Rudolf Weigl

When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the Soviet Union, under the provisions of the secret pact it had signed with Germany, also invaded the country and occupied roughly the eastern third of Poland. The city of Lwów (today Lviv, Ukraine) was under Soviet occupation until June 1941, when Germany invaded its erstwhile ally. Lwów was then under Nazi occupation. During World War II, typhus epidemics were ravaging the millions of German soldiers on the Eastern Front as well as Jews in the ghettos of Eastern Europe and civilians in war-torn areas. 

Boy looking through window of a door in the Warsaw Ghetto. Translation of the sign (in German and Polish): "Typhus. Entering and leaving are strictly prohibited."

Weigl avoided politics, but he kept informed and predicted long before many others that Hitler would threaten Poland. Weigl abhorred racism and protested vigorously against the anti-Semitism and violence of Polish students against their Jewish classmates, branding them barbarians:

In 1937, when the nationalist government [in Poland] passed a law requiring that Jews stand in university classes, Weigl was one of the few professors to reject it. He walked into his lecture hall one day and saw some students standing alone against the wall. “What’s going on here? Why don’t you sit down?” he asked. One of the nationalists explained that the standing students were Jews. “In that case,” Weigl said, “I will stand until they sit.” (Allen)

Weigl with colleagues

The Old University Building (three-story building on the right) at the Mikolaj Street, where Wiegl's Institute produced his Typhus vaccine. 

When Lwów came under the Nazi German occupation in 1941, Weigl was ordered to set up a production plant at his Institute to supply vaccine to the German army.  This posed an ethical dilemma:  He was to oversee “the production of millions of vaccines designed to protect an army bent on the mass murder and subjection of Poles among others” (Allen). On the other hand, Weigl had more than a thousand people working at the Institute, and he used the Institute to employ and protect many Polish intellectuals and artists, Jews and members of the Polish underground.  He also distributed false identification papers to Jewish doctors in the city (including the Lwów Ghetto) stating that they were employees of his Institute, and these papers provided them with special protection. Weigl’s Institute also arranged for vaccine to be smuggled into the ghettos in Lwów and Warsaw as well as to members of the resistance.

The postwar years were difficult for Weigl, politically and professionally.  Weigl’s reputation suffered because he was seen by many as a Nazi collaborator. His old colleagues abandoned him, and other scientists and academics shunned him. In addition, he was distrusted by the Communists and in fact was under NKVD (Soviet secret police surveillance) for many years.  His career floundered, and he was never admitted to the Polish Academy of Sciences.  His death in 1957 went largely unrecognized, and it wasn’t until the post-Communist era in the 1990s that Weigl’s reputation was rehabilitated.

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Weigl Monument (erected in 2000) at medical faculty of Wrocław University (Poland)

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2011 Polish postage stamp

1883 Born in Prerau (now Přerov), Moravia, at the time in the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

1907 Graduates from the biology department of the University of Jan Kazimierz, Lwów (Poland)

1913 Completes advanced degree (habilitacja) in the department of zoology and anatomy

1914 Drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army as a parasitologist; becomes interested in typhus as a research topic

1933 Begins large-scale testing of typhus vaccine produced by growing infected lice and crushing them into a paste

1941 (June 29) Lwów is occupied by Nazi German forces

1945 Becomes Chair of General Microbiology, Jagiellonian University, Kraków

1957 Dies in Zakopane Poland

2003 Recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous among the Nations of the world

Allen, Arthur.  The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled

Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis.  New York: W. W. Norton, 2014.

“How Scientists Created A Typhus Vaccine in a 'Fantastic Laboratory’.”  Interview

of Arthur Allen by Dave Davies. “Fresh Air”.  National Public Radio.  July 22, 2014. http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=333734201

Kryński, Stefan.  Rudolf Weigl (1883-1957). http://www.lwow.home.pl/Weigl/human.html