The Furies

THE BACKGROUND TO THE FURIES

The attitudes and atmosphere existing in the Mittelwald convent reflect those that prevailed in many scientific institutes in Nazi Germany. The purging of Jewish scientists from German institutes began almost as soon as the Nazis came to power, as did the moral compromises of many who remained. Dr. Klein's drunken ravings in the convent's wine cellar are based on ideas taken seriously at the time. These weren't harmless: racial hygiene was a core belief of Nazi philosophy. This crank science had an uneasy coexistence with real, high-quality work.

The secret weapons program likewise was a chaotic mixture of crackpot notions and concepts that, had they been turned into hardware, could have altered the direction of the war. It ultimately failed because effort was dissipated among too many projects.

The medical experiments at Natzweiler are a matter of record. The camp doctor, Wernher Rohde, was hanged by the British at the end of the war. Dr. Hirt, he of the fine skull collection, committed suicide.

Operation Paperclip, the postwar plunder and looting of German scientists, was a reality, as was the conspiracy to undermine President Truman's order to keep Nazi war criminals out of America. When the Red Army overran Silesia (now part of Poland), where Hochwerk was producing hundreds of tons of nerve gas every month, they dismantled the entire factory, which then disappeared into the depths of Soviet Russia. It emerged a generation later as the Soviet Biopreparat program, a child grown into a monster. All the Allied powers were involved in the game, sometimes even kidnapping captured German scientists from each other as tensions grew between East and West.

A few tens of kilograms of anthrax, efficiently dispersed over a major city, could cause a million deaths if people were caught outdoors, say at lunchtime on a dry, sunny day. However, the problems of mass generation of anthrax and its efficient dispersal are, hopefully, beyond the resources of terrorist groups. Although there is evidence that at least two circular winged aircraft were experimented with in Nazi Germany, the "Nazi flying saucers" project is in all probability a myth, and the Furies, both the machines and their Greek namesakes, belong to the realms of imagination.