Eugene Lazowski Terrified the Nazis with Fake Typhus

We are aware of a small number of Nazi collaborators who secretly worked against them and did everything in their power to preserve Jewish lives during the Second World War. Eugene Lazowski, a Polish physician, was one of them. He took advantage of Nazi suspicions to save 8,000 locals, including Jews who had been concealed among them.

Lazowski was prohibited from treating Jews, but he nevertheless did so, and at the height of a typhus epidemic, a colleague made an amazing discovery. Patients who received an injection of a dead strain of the typhus virus would not get the illness, but they would still test positive for it.

The Nazis were frightened about the rise of typhus, which was killing thousands of people. Lazowski then devised a scheme. By spreading the deceased typhus strain to thousands of nearby villagers, he might simulate an epidemic. To give the entire operation credibility, they moved patients to nearby towns to corroborate blood tests while injecting people at a rate calculated to simulate a real typhus epidemic. As a result, the Nazis placed more than a dozen communities under quarantine, where they stayed until liberation.

Due to the large number of instances but no recorded fatalities, the entire scheme came dangerously close to unraveling at one point. In order to keep the investigating Gestapo intoxicated and well-fed so they wouldn't notice the inconsistencies, Lazowski partied with them.