The Fake Epidemic That Fooled the Nazis

In 1942, in the Polish town of Rozwadów, Dr. Eugene Lazowski lived in a house bordering the ghetto. He worked at a Red Cross clinic, and in secret he belonged to the Home Army, the Polish underground. Through a hole in his backyard fence, he treated Jewish patients. The Nazi occupiers had a habit he understood well. They pointed to typhus to justify emptying ghettos and clearing towns. Jews said to be infected were shot. Polish areas with typhus were simply quarantined. Lazowski and his colleague Dr. Stanisław Matulewicz saw the difference in those two rules. The Germans feared typhus, carried by lice, more than almost anything. So the doctors asked a dangerous question. What if Rozwadów had an epidemic that did not exist? How could two doctors make a disease appear on paper?