Emails from people on the Germans and DDT during World War II:
Various anti-lice powders were already available in WWI.
Most of them turned out to be rather ineffectice.
German army preferred old-fashioned delousing with shower and delousing of clothes
in delousing chambers whenever possible, since this
procedure was very successful in WWI.
DDT and a few other insecticides were rather expensive because they were covered
by patents. That's no joke and if you consider the amounts that an army or the
SS needed the price difference becomes very important. There was still a free
market in Germany.
Since 1943 the German company Schering AG produced DDT under license from the
Swiss company Geigy. The Geigy brandname for their product was Gesarol.
Lauseto was produced by I.G. Farben and contained 15% DDT.
The raw materials (especially chloral) for the production of DDT and DDT itself
were in short supply.
Germany realized too late how effective DDT was and the Allies didn't really
advertise their positive experiences with DDT. The Allies could have easily
supplied the German camps with DDT via the Red Cross to prevent the catastrophe
in the winter 1944/1945.
I know that most english-language websites claim that the Americans had DDT
and a typhus vaccine while the Germans did not have them.
That's wrong. The Germans also had the typhus vaccine.
The older Weigl-vaccine was produced by manually infecting large numbers of
lice - every louse was infected individually by hand - and then feeding the
lice on human donors until enough bacteria had grown in the lice. Then the gut
from every single louse was removed and used for the vaccine. It's obvious that
with this time consuming method only small quantities could be produced. 100
lice were necessary for one shot and three shots were necessary to immunize
one person. A real infection usually gives immunity for several decades, whereas
the vaccine with killed bacteria protected only for one year. And the vaccine
did not prevent infection, the disease was only much milder and never fatal.
The Germans also experimented with the egg-based vaccine which is easier to
produce on a mass-scale.
The problem was that the scientists and the Wehrmacht had not much trust in
this new vaccine. They did not know if it was as effective as the Weigl-vaccine
and they did not know the dose that was necessary to produce immunity.
That's why they decided to test this vaccine on a few inmates in the Buchenwald
camp. That was certainly not a very ethical decision, but I guess they thought
it would still be better than to risk the possible death of tens of thousands
if the new vaccine turned out to be a complete failure.
It's a philosophical question: Is it allowed to sacrifice a few lifes in order
to save several thousands of lifes? I'm glad that I don't have to make such
a decision but I have a problem with people who demonize such a behavior but
have no problem with the fact that the Allies at the same time bombarded civilians
in hundreds of German cities and at the same time refusing any peace talks.
In other words it could be argued that they forced the Germans into this dilemma.
Anyway, the egg-based vaccine was eventually approved for large-scale production.
Until the very end of the war typhus was not a real problem in the camps in
the west. A vaccine would not have been necessary as long as delousing was possible.
The problems only began with the mass evacuations from the east. By that time
it was probably too late for vaccination - not enough vaccines, not enough time,
blocked transportation / infrastructure. And I guess nobody really planned for
this total defeat.
At the same time a typhus vaccine was more and more important for German soldiers
at the eastern front. During heavy and prolonged combat soldiers can no longer
delouse or change clothes so that they inevitably get lice-infested. That's
why typhus broke out among the German soldiers during the battle of Stalingrad
- with heavy losses. During most of the war most the the German soldiers were
not vaccinated against typhus because not enough of the vaccine was available.
Only medical staff and important older people from the military could be vaccinated.
Paul Kremer mentions in his diary when he received his three typhus vaccine-shots.
I guess that in the last months of the war most of the available vaccine was
consumed by the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS because it was their only protection
when they weren't able to delouse during combat - together with the sparse amounts
of Lauseto and other DDT-containing insecticides.
The Germans had their own version of DDT called "GESAROL" which was
chemically the same substance. Dr. Paul Mueller, the Swiss chemist at
CIBA (Geigy?) who received the Nobel Prize after the war, discovered the insecticidal
powers of the chemical substance--made that information available to many countries
for free during the war. Germany was included and had its own supply in
use in early 1944 and I have some of the German essays and even advertisements
for it in my files. But, the Germans amazingly at the very same time recognized
the major problem with the chemical which was that it was non-selective; it
killed all insects. In response, I G Farben developed several alternatives,
the best of which was called "LAUSETO-NEU." That substance was
six times more deadly than DDT at killing lice--and did relatively little harm
to other insects. Because of the bombing of German pharmaceutical plants,
however, all of these substances were in short supply.
The Germans also had a good anti-typhus vaccine from the early days of the war--but
it was made from the intestines from typhus-infected lice at an institute in
Krakow. The great innovation of the American Cox-vaccine was that it could
be made in much larger quantitites.