A City's Greatest Minds Let Lice Drink Their Blood to Survive the Nazis 🩸

[!NOTE] Historical File: A City’s Greatest Minds Let Lice Drink Their Blood to Survive the Nazis 🩸 Location: Poland | Era: Archival History | Format: Documentary & Narrative Record

The Untold Story

To survive the Nazis, great minds let lice drink their blood. Poland, 1941.

Biologist Rudolf Weigl created the first typhus vaccine by feeding lice on human blood and grinding them into paste.

Feeders strapped wooden boxes of hundreds of lice against their legs, letting them feed for forty-five minutes.

The Germans needed that vaccine for soldiers, so feeders carried army papers that kept them safe from the Gestapo.

Weigl hired university professors, underground fighters, and smuggled life-saving vaccine into the Jewish ghettos.

Their blood fed the lice. The lice kept them alive. Would you have volunteered? Tell me in the comments.

Historical Discussion

💭 The mathematician Stefan Banach fed lice at Weigl’s institute from autumn 1941 until March 1944 and survived the war, and the job also protected his wife. The poet Zbigniew Herbert fed lice there too. Could you have sat through forty-five minutes of it? Stick around for more of history’s strangest ways to survive.

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