport Jews in conditions that were even worse than those in the Jewish ghettoes would be subsequently used on the return trips to transport non-Jews back to the West without thorough delousing and cleaning? The answer must be--no! It would have been madness for the Germans not to delouse these trains. If there was ever a need to delouse a train, that need would surely have been greatest for trains that had carried Polish Jews. The mere fact that a train had come from the Warsaw ghetto where typhus had been rampant would, in itself, have been reason enough for a thorough delousing of the entire train afterwards before using it for any other purpose.

The Budapest Fumigation Plant for Mass-Murder?

How then could the knowledge of the operation of those superbly designed gas chambers, which used Zyklon-B as a matter of routine to delouse railroad trains, have been unknown to the very same Nazis who were supposedly exterminating the Jews? Furthermore, once the existence and the locations of the railroad delousing tunnels would have been known to the mass-murderers, why would they have ever again bothered to use anything else for mass-murder?

    The fact that neither the Budapest gas chamber nor any other railroad delousing tunnel, either in Hungary or anywhere else, has ever been implicated by any of the Holocaust "scholars" merely shows how twisted the Holocaust story really is. Surely, the SS would have seen the logic in using the gas chamber in Budapest to exterminate the Hungarian Jews, if extermination had ever been their intent, rather than transport the same Jewss to Auschwitz in mid-1944 when Germany was desperately trying to move troops and supplies to the Normandy invasion area. Surely they would have used the Budapest gas chamber rather than try to use "gas chambers" which were hardly more than ordinary cellars with small holes in the ceilings through which the Zyklon-B granules were dumped either onto the heads of intended victims or else down perforated sheet-metal false columns with internal spirals.

    Those claims are absurd for technical reasons alone. However, they are also absurd because of the superb technology which could have easily been employed to do the terrible deed properly. Surely, Adolf Eichmann and at least some of the people around him with their expertise in railroad transportation and scheduling would have known--the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem was, after all, largely a problem of transport even on the basis of what the Holocaust "scholars" write themselves.

    Can anyone believe that the Nazi murderers shipped hundreds of thousands of Jews away from a gas chamber which was one of the most advanced large gas chambers in the entire world, designed specifically for Zyklon-B, to kill them instead in cellar rooms which had been designed as cold-storage mortuaries but subsequently disguised as showers?

Conclusions

Despite great progress in hygiene and sanitation in the last century and despite German efforts throughout most of the war to practice good hygiene and sanitation in the concentration camps, conditions by the end of the war had deteriorated horribly. The history of the American Civil War and other wars of the last century tells us that conditions in the regular military camps of that era, not just prison camps, were appallingly similar.

    Anyone seriously interested in possible applications of Zyklon-B would have certainly read the DEGESCH advertisements and seen the large gas chambers for the fumigation of railroads and trucks. Surely anyone reading the relevant technical literature about Zyklon-B would have also read some of the detailed discussions about the same gas chambers and how they were constructed with blowers and ductwork for circulation and specially coated interior walls as well as heaters to raise the interior temperatures above 78.60 F.

    The very idea that the Germans would have constructed showers and delousing facilities in order to lull Polish Jews into gas chambers is ridiculous. Polish Jews were probably the least likely people in all of Europe, if not the world, to react calmly or peacefully to the prospect of bathing under any circumstances.

    Polish Jews were regarded by many as among the filthiest people in Europe with the most primitive personal habits. They lived in some of the worst pestholes in the world where highly contagious typhus had often reached epidemic proportions and from where typhus was more than likely to spread again despite a strict quarantine imposed by the Germans. They accounted for roughly 3/4 of all known cases of typhus for all of Poland not only during the early part of World War 2 but also during the years following World War 1 after German troops had left.

    On the basis of the "Holocaust" literature itself, even the Polish Jews regarded as appallingly filthy those railroad trains which were used after 1941 to move large numbers of Polish Jews to the East. If there were ever a need to fumigate a railroad train, the need would have been greatest of all for such a train. Regardless of the ultimate fate of the Jews at Treblinka or Belzec or Sobibor once they had stepped off a railroad car, the Germans would have certainly fumigated that railroad car afterwards before using it to carry German troops or prisoners or freight on a return trip to the West. To do less than that would have been totally inconsistent with numerous Jewish comments that the Germans were "obsessed" with cleanliness and fear of typhus.

    Adolf Eichmann and many others responsible for carrying out "the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem" would have been well aware of the need to delouse trains used to transport Jews. They would have also had the good sense to recognize the obvious: gas chambers used to fumigate empty trains with Zyklon-B could just as easily be used to fumigate trains filled with Jews; gas chambers used to fumigate empty trains after the Jews had stepped off could just as easily be used to fumigate trains before they stepped off. What could have been simpler or more logical--and no fake showers, delousing stations or transit camps either. For these reasons as well as for many others, the Holocaust story is absurd.

TO THE APPENDIX