The medical experiments of Josef Mengele on concentration camp prisoners are well known and documented – but journalist Arthur Allen has written a new book, with help from the Visual History Archive, about two little-known doctors whose experiments actually saved lives and were in themselves acts of defiance against the Nazis.

Allen, a veteran journalist, author and currently health and technology writer at Politico, wrote The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis, now available at Amazon and other booksellers. It tells the story of Polish scientist Rudolf Weigl and his assistant Ludwig Fleck, who were enlisted by the Nazis to develop a typhus vaccine which would be used to prevent the spread of the disease (carried by lice) among camp inmates and guards.

However, both engaged in sabotage while they conducted their experiments. They enlisted Buchenwald inmates to participate in their experiments – involving strapping matchbox-sized cages filled with lice to their legs, letting them feed on their blood – which ultimately saved these inmates from selection to die in the gas chambers. They also produced fake vaccines to give to Nazi guards and smuggled lifesaving medicine for the camp inmates.

To aid in his research, Allen watched dozens of testimonies in the Visual History Archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. From descriptions of survivors who interacted with Weigl or Fleck or knew people and places who were important to Weigl and Fleck’s story, he was able to fill in the book with details that made their world come alive.   

“It was so precious because those things are what make a book work,” Allen said. “Those details and voices – and to know that something was real, because someone was there.”

One particularly valuable testimony was that of Bruno Seeman, who survived Auschwitz as a child and whose mother was one of Fleck’s laboratory assistants. In another, Henryk Mikols describes being subjected to an experiment (unrelated to Weigl and Fleck) in which he was fed potato salad that was injected with typhoid. Peter Schenk worked as a tailor for an SS guard right above the typhus ward.

Though the book concerns a specific experience and group of people, Allen said Weigl and Fleck’s story is a universal example of the difficult choices people faced in order to survive the Holocaust.

”What would you or I, someone who’s very well educated and has a normal life and is thrust into this situation – what happens to you? How do you react? What kind of compromises do you make?” Allen said.

It also reveals the unusual situation scientists like Weigl and Fleck found themselves in: making not only scientific observations, but social and anthropological observations as they watched the behavior of their fellow inmates, patients and Nazi guards and officials, Allen said.

Allen said the Visual History Archive was an incredible and valuable resource. From the testimonies he watched, he could tell how unique of an opportunity it was to hear the survivors’ stories. Many, as Seeman’s son told Allen about his father, might never have otherwise shared their experiences.

“I really get the feeling that it’s this window into the world that even a lot of people who are very close to the survivors don’t see,” Allen said. “It’s not something that these people would really want to talk about at all, but they do it for history so people don’t forget.”