Marian Ciepielowski

Marian Ciepielowski (30 August 1907 – 1 February 1973) was a Polish physician and scientist. A survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, he is best known for his activity as a saboteur within the camp's vaccine production unit. Ciepielowski's actions resulted in useful vaccines being distributed to camp inmates, while inactive and useless "vaccines" were sent to Nazi soldiers. After the war he emigrated to the United States.

Before the war Ciepielowski was born on 30 August 1907 to a Polish Catholic family in Dzikowiec. He attended a school in Tarnowskie Góry and then went to study medicine in Kraków, graduating in 1934 from the Jagiellonian University Medical College. He was active in the Bratnia Pomoc student organization. Specializing in infectious diseases, after graduation, he worked at various places including Kraków's Department of Microbiology and Serology and a social insurance company.

Wartime activities Ciepielowski, who already considered himself a socialist at university, joined the Polish defense against the Nazi invasion in September 1939. After a brief internment in the USSR, he returned to Poland and joined the clandestine resistance. He was arrested by the Gestapo in April 1941 and convicted based on vague accusations of anti-German activities. He was imprisoned at Montelupich Prison before being sent to Buchenwald. One of the camp's SS officers, the surgeon Erwin Ding-Schuler, needing researchers to staff his vaccine laboratory, pulled Ciepielowski to assist. Ciepielowski would work in the camp hygiene department from July 1943 to April 1945. Rabbits were used in the production of vaccine because the other methods were deemed less acceptable; one involved growing the vaccine in typhus-infected lice, which the SS did not wish to introduce into the camp, and another involved culturing the vaccine in chicken eggs, and chicken and eggs were both likely to be stolen for food. Ciepielowski and the other researchers regarded Ding-Schuler (who had received his degree through party loyalty, rather than scholarship) to be a fool, easily manipulated due to his lack of medical knowledge. He was later approached by representatives of a large pharmaceutical firm who were stymied by their inability to produce a viable typhus vaccine using the fraudulent methods published under Ding-Schuler's name.

Ciepielowski married a fellow Polish survivor in West Germany, and in 1951 they immigrated to the United States. He worked at the Roosevelt Hospital in New York, where he eventually rose to the post of deputy director. He died in 1973 and was buried in Metuchen, New Jersey.