Rudolf Weigl

Rudolf Weigl

Rudolf Stefan Weigl (September 2, 1883 – August 11, 1957, Zakopane) was a Polish biologist and inventor of the first effective vaccine against epidemic typhus. He founded the Weigl Institute in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), where he undertook vaccine research. It was here, during the Holocaust, that he harboured Jews and personally risked the death penalty to do so; his vaccines were also smuggled into the local ghetto as well as to the ghetto in Warsaw, saving countless additional Jewish lives.

Weigl had Austrian heritage and was born in Prerau (now Přerov), Moravia. His father died in a bicycle accident when he was a child. His mother, Elisabeth Kroesel, married a Polish high school teacher, Józef Trojnar, and they raised Weigl in Jasło, Poland. Later the family moved to Lviv, where Weigl graduated in 1907 from the biology department at University of Jan Kazimierz, taught by professors Benedykt Dybowski (1833 – 1930) and J. Nusbaum-Hilarowicz (1859 – 1917). After graduation, Weigl became Nusbaum's assistant there and was habilitated in 1913 in the comparative zoology and anatomy department.

Following the Soviet and Nazi German invasions of Poland in World War II, the Nazis became quite attentive to Dr. Weigl's research. When they occupied Lviv they ordered him to set up a vaccine production plant at his Institute. About a thousand people worked there. Weigl employed and protected Polish intellectuals, Jews and members of the Polish underground. His vaccines were smuggled into ghettos in Lviv and Warsaw saving countless lives, until the Institute was shut down by the Soviet Union following anti-German offensive of 1944.

Weigl came to Kraków in 1945. He was appointed the Chair of General Microbiology Institute of the Jagiellonian University, and later as the Chair of Biology of the Medical Faculty in Poznań. Production of the vaccine remained in Kraków in the following years until discontinued. Weigl died on August 11, 1957.

The Weigl Institute features prominently in Andrzej Żuławski's 1971 film The Third Part of the Night. In 2003, professor Weigl was posthumously awarded the medal of Righteous Among the Nations of the World by the state of Israel.