The Secret Experiment: How One Man Saved Thousands from Typhus

Have you ever met someone with typhus? Chances are, you haven't, especially not in the past eighty years, as the dreadful disease was eradicated, thanks to an act of divine providence.

The person who played a crucial role in eradicating this harrowing disease was Ludwik Falk, a Jewish doctor who developed a vaccine in the heart of the Buchenwald death camp and managed to keep the discovery hidden from the Nazis.

Typhus epidemics were common in overcrowded populations where maintaining hygiene was challenging. These conditions were rife in ghettos and concentration camps. The Nazis often portrayed Jews as carriers of diseases, pointing to outbreaks in ghettos and camps—ironically, a result of their own inhumane actions and the appalling conditions in which Jews were forced to live. In 1941, the malicious protector Heydrich ordered SS doctors to spread typhus in the Warsaw Ghetto. Out of 380,000 Warsaw Ghetto Jews, over 80,000 died from starvation and disease.

A senior medical officer in Nazi-occupied Poland declared in a speech: "Jews are inherently carriers and spreaders of typhus. There are only two ways to 'solve' this problem. Either condemn the Jews in the ghetto to starve to death, or shoot them… We have only one responsibility: to ensure that the German people are not infected or endangered by these parasites. For this, any means is justified."

Ludwik Falk had served as a medical officer during World War I, witnessing the devastation typhus wreaked upon soldiers who could not maintain hygiene during the long war. He studied under a biologist named Rudolf Weigl, who was searching for a typhus vaccine. They worked together in a lab in Lviv, Poland. After the German invasion in World War II, Falk was imprisoned, along with other Jews, in the Lviv Ghetto. He continued his research inside the ghetto and even saw a breakthrough—a vaccine's inception. He managed to vaccinate Jews in the ghetto and save their lives, as well as those in the nearby Janowska camp, where patients received vaccinations and their lives were saved.

The Nazi guards noticed activity and asked if there was a cure for typhus. Falk replied that the medicine was derived from Jewish blood cells and would not work on Germans. The arrogant and racist Nazis believed this explanation and left the matter alone.

Falk was sent to Auschwitz and later to Buchenwald in 1943, where he was placed in a special lab the Germans had set up to find a typhus vaccine for their soldiers, who suffered greatly from the disease. The German lab head repeatedly failed to provide his superiors with an effective vaccine. However, Dr. Falk succeeded in the same lab, secretly administering vaccines to Jewish inmates. When the lab director demanded vaccines for the front lines, workers used his failed formula, which led him to fits of anger, while discreetly producing a genuine vaccine that Nazis were unaware of and consequently did not use. Messengers even managed to smuggle vaccines into the Warsaw Ghetto, providing vital assistance to the Jews. The Nazis did not benefit from a single gram of vaccine.

The Nazi lab director, Dr. Marogowski, was sentenced to death by hanging at the Nuremberg Trials. Another German doctor committed suicide in jail before his trial, while his wife, meanwhile, died—of typhus. Dr. Falk immigrated to Israel and worked at the Biological Research Institute in Ness Ziona. He passed away in 1961.