Fleckfieberforschung im Deutschen Reich 1914 - 1945. Untersuchungen zur Beziehung zwischen Wissenschaft, Industrie und Politik unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der IG Farben

In the 1930s there was no research on Typhus in Germany. The knowledge about the illness was limited and the nature and causal mechanisms of the pathogen were unknown. During the process of second world war preparations researchers at the elite institutes in Berlin and Frankfurt, Wehrmacht physicians assigned to work there, and the researchers of the IG Farben in Marburg began with investigations for the production of vaccines for planed mass productions. There was agreement that vaccines were to be produced by deadened pathogen cultures. The researchers adopted procedures that were either already developed or in process of being developed by international researchers and attempted to modify these procedures. Merely the Wehrmacht focussed on the production of the already established polish vaccines. However, due to its laborious productive method this vaccine could not be produced in the necessary amount to provide adequate supply. In the end, delousing procedures remained the only effective way of combatting Typhus. Researchers who had been delegated to the occupied areas used ineffective therapies with the biologics of the IG Farben. They also participated in the search for known and new vaccines. The German policy of war and genocide (war imprisonment, ghetto centralization, compulsory labour and concentration camps) caused a situation in which Typhus became a serious danger to the aspired aims of war. In the concentration camps persons with Typhus were murdered in order to prevent the spreading of epidemics. At the front, cases of Typhus increased. As a consequence of these circumstances, researchers also increased their efforts to develop vaccines and therapies. The effectiveness of these agents was tested using controlled study-designs in concentration camps, camps for war prisoners, polish hospitals and other places in which involuntary test persons could effortlessly be recruited. Due to their experiences with human experiments and their personal and political connections to Wehrmacht, SS and public institutions the IG Farben was particularly effective in pursuing their interests. As the agents were mostly ineffective, these experiments caused a large, however not precisely detectable, number of deaths and an even higher number of severe and mild Typhus infections. Furthermore, they were followed by repeated efforts to control the Typhus problem by using modified and new methods and thereby producing more and more victims. Because the vaccines did not have the expected effect, there was support by the Reichsforschungsrat, the airforce and the "Ahnenerbe" to advance procedures using live cultures, although these procedures had previously been rejected in unison. This also brought on innumerable deaths. While the prosecution of these medical crimes by the Allied (Nuremberg Trials) merely appeared inconsequent, the lack of interest to prosecute on behalf of the German judiciary leaves no open questions. Only seldom has this been as obvious as in the Limburger Buchenwald procedure 1960/61.