He attended a school in Tarnowskie Góry and then went to study medicine in Kraków, graduating in 1934 from the Jagiellonian University Medical College.
Specializing in infectious diseases, after graduation, he worked at various places including Kraków's Department of Microbiology and Serology and a social insurance company.
[2] One of the camp's SS officers, the surgeon Erwin Ding-Schuler, needing researchers to staff his vaccine laboratory, pulled Ciepielowski to assist.
Prisoners in the hygiene unit had individual beds with clean linens, and were given additional rations of sugar, fat, and bread.
[4] It would be one of a half-dozen papers Ciepielowski wrote (with fellow inmate Eugen Kogon as his medical clerk) to be published under the name of the SS officer.
[5] Ciepielowski and the other researchers regarded Ding-Schuler (who had received his degree through party loyalty, rather than scholarship) to be a fool, easily manipulated due to his lack of medical knowledge.
He was liberated by American soldiers, and spent the next several years working as a medical inspector for the Red Cross, as well as the International Tracing Service of the Allied High Commission for Germany in the Exhumation and Identification Department.
[6] He was later approached by representatives of a large pharmaceutical firm who were stymied by their inability to produce a viable typhus vaccine using the fraudulent methods published under Ding-Schuler's name.