List and Details on Delousing Facilities

[Wetzelrad]

There are more complaints about the disinfection squads doing shoddy work and taking bribes. Sometimes they didn't seal the windows of disinfection rooms.

At this point you have enough material to write an article collating all the instances of disinfection noncompliance. I'm astonished at how much of this there is.

[pilgrimofdark]

There are more complaints about the disinfection squads doing shoddy work and taking bribes. Sometimes they didn't seal the windows of disinfection rooms.

At this point you have enough material to write an article collating all the instances of disinfection noncompliance. I'm astonished at how much of this there is.

It's hard to know what to think about it all.

"Judea Declares War On Lysol" is an intriguing title.

On the other hand, if the government told me a neighbor was hiding a lice infestation, and that I needed to walk half a mile to a disinfection facility, then stand in line for 3 hours in winter to take a cold shower with all my other neighbors, while my own home was sprayed with Lysol by government workers I don't know who pilfer through my stacks of Holocaust books, and all my bedding was taken to the infested neighbor's apartment to be disinfected and smell like sulfur... I'd be pretty aggravated and do whatever I could to avoid it in the future.

Spoiler

Me: Wow, that sucked. I'm never doing that again if I can help it.
Neighbor: Yeah, totally agree. They didn't even take Frank a few houses down. He's infested with lice, but they didn't find him.
Me: Well, don't tell anyone or we'll be forced to go take another bath half a mile away. These government bathhouses are almost as bad as the DMV.
Neighbor: What if Frank dies? They'll find his body and know he had lice all over. He's pretty sick.
Me: I don't know. Throw his corpse across the street. Let them deal with it.

The conventional histories that discuss this issue are similarly conflicted. It's difficult to argue that bathing is literal torture and genocide, but that's how the Jews described it at the time. Some historians agree, but don't dwell on this topic too long.

It's equally difficult to argue that Jewish Resistance to Nazi Persecution™ included... bribing poor people to take a bath for you, deliberately hiding cases of typhus, and strategically placing corpses in front of buildings to avoid being disinfected.

There are also obvious overlaps and contradictions compared to the Treblinka homicidal steam chamber narrative.

Germans: "Jews! Welcome to Treblinka! You are being sent to the Ukraine to work on agricultural farms! But first, you must take a bath! This way for the steam, ladies and gentlemen."
Jews, arriving from Warsaw after desperately avoiding the steam bathhouses for the last 2 1/2 years: *applause, relief*

[Stubble]

There are more complaints about the disinfection squads doing shoddy work and taking bribes. Sometimes they didn't seal the windows of disinfection rooms.

At this point you have enough material to write an article collating all the instances of disinfection noncompliance. I'm astonished at how much of this there is.

It's hard to know what to think about it all.

"Judea Declares War On Lysol" is an intriguing title.

On the other hand, if the government told me a neighbor was hiding a lice infestation, and that I needed to walk half a mile to a disinfection facility, then stand in line for 3 hours in winter to take a cold shower with all my other neighbors, while my own home was sprayed with Lysol by government workers I don't know who pilfer through my stacks of Holocaust books, and all my bedding was taken to the infested neighbor's apartment to be disinfected and smell like sulfur... I'd be pretty aggravated and do whatever I could to avoid it in the future.

Spoiler

Me: Wow, that sucked. I'm never doing that again if I can help it.
Neighbor: Yeah, totally agree. They didn't even take Frank a few houses down. He's infested with lice, but they didn't find him.
Me: Well, don't tell anyone or we'll be forced to go take another bath half a mile away. These government bathhouses are almost as bad as the DMV.
Neighbor: What if Frank dies? They'll find his body and know he had lice all over. He's pretty sick.
Me: I don't know. Throw his corpse across the street. Let them deal with it.

The conventional histories that discuss this issue are similarly conflicted. It's difficult to argue that bathing is literal torture and genocide, but that's how the Jews described it at the time. Some historians agree, but don't dwell on this topic too long.

It's equally difficult to argue that Jewish Resistance to Nazi Persecution™ included... bribing poor people to take a bath for you, deliberately hiding cases of typhus, and strategically placing corpses in front of buildings to avoid being disinfected.

There are also obvious overlaps and contradictions compared to the Treblinka homicidal steam chamber narrative.

Germans: "Jews! Welcome to Treblinka! You are being sent to the Ukraine to work on agricultural farms! But first, you must take a bath! This way for the steam, ladies and gentlemen."
Jews, arriving from Warsaw after desperately avoiding the steam bathhouses for the last 2 1/2 years: *applause, relief*

Do it, doo ittt.

[pilgrimofdark]

There's a short article on "Delousing and Resistance During the Holocaust" in the book Jewish Medical Resistance in the Holocaust. (There might be a few relevant articles in the book.)

Jews resisted delousing during a 1919-1921 typhus epidemic, associating shaving of hair with violence during pogroms in eastern Europe. So they were already primed to resist delousing procedures when the Germans attempted to impose them.

The article suggests some Einsatzgruppen shootings were carried out because the Jews were suspected to be carrying typhus, which the Sanitary Office of the Waffen-SS wanted to prevent spreading to Germans.

And more on how delousing was implemented in Warsaw: disinfection ovens would break down, catching fire or causing carbon monoxide to spread. On the other hand, sometimes the ovens couldn't be heated to a high enough temperature.

On the intentional spread of typhus: the article cites the Nuremberg Doctor's Trial records to suggest the SS believed typhus was being intentionally spread by the Polish resistance and that there was a central laboratory in Poland responsible for spreading the typhus bacteria.

In Buchenwald, prisoners produced typhus vaccine, although they provided ineffective batches to the SS while keeping effective vaccine for themselves.

In the article "Typhus Epidemic Containment as Resistance to Nazi Genocide" (a ridiculously sensationalistic title compared to the actual content), there is more information.

The Krakow ghetto was supplied with a disinfection van. The Vilna ghetto received typhus vaccine and also had a public bathhouse. Monthly food ration cards weren't distributed unless a person had received a certificate/card from the bathhouse.

I'm not sure if these count as "Nazi genocide" victims... but the Germans established a delousing center in Kovno for ill and wounded German soldiers returning from the east. They were shaved, bathed, and disinfected, then returned to the train.

I was hoping to run into some blueprints or floor plan for a ghetto disinfection bathhouse, but no luck so far.

[Wetzelrad]

The Krakow ghetto was supplied with a disinfection van.

A gas van in the Jewish ghetto? This would be a nice thing to have details on.

[pilgrimofdark]

Here's the relevant quote for posterity.

The local authority had some leeway, as can be seen, for example, in the fact that the Cracow ghetto was supplied with a disinfecting van, while typhus vaccine was made available to the Vilna ghetto health authorities. (The Vilna Jews were so afraid of this gift of vaccine that they first gave it to dogs to ensure it was not poison.)

- Naomi Baumslag & Barry M. Shmookler. "Typhus Epidemic Containment as Resistance to Nazi Genocide" in Jewish Medical Resistance in the Holocaust. p. 41

I wonder if the dogs survived. Is there a US Holodogocaust Memorial Museum where I can learn more about this?

There's no citation for these sentences. The authors' main source for the "local authority" is mostly Isaiah Trunk's book Judenrat.

And Trunk's book must be the source:

The health department in Cracow was established at a meeting of Jewish physicians that took place in February 1940, called at the order of the commandant of the Security Police and the SD, and held in the Kehila building under the chairmanship of Dr. Moritz Haber, a Council member. The department embraced the following activities: medical and hygiene supervision of over 50 various communal shelters; disinfection of the inmates and unsanitary living quarters, for which the Stadthommandant put a mobile disinfection unit at the disposal of the Council; systematic sanitary control of the buildings in the so-called Jewish living section of the town. According to a preserved report, the sanitary control took place twice a month, accommodating 30,000 ghetto inmates in some 1,000 buildings with 10,000 apartments. A medical check of candidates for labor duty was also performed by the department.

- p. 161-162

Trunk cites something several paragraphs later called Bericht Krakau. This might be Franz Guen's Bericht über die Tätigkeit der jüdischen Gemeinde in Krakau in der Zeit vom 13 September 1939 bis 30 September 1940. Not sure if this full report is digitized or where to get it.

Baumslag also wrote a book with a sensationalistic title similar to this article: Murderous medicine: Nazi doctors, human experimentation, and Typhus. Nothing shows up about a disinfection van in Cracow, but there's one passage of interest:

When an epidemic occurred in Warsaw in 1917, the Polish minister of health Dr. Trenkner attributed it chiefly to Jewish food smugglers whom he claimed brought the disease into the city. Trenkner also blamed Jews living in the Jewish quarter, ignoring the fact that the German occupying forces failed to enforce consistent, sustainable sanitary measures.

Under German authority citizens were deloused by force at the point of a bayonet, but when the Germans left, hygiene deteriorated. Disruption of services and shortages of soap and water further aggravated the situation. Overcrowded trains helped increase the spread of the lice, as did the reduced availability of water during the winter. The Ministry of Health used mobile vans for delousing, but when people heard the sanitary squads were in their neighborhood, they locked their houses fearing the intimidating procedure. People infested with lice were sent to delousing centers and were denied a passport until they produced a certificate that they had been deloused.

- p. 16

Bathing = resettlement = shooting = death seems to be an inter-generational attitude here.

[Wetzelrad]

I'm searching for survivor stories about disinfection in Krakow and coming up short. But I did come across a survivor story relevant here. This is Gertrude Gottfried's story, the part where she discussed disinfection in Bergen-Belsen.

Interviewer: When you arrived at the camp, when you came out of the cattle cars, what was your first impression of what you saw?

Gottfried: We didn't see nothing. It was nighttime. We walked through woods. We walked I don't know how long. I don't know how long. But the impression when we came to gates, to-- I don't think-- I think it was electrical gates, the wire gates, and we saw Gestapo with dogs, German Shepherds, big German-- this was middle of the night.
[...]
But it was so dark and it was the woods. It never dawned on me to run. I don't know. We were on those trains, and the girls cried, and everything. I couldn't even cry. I said to myself, whatever it's going to be is going to be. And you couldn't. You couldn't think so. The girls said, they're going to kill us. We're not going to get out from here. And we were hungry.

And it was unbelievable. But when we came into Bergen-Belsen, this was the worst thing I ever saw in my life-- the dogs and those-- the Gestapo, and the screams. And they took us in the way, and they told us to get undressed, and they took our clothes.

Interviewer: Now, was this everybody or did they just choose certain ones to--

Gottfried: No, they couldn't all 500 go, maybe about 10 girls.

Interviewer: But they didn't divide you, some go one place and some go--

Gottfried: Oh, we didn't go in one barrack, not all 500. They told us here, you go a few, and here went a few. But when they give us, the Germans, they were walking around. And they told us to take showers. So they came out ice cold water. And I don't remember if we had a towel to wipe ourselves. I can't remember. I don't think so, because they took everything from us. And when we came out, I don't know, we had to recognize our clothes.
[...]
They came out from ovens. And we thought they were going to put the girls in.

Interviewer: What came out of ovens?

Gottfried: The clothes. They put in ovens. They had like baked, like you put in like some baking oven.

Interviewer: They put your clothes in there?

Gottfried: Yeah, to disinfect. They put our clothes in. We were shivering, because the water from shower came out so cold. And this was in January. And when we came out, I think I still had a half a bread left over.
[...]
Interviewer: Well, you when you got to Bergen-Belsen, were there any special things they did to process you into the camp, other than just take your clothes off?

Gottfried: This was the processing, I think. They told us to go a few girls this and this barrack, and in this barrack. They called them barracks.

Interviewer: They selected which ones would go, or you just--

Gottfried: Yeah, they said, here. You go here. And this one goes here. A few of the girls went differently, which I never I didn't see them later on.

It is a familiar sequence of events:
- On arrival, the Jews already feared they would be killed.
- They were sent directly to disinfection where they undressed, showered, and re-dressed.
- Their clothing had been put through hot-air delousing devices described as "ovens".
- The Jews mistook the delousing ovens as being intended to kill them.
- There was some version of selection into different barracks.

I had no awareness of delousing in Belsen. It is briefly mentioned by Mark Weber here, in a quotation from Josef Kramer.