Abstract
This article analyses responses to the typhus epidemic in German-occupied Poland during the First World War. The German conquest of the Kingdom of Poland in 1915 not only instated a new political regime, but also brought about social misery on an unprecedented scale. Especially in larger cities, the poor segments of the population were made homeless or cramped into tiny apartments and suffered from hunger and disease. From 1915 outbreaks of typhus occurred in major cities, often found amongst the Jewish population. The German occupiers forcefully responded by fumigating houses, quarantining suspected cases, and forcing thousands of families into delousing facilities. These measures particularly targeted Jews as German medical officials identified them as the carriers and spreaders of the disease – some of them characterized typhus itself as a ‘Jewish disease’. In an effort to prevent the spread of the disease to Germany and to protect the German Volkskörper, Polish Jews – for the fact that they were Jews – were from 1918 onwards barred from crossing the border and thousands of Jewish migrant workers in German industry were arrested and deported. The article examines both the political and the medical context in which these policies were employed and analyses Jewish responses to both the spreading of the disease and the German anti-Jewish policies. It shows the close connection between health policy and antisemitic and nationalist ideological narratives and projects, and identifies this racialization of disease as a key moment in the development of German antisemitism.
When the German armies conquered large parts of the Russian Empire in 1915, its soldiers, doctors, and bureaucrats were confronted with a seemingly new, deadly disease that spread like wildfire. 1 Typhus (typhus exanthematicus), 2 a highly infectious bacterial disease commonly transmitted by lice, was a well-known threat, but knowledge of the disease was very limited at the time. The transmission of the illness had only been detected in the years 1909/1910 when scientists also developed a reliable test, while in Germany the disease was considered foreign and not much attention was given to it in the scientific community. 3 German doctors, bureaucrats, and politicians perceived typhus as a specifically ‘Jewish’ phenomenon, associated Jews with illness and infection, and even described it as a ‘Jewish disease’. 4 While the conditions of war, displacement, and destitution caused suffering and illness amongst the Jewish population, typhus was, in fact, by no means restricted to the Jews, as Polly Zavadivker has recently shown. 5 Since neither lice nor bacteria discriminate between religious, ethnic, and national groups, the association of Jews with the disease resulted from specific decisions the medical, civilian, and military authorities took, based on their preconceived antisemitic worldviews – with dire consequences.
The article shows how the conceptualization of typhus as a ‘Jewish disease’ informed the authorities’ approach to public health and immigration policy during the First World War. First, authorities targeted and humiliated Jews suspected to be carriers of the disease within Poland. Second, the German government closed its border with occupied Poland to Jews – only to Jews – in April 1918. In its decree the German Ministry of the Interior stated that the thousands of Polish-Jewish workers who had come to Germany to work in the war industry in previous years were a health hazard. Attributing all the antisemitic stereotypes of Jews as filthy and as spreaders of disease to them, the decree concluded that in order to prevent the spread of typhus amongst the German population, East European Jews needed to be kept out. The decree did not mention non-Jewish Polish workers and instead associated the disease exclusively with Jews: A special hazard derives from the entire population’s ineradicable uncleanliness in regard to matters of health. For a great part lice-ridden, the Polish-Jewish workers are particularly likely transmitters of typhus and other infectious diseases. The hazard comes to an increased degree from the recently imported Jewish-Polish workers from the Generalgouvernment, where the spread of typhus has recently reached a hitherto unknown scope especially amongst the Jewish population. The imperial administration in coordination with the Ministry of War (War Labor Office) felt obliged to fully suspend and prohibit the recruitment of Polish-Jewish workers for Germany.
6
Misery and Disease
In 1915 the German and Austro-Hungarian armies swept through much of the formerly Russian-ruled Kingdom of Poland and beyond, bringing a territory of approximately 12.8 million people under its control. The occupied territories were eventually divided into three regions: southern Poland, which was ruled by the Habsburgs, and two German-ruled territories, the Generalgouvernement Warschau (General Government of Warsaw) and the region under the control of the Oberbefehlshaber der Gesamten Deutschen Streitkräfte im Osten (Supreme Commander of All German Armed Forces in the East; Ober Ost). While the Germans prided themselves for bringing ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’ to the East, both their military offensive and their subsequent policies wreaked havoc on the civilian population of the region. 8
The Central Powers’ offensive aggravated an already destitute situation created by the Russian imperial authorities in the first year of the war. The mass deportations of Jews, perceived by the authorities as actual or potential traitors and agents of the German government, created a situation in which a significant part of the Jewish population became homeless, starved, and detached from their social environments, not knowing anyone to whom they could turn for support. 9 In the urban centres, they were often forced to live on the streets or were housed in empty buildings or squeezed into tiny apartments. Earlier outbreaks of typhus can be traced back to the conditions created by deportation and mass repression. 10 Rabbi Alexander Carlebach reflected on these refugees in a letter to his wife: ‘This is why today the condition and the sight on the street is so heartbreaking, why hundreds of thousands collapse exhausted and without blood in their veins. Tauwim hoju challele cherew. 11 […] Everyday Kewuraus 12 of children, elderly, women who died of exhaustion and hunger typhus – and the war rages on’. 13 Hunger-typhus was one of the many names given to typhus at the time. 14
Especially in the urban centres of Warsaw and Łódź, the living conditions for refugees and the Jewish proletariat were miserable. 15 A representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee wrote in the summer of 1916 about the conditions of the Jewish population of Warsaw: ‘What we saw surpassed even our worst apprehensions. In moist, dark, underground dwellings were until [sic] ten people huddled together. The air there was unbearable’. He noted further that due to these conditions and the ‘undernourishment of the great masses various epidemic diseases broke out. It is of course the children who are worst off’. 16 Similarly another visitor – probably German Zionist activist Franz Oppenheimer – reported on the terrible living conditions of the Jewish masses in Warsaw, where entire families would occupy a single room in the basement, concluding that ‘these masses of people are defenseless against the spread of infectious diseases’. 17 Max Bodenheimer, a German Zionist who travelled to Łódź in 1915, wrote to his wife that ‘in the very poor neighborhoods, the population is decimated by illness and hunger-typhus’. 18
To halt the spread of disease, especially concerned about the potential infection of their soldiers, the German administration initially established 12 delousing facilities in the Generalgouvernement which were primarily used by the military. 19 Administrative reports from the fall of 1915 suggest that at this stage the number of civilians infected by the disease was very low, with about two infections weekly in Łódź and isolated cases in other places. 20 However, the numbers increased substantially in the following months. By the end of the year the administration reported on ‘accumulated cases’ in Warsaw and Łódź but declared that due to ‘energetically implemented measures the epidemic could be confined to the Jewish quarter and was eventually suppressed’. 21 In the following years, the Germans established a total of 292 steam disinfection machines, 320 formalin (formaldehyde) chambers and about 300 isolation wards and special hospitals to tackle the disease. 22 In the winter of 1915/1916 typhus infections escalated into an epidemic with thousands falling ill, especially in the main urban centres of Łódź and Warsaw. 23 Over the years infections and mortality rates rose dramatically as the population became evermore exhausted. In Warsaw the year 1915 saw 1244 registered infections with a mortality rate of 6.8 per cent; this would escalate dramatically in the following years: 1916 (1628 infected, 9.2% mortality), 1917 (29,616 infected, 7.8% mortality), and up to November 1918 (30,567 infected, 9.3% mortality). 24
The German authorities cracked down brutally on those whom they suspected to be carriers of the disease, particularly focusing on the Jewish population. Houses were repeatedly raided, and inhabitants checked for signs of illness. Especially in Warsaw and Łódź apartments were then disinfected and residents sent to delousing-stations followed by several weeks of quarantine in the hastily erected prison-like hospitals.
25
Several accounts describe the horrors, mistreatment, and humiliation that came with the disinfection measures. ‘Khane’ (born in 1912) remembered the crackdown by the authorities after a neighbour contracted the illness. Under the German occupation, whenever someone became sick with a communicable disease the entire household was sent to a quarantine, where we were treated worse than prisoners. The building where we were held was like a prison – a tall brick wall surrounded it, and there was a barbed-wire fence, bars on the windows, and an armed guard at the door. They barely gave us enough food to hold body and soul together.
26
They did come and spray the house, and the air was filled with poison. Mother and I went off with a policeman, Mother carrying the few things she had been permitted to pack. In a strange house full of male and female guards, another boy and I had our hair cut. I saw my red sidelocks fall and I knew this was the end of them.
27
While many memories relate the experience specifically to the Germans, much of the measures and humiliations were implemented by non-Jewish Poles recruited to the militia and police, in which Jewish representation was virtually non-existent.
28
Polish antisemites indulged in the imagery of Jews as filthy and as carriers of disease and often carried out searches, imprisonment, and the cutting of hair and beards with sadistic joy.
29
I. B. Singer's brother, Israel Joshua, described one such case of humiliation of Jews by the police during the inspections and disinfections: Baruch Joseph’s flat was always spotless, and he balked characteristically when the police came to inspect the premises. ‘I defy you to find even one speck of dirt!’ he challenged them. ‘Look all you want – you won't find a goddamn thing’. But naturally they did. One held up a tiny mote of dust and asked triumphantly, ‘And what do you call this, Jew?’ Toybele pleaded with her husband. ‘Joseph … slip them a few marks! We’ll be disgraced if you don’t. …’ ‘Never!’ he raged. ‘They won't get away with it! My house is clean! It’s a trumped-up charge!’ The policemen dragged him and Toybele out of the house and sealed off the apartment. Along with a mob of beggars, street loafers, and paupers they were herded through the streets to the disinfecting station. Passersby hooted and whistled at the draggletailed band. ‘Hurray! They’re driving the sheenies back to Egypt!’
30
With his letters home, Hans Block, a German-Jewish soldier stationed in the predominantly Jewish town of Slonim/Słonim in 1916/1917 provided a picture of the local dynamics. The already cramped living conditions of the population were made much worse by the stationing of several thousand troops in civilian homes and completely deteriorated when after the first cases of typhus had been detected a strict separation of military and civilian living quarters further displaced families. 31 Block's commanding officer was so paranoid about getting bitten by infected lice that he ordered all Jews to step down from the sidewalk whenever a German soldier approached and he himself used a whip to drive any passer-by away. 32 The bathhouses had been requisitioned by the army, while hunger and dirt accelerated the spread of disease from December 1916 onwards despite German efforts to disinfect homes and delouse large groups of people on a daily basis. 33
The situation was also terrible in Wilno/Vilnius, as Hirsz Abramovicz remembered.
34
When someone was coming down with the disease, the person would be confined to the ‘hospital’. The director of the ‘hospital’ was usually the local feldsher [military physician assistant], who often did not appear there for days at a time. No treatment was offered, and outsiders were strictly forbidden to enter the place. The patient was thus sentenced to die. Indeed, the people considered the ‘hospital’ a morgue.
35
Naturally, most people were terribly afraid of the prospect of being sent to disinfecting stations and these ‘hospitals’ and tried to avoid being detected by the authorities if they showed signs of infection.
36
‘The mere mention of the disinfecting station’, wrote I. J. Singer, ‘sent terror into the hearts of the Jews’.
37
The authorities’ decision to confiscate and burn all textiles and other household goods owned by supposedly infected families – often their only possessions in times of extreme shortages – probably contributed further to peoples’ attempts to hide.
38
When the police raided houses and drove suspected infected inhabitants into the streets, the apartments were left open to being plundered.
39
All this in turn made the authorities even more ruthless in their attempts to find and ‘treat’ potentially infected people. Singer remembered the situation in Warsaw in 1917: The Germans began to compel everyone to take baths in the public bathhouses. A cordon of soldiers would be thrown around a courtyard and the inhabitants driven off to the municipal bath. The beards of the men were shaven off and the girls’ hair cut. People were afraid to go into the streets. Sanitary commissions inspected the houses, looking for dirt. Hunger, sickness, and fear of the Germans made life unbearable.
40
The situation also contributed to Germans’ preconceived conception of the Ostjuden and their notion that the problems in treating the disease stemmed from the character of the people rather than from the disease itself or the methods they employed. 41 The association of Jews, and in particular the Jewish poor and refugees, with disease, was built on longer trajectories and can already be observed in the first year of the war under Russian rule. Health and sanitation had been arguments for repression and the removal of Jewish refugees already during the earlier phase of the war. 42 Similarly, public health measures targeting the Jewish population, but primarily intended to protect soldiers from infection had already been employed by the Russian administration. 43 There were attempts, especially at the beginning of the occupation, to enlist the support of community leaders, rabbis, and teachers to educate the Jewish population about the disease, proper hygiene and so on. 44 Jewish communities also actively tried to combat the disease by their own means. 45 However, seemingly losing control over the situation the German authorities increasingly shifted their focus away from the medical problem of treating an infectious disease towards identifying and tackling a perceived social problem that was the infected people – predominantly, if not exclusively, identified as Jews.
This was most evident in the case of displaced persons who either attempted to find a way home or had been reduced to wandering beggars. The ‘Judenfuhre’ (Jewish dray), ‘up to 20 closely packed trader-Jews [Handelsjuden] being dragged down the country road by two malnourished nags’ along with the ‘extremely lice-ridden and ragged Jewish wandering beggars’ 46 were identified as the main spreaders of the disease from the main cities throughout the country. There was a strong correlation between the antisemitic myth that Jews were inherently unhygienic and filthy and the observation of the squalid living conditions of large segments of the Jewish population of Warsaw, leading to the identification of Jews – for the fact that they were Jews – as carriers of the disease. 47 Similar to other anti-Jewish measures, the repression and the racialization in practice centred on the impoverished masses of the Jewish population while those better off, fashioned in ‘European’ attire and indistinguishable from the Christian population could avoid being harassed. 48 In the authorities’ conceptualization, however, the racialization, did not stop with the impoverished Jewish proletariat. All Jews were suspected of being carriers of the disease, 49 and Gottfried Frey, the chief medical official (Medizinalreferent) in the Generalgouvernement, claimed that even the richer and better-off Jewish families were louse-ridden. 50 ‘The Pole’, Frey reported, was ‘by nature cleaner than the Jew’. 51 According to this logic, if non-Jews contracted the disease it was because they had been in close contact with Jews or because they ‘had adopted the filthy habits of the Jews’. 52
The German authorities assessed that about 95 per cent of those infected were Jews. 53 Other sources point to a lower number – about 70 per cent of all patients – but essentially, the statistical data from occupied Poland is highly unreliable. 54 The mortality rate amongst non-Jewish Poles was notably higher than amongst Jews (in Warsaw 13.4% compared to 6.4%). 55 Erich Martini, a navy doctor and expert on infectious diseases who was based in Włocławek, reported that during his time there he counted 452 Christians who contracted typhus of whom 80 died (17.69%) and 712 Jews of whom 90 died (12.6%). 56 After the war, Martini would also describe Jews as the primary victims and spreaders of the disease but his war-time study challenges the general assumption of typhus being a ‘Jewish disease’. 57 There are no definitive explanations for the higher mortality rate. It may be the case that it was easier for non-Jews to hide less severe cases. It is also possible that a tighter-knit Jewish family in which women usually did not work outside the home was better suited to quickly respond to a family member getting ill. 58 Martini assumed that many Jews had already contracted the illness in childhood years (when it was rarely fatal) and had developed a certain degree of immunity. 59 However, key to explaining the disproportionality seems to have been that the authorities’ conviction that Jews were the carriers of the disease made them focus all their efforts on controlling the urban Jewish population, disinfecting homes and people, etc., thereby automatically identifying more cases. At the same time they had little knowledge of what was going on in rural areas where fewer Jews lived and where a lack of doctors meant that cases of infectious diseases (not only typhus) were rarely reported to the central authorities. 60 Eventually, the authorities gathered highly distorted data. As Polly Zavadivker has shown in her study on the typhus epidemic in the wider region, the disease was by no means limited to Jews, and aside from some specific hotspots, the majority of victims were not Jewish. ‘Jews shared the illness with non-Jews in over eight years of catastrophic suffering born of military conflict, poverty, geographic dislocation, mass violence, and epidemics’. 61
The racialization of typhus and the identification of Jews as primary carriers of the disease was not a natural occurrence but resulted from decisions medical professionals and bureaucrats took. Theodor Zlocisti, a doctor who served with the German troops in a field hospital in Istanbul during the war, identified Greeks as the main carriers of the disease, which he believed was caused by widespread alcoholism amongst members of this ‘race’, whereas he was convinced that Jews, Germans, and Turks were rather resistant to typhus. 62 Depending on whether doctors decided that the category ‘Jew’ was relevant to their research or not, they reached different conclusions. Paul Croner-Charlottenburg who headed the Institute of Hygiene in the multi-ethnic city of Łódź equally examined German, Jewish, and Polish patients. In his study, he disregarded the category of ‘race’ and highlighted the effect of the disease on categories of patients he differentiated by age and sex, deducing that younger people were infected more frequently but less often with fatal consequences and that men and women contracted the disease in similar numbers. 63 However, the narrative was shaped primarily by doctors who firmly believed that the category ‘Jew’ was essential for the understanding and countering of the disease, first and foremost by Medizinalreferent Gottfried Frey. 64 Frey not only shaped the response to the disease in occupied Poland, 65 but also the way in which his superiors in Berlin were informed about the situation. His academic article on what he termed the ‘Judenfieber’ (Jewish fever), largely copied verbatim the official report by the civilian administration to the government in Berlin. 66 In early 1918 the official report by the civilian administration of the Generalgouvernement described typhus as ‘a truly Jewish disease’ 67 and argued that only when an entirely new people, educated to cleanliness, had replaced the Polish Jews, would true progress be possible. 68
Polish-Jewish Workers Coming to Germany
For German physicians and bureaucrats, typhus presented itself as a ‘threat from the East’, profoundly endangering a German Volkskörper (national body) that was already strained by the hardships of war. 69 For many, including a large number of German physicians and officials, the elevation of the German ‘race’ in the context of the war and its protection against the foreign threat of both disease and ‘foreign races’ was of paramount importance to the war effort and to the future of the nation. 70 From the beginning, the German administration was concerned with the possibility of the ‘import’ of diseases from occupied Poland into Germany; though there were no cases of typhus according to early reports. 71 The earliest large-scale outbreaks of typhus occurred in late 1914/early 1915 amongst the half million Russian prisoners of war, of whom reportedly 27,500 contracted typhus. As many of them were forced to work in German mines, factories, and fields, the fear that the disease would spread to the German civilian population led the authorities to isolate the prisoners as much as possible. 72 Amongst civilians, the first larger outbreaks were detected amongst regular Polish agricultural workers who had come to Pomerania, as they had done before the war, to work during the sowing and harvesting seasons. During the war further workers from the territories of the Russian Empire, now occupied by the Central Powers, came to the country. While they were subject to examination by German medical officials and later deloused before crossing the border, the miserable, cramped living conditions fostered the spread of the disease. 73 Initially, the authorities aimed to deal with Jewish migrant labourers in the same way. The aforementioned Judenfuhre and wandering beggars were pushed back at the border and workers hired for German factories and farms were allowed to cross only after being deloused and put into quarantine for several weeks. 74
In order to address the dire need for labour in German industry and agriculture from 1915 onwards the authorities ‘imported’ large numbers of Polish workers to Germany. 75 Bilingual Polish-German leaflets published by the German Arbeiterzentrale (Labor Office; lit. ‘workers centre’) in Warsaw promised decent working conditions, good pay, and safe jobs in German industry and agriculture until the end of the war. 76 It was no coincidence that the leaflets were not printed in Yiddish. German authorities were convinced that Jews were physically weaker than non-Jews and did not possess the necessary professional skills required by German industry or agriculture, wherefore they were initially excluded from the recruitment. 77 Jews in the occupied territories nonetheless represented a vast reservoir of labour which the authorities aimed to exploit. 78 Throughout the occupied territories Jews were subjugated to a brutal system of forced labour that particularly targeted them as a group. 79 Just as the authorities sent policemen to search for people with infections in the Jewish neighbourhoods, they sent them to arrest people from queues in front of soup kitchens in the Jewish quarters, or in small towns ordered people who did not own land (which few Jews did) to report for forced labour. 80 The conditions were appalling, characterized by hard labour, brutality by the guards, lack of adequate food and healthcare and subsequently a spread of disease and spiking death rates. 81
German-Jewish activists, especially Zionists, were convinced that in order to end this misery, it would be ‘necessary to put these efforts under Jewish influence’.
82
They subsequently addressed the authorities, proposing to organize the recruitment of Jews for the German war industry.
83
In early 1917 the civil administration of the Generalgouvernement established a Jewish Department at its Arbeiterzentrale which was headed by leading German Zionist Julius Berger.
84
The official administrative report noted: For the sake of improving the [process of] recruitment of Jewish workers, and, more specifically, to organize their evaluation and classification more effectively, the general secretary of the Zionist Association for Germany [Julius Berger] is employed in the German Arbeiterzentrale in Warsaw. His activities have undoubtedly increased the willingness of Jewish workers to go to Germany for work. In Lodz as well, institutions have been established for organizing the recruitment and evaluation of Jewish workers more effectively.
85
Re-Making the East, Closing the Border, Protecting the Volkskörper
The flight of Jewish workers from their workplaces to German cities in turn caused anxieties amongst authorities that they would spread typhus amongst the population, which was one of the main arguments for the closing of the borders to Jewish workers in April 1918. 95 However, Gottfried Frey himself had noted that despite the ‘import’ of 220,000 workers (both Jewish and non-Jewish) from the Generalgouvernement to Germany, virtually none of them had fallen ill while working there and the spread of the disease to the local population was unheard of. 96 Jewish organizations also reported that amongst the Polish-Jewish migrant workers no cases of typhus were detected. 97 Similarly, the director of the Arbeiterzentrale in Hamburg stated that he was not aware of any Polish-Jewish workers contracting or spreading typhus in his city. 98
The turn towards a closure of the Eastern border to Jews evolved from long-held convictions amongst German antisemites who had for a long time argued for such measures. Besides their aim to reverse Jewish emancipation, German antisemites from the 1870s had argued for an end or at least a severe restriction of East European Jewish immigration to Germany. 99 The idea that Jews were carriers and spreaders of disease was a commonplace in the antisemitic imagery. 100 With the outbreak of the First World War, the antisemitic paranoia of a wave of East European Jewish immigration was revived. 101 From 1915 onwards, numerous publications dealt with the Ostjudenproblem, emphasizing the danger it supposedly represented – especially through immigration – to the German Volk. 102 Others appealed directly to the authorities, demanding they protect Germany from the ‘swarm of locusts’ whose arrival in Germany would cause ‘severe harm to the German national body [Volkskörper]’. 103
At times, the arguments for blocking or curtailing East European Jewish immigration related to the question of disease. In a 1915 article, for instance, the pan-German Wolfgang Heinze argued for a complete ban on immigration based on racial criteria. However, he believed that such measures could not be implemented in the existing legal framework. He therefore suggested a legalistic work-around in order to exclude Jews on the basis of supposedly objective legal criteria, such as subversive ideology, unemployability, or illness, 104 thereby building on long-standing legal practice in Germany. 105 Probably not aware of typhus at the time of writing, he suggested that a ‘particularly convenient, but also justified measure for the repulsion of these undesirable elements could be an appropriate examination of the immigrant for suspected tuberculosis’. 106 His starting point was not the protection of Germans from possible infectious diseases, this was merely a strategic argument for keeping away ‘undesirable elements’. 107
The question of how Germany would relate to the populations of newly conquered territories of the Russian Empire was also addressed by German-Jewish activists. In a conversation with Count Kuno von Westarp, the head of the parliamentary group of the German Conservative Party, members of the Zionist-led Komitee für den Osten (Committee for the East) stated that they were in full agreement over the necessity to avoid a ‘flooding with Poles, may they be of Christian or Jewish religion’. 108 They argued against special restrictions for Jews, but in internal conversations Franz Oppenheimer of the Komitee stated that ‘it is not in the Jewish interest to have 200,000 scroungers from the East moving to Germany’ and that he expected the German government to impose restrictions that would grant entry to ‘the educated’ while ‘the way to Germany will have to be blocked for the caftan-Jews’. 109 In general (and in public), however, German Zionists vigorously rejected the implementation of any special laws or provisions targeting Jews migrating to Germany. 110 While they especially emphasized the necessity to transform the conditions of East European Jews in their place of residence, or possibly in a future homeland in Palestine – arguably in part in order to avoid their migration to Germany – this basic understanding was shared by most German-Jewish actors. Felix Goldmann-Oppeln of the liberal-integrationist Centralverein Deutscher Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith; CV) expressed German Jews’ fear that a large-scale Eastern Jewish immigration would lead to a rise of antisemitism in Germany. However, he strongly argued against any special laws targeting Polish Jews, as they would only be a first step for special laws targeting all Jews. For him, the solution would be to grant the Jews of the future German-dominated East full emancipation, which he believed would automatically end any striving for migration. 111 Even clearer was the position of the Orthodox movement which argued that a closing of the border would be a ‘self-degradation’ of Germany and that once relieved from Russian oppression, Polish Jews would have no interest in leaving their beloved homeland. 112
The demands and suggestions raised by both German nationalists and Jewish activists were part of a wider debate over the future of a German-ruled East, ignited by the conquest of large parts of the Russian Empire by the Central Powers in 1915. German nationalists of various persuasions believed in a mission of bringing civilization and culture to the East, into regions which were either to be incorporated into a greater German Empire or held and developed in close dependence on the Reich. 113 Not completely dissimilar, German-Jewish organizations engaged in what they themselves perceived to be a civilizing mission in the East for the sake of both Germany and the Eastern Jewish population. 114 In part this included consent to some of the brutal measures the occupation authorities directed towards the Jewish population, ‘undoubtedly well-meaning measures’ as one activist stated, which ‘do not everywhere receive the understanding that they deserve. The reason is that the masses of the population […] remain on a relatively low level of culture’. 115 Plans for the region were far-reaching. From the beginning of the war the Committee for the East, for instance had demanded to split off Russia's Western provinces ‘[…] and [to] unite them in a buffer state’ 116 in which ‘the Germans and the Jews would be an effective counterweight against the predominantly Slavic population’. 117 For German nationalists, ideas of re-shaping the region at times included megalomaniac plans for the expansion of German power in the East, which in the context of the Brest-Litovsk peace agreement of March 1918 seemed to materialize. These debates, as Paul Weindling observed, ‘had a medical sub-plot – to contain Russia as an “Asiatic” and barbarian state, by imposing quarantine measures, a Pestcordon, or a medical “Chinese Wall” on the new frontier’. 118
It was in this context that the demands for closing the Eastern border began to receive greater attention. Given the labour shortage in Germany, the authorities had previously refuted such calls. When in April 1916, for instance, the Elberfeld branch of the Deutschvölkische Partei demanded an end to Polish-Jewish immigration in order to protect the German people, this was resolutely rejected as a misinformed opinion that ignored the requirements of the German war industry. 119 This changed fundamentally, as leading German politicians and bureaucrats seemed to have adopted the idea of an anti-Jewish Pestcordon to the East. A conference on the prevention of the spread of typhus was held in March 1918 and on 23 April the Minister of the Interior, apparently in coordination with the Ministry of War but without consulting the Foreign Office, decreed the closure of the Eastern border to Jews. 120
A Ban ‘to Prevent the Import of the Disease’
With the issuing of the decree, the recruitment of Jewish workers in the Generalgouvernement ended abruptly. Whereas from October 1917 to February 1918 an average of 657 Jews and 3370 non-Jewish Poles had been sent to work in German agriculture and industry each month, 121 the number of Jews dropped to zero after the implementation of the new decree and was compensated by an increased recruitment of non-Jewish Polish workers, an average of 5104 made their way to Germany in the following months. 122 The first affected were workers who had had temporarily returned to Poland on leave. They had been forced to pay between 100 and 150 marks (up to 200 marks according to other sources), 123 approximately two to three weeks’ pay, as a deposit to ensure their return to their workplace. Now, with the border blocked to them they were unable to retrieve either the money or their personal belongings left behind at their German workplaces. 124
Aside from the complete stoppage of the immigration (including the return) of Jewish workers to Germany, German authorities moved to get rid of those already in the country which illustrates that they were not truly concerned about any ‘import’ but were rather motivated by the wish to expel Jews. In the coming months Jewish workers who either lost their job because the employer was unsatisfied with their work or because their workplaces closed down or laid people off due to a shortage of supplies were arrested and deported to Poland. 125 Testimonies by Polish-Jewish workers in Berlin, collected by local activists, show that people were often arrested because they were suspected of being unemployed, but in fact just had a day off, their workplace had temporarily shut due to a lack of raw materials, or they were on sick leave. 126 Locksmith Abraham Pruszynowski was arrested in his apartment where he was recovering from an illness, and his colleague David Praschker and munitions worker Alex Makowski, who were on temporary leave because their workplaces had shut down due to a lack of raw materials, were arrested as ‘unemployed’. Emil Schulz, who had escaped the back-breaking work in a coal mine was arrested and deported, while Mailach Kempinski was arrested while drinking a cup of coffee on his way to work. 127 There seemed to have been a virtual hunt for Polish-Jewish workers with a notable focus on those who were sick, ‘even if it was a simple illness that would in no way prevent someone from working’. 128
The measures had ripple effects in the region. Both in Poland and in Ober Ost Jews who had fled or had been deported to Russia during the war were prevented from returning, both in order to prevent the spread of disease and to halt the spread of Bolshevism, which in the antisemitic imagery was associated with Jews. 129 Several orders and decrees by Polish and German officials – all dated after the German government's decree – prevented Jews from crossing borders. 130 The Rückwanderungskommission (Return-commission) in Kovel/Kowel ordered for instance that ‘criminals, prostitutes, and also Jews cannot return to Poland’. 131 The measures were directly connected to the German decree of April 1918 and while the bureaucratic obstacles used against Jews attempting to return to Poland differed in some respects, the purpose of the measures was the same. 132
The closing of the border came as a shock to German-Jewish organizations. It is unclear when they learned about the decree (which was not published), but the first mention of the new policy in the Jewish press can be found in a small note in Frankfurter Israelitisches Familienblatt on 24 May. The paper noted without comment that ‘a ban on the import of Eastern Jewish workers has been issued by the Minister of the Interior, justified by the risk of bringing in typhus which is rampant in the Russian territories and which occurs especially often amongst the Jews which are the mass of the poorest population. This ban should prevent the danger of importing this disease’. 133 German-Jewish organizations did not immediately react in public. Consistent with their overall wartime strategies, they attempted to influence government policy quietly instead of vocally voicing opposition to discrimination. 134 Instead, German Jewish organizations, most prominently the Zionists, who through their role in the Deutsche Arbeiterzentrale in Warsaw were most intimately connected to the problem, collected material in order to address the government's reasoning of the border closure.
From May 1918 German Zionists approached sympathetic physicians in an attempt to collect scientific evidence to counter the medical arguments at the basis of the governmental decree. 135 Their interpretations of the disease and of possible approaches to tackle it, differed significantly from the racialization that can be observed in the above-cited reports by many German physicians and bureaucrats. A member of the German Zionist Association who served as a medical officer in Warsaw provided a lengthy statement in which he outlined the social reasons for the spread of typhus amongst the Jewish population of Poland, of whose above average infection rates, he believed, there could be no doubt. However, ‘[f]rom a scientific point of view there are individual predispositions for some illnesses. General predispositions of entire people can only be created by specific local – for example climatic – conditions’. 136 These ‘general predispositions’ had been created, he argued, by the effects of war, which led to shortages, hunger, and mass homelessness by which the Jewish population was exceptionally affected. This situation not only made regular washing, or the purchase of new clothes harder, if not impossible, but most importantly weakened people's immune system. ‘Any of the organism's resilience against harmful external impacts has vanished. Surely and with success, the louse bites into the dirty, unwashed, naked body, dried out by hunger and misery. Typhus had found a contingent of certain and unprotected victims’. 137 Numerous other medical professionals contributed to the collection of material. At its core, they all basically agreed on the scientific consensus that typhus was transmitted by infected lice and there was no causal relation to the patient being Jewish (or not). Arthur Felix, co-inventor of the diagnostic test for typhus, asserted that properly deloused persons would not be able to transmit the disease, 138 whereas another doctor, stationed in a field hospital for infectious diseases, wrote that there was no scientific certainty that seemingly cured and deloused patients might not spread the disease at a later stage. 139 All, however, approached the disease and the higher infection rates amongst the Jewish population of the Generalgouvernement essentially from a sociological perspective. Sharing the basic understanding that the disease itself did not discriminate between religious or ethnic groups they explained the higher infection rates amongst Jews in terms of the effects of the war rather than by the fact that they were Jewish. 140
German-Jewish organizations approached the German Chancellor in late June 1918 repeating the argument that the delousing of migrant workers, either Jewish or Christian, had been and continued to be sufficient protection against the spread of typhus. If a closure of the border was considered absolutely necessary, ‘then it should by no means be directed against Jews as such’. 141 Another letter was sent to his deputy which included numerous statements by German employers about the value of Jewish workers. 142 A letter by the Komitee für den Osten to the German Foreign Office in early September made similar arguments, stating that an exclusion of Jews for the sake of preventing typhus was irrational and unjust. In fact, this policy would be detrimental to German interests, not only due to the loss of labour force but because together with other governmental anti-Jewish measures it would contribute to an anti-German sentiment amongst the Jewish communities in neutral countries. 143
Only about two months after the decree had become known and one month after their first letter to the government did German-Jewish organizations react publicly. 144 The Zionist newspaper Jüdische Rundschau published its first article on the closure of the Eastern border in late July 1918. The anonymous author quite correctly understood that disease control was a fig leaf for the implementation of antisemitic policies and long-harboured antisemitic desires. Not only did the louse, the real transmitter of the disease, ‘in unsurpassable objectivity’ not discriminate between Jews and Christians, but quarantine measures and delousing at the border were sufficient to tackle the spread of disease. All measures directed against Eastern Jews alone were only a first step towards attacks against all Jews, including German Jews, and a disgrace for Germany as a whole. 145 This was one of only very few public reactions to the decree. The Centralverein's paper only published a small note in its September issue (taking up the report in Jüdische Rundschau), promising that it would later return to the matter, which it never did. 146 The main liberal Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums equally took up the article in Jüdische Rundschau in mid-August and demanded explanations by the government. 147 However, the main group organizing protests against the closure of the border were the Zionists who at times expressed their disappointment and anger over the inactivity and ineffectiveness of the broader Jewish organizations in this matter. 148
When the government finally responded to the petitions and complaints by German-Jewish organizations it showed no willingness to withdraw any of the implemented measures. A letter by the Ministry of the Interior and the Chancellery from October 1918 insisted that the reasoning behind the closure of the border was ‘only of a medical-policy nature [medizinalpolizeilicher Natur]’ and that the ‘benefit of recruitment […] is disproportionate to the severe dangers for public health associated with it’. The letter reiterated the old claims made by Frey and other medical officials that Jews were the primary, if not exclusive, spreaders of typhus in the Generalgouvernement and subsequently (or at least potentially) in Germany as well. While denying any antisemitic reasoning, the letter attributed the spread of typhus amongst Poland's Jews to their being ‘on a cultural low point of the worst kind’. Their ‘inclination towards uncleanliness’ had been ‘ingrained for generations’ and could not be overcome even by the best efforts of the civilizing German authorities. 149 An earlier response by the liberal Vice-Chancellor Friedrich von Payer to a member of parliament who had inquired about the closure of the border made the same arguments of Polish Jews as spreaders of the disease, and that the Jewish workers who had come to Germany were generally useless and included ‘an especially high number of morally inferior elements’. 150
The Jewish response to this policy shifted fundamentally away from medical arguments, which failed to convince anyone, towards an overt struggle against antisemitism but also to questions of Jewish self-empowerment. There were, according to Theodor Behr, only two reasons for this policy, ‘the ineradicable antisemitism of the German official, [from] the lowest Gendarme to the highest […] minister’ and the fact that ‘German politics have hitherto failed to recognize the Jewish people as a [real] power’. 151 Similarly, Jüdische Rundschau explained that the failure of the German-Jewish organizations to respond appropriately to this ‘severe insult to Jewish honour’ was due to their wrong policy, their failed understanding of antisemitism, and their blindness towards the vital needs of the Jewish people. 152 It had become clear that what Mühsam, one of the doctors consulted for his expertise on typhus, had suggested was true: that this had never been about the fear of infection but always about antisemitism; that refuting the medical arguments was futile as antisemites would resort to any other argument in order to keep Jews out of Germany. 153 Indeed, this is what happened, just as the antisemite Wolfgang Heinze had suggested a few years earlier.
Conclusion
The decree reflects on the rise of antisemitism in Germany during the First World War. 154 However, the government's denial that antisemitism had anything to do with its decision to close the borders and that it reflected only medical considerations might have – subjectively – even been truthful on its own accord. But crucially, this points to the conceptual understanding and response to disease that came with the identification of Jews as an ethnic group, as the primary, if not exclusive, carriers of the disease. The medical decision to concentrate on Jews because they were Jews stemmed from a racialized framing of the disease itself that was fundamentally antisemitic. By employing this racialized logic of disease prevention, the German authorities de facto implemented longstanding demands by the völkisch right. For antisemitic politicians and propagandists it did not matter whether Jews actually were more likely than non-Jews to carry diseases. For them, the threat to the German nation were the Jews, especially East European Jews, whom they wanted to keep out of Germany.
But even if the rationale behind the blocking of the border had been purely medical, the effect was the same. The collapse of the German Empire in the fall of 1918 neither weakened antisemitism nor did it bring about an easing of the restrictions to immigration. 155 In January 1919 Erich Martini wrote to alert Germans of ‘the typhus threatening from the East’ and warned of the ‘immigration of Jewish Poles, typhus-suspected wandering Jews’ making their way to Germany. 156 Although the border had become somewhat porous in the wake of the German military collapse, the blockade against Jewish immigration persisted. In May 1919, following several interventions and negotiations between German-Jewish politicians and organizations and the government, deportations of Jews from Germany could be limited. 157 In November 1919, the Ministry of the Interior published a decree that made the right of East European Jews to remain in Germany dependent on new ‘objective’ criteria such as gainful employment. 158 However, in 1921 the Ministry of the Interior repeated its order to border police posts to arrest and deport East European Jews coming into the country in order to stop the ‘flooding by Eastern Jewish immigrants’ although this had proven to be difficult as Polish border guards often refused to accept deported migrants. 159
In some cases, the rhetoric in relation to Jews as spreaders of typhus somewhat subsided; often only to make way for the accusation of Jews as spreaders of Bolshevism. 160 However, the war years had seen profound and lasting changes. The identification of Jews with disease and vice versa had become a central aspect for the way in which both were conceptualized and approached. The racialization of typhus had become key to the way in which physicians and politicians approached the disease, subsequently endorsing and implementing the demands various antisemitic movements had raised for decades. Concentrating measures on a specific group and closing the borders to a disease that knew no borders was irrational in the wider context of public health. But it made sense in the minds of nationalists, antisemitic doctors, bureaucrats, and officials. The war had been a fundamental shift in the way German authorities attempted to respond to the outbreak of typhus, and as historian Wolfgang Eckart noted ‘a fight against the louse as transmitter of the disease gradually became a fight against the Jewish population’. 161 Indeed, this was a key element in the evolution of antisemitism towards its eliminationist form.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Helga Embacher, Jasper Heinzen, Marcos Silber, and Tim Stanton for their wonderful comments, critique, and support.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust (grant number RL-2016-044).
