Bruno

In the middle of World War Two, German soldiers in southeastern Poland started avoiding a cluster of villages. They wouldn't go in. They wouldn't take people out for forced labor. They put up warning signs and stayed away. They believed the area was infected with typhus. It wasn't. Two doctors had invented the whole thing. The man behind it was Eugene Lazowski, a young Polish doctor working for the Red Cross in the town of Rozwadów. He was watching the Nazi occupation tear his country apart. Executions. Deportations. People shipped off to labor camps, many never coming back. He wanted to stop it. He had no weapons, no army, and no way to fight. What he had was medicine. His friend and fellow doctor, Stanisław Matulewicz, had discovered something strange. If you injected a person with a harmless, dead strain of a certain bacteria, their blood would test positive for typhus. They wouldn't be sick at all. But on paper, they'd look like they had one of the most feared diseases of the war. And the Germans were terrified of typhus. It spread fast, it killed, and it could tear through an army. When the Germans found it, they quarantined the area and kept their distance. Lazowski realized what that meant. If he could make enough people look infected, the Germans would leave the whole region alone. So he started injecting his patients. He chose carefully. He sent the blood samples to German labs for testing, exactly as the rules required. The results came back positive. Again and again. The Germans declared an epidemic zone. Villages were quarantined. Soldiers kept out. People who would have been seized for forced labor or worse were left alone, because nobody wanted to go near them. Lazowski had to be careful. If too many cases looked fake, someone would ask why nobody was dying. So he spread out the injections over time and kept the outbreak believable. Eventually the Germans did get suspicious. They sent a team of doctors to inspect. Lazowski met them with food and vodka and played the gracious host. He guided them toward the sickest looking, dirtiest patients he could find, in the most crowded rooms. The German doctors, worried about catching typhus themselves, took a few samples and left in a hurry. The tests came back positive. The fake epidemic lasted until the end of the war. Estimates say it may have protected around 8,000 people. Lazowski also secretly helped Jews from the nearby ghetto, giving them medical care at enormous risk. After the war he moved to the United States and became a professor of pediatrics in Chicago. For decades he barely talked about what he'd done. Late in life he finally wrote a memoir. He called it My Private War. He died in 2006. He never fired a shot. He beat the Nazis with a needle and a lab test.

On the other side of the bombing war, in the dark over Germany, waited the men who hunted the bombers, and the deadliest of them all was a young pilot the British crews called the Spook of St-Trond. Heinz-Wolfgang Schnaufer shot down one hundred and twenty-one aircraft at night, almost all of them British heavy bombers, the most of any night-fighter pilot in history, and he wore the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds, Germany's highest decoration for valor. Schnaufer flew night fighters against the RAF's nighttime bombing offensive, the campaign that produced the firestorms I described, over Kassel and Hamburg and the rest. The RAF came by night, in great streams of hundreds of bombers, to attack the German cities, and the German night-fighter force existed to find and destroy them in the darkness. It was a strange, deadly, technical kind of war, fought in the black sky with radar, the night fighters guided onto the bomber stream by ground controllers and their own airborne radar sets, then stalking the great four-engined Lancasters and Halifaxes in the dark and shooting them down, often from below. Schnaufer was a master of it, young, methodical, and relentless. Operating largely from a base at St-Trond in Belgium, from which he got his nickname among the enemy, he ran up a staggering score hunting the bombers night after night. His total reached one hundred and twenty-one aircraft destroyed, every one of them at night, the overwhelming majority of them the big British bombers with their crews of seven. In one extraordinary night near the end of the war he shot down nine bombers in a single day's flying, seven of them, it is said, in the space of about nineteen minutes. Each of those victories meant a bomber falling in flames in the dark, and the mathematics of it are sobering, because a heavy bomber carried a crew of seven, so a night-fighter ace's score, counted in aircraft, represents a very large number of airmen. The night war over Germany was as lethal to the hunters' prey as the day war, and men like Schnaufer were the reason Bomber Command's casualties ran so appallingly high, the losses that made a man like Cheshire's survival over a hundred missions so remarkable. Schnaufer received the Diamonds to his Knight's Cross in the autumn of 1944, one of only a small number of men so honored, recognition as the preeminent night-fighter pilot of the war. He survived the fighting, was captured at the end, and then died young, a few years after the war, in a car crash in France. His tally of one hundred and twenty-one night victories has never been approached, the record of the most successful night-fighter pilot who ever flew, earned in the darkness over the burning cities of Germany.