Strain out a gnat and swallow a camel poop

Here at the Riddled Institute of Narrativium Mining and Experimental Epistemology, we harbour a professional interest in "Narrative Verisimilitudening". Which is to say, the process by which the sheer baldness of otherwise-unconvincing narratives leads to their accretion, by inducing corroborative details to emerge in their vicinity from fluctuations in the quantum vacuum.

Today's example of the phenomenon pulls together the Afrika Korps in 1941-43, and the scourge of dysentery, and camel-coprophagic self-medicating Arabs. The currently-canonical version of this story has been heavily churnalised across clickbait aggregation sites, repeated as gospel at MentalFloss (2010) and Cracked (2012) and Warhistoryonline (2016)... fueled by the Squick Factor, and rendered more plausible by the popular enthusiasm for probiotics, fecal transplants, and the microbiome as the cause of (and solution to) all of life's problems.

And none of it is true.

A collective engineering-student-sourced textbook on "the Social Interface of Technology" invokes the story as an example of how "disgust can undermine technical effectiveness". It has been enshrined in a 2001 academic paper by Ralph Lewin*...

...and in a 2015 book with the imprimatur of Yale University (and accompanying blogpost) by the Curator of microbial systematics and genomics in the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History.

But, camel dung in its true form would hold a life-saving secret. Soldiers were suffering greatly from dysentery and the Nazi medical corps was brought in to attempt to alleviate the outbreaks. Early on, the local nomads were thought to hold a key to the solution, because they rarely suffered from dysentery. In fact, when an outbreak of dysentery occurred, or even when slight diarrhea was experienced, the nomads would diligently follow their camels around. When a camel defecated, the nomad would quickly scoop up the dung and ingest some while it was still steaming. After close scrutiny of the dung, the corps discovered that the dung was loaded with the bacterium Bacillus subtilis. This species is in the same genus as a terribly pathogenic species, Bacillus anthracis, which causes anthrax, an often lethal respiratory disease. Bacillus subtilis, however, has since become one of those bacterial species considered “good” for humans.
What is it about B. subtilis that would make Arab nomads ingest camel dung? This species is a voracious eater of other microbes, including the ones that were causing dysentery. By ingesting the camel dung, the nomads were essentially altering their gut ecology to get rid of the pathogen causing the dysentery. But the B. subtilis was present only in warm dung; it would die out when the dung cooled. Not wanting the troops to ingest camel dung, the German high command and medical corps, instead, cultured large amounts of B. subtilis in vats and fed the broth from the cultures to the troops, stopping the outbreaks of dysentery. The Nazi medical corps even developed a way to dry out the B. subtilis and put it into powdered form for their troops. Since the Nazi experience with camel dung, B. subtilis has been used in much the same way as an antidysenteric agent.

Diligently following a camel around

Lewin (2001) helpfully cites "Bacillus subtilis: Beschreibung und Charakterisierung" (Bernhardt, 2000). This turns out to be an an internal unpublished document at Uni. Greifswald by Jörg Bernhardt, who was just finishing / had just finished his Ph.D there [Dr Bernhardt's research is no longer focused on B. subtilis]. Lewin's summary breached the barriers at the Fictive Confinement Laboratory and lodged the concept firmly within Accepted Reality, so at time of writing a search for the evocative term "fresh, warm camel feces" evokes 233 Ghits ranging through discussion boards, scholarly papers, and grifty little book-shaped objects recycling the authoritative Whackyweedia pages. Possibly assisted by Lewin's high reputation.*

Bringing the powers of Goofle Translate to bear:

The first documented medical application of B. subtilis took place in 1941 by the medical department of the Afrika Korps of the German Wehrmacht during the campaign in Libya. Because a [dysentery] epidemic numerous soldiers were killed, there was an urgent need for medication. Antibiotics were not available yet. Research on the spot showed that the [dysentery] was successfully treated by the local population by the oral administration of fresh, still warm camels[dung]. The success of the treatment was finally attributed to B. subtilis, which was eventually found in large numbers (ROTHSCHILD, cited by DL WOLFE, 1993).

"Documented" is here a term of art, with an alternative gloss as "completely undocumented", for "Rothschild... 1993" turns out to be the newsletter for a "Bio/Tech" Alt-Med pill-mill, pimping their 'EarthFlora' diet-supplement scam. The anonymous ad-writer calls upon "Dr. Peter Rothschild, one of the world's foremost experts on human immune response and its relation to beneficial microorganisms", to vouch for the efficacy of the company's crapsules:

Dr. Rothschild backed up his point by telling us the story of the discovery of the Bacillus subtilis, a bacterial microorganism that is commonly found in the environment rather than in humans, yet is well known by modern science to be very friendly to the human system. It can promote dramatic healing benefits in humans, even though it isn't one of the native microbes that normally inhabit the human body. According to Dr. Rothschild, the story of Bacillus subtilis goes like this:

The bacillus subtilis was discovered by the Nazi German medical corps in 1941, toward the end of their African campaign. At the time, the German military victory was at its height. But the German high command became genuinely alarmed when hundreds upon hundreds of soldiers in North Africa suddenly began dying every week. Oddly, the Nazi soldiers weren't dying because of British General Montgomery's retaliatory bombs and shrapnel, but instead, they were dying of uncontrollable dysentery....

The idea that 1941 was "toward the end of the African campaign", with "German military victory at its height" and "British General Montgomery" already present, gives the reader fair warning that Rothschild was an ignorant buffoon and that the whole passage is completely fraudulent. Let alone B. subtilis being a 1941 discovery, when any fule kno that in consensus reality it was identified in 1835.

For "one of the world's foremost experts on human immune response", Dr Rothschild kept a very low profile, perhaps from an exaggerated sense of modesty; the name is unknown outside the circles of med-fraud pill pimps. However, he was not a total invention of the scammers, and nutrition guru Jordan Rubin remembers him fondly as a lovable eccentric genius:

There are hints that he practiced his quackery in Mexico, just outside the reach of FDA enforcement. Rubin also relied heavily on Rothschild's "research" in advertisements for his "Garden-of-Life" products, so the name turns up frequently among the documents accumulated by the FTC in their fraud case against Rubin.

Anyway, the Bio/Tech confection was consumed holus-bolus by the Ouroboran human centipede of health-scammer webstores and Truther conspiracy sites (but I repeat myself!). It bounced around there for years: the way that it showed the perfidy of mainstream medicine (always suppressing the One Secret of Wellness!) was enough to authenticate it. Ultimately it ascended to the giddy empyrean of Rense.com, a wretched hive of scum and villainy well-known pantechnicon of Alt-Reality paranoia. From that reliable source, it came to the attention of the clickbait churnalists.

Different aggregator sites have experimented with variant details... the helpful informants are variously Arabs, Bedouins, "natives", or just "locals". In some versions the stricken German tankies are forced to consume the "fresh, warm" camel dung themselves while in others they are spared that unwholesome diet by the rapid cultivation of cultured B. subtilis, either on the spot or in German factories. The detail of "large vats" in this process seems plausible, but it remained unspecified until contributed by the 2015 DeSalle-Perkins recension.

No-one ever speculates on what the Allied army used to deal with their intestinal distress.

The 2010 MentalFloss author was the first to draw a parallel between the curative role of camel fewmets and the camouflaged weapon of Poop Bombs.

Camel "apples" became a good luck charm for the German military. The Allies discovered their habit of intentionally running tanks over piles of the droppings for good luck. So the Allies developed and planted land mines that looked like camel dung! When the Germans caught on to the trick, they began to avoid fresh piles of camel manure. In turn, the Allies caught on and began to make mines that looked like camel dung that had already been run over by a tank and therefore seemed safe enough to a Nazi driver. Genius.

No evidence exists that these turd-mines ever existed (or even that Rommel's tankies were indeed accustomed to swerving and driving over camel-dumps as an apotropaic, thus providing the rationale for their design). They are only attested by the second-hand self-aggrandising recollections of one Jasper Maskelyne, a notorious fabulist and camelshit bullshit-artist, in a popularised History-Channel series not known for excessive reverence for facts. Nonetheless, that detail has entered the canon, though subsequent retellings leave out the implication that the purported curative effect is what inspired the good-luck custom of turd-targetted tank-swerving.

Bad taxidermy: not a Poop-Bomb

Dr Perkins has kindly provided a citation to "Animal Substances in Materia Medica: A Study in the Persistence of the Primitive" - a 1946 survey of the use of dung in the pharmacopoeia of several medical traditions. And it is certainly true that if North African Arabs were in the habit of self-medicating with camel dung, this could have gone undocumented. But I am inclined to think that if the German Army had adopted the custom, then military historians would have said something.

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* "Ralph Arnold Lewin [...] known as 'the father of green algae genetics' [...] published more than 250 scientific papers, among which his 2001 review paper entitled More on Merde was an entertaining review on the worth of feces in biomedicine.

...

"Ralph Lewin was an Esperantist, and was Ordinary professor (orda profesoro) at Akademio Internacia de la Sciencoj San Marino, the only university in the world where all courses are studied in esperanto.[1]

"He translated Winnie-the-Pooh into Esperanto with Ivy Kellerman Reed and was the author of Merde: excursions in scientific, cultural and socio-historical coprology."
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UPDATE: Up until 15 October 2013, the Whackyweedia page on B. subtilis used to include the claim that

It was used by the German medical corps in 1941 to treat dysentery during the North African campaign after seeing local Arabic population using it for this purpose.[8]

with a link to the now-deprecated Rense version. The sentence was expunged on 26 Dec. 2013 as unverifiable "with reliable sources". 'Thangor Orlando' deserves some kind of medal. However, there are still a great number of fourth- or fifth- or sixth-hand repetitions of the story across the Intertubes, citing the uncorrected wikipage.

UPDATE²: DeSalle and Perkins presumably encountered the poop-bomb part of the narrative in MentalFloss or Cracked, but they made an effort to find a better source than [Rothschild -> Rense] for the dysentery-cure component. Hence we read that "Camel dung is referenced from Damman et al. (2012)." But the language of Damman's review sounds familiar:

...and indeed we are back at the familiar trail of provenance, [Rothschild -> Bernhardt -> Lewin].