The First World War and Combating Lice

Armed with the discovery that the louse was the carrier of typhus, Nazi Germany's military hygienists set out to ameliorate the squalid conditions in the trenches on the Western Front during World War I. They built up defences against incursions by rats, lice, and mosquitoes, and derided North African French troops as typhus carriers. The confrontation with alien species of disease carriers led to draconian delousing of civilians and racial stigmatization; in the Near East, German hygiene experts came to the threshold of genocide. The network of hygiene institutes was rapidly mobilized for strategic tasks. The shock of encountering typhus in Serbia forced the disease onto the Allies' medical agenda. But two elements were distinctive on the German side — the German interest in the use of poison gas for delousing and mounting racial prejudice against the Polish Jews. Typhus worsened as the military situation deterioriated, and medical animosity against the eastern Jews — derided as treacherous vermin — intensified. Epidemics provided a pretext for genocide.