Before thalidomide: Heinrich Mückter and the Nazi typhus complex

The physician and chemist Heinrich Mückter (1914-87) is widely known for his role in developing thalidomide at Grünenthal, whose market launch led to one of the most serious pharmaceutical scandals in history. Less scholarly attention has been paid, however, to his involvement in Nazi Germany's typhus control and vaccine research and production between 1942 and 1945. Drawing on a variety of historical sources, this article reconstructs his work at a delousing facility in the Białystok District and at the Institute for Typhus and Virus Research of the German Army High Command in Krakow under hygienist Hermann Eyer (1906-97). We show that Mückter participated in a racially framed typhus control programme and in ethically dubious vaccine production methods. He also conducted unethical and methodologically questionable vaccine experiments on human beings in Krakow, including underage test subjects and exploiting the structural vulnerability of the occupied Polish population. In addition, we reassess assumptions about cooperation between Eyer's Wehrmacht institute and the research station at Buchenwald concentration camp under SS physician Erwin Ding-Schuler (1912-45). Taken together, we argue that Mückter operated within a broader network of civilian and military scientists, health officials, and representatives of the pharmaceutical industry who accelerated the erosion of ethical boundaries in biomedical research and contributed to an exterminatory health and population policy in the occupied East. These practices, termed the 'Nazi typhus complex', reveal how preventive medicine, biomedical research, and exterminatory policies were intertwined in the context of an anti-Slavic war of annihilation and the Holocaust.