I sat savouring these bitter dregs of war.
'But why should Dr Dieffenbach be arrested? I remember him as a Nazi supporter.'
'I understood it was for behaviour prejudicial to the State, and making subversive remarks. They were common charges, when the SS wanted to do away with somebody.'
'Then what made him change his opinions about Hitler?'
'Like many professional men, he found the Nazis no friends of the middle classes. The Nazis wanted to create a society where all men were equal-equal under the domination of their own officials. The Nazi Party was a duplicate state in Germany, you know. I was certainly never a member of the Party. I never supported Hitler. I acquiesced, I agree. Through prudence, and through fear. You will understand that, Herr Elgar?'
Domagk laid his hand on the bare table with a resigned gesture. 'My country was at war, and I backed the war patriotically. My work was on drugs of no military significance. Drugs which may benefit all mankind. I spent my time trying to extend the range of the sulphonamide drugs to tuberculosis, though unfortunately without success. So I turned my attention instead to the thiosemicarbazones, which as you know are related to the sulphonamides. Have you heard of Tb-I 698? I found that to have a definite action against the tubercule bacillus. And all through the war I continued my work on natural and acquired immunity to tumours, and on drugs against cancer.'
'Do you know about penicillin?'
'Oh, yes. A Penicillin Committee was set up in Berlin last year. We began to grow a little of the mould, in the way described by Florey. Had the war continued another year, I'm sure that German chemistry would have produced plenty of it.'
Domagk stubbed out his cigarette. I noticed that he had pronounced arthritis of the hands. 'Will you answer a question which I have been wanting to ask all the war, Professor? Why precisely did you concentrate on the sulphonamide dyes against streptococci? In the I G Farben works you had an enormous choice of chemicals to experiment with.'
'I was testing about three thousand different chemical compounds a year,' Domagk agreed. He thought for some moments, his head inclined to one side, as I remembered him. 'I started with the notion that bacteria were destroyed by the natural defences of the body very much more easily if they were damaged somehow first-'
'That was in the reprint you gave me for Sir Gowland Hopkins. He told me recently that-re-reading your paper-it made inevitable your becoming the discoverer of modern chemotherapy.'
Domagk accepted the flattery with a smile.
'Hopkins is still alive?'
'A spry eighty-four. He only retired as Professor during the war.'
'My first attempt was to damage the invading streptococci with mild heat-it was only for demonstrating the reaction to students, using the living mouse. Then instead of heat I turned to various chemicals-gold, acridines, finally the azo dyes synthesized by Dr Meitzsch and Dr Klarer, one of which damaged the streptococci so thoroughly that the mouse could completely overcome the infection. That became our "Prontosil".'
'You have not entirely satisfied my curiosity. Who suggested to your chemist colleagues Meitzsch and Klarer that they turned their attention to these particular azo compounds? After all, as you just said, there were thousands of different ones pouring through their hands every year. To put it technically, who exactly suggested introducing the sylphamyl group in the molecule, and thus turn a dye into a drug?'
'That decision belongs entirely to Professor Hцrlein,' Domagk imparted 'He was my superior, in charge of the whole Elberfeld plant. My own position in the laboratories was not administrative, but entirely technical. Professor Hцrlein had made a comprehensive study of these azo dyes, and he was convinced that they could have some medicinal effects. He had noticed that similar dyes could arrest infection with the trypanosome parasite in mice.'
'So it is to Professor Hцrlein we must be grateful as the true originator of the sulphonamide drugs? And so opening the eyes of Florey, that he might see the potentialities of penicillin? Well, that's very interesting. Isn't Hцrlein the real father of modern chemotherapy? And the father of other and perhaps more remarkable drugs of similar sort yet to be created?'
I noticed Domagk stiffening in his chair and starting to fidget as I said this. I wondered if I had perhaps offended his vanity, though he had little enough of it. I asked, 'Is Hцrlein still alive?'
Domagk's lip trembled. 'Haven't you heard? He was arrested last Wednesday. By the Americans. He is in prison somewhere, I think in Dьsseldorf. Charged with the most terrible things. With killing people, with mass murder…' Domagk looked at the floor, then suddenly back at me. 'Professor Hцrlein was on the board of I G Farben, and on the board of its subsidiary company, Degesch. That firm made chemicals…poisonous gases, "Zyklon-B". You've heard of it? The SS used it for killing their prisoners in the concentration camps, killing them by the thousand upon thousand. I assure you, Herr Elgar, that of these matters I knew nothing, nothing.'
We fell silent. So the man responsible for modern chemotherapy was also responsible for the gas used in genocide. A sickly paradox. But perhaps Hцrlein had not seen it as a paradox? Drugs to cure and drugs to kill are still only chemicals. When to do either the one or the other is equally laudable, who is the technician to object? Such moral autism was the secret of the Nazi power. I wondered if Greenparish would have understood it.
'Have another cigarette.' Domagk and myself had said enough for one day. 'Take the packet.'
'You must excuse me if I unashamedly accept your generosity. Defeat reduces us all to a common denominator.' As he inspected the gift I translated the name, 'Geissblatt.' He nodded. 'They have a good taste, more to my palate than the much prized Lucky Strike.'
33
Greenparish was giving a party.
I had been in Wuppertal all autumn, and I had grown dreadfully bored. I had questioned over and over again all the scientists and technologists of the I G Farben works, most of whom I felt could be of no interest to the occupying powers, and little even to their friends.
SHAEF had been dissolved. FIAT was under the British Control Commission, co-operating with ASLOS, OSRD, CIOS, TIIC, OMGUS and JIDA. We were all concerned in Operation Overcast and Project Paperclip, to whisk five thousand top German scientists into the United States, by way of detention camps near Paris and Frankfurt, named somewhat savagely Backporch, Ashcan and Dustbin. The bodies behind these initials naturally quarrelled fiercely with each other, with the United States Army and with Washington. By the end of November, only three scientists had reached American soil, and they were sneaked out for their own use by the United States Air Force, which was thought most unsporting. Many I interrogated showed little zest for a new life across the Atlantic. So little, they got on their bicycles and disappeared from official view for ever.
I was comfortable and well fed. We lived isolated in an Anglo-American town near the Zoo, protected by sentries and road-blocks. We had our own shop, cinema, library and discussion group. Greenparish lectured the troops on the psychological background to Hitlerism, to their mystification and boredom, but at least it was warm and they were allowed to smoke and there was nothing else to do.
I saw something of David Mellors, who had become a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps, stationed at the British Hospital in Bad Godesberg, where Chamberlain once met Hitler beside the Rhine. On the far side of black, cold, ruined Wuppertal at Barmen, the Royal Artillery were blowing up the enemy's ammunition. The Grenadier Guards were up the hill, in a brand new German Army barracks. Greenparish and myself, and some uniformed nutritionists in UNRRA, shared the mess of an armoured regiment. His Majesty George VI filled almost exactly the outline left by Adolf Hitler over the fireplace. I had grown used to the clockwork of ping-pong, there were plenty of copies of Life and Look, and we got Bourbon from the Americans in exchange for British duffle-coats.