Biological Warfare -- typhus-carrying lice as a weapon against Germany

[Wetzelrad]

The Holocaust Handbooks series devotes many, many pages to describing deadly typhus outbreaks in the concentration camps and the extensive German efforts to combat the disease, including by delousing, vaccination, quarantine, and other medical care. The revisionist position seems to be that a major portion -- perhaps even the majority -- of concentration camp deaths were from typhus, and as far as I can tell this is true and well-supported.

Much less ink has been spent on the apparently deliberate efforts of resistance forces to spread typhus-carrying lice. I have now come across four items that evidence this.

1) Colonel Leon Mitkiewicz's report dated September 7, 1943.

According to this report, the Polish Secret Army had successfully taken the lives of "a few hundred" German occupiers using "typhoid fever microbes and typhoid fever lice", obviously meaning typhus.



For more on this item, see Germar Rudolf's article:
https://codoh.com/library/document/aspe ... ld-war-ii/

2) Witold Pilecki's extended report on Auschwitz.

According to this Polish resistance leader who escaped from Auschwitz in 1943, they grew typhus-infected lice and deliberately set them on the SS, ultimately killing them.

The Bolsheviks left louses and terrible Siberian typhus, from which our colleagues began to suffer in mass. The typhus took the camp and was making a huge devastation. The authorities rubbed their hands, quietly contemplating that ally in doing prisoners away. Then we began, in HKB laboratory, to rear typhus louses and to set them free upon overcoats of SS-men, during each report and inspections of our blocks.

https://archive.org/details/WITOLDREPOR ... 2/mode/1up

Who went for typhus, he returned rarely. But also our little, bred louses were doing their job and typhus broke up also in the barracks of SS-men and an epidemic grew up. Doctors could hardly cope with Siberian typhus, but organisms of SS-men also. The ranks of SS-men suffered more and more losses. They were sent to the hospital in Katowice, where SS-men died in most cases.

https://archive.org/details/WITOLDREPOR ... 1/mode/1up

3) Dr. Walter Dötzer's Disinfection, Decontamination and Disinfestation.

This SS textbook from 1943 includes a warning about "sabotage" of delousing procedures in the East. From page 108:

Kurze Zusammenstellung der häufigsten Fehlerquellen bei Entlausungen
[...]
5. Unvollständige Sachenentlausung durch Verbergen oder Verstecken von Kleidungsstücken. (Furcht vor Beschädigung der Kleidung!) *)

*) Bei Entlausung von Zivilpersonen in den besetzten Ostgebieten ist auf Sabotage zu achten, ferner wird das Fehlen von Läusen in diesen Gebieten oft als gesundheitsschädlich angesehen und eine vollständige Entlausung mit allen Mitteln zu verhindern versucht.

Translated to English:

Brief summary of the most common sources of error in delousing procedures
[...]
5. Incomplete delousing of belongings due to concealment or hiding of clothing. (Fear of damaging the clothing!) *)

*) When delousing civilians in the occupied Eastern territories, sabotage must be anticipated; furthermore, the absence of lice in these areas is often considered detrimental to health, and attempts are made to prevent complete delousing by all means.

Information on this book including a scan has been kindly provided by Scott in this post:
https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=7464#p7464

4) The Alfred Franke-Gricksch Report.

On May 4, 1943, Franke-Gricksch visited Auschwitz and wrote a report not long after. According to him, Jewish prisoners would try to protect "their lice" during delousing procedures.

It is a very difficult task to cope with the individual groups of prisoners. The gypsies have to be treated differently from Poles, and the Poles differently from the Ukranians. The hygiene question is a very heavy responsibility for the Administration, nearly all the inmates, especially the jews from the East and South-East have to be trained in this respect for they show a particular fear of keeping themselves clean. In parts there have to be very strict measures in order to train the prisoners out of superstition. When having a shower bath they wrap up their lice in a piece of paper and hide it in their mouth in order to have them in their new clothes as they are of the opinion that whoever has lice will not become ill.

See this encyclopedia entry for a longer explanation on what the report is:
https://holocaustencyclopedia.com/witne ... lfred/292/

Here is a link to an English translation of the report:
https://www.holocausthistoricalsociety. ... eport.html

Conclusion

These four items, all from 1943 -- which is possibly the peak year for typhus fatalities in Poland -- give substantial reason to believe typhus was used as a weapon by anti-German groups. In an article linked above, Rudolf mentioned that the Soviets, too, had been considering typhus as a weapon, but further evidence of that usage had not been found. I would be interested to know if anyone else has come across evidence of this kind.

An argument could be made that Franke-Gricksch and to a lesser extent Dötzer described the culprits as acting out of "superstition", meaning they protected the lice without ill intent, but it strikes me that this may only have been a convenient excuse by saboteurs who did have ill intent. In any case, the result is the same. People died of typhus because some of their own chose to resist and frustrate the Germans' efforts to delouse them.

[pilgrimofdark]

I haven't found anything from the Soviets that they were deliberately trying to infect Germans with typhus, but there seem to be hundreds or thousands of references to typhus in these Russian records. Most of them are official government reports, so they might be sanitized of any reference to deliberate use of typhus against the Germans.

However, they were accusing the Germans of spreading typhus in their own concentration camps, which is almost as good as the Soviets admitting to doing it themselves.

ON THE DELIBERATE SPREAD OF TYPHUS EPIDEMIC BY THE NAZIS

From the statement of Maria Iosifovna Pikul, born in 1918, a resident of the city of Zhlobin.

On March 12 and 13, 1944, the Germans brought to the camp near the village of Rudobelki, in four trucks, patients suffering from typhus who were in serious condition. They were all unloaded and thrown into the mud, into the midst of the people already there. To my question, "Why are you putting the sick together with the healthy?" the German guard cynically replied, "We are preparing reinforcements for your Red Army." The abandoned patients died, but they were not removed, and we were not allowed to remove them. Two days later, on March 14th, we, both the healthy and the sick, were again loaded onto trucks and taken to another camp located in the burned-down village of Porosnishche, Parichsky district, Polesie region. I can state with full responsibility that the Germans deliberately brought infectious patients into the camp to spread an epidemic and infect as many civilians as possible, who had been forcibly rounded up into the camps, with the aim of mass extermination of peaceful Soviet citizens.

- courtesy of the Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK)
Source

SMERSH was also busy making things up, as usual:

"SMERSH" of the 3rd Belorussian Front on the arrest of participants in atrocities committed against concentration camp prisoners in Stutthof

Implementing their fascist policy of exterminating Slavic peoples, the German monsters, in June 1944, built a special gas chamber in the Stutthof concentration camp, where, until April 1945, they mass-murdered prisoners using one of the hydrocyanic acid preparations (Zyklon B). At the same time, they condemned prisoners to death by starvation, deliberately infected them with typhus, and injected gasoline and increased doses of morphine into the prisoners' blood vessels under the guise of treatment, causing mass mortality.

Source

There are numerous similar reports.

Pretty typical example of the Soviets "observing something bad," then accusing the Germans of orchestrating it, then layering on top various exaggerations and additional atrocities.

[Stubble]

They did have a biological weapons program and bred typhus infected lice, but, linking this to the other, nothing solid emerges.

Conscious of this, the revolutionary Soviet government early on put a high priority on diseases as a method of warfare. In 1928 it issued a secret decree ordering the development of typhus as a battlefield weapon. In the decades that followed, the USSR built and maintained a wide-ranging biological warfare program.

https://nationalvanguard.org/2020/05/se ... e-program/

[pilgrimofdark]

This is the first I'm hearing of the Sonderläusefütterungkommando (special lice-feeding commando).

"Our duties included collecting lice: in the ghettos, in concentration camps, in prisoner-of-war camps. After that, we had to feed them with our own blood. We were subjected to experiments repeatedly. I had 500-700 lice poured down the collar of my shirt. I was obliged to wear this shirt day and night for 15 days, until the lice laid fresh eggs there." (From the statement of Peiros Semen, November 22, 1944).

Similar testimony is provided by citizen Rudolf Michelson in his statement dated November 30, 1944, who was used by the Germans for feeding lice.

The lice, raised in this manner, were used to inject them with typhus pathogens, and then to multiply the pathogens millions of times. The typhus pathogens were then sent by the SS Hygiene Institute to German-occupied areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland, as well as to prisoner-of-war camps, where outbreaks of typhus epidemics occurred after some time. This provided a pretext for the SS Institute of Hygiene to send out special units, ostensibly to combat the epidemic. In reality, however, this special team used gassing to exterminate large numbers of Soviet prisoners of war and Soviet civilians who had been infected with typhus by the German executioners themselves.

- Source

So the Germans created typhus epidemics to have an excuse to gas people?

It's a bit garbled, but this almost serves as an alternative origin story for why T-4 medical personnel were at AR camps. Not "because they had experience killing so were sent to kill" but "because the camps were set up for combating the typhus epidemic but that was a pretext for killing."

Soviet materials are so goofy sometimes.

[Wetzelrad]

Thank you for the contributions.

This is the first I'm hearing of the Sonderläusefütterungkommando (special lice-feeding commando).

So the Germans created typhus epidemics to have an excuse to gas people?

Ignoring all the other dumb assumptions that led up to this, why would the Germans infect a disarmed and captive population with a deadly and highly transmissible disease? And then ship them around and build hospitals and so on? Obviously it would spread to and kill Germans, which it did. The idea that they would do all this as a "pretext" to gas prisoners, as opposed to simply shooting them before all this started, is irredeemably stupid.

[pilgrimofdark]

I didn't read this whole document yet, but probably should. This is amazing.

Same document as the lice-feeding commando quoted above:

On this matter, witnesses testify: "To cultivate lice, Jews were brought to the institute to feed them, specifically ordered by the ghetto commandant, Obersturmführer Krause. These Jews had to feed 15,000 lice three times a day, both typhus-infected and non-infected. The feeding was supervised by laboratory assistant Martha Hansen from Hamburg and Dr. Absagen Konrad from Stettin. The latter would beat Jews for the slightest movement. Sometimes, in order to establish the necessary temperature for breeding lice, 500-1000 lice were poured into one of the Jew's shirts. He was locked in a cold cellar and kept there for two weeks." (From the statement of Gurevich P.B. dated November 25, 1944).

I thought it was just referring to the concentration camps, but then realized gas vans also makes sense.

The Germans bred typhus, deliberately spread it around eastern Europe, then created the special units and gas vans to travel around the east to gas the typhus victims under the pretext of sanitation to combat the epidemic

And yes, that's in the document:

In reality, the SS Institute of Hygiene was engaged in the following:

1. Disinfecting the clothing of peaceful Soviet citizens executed by German executioners and sending this clothing to Germany.

2. Spreading typhus epidemics in the occupied regions and districts of the Soviet Union and in prisoner-of-war camps. Mass extermination of Soviet citizens and prisoners of war under the pretext of combating the typhus epidemic.

3. Exterminating civilians and prisoners of war through gassing. Operating gas vans and gas chambers.

...

The SS Institute of Hygiene also carried out the gassing of foreign Jews and Soviet patriots in a special train and a hangar into which the trains entered. The hangar was closed and the gas was released; after 30 minutes, the locomotive pulled out the wagons filled with corpses.

[Stubble]

If operating under the 'every accusation is a confession' framework, one could posit that the Soviet used their weaponized lice (from the biological weapons program established in 1928 for the purpose of incubating typhus and lice for use in conflict) on the civilian population in the east to cause trouble to the German Authorities, and attempted to frame them for doing it...

Best I can do.

[Eye of Zyclone]

This is the first I'm hearing of the Sonderläusefütterungkommando (special lice-feeding commando).

"Our duties included collecting lice: in the ghettos, in concentration camps, in prisoner-of-war camps. After that, we had to feed them with our own blood. We were subjected to experiments repeatedly. I had 500-700 lice poured down the collar of my shirt. I was obliged to wear this shirt day and night for 15 days, until the lice laid fresh eggs there." (From the statement of Peiros Semen, November 22, 1944).

Similar testimony is provided by citizen Rudolf Michelson in his statement dated November 30, 1944, who was used by the Germans for feeding lice.

The lice, raised in this manner, were used to inject them with typhus pathogens, and then to multiply the pathogens millions of times. The typhus pathogens were then sent by the SS Hygiene Institute to German-occupied areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland, as well as to prisoner-of-war camps, where outbreaks of typhus epidemics occurred after some time. This provided a pretext for the SS Institute of Hygiene to send out special units, ostensibly to combat the epidemic. In reality, however, this special team used gassing to exterminate large numbers of Soviet prisoners of war and Soviet civilians who had been infected with typhus by the German executioners themselves.

- Source

So the Germans created typhus epidemics to have an excuse to gas people?

Soviet materials are so goofy sometimes.

In December 1941 (that is, 6 months before the mass gassing of Jews was alleged for the 1st time in Allied newspapers!!), some Zionist propagandist(s) of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency claimed that the Germans had just gassed over 1,000 Jews to death in the Warsaw ghetto in order to curb a typhus epidemic raging there and on the Eastern front.

[Eye of Zyclone]

I thought it was just referring to the concentration camps, but then realized gas vans also makes sense.

The Germans bred typhus, deliberately spread it around eastern Europe, then created the special units and gas vans to travel around the east to gas the typhus victims under the pretext of sanitation to combat the epidemic

The German anti-typhus delousing "special purpose vehicles" of WW2 and the mobile units operating them are the source of the Holohoax gas-van story (and therefore also of the whole gas-chamber story). That's the reason why Holohoaxers kick-started the Jewish Holohoax myth with mobile gas chambers instead of stationary ones when they rehashed that old propaganda lie from WW1.

viewtopic.php?p=18790#p18790

[Wetzelrad]

This is the first I'm hearing of the Sonderläusefütterungkommando (special lice-feeding commando).

Okay, to be fair here, there was a real attempt to breed lice and innoculate against typhus. This was an endeavor that was already underway prewar at the Rudolf Weigl Institute in Lwow. There are many stories about this on the internet. Many stories especially concern deceitful activities like intentionally producing a fake or ineffective vaccine for Germans, or withholding the vaccine for Jews or for the black market, or giving special status to members of the resistance for their protection.

My impression is that the work of feeding lice was primarily if not entirely voluntary. The status of working at the "Typhus Institute" bestowed some kind of special identity and privilege, maybe extra rations. They did not have lice stupidly dumped down their shirts. Instead, there was a process to strap a small container of lice to the person's leg for a short period of time. This practice can be seen in a documentary film titled Kampf dem Fleckfieber!. Although I think this shows a lab in Krakow, not Lwow. Here is a link to the part of the film that shows feeding and handling lice:
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1002487

The subjects could be called lice-feeding commando, if you like. They look Aryan to me, and happy to be there.

In the end I think it was a mostly fruitless endeavor. There is still no effective vaccine for typhus.

[Wetzelrad]

I did some searching and found supporting evidence for items 2, 3, and 4. Several secondary sources agree that the person responsible for breeding lice at Auschwitz was Witold Kosztowny. Here is one:

Later, when in 1942 typhus was rife, the menace of an underground sentence even extended to SS men. The hospital laboratory was from the very beginning run by Witold Kosztowny, an early member of the underground, sworn in by Pilecki in the autumn of 1940. Very secretly Kosztowny started to breed lice infected with typhus. The SS could not easily discover this. Who, after all, would see the difference between a normal louse and one infected with typhus? Kosztowny’s experiments were a guarded secret, known only to a very few of the most trustworthy prisoners. Later these lice were thrown on to the most hated members of the guards, or handed to them in sweaters to which they had taken a fancy. In this way the Senior Medical Officer, Siegfried Schwella, who died of typhus on 10th May, 1942, was liquidated. [13] Attempts were also made to kill the head of the Political Department, Maximilian Grabner, and, above all, the Rapportführer, Gerhard Palitzsch. He did not catch typhus, but his wife died of it. This changed the pattern of life of the cruel SS man and ultimately decided his fate.

[13] [Władysław Dering, Tajna Armia Polska], p. 89

Fighting Auschwitz: The Resistance Movement in the Concentration Camp by Józef Garliński, ch.3.2

I give the story more credibility if it comes from multiple perpetrators. However, I can't find the original sources. Perhaps it will only trace back to Pilecki's writings, or perhaps it will be mere inference.

Separate from that, here is a book where the writer (Weindling, citing himself) admits that Jews were noncompliant with delousing efforts.

As German delousing measures became more coercive, Jewish evasion increased. Jews continued to resist delousing during the epidemics of 1919–21, for they associated the shaving of hair with bodily assault during pogroms, when beards and sidelocks were removed by force. Thus, when the Germans sought to impose delousing as part of their genocidal policies in World War II, they encountered widespread lack of compliance. [3]

[3] Paul Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945 (Oxford and New York, 2000)

"Delousing and Resistance during the Holocaust" by Paul Weindling, in Jewish Medical Resistance in the Holocaust edited by Michael A. Grodin, p.49

In the next two paragraphs, Weindling argues that typhus was simultaneously a pretext for killing Jews but also for saving Jews from killing. Nonsensical. Later he gets to sabotage.

German fears of bacterial sabotage increased: SS doctors believed that Poles were poisoning high-ranking Germans by recruiting waiters to add lethal bacteria to German’s meals and by adulterating furniture polish. [22] The Germans blamed epidemics of typhoid fever on Polish resistance agents, and believed there was a central laboratory distributing bacteria throughout Poland. [23]

[22] National Archives, Washington, DC, Nuremberg Doctors Trial, microfilm 30, 418, evidence of Werner Kirchert.
[23] National Archives, Washington DC, Record Group 112/295A, Box 10, Current Intelligence; Blome interview, 2; Kliewe memo, December 16, 1942, 26, 35.

"Delousing and Resistance during the Holocaust" by Paul Weindling, in Jewish Medical Resistance in the Holocaust edited by Michael A. Grodin, p.53

I'm not going to check any of these sources, but this seems like good support.

[Eye of Zyclone]

Fighting Auschwitz: The Resistance Movement in the Concentration Camp by Józef Garliński, ch.3.2

Separate from that, here is a book where the writer (Weindling, citing himself) admits that Jews were noncompliant with delousing efforts.

As German delousing measures became more coercive, Jewish evasion increased. Jews continued to resist delousing during the epidemics of 1919–21, for they associated the shaving of hair with bodily assault during pogroms, when beards and sidelocks were removed by force. Thus, when the Germans sought to impose delousing as part of their genocidal policies in World War II, they encountered widespread lack of compliance. [3]

[3] Paul Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945 (Oxford and New York, 2000)

"Delousing and Resistance during the Holocaust" by Paul Weindling, in Jewish Medical Resistance in the Holocaust edited by Michael A. Grodin, p.49

In the next two paragraphs, Weindling argues that typhus was simultaneously a pretext for killing Jews but also for saving Jews from killing. Nonsensical. Later he gets to sabotage.

German fears of bacterial sabotage increased: SS doctors believed that Poles were poisoning high-ranking Germans by recruiting waiters to add lethal bacteria to German’s meals and by adulterating furniture polish. [22] The Germans blamed epidemics of typhoid fever on Polish resistance agents, and believed there was a central laboratory distributing bacteria throughout Poland. [23]

[22] National Archives, Washington, DC, Nuremberg Doctors Trial, microfilm 30, 418, evidence of Werner Kirchert.
[23] National Archives, Washington DC, Record Group 112/295A, Box 10, Current Intelligence; Blome interview, 2; Kliewe memo, December 16, 1942, 26, 35.

"Delousing and Resistance during the Holocaust" by Paul Weindling, in Jewish Medical Resistance in the Holocaust edited by Michael A. Grodin, p.53

Typhus and typhoid fever are 2 distinct diseases and delousing is useless to check typhoid epidemics. Typhoid fever is transmitted by contaminated water, not infected lice.

[Wetzelrad]

Yes, Weindling's entire article is explicitly about typhus and delousing, but he abruptly switched to typhoid fever for that one paragraph. It's possible that could be confusion on his part or the Germans'. I can't say without seeing the sources. Regardless, it is part of the broader theme of biowarfare.

[Hektor]

Thank you for the contributions.

This is the first I'm hearing of the Sonderläusefütterungkommando (special lice-feeding commando).

So the Germans created typhus epidemics to have an excuse to gas people?

Ignoring all the other dumb assumptions that led up to this, why would the Germans infect a disarmed and captive population with a deadly and highly transmissible disease? And then ship them around and build hospitals and so on? Obviously it would spread to and kill Germans, which it did. The idea that they would do all this as a "pretext" to gas prisoners, as opposed to simply shooting them before all this started, is irredeemably stupid.

Which is why it was celebrated as success: https://archive.org/details/ReportFromP ... WarTwo1943

[Stubble]

Thank you for the contributions.

This is the first I'm hearing of the Sonderläusefütterungkommando (special lice-feeding commando).

So the Germans created typhus epidemics to have an excuse to gas people?

Ignoring all the other dumb assumptions that led up to this, why would the Germans infect a disarmed and captive population with a deadly and highly transmissible disease? And then ship them around and build hospitals and so on? Obviously it would spread to and kill Germans, which it did. The idea that they would do all this as a "pretext" to gas prisoners, as opposed to simply shooting them before all this started, is irredeemably stupid.

Which is why it was celebrated as success: https://archive.org/details/ReportFromP ... WarTwo1943

Excellent, thank you. Downloaded and archived. Also, shared via my channel over on odysee.