This is a little story that most all non-Germans have never heard of, and I would imagine less than 1-percent of Germans actually know it.
At the beginning of the 1900s....Tuberculosis was a pretty serious deal in Germany and central Europe.
Around the 1920s....several folks were working on treatment plans. Two of these folks were French guys....Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin.
The two had a treatment which was used for juveniles (mostly in France) throughout the 1920s. Some suggest 100k kids treated....some suggest on up to a quarter-million.
So two German doctors knew of the French efforts, and decided that for the Lubeck region...about a 40 minute drive NE from Hamburg....they could get the 'culture' from France, and run their own inoculation program.
The culture arrived in August of 1929. Various people would point this out later, but the lab the two German doctors used....was a lab for the cultures and the active Tuberculosis virus itself. There was no boundary, and whatever culture that was brought in....probably wasn't 'pure' for that long.
Around the last week of February 1930....vaccinations started up. You have to remember, this was all with good intentions and using modern science.
Was the vaccine still pure, from the lab in France? No.
Somewhere in the midst of this start-up.....parents had to sign a slip to say it was OK with them.
The design of this vaccine? For new born kids....which in this hospital area....it was around 260 kids born and inoculated over a two month period.
Roughly about 45 days into this period....the first kid died of TB.
By the end of April, three more kids had died, and the inoculations were halted.
Seventy-seven kids from this program were to die by the end, and another 130-odd kids were fairly ill. Sixty of the kids? Oddly, nothing. This is the mystery part of the story, I think. Either they had some kind of immunity or they actually (by accident) got the good stuff.
The chief German doctor in this effort? He'd be dragged into court around 18 months later, and convicted on negligent homicide and negligent bodily harm.....getting two years of prison. Various efforts for appeals came and went.....he'd die six years later. As far as I can tell....he never stepped into a jail-house.
His partner? Fifteen months of jail-time on the same charges....he entered and was able to leave after seven months.
This story made it around Germany via newspapers, and was actively discussed. If you read a lot of German history....you might know of the story, or if you hang out with the medical crowd....you might know something about it.
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