While learning to administer the test on his own so he could bypass the German labs and keep any typhus infections among his Jewish patients secret, Matulewicz figured out that a person injected with the same dead bacteria would produce the same antibodies, yielding a false-positive test result for typhus. “It immediately became clear that the artificial Weil-Felix could be used as a form of defense against the policies of the German occupation government,” Lazowski later explained.
He suggested that they use doctored tests and false-positive results to create a typhus “epidemic” in and around Rozwadów to keep the Germans away. Starting with the laborer on leave, they began giving any non-Jewish patients with symptoms resembling the early stages of typhus, such as fever, cough, rash, and aches, injections of dead Proteus OX-19 under the guise of “protein stimulation therapy.”
The doctors worked in secret and didn’t even tell their patients what they were doing, and only revealed their scheme to the world in 1977 in an article for the American Society for Microbiology’s newsletter. They were also careful to mimic the ebb and flow of real epidemics, giving more injections and creating more “typhus” cases in the winter and fall. To throw the authorities off, they referred some of their injected patients to other doctors, who would diagnose and report the typhus infections on their own.
“More and more positive Weil-Felix reactions were reported by German-controlled laboratories to German authorities and confirmed by our reports,” the doctors wrote. “Soon the number of reported cases was sufficiently large to declare the area of our practice (about a dozen villages) an ‘epidemic area,’ with relative freedom from oppression.”
While learning to administer the test on his own so he could bypass the German labs and keep any typhus infections among his Jewish patients secret, Matulewicz figured out that a person injected with the same dead bacteria would produce the same antibodies, yielding a false-positive test result for typhus. “It immediately became clear that the artificial Weil-Felix could be used as a form of defense against the policies of the German occupation government,” Lazowski later explained.
He suggested that they use doctored tests and false-positive results to create a typhus “epidemic” in and around Rozwadów to keep the Germans away. Starting with the laborer on leave, they began giving any non-Jewish patients with symptoms resembling the early stages of typhus, such as fever, cough, rash, and aches, injections of dead Proteus OX-19 under the guise of “protein stimulation therapy.”
The doctors worked in secret and didn’t even tell their patients what they were doing, and only revealed their scheme to the world in 1977 in an article for the American Society for Microbiology’s newsletter. They were also careful to mimic the ebb and flow of real epidemics, giving more injections and creating more “typhus” cases in the winter and fall. To throw the authorities off, they referred some of their injected patients to other doctors, who would diagnose and report the typhus infections on their own.
“More and more positive Weil-Felix reactions were reported by German-controlled laboratories to German authorities and confirmed by our reports,” the doctors wrote. “Soon the number of reported cases was sufficiently large to declare the area of our practice (about a dozen villages) an ‘epidemic area,’ with relative freedom from oppression.”
Thanks for this fascinating post!
I was once told that if I ever got mugged I should tell them I have AIDS and they may run away.