"typhus, did not trouble itself to distinguish between victor and loser"

army.mil/cmh
CHAPTER XII The Rhineland Campaign, 1945
In cold logic, hunger was the Germans' problem.
It could be argued that whatever befell them was their own doing.
But the rickettsia microorganism, which causes typhus, did not trouble itself to distinguish between victor and loser. It accompanied war but was not concerned with justice or with causes, any more than was the body louse on which it traveled. On the drive across the Rhineland all the armies discovered cases of typhus. The 6th Army Group found several in a camp for Russian forced laborers near Saarbruecken. Some inmates had wandered off, and, predictably, the disease also began appearing in surrounding DP camps. In Cologne a small epidemic had begun from two separate sources before the Americans arrived. In January, a doctor and several SS guards escorting political prisoners eastward had fallen ill and entered the hospital in Cologne. In the confusion of war and the continuous bombing, they were at the hospital two weeks before their cases were diagnosed as typhus. By then they had infected several nurses and others on the hospital staff. The second source was the Klingelputz prison where, owing to overcrowding and neglect, the Germans did not detect the disease until after it had passed from the prisoners to the guards and been carried outside the walls. Having seen at first hand what the disease could do, the army and army group G-5's reported that they could not prevent its spread to the troops with the resources they had, and SHAEF issued orders making public health a command responsibility and the concern of all US medical officers in Germany. SHAEF also began shipping in enough vaccine to inoculate all displaced persons. ETOUSA, charged with maintaining the communications zone across France, set up a cordon sanitaire on the Rhine from the Netherlands to the Swiss border and allowed no civilians to cross without an examination and DDT dusting. Persons going west into France were dusted with DDT at the border control stations. At the end of the month authorities were far from certain that the disease was being stopped. Cologne still had 185 suspected cases, and there was no way to isolate carriers among the displaced persons, short of a rigid and probably unenforceable stand-fast order.