Medical Discoveries in the Ghettos: The Anti-Typhus Battle

Mortality in the Nazi ghettos increased parallel to the duration of the incarceration. Death was the result of hunger-induced depleted body resistance, the appalling sanitary conditions and the lack of medications. All attempts by ingenious physicians to improve nutrition (by artificially produced food and vitamins) could not overcome the starvation. The physicians could not control infectious diseases (tuberculosis, gastroenteritis) without rudimentary sanitary conditions, medications (clandestinely imported or manufactured), or vaccines. Neither could they prevent the infestation of lice with its resultant high morbidity, nor mortality from typhus exanthematicus (spotted fever, 'fleck fieber') in those not yet designated for extermination. This brief review article pays tribute to the heroic physicians who battled typhus in the ghettos. Epidemics of typhus during wartime are fatal, a fact well documented. A mass grave incidentally discovered in 2001 in the surroundings of Vilna immediately raised the suspicion of yet another atrocity of the Nazis. However, the intact skulls (no fractures and no penetration) and the presence of French uniforms indicated that the grave was that of the Napoleonic Grand Army. DNA testing proved the presence of typhus, suggesting it as the cause of death. This corresponded to historical descriptions of the demise of a large part of the Emperor's Army – not by the Arctic conditions, but by a feverish illness that caused severe weakness, extreme thirst, exanthemata on the skin, hemorrhagic pneumonitis and encephalitis-induced delirium.