pilgrimofdark wrote: ↑Wed Jun 17, 2026 7:20 pm The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City has a long section on typhus. Since the book is expensive and not online, points of interest are below:
There were two waves of typhus in the Warsaw ghetto:
- first half of 1940 (large influx of refugees from areas annexed to Germany)
- first half of 1941 (influx of refugees from western district of Warsaw)
Around August 1941, the Judenrat set up the Health Council, which was led by Professor Ludwik Hirszfeld.Three groups of insect pest controllers were set up, each with four pest-eradication columns. A column was made up of twelve Jewish and six Polish sanitary workers and was under the supervision of German pest controllers and Polish doctors. Each column was also accompanied by a Jewish doctor and a Polish and Jewish policeman.
Official numbers counted 15,449 cases of typhus. Counting people hiding their illness, the estimated real number was 110,000 to 150,000 cases.
The soap was low quality "hard soap" or "gray soap," which contained a lower percentage of fatty acids than regular soap. People at the bathhouses were given very small amounts of it to clean themselves.
There were five public bathhouses in the ghetto. At least one bath outside the ghetto was also used by Jews who were escorted there and back.
It's claimed the SS men escorting Jews to bathhouses would sometimes fire randomly into the crowd.
The widespread attitude was that the German methods of combating the epidemic only served to spread the disease further. Hospitals were overcrowded, whole buildings were quarantined, and the sanitary columns and doctors were corrupt. The public baths also took bribes to issue certificates without a person being cleaned. The sulfer was too weak to kill the lice. People in quarantined houses would bribe their way out so they could work or acquire food. Because everyone in a house had to be bathed, they were standing in lines for hours at a time, where the lice could spread to healthy people.
The apartments where people suffering from typhus were discovered were chosen for the sulfur gassing. Belongings from potentially clean apartments were brought into the infected apartment, thereby spreading lice if the sulfur was not strong enough.
Until fall of 1941, treating typhus at home could lead to imposition of the death penalty. An illegal private hospital was set up in the ghetto.
The book cites memoirs diaries by Hirszfeld, Adam Czerniaków (head of the Judenrat), Ringelblum, and others. Also cited is Courage Under Siege: Starvation, Disease, and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto, which is online from the usual suspects, but I haven't read yet.
It should also be noted that Samuel Crowell's The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes discusses the issue of immigrant Jewish attitudes and misconceptions about bathing/disinfection in New York as early as the 1890s: believing they were going to be killed, starving themselves in quarantine due to no kosher food, hiding cases of typhus.
I'll get back to the other points, but this one is interesting because of the inversion.
At Treblinka, Warsaw Jews were allegedly calmed down by being told they would be sent to the Ukraine for work after they bathed.
Sequence of events:Only at Step 11 did the Jews suspect anything was wrong.
- blockades & merciless beatings on the journey to the train station, cripples and elderly shot
- calming speech about being resettled for work
- merciless beating to get onto the trains
- starvation, suffocation, dehydration on the 3-day train ride; occasionally punctuated by Latvians, Lithuanians, or Ukrainians entering the trains to rob people; SS and guards firing randomly into the trains
- merciless beating of the 1-20% who survived to get out of the trains
- calming speech about being bathed and sent to Ukraine for work
- merciless beating into the barracks
- undressing, shaving, turning over currency, getting a receipt
- merciless beating through the "tube"
- calming speech at the bathhouse
- merciless beating to shove as many people into the bathhouse as possible
(Yes, this is the process Arad, Chrostowski, and others describe, based on the eyewitnesses cited.)
Wait, you think at step 11 according to the orthodoxy they knew something was wrong? I thought it was at step 12 when the door closed and chlorine was tossed in through the roof hatch or whatever.
