1940

In November, Nazis seal Warsaw ghetto, with nearly a half million people. It was rationalized by German and Polish physicians in terms of the Geomedizin notion “that typhus was a Jewish disease, one that moreover did not do real harm to Jews, since they were the racial and geographical carriers of it.” This “seemed to justify a policy of keeping Jews locked behind ghetto walls, where typhus could be confined without threatening the vulnerable Aryan population, especially the German occupants” (A. Allen, 106, 79-80). Cramming a half million people into a few square blocks in the dead of winter created a typhus epidemic, which German doctors then blamed on the Jews (108). Weigl, through two employees, smuggled at least 30,000 doses of his typhus vaccine into the ghetto (109). This lasted until the Germans arrived.