Civilians under Nazi occupation made a point of studying the Germans who were controlling their lives. One of the things that comes up repeatedly in reports, memoirs and diaries is that the Nazis were terrified of illness. Well, they didn’t mind at all if millions of men and women under their control in prisons and concentration camps died of disease. But they were terrified of getting sick themselves.

This was so universally well-established that resisters used the threat of illness to protect themselves on many occasions. In February 1944, for example, the SS shot every prisoner who could not stumble out on a death march before the Russians arrived at a sub-camp of the women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück. Every prisoner, that is, except for the women in one particular ward of what they called an infirmary. A young woman who belonged to Dutch-Paris was lying on a bunk bed in that room. A Polish prisoner in that ward had the courage and presence of mind to tell the SS that the women in the room had typhus. Just the word “typhus” scared the SS so deeply that they paused in their killing spree long enough to get themselves far away from contagion. The women survived to have the joy of being liberated, although many had been so starved and maltreated as prisoners that they could not survive more than a few days of freedom.
There are other, less desperate stories of couriers diverting attention by fake coughs and mumbled words like “fever.” The Germans’ skittishness around disease tells us something about Nazi culture, but it also tells us quite a lot about the conditions of everyday life in the lands ruled by the Third Reich.

After years of war, malnutrition had become endemic in most populations. That, of course, weakens a person’s immune system. So does not having enough fuel to heat your home or access to warm enough clothing, as was the case for millions of civilians. And whether a sick person was in Paris or in a concentration camp, there wasn’t a whole lot of medicine available.

Penicillin, the first true antibiotic, was discovered in 1928, only a decade before the war. The huge pharmaceutical industry that we have now, let alone its vast array of products, simply did not exist. Men, women and children were still dying from diseases such as pneumonia that many of us in the US and Europe simply assume will not kill us because we take antibiotics for granted.

So, really, the Germans were just being sensible to fear infection. But that fear was a crack in their armor, as fears always are. It gave resisters an opportunity to shield themselves by exploiting the German fear of sickness.