This paper reconstructs how the brains of Jewish and non-Jewish victims of a typhus epidemic in German-occupied Warsaw were transmitted via military pathological networks to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Brain Research in Berlin-Buch, which was the predecessor of today’s Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Brain Research in Frankfurt am Main. The involvement of German military pathologists in the transfer of brains from the Jewish hospital in Warsaw raises questions of greater historical significance. The inherent connection between typhus prevention and genocide has been studied for a long time by medical historians and Holocaust researchers, but it was generally assumed that the German civil administration competed with the SS for sole responsibility for “Jewish affairs” in the General Government. While the contribution of military doctors has been neglected, historians have so far focused on the role of civilian doctors and medical administrators in developing and justifying the policy of forcibly ghettoizing Polish Jews as a sanitary precaution against the spread of infectious diseases.
Weindling et al. (2026) studied this question.