Axis History Forum

Two infectious diseases have their names from the related distortion of consciousness, "typhus" (fog) and "cholera" (rage). Both diseases are relatively uncommon today.
In war campaigns in history that was different. Napoleons 600.000 men army invading Russia in spring 1812 lost 80.000 lives by typhus during the first month of the campaign . At their return in December 1812, 500.000 soldiers of Napoloeon's army had been lost, among those more than 260.000 had died on typhus.
An interesting question would be, if and how those diseases influence the content of post war memories. Typhus played a significant role during WWII especially in the East. However nobody has investigated how eye witness reports could have been distorted by an infection, impairing the perception of reality.
It must be mentioned before that "typhus" in German medical publications is a gastro-intestinal infection caused by the bacteria salmonella typhi, -paratyphi and -typhimurium. Typhus in anglo american terminology is an infection being transmitted by lice, which themselves have an infection by a virus/bacteria chimera called rickettsia prowazekii. That illness in German has the name "Fleckfieber" or "Läusefieber", "spotted fever" or "lice fever". To avoid confusions, the English expression "spotted fever typhus" will be used furtherly.
The bite of the infected garment louse leads to a state of feverish rash lasting approximately one or two weeks. It is connected to inflammation of the cerebral vessels and had a mortality of more than 60% in the time before antibiotics. Spotted fever typhus disappeared with vaccination and strict hygienic measures.
Even to German WWII physicians spotted fever typhus was unknown. In 1942 the German army psychiatrist W. v. Baeyer* published a case report of 7 patients he had observed in a German military hospital during the campaign in the East.
The paper is the only report of such kind which was found in an intensive literature research. I have therefore translated most of it (I left away laboratory and physiological parameters which were mentioned to prove that all patients had undergone spotted fever typhus and none of them had a primarily psychiatric or drug related disease).
W. von Baeyers conclusions could have some important consequences for reports of Nazi UFOs and secret weapons, conspiracy theories but also atrocity reports: the absence of spotted fever typhus in the medical history of the patient around the time of the reporting period should be verified to increase some report's validity. The reasons are listed below.
The translation of 90% of the content is attached.
In summary W. v. Baeyer observed:
In spotted fever typhus two phases of distortion of consciousness occur
The first phase during the acute fevrish period is not different to other infectious diseases with high fever and septic organ function impairment
The second phase occurs after full recovery with a latency of up to two weeks
It is characterised by intensive phantasy constructions ("confabulations") which are stored in the patient's memory as facts having actually happened in reality.
Those phantasy constructs are very succeptible to suggestion. Any suggested content lead to integrating it in those phantasies further developping or processing it, the resulting being oftenly gross exaggerations.
Those patients are completely normal concerning other psychic functions and even are able to distinguish memories of dreams occuring in the same time as phantasies occur from memories of real events.
Spotted fever typhus phantasies being stored as real experiences lead to considerable suffering during the time period when they disappear, related to their "experience" quality in the memory against the more and more developping perception of their absurdity.
Those phantasy contents do neither delete other memories nore replace them, they also do not fill memory gaps. They are simply additive, the normal memory of patients being completely preserved.
Even after full recovery patients do NOT learn to accept those phantasies as intrusions and to store them in memory as having been dream like contents. Patients try to forget them and with growing time distance actually seem to forget them.



*: Walter Ritter von Baeyer received his doctorate in Munich in 1928. Habilitation was denied to him by the Nazis. He was chief of psychiatry in the Nuremberg hospital from 1945 to 1955 and of the Dept. Psychiatry of the University of Heidelberg from 1955 to 1972. He has founded the society against abuse of psychiatry which cared for those cases in the countries behind the iron courtain during the time of cold war. The "Society for Ethics in Psychiatry" is named after him.

Hm,I am reading the following in Va Banque (by H.Schustereit) on P 72
Ab Mitte Oktober wurde eine zunehmende Verlausung der Truppe festgestelt(Quelle:BA-MA III W 805/6II,121), doch traten die durch sie verursachten Fleckfiebererkrankungen vereinzelt erst in der ersten Novemberhälfte auf und zwar im Bereich der Heeresgruppe Mitte (Quelle:BA-M III W 805 /7 I /44)
Die Zahl der Fleckfiebererkranten erhöhte sich in Dezember auf über Tausend,von denen jeder Fünfte starb. (Quelle:BA-MA W 805 /7 I /205 and 7II /32)
Translation :since 15 october an increasing lousing was noticed,but the typhus wich was caused by the lausing,appeared only in the first half of november and especially in the Army Group Center.
The number of sick cases due to typhus was increasing in december to more than 1000 (20 % died) .

Doctors working at KZ camp Buchenwald were working on a typhus vaccine, using camp inmates for experiments.

See this thread
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=129301

Many German bombed-out refugees entering Denmark from early 1945 and on were found to have the lice-carried variety of typhus. Mortality was high, but it wasn't quite 60%

murx wrote:*: Walter Ritter von Baeyer received his doctorate in Munich in 1928. Habilitation was denied to him by the Nazis.....

.... he has jewish ancestors, see:
Pongratz, Ludwig J. (Hsg.): Psychiatrie in Selbstdarstellungen. Bern-Stuttgart-Wien Huber, 1977. page 18.

Walter Ritter von Baeyer (* 28.05.1904; † 26.06.1987 Heidelberg)
He entered the Wehrmacht in order to remain in germany !
Since 1935 active as Sanitätsoffizier. Beratender Psychiater der 16. Armee until September 1944, then with Heeresgruppe Nord. Last rank Oberstabsarzt.
He worked about concomitants and aftereffects of the encephalitis due to spotted fever.
See in detail in
Georg Berger: Die Beratenden Psychiater des deutschen Heeres 1939 bis 1945. Peter Lang, Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften, Frankfurt am Main u. a., 1998

See also
Aschenbrenner, Reinhard und Walter Ritter von Baeyer: Epidemisches Fleckfieber. Eine klinische Einführung.
Stuttgart : Enke, 1944.
and
http://www.aerzteblatt.de/v4/archiv/art ... p?id=44157 (also with pic)
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Ritter_von_Baeyer
http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/presse/news04/2405psy.html
http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL149135 ... von_Baeyer


Dieter Z.
I knew him when I was student in Heidelberg.

I did not even know that the Wehrmacht had psychiatric care at all. My source of information about W. v. Baeyer was Wikipedia. His paper has an added value for today: Some of the stories told by veterans or "survivors" might be pure invention, nothing on them being true: Those who report them do not lie to us anyways. I haven't seen things that way before. It shows that there is something between "truth" and "lie", "acceptance" and "denial". If anybody is interested in the original German paper, which is too large to attach: I will upload it on some server and post the link here. I can deposit also a huge doctor thesis (German) about the hygienic measures which were taken by the German Wehrmacht to prevent spreading of typhus to Germany and how this knowledge was obtained during WWI, the Krimean wars and military cooperation with the Turks. Those 350 pages will be translated too, but that takes some time.

Lieber Murx,

I'm very interested in

I can deposit also a huge doctor thesis (German) about the hygienic measures which were taken by the German Wehrmacht to prevent spreading of typhus to Germany

Please post at least the cover of the dissertation, the author, the university and the year of publication.
Thank you.

Dieter Z.

I have deposited the original paper, the German doctor thesis and some historical and actual typhus papers (English and German) under the link below. I also attach some interesting pictures I found in a medical presentation of typhujs. It shows: DDT delousing, US-Army typhus ward WWII, German quarantene measures in Poland.
https://smartdrive.web.de/guest?path=T ... viewType=0

(Click: Smartdrive Gastzugang starten) / (Start guest access)

Thank you very much !
For german speaking researchers the same link directly:
http://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/diss/z2 ... df/dtw.pdf

Dieter Z.

Danke!

Here attached are the reports of the leader of the Warsaw Institute of Hygiene concerning measures to fight epidemies like typhus and the working instructions for the use of desinfectants and highly toxic gases (including accident prevention measures for operating gas chambers) for the Waffen SS (both in German, for compatibility of file sizes I had to remove the pictures)

I have an open question to which I didn't find an answer yet: Has ANY court of the post WWII trials taken one tmde into consideration that some of the weirdest stories of alleged atrocities, UFOs or gold treasures could have been typhus fever phatasies?

murx wrote:I have an open question to which I didn't find an answer yet: Has ANY court of the post WWII trials taken one tmde into consideration that some of the weirdest stories of alleged atrocities, UFOs or gold treasures could have been typhus fever phatasies?

I don't know whether any court has considered it, but apologists have. And again, there are plenty of discussions on that theory in the Holocaust and War Crimes section, which is the appropriate place for it.

~Vikki