'Ever since 1933, Professor Hцrlein was in opposition to the Party,' Dr Nelte asserted. 'Especially to Streicher, who supported the fanatical adherents of treatment by natural remedies in their attacks upon pharmaceutical firms. Moreover, he became a victim of a campaign of defamation, because he took part in the fight for freedom in the field of science against the plans of Hitler and Gцring to prohibit vivisection for scientific purposes.'
I did not think the judges were impressed with this either. But it rang true to me. The Nazis were fervent health cranks. That Hitler was appalled by vivisection was another paradox matching that being untangled before me.
It was strange next to hear the lawyer refuting the charge I had first heard from Colebrook in 1935-of I G Farben withholding the sulpha drugs from the world until certain that the lining of its pockets was safely sewn up with patents. 'Through the discoveries made in the Elberfeld works, which were organized and managed by Professor Hцrlein,' he declared for good measure, 'every year millions of human lives were saved, and through drugs like the antimalarial atebrin, health restored to hundreds of millions of human beings.'
Then he came to the Zyklon-B.
The defence was simple. Hцrlein did not know what was going on. Degesch was a subsidiary company of I G Farben at Frankfurt, its full title Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Schaedlingsbekaempfung. But Hцrlein did not know that Degesch was supplying Zyklon-B to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. He did not know that Zyklon-B was for the gassing of human beings. Hцrlein was admittedly a member of the Degesch Verwaltungsrat-its management committee-but several links were missing in the chain of evidence. 'The assertion that the management committee knew of the business transactions involving Zyklon-B is unsupported. No transcript of such meetings has been submitted, no evidence has been introduced to prove that Hцrlein had obtained knowledge of it in any way whatever. He did not take part in any meetings of the management committee at the critical time. He did not receive reports disclosing that Zyklon-B had been supplied to Auschwitz or the terrible use made of it at Birkenau.'
These missing links were a year later to stimulate the curiosity of the _New York Times._
Domagk's name came up for the first time. Dr Nelte was arguing that new drugs were never allowed to leave the Elberfelt works until exhaustively tested by the latest scientific methods. From my knowledge of Domagk's character and talents this was transparently true. But his reason for labouring the point soon became clear.
'Professor Hцrlein had no influence in, and therefore no responsibility for, the selection of doctors to whom the Elberfeld drugs were given for clinical testing. There was no correspondence or direct association between Professor Hцrlein and Dr Vetter, who at one time worked in Dachau, where the prosecution accused him of experimenting with various preparations. Concerning allegations of experiments in the Buchenwald concentration camp, the prosecution has linked Professor Hцrlein with the therapeutic experiments with methylene blue, supposed to have been carried out by Dr Ding there in January 1943.' I knew this to be another dye, used as a urinary antiseptic. 'The prosecution state that in September 1942 the defendant Hцrlein urged the testing of methylene blue on typhus. But no evidence has been produced.'
Dr Nelte ended by stressing Hцrlein's good character. 'I shall submit numerous affidavits from German, Jews and persons of foreign nationality,' he promised. 'The result will be a picture of a man who, during the bad years after 1933, preserved a courageous and noble heart. A man to whom great injustice is done if one calls him, as did the chief prosecutor, a "sickly spirit" and an "architect of the catastrophe".'
He ended with a curious irony which had already occurred to me. 'In the _Neue Zeitung_ I read yesterday of the ceremonial award of the Nobel Prize in Stockholm. Dr Gerhard Domagk, director of the pathological laboratory of the Elberfeld works, appeared for the presentation of the Nobel Prize awarded to him in 1939 for the discovery of the medical effects of sulphonamide. Professor Domagk worked with and under Professor Hцrlein in the Elberfeld I G Farben plant. Whereas the world pays tribute to Professor Domagk and thus also to the Elberfeld plant by presentation of the highest scientific award, Professor Hцrlein, who was given honourable mention together with Professor Domagk by North American newspapers for work on the sulpha products, stands at the same time before this Tribunal as a defendant.'
The story on which Hцrlein's life depended took more than a day in the telling. I was billeted on the Americans, spending my spare time in Munich watching the mending of its fragmented university. When it came Hцrlein's turn to testify in his own defence, he spoke with dignity, with respect and with effectiveness.
'Mr President, Your Honours. As a layman in legal matters, I believed that the prosecution would give facts which-at least, in their own opinion-gave them the right to claim individual guilt. Instead, they merely mentioned my name in connexion with the general charge of criminal medical experiments. It is so simple to make charges, but it seems to be very difficult to acknowledge errors.'
He talked about a life spent solving health problems of the whole world. 'I worked for humanity, for the honour of German science, for the benefit of the German economy, for my firm and for my family. There was no conflict of interest, and no conflict of conscience, in all these goals.'
Hцrlein claimed that he would never have changed his job of running the comparatively small Elberfeld works. He had once refused a bigger one in I G Farben, because his task at Elberfeld was directed to humanity's greatest benefit-health. 'Hundreds of thousands of soldiers _of all nations,'_ he emphasized, 'in this war have had their lives and health preserved by atabrine.' That was the drug discovered under his influence at Elberfeld as an improvement on quinine 'Millions of people may in the future be saved from death by malaria, a disease from which a third of mankind is suffering, by this invention of the Elberfeld laboratories which can be produced in any quantity desired.'
He ended, 'I am proud that before this Court many scientists of international reputation have paid tribute to my work.' That was all in Dr Nelte's affidavits. 'The prosecution, however, in their opening statement called me and others of my colleagues a "damaged soul". They accused me of crimes against humanity, and tried to prove this monstrous statement. I hope that the Tribunal has been convinced by the presentation of evidence by my counsel that these charges are unfounded. I am, therefore, awaiting your decision with calm and confidence.'
The decision was long coming. The judgements were not given until the last days of July 1948. By then, the Berlin airlift had been flying a month, the German currency reform had laid the foundation stone of a palace of prosperity, I was married and Elizabeth was pregnant.
Life in postwar Britain was still threadbare. But it was enlivened for me by the delightful Gilbert and Sullivan situation which had developed between Fleming and Florey. They seemed to know as vaguely as the Karolinska Institute, or anyone else, who deserved the credit for penicillin. Sir Howard Florey took the Heath Robinson apparatus in the Oxford Dunn labs as a ladder which raised him to become Provost of Queen's College in Oxford and Chancellor of the National University in Australia, to a peerage and the Order of Merit. Sir Alexander Fleming used his interpretation of the penicillin mould in St Mary's to savour the adulation of a film star.