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

Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the desperate: refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples. The Nazis, who equated the louse with 'parasitic, subhuman' Jews, so feared the disease that they granted special status to an eccentric Polish scientist named Rudolf Weigl, the only one who could make an effective vaccine. In his laboratory, Weigl hid members of the intelligentsia, protecting them from the Gestapo. Employing mathematicians, writers, doctors, and other thinkers, Weigl's lab became an epicenter of intellectual activity and resistance. Among Weigl's assistants was Ludwik Fleck, a gifted Jewish immunologist later sent to Buchenwald, where he deceived the Nazis and undermined their sadistic medical trials. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with survivors, Arthur Allen tells a harrowing story of two brave scientists, a Christian and a Jew, shattered by the war, who nevertheless put their training to the best possible use, at the highest personal risk.