The Invisible Victory

32

'The problem of the Nazi is essentially that of Caliban,' said Dr Harold Greenparish in his quarrelsome little voice. 'To all intents and purposes, your Nazi has been raised in complete isolation from the rest of the world. His standards are those of his dam Sycorax, his worship directed to her god Setebos-the Nazi state and the late Adolf Hitler,' he explained to me. 'He has simply no yardstick of conventional morality to measure his behaviour, none whatsoever.'

'I think that's rather an oversimplification.'

He looked pained, annoyed, a little shocked. It was the first time I had contradicted him since we had left London. 'No, I don't think so. I've talked to some of these SS chappies in the prisoner of war camps. They're puzzled-to say the least-suddenly to find the world regards them as absolute monsters. By their own lights, they were simply doing their duty. In war, one is required to kill one's fellow man, whether he is the enemy without or the traitor within. The more of either category one disposes of, the more patriotic one is esteemed to be. Surely you take my point? That's how the SS people see it, I assure you.'

'Traitors? Jews, Slavs and Czechs? And a lot of other defenceless men, women and children who did nothing wrong except to be themselves?'

Greenparish's expression indicated forbearance of my tediousness. 'Essentially, yes. In the framework of Nazi doctrines. One must be clear-headed about this, Elgar. The Nazis in their private dealings could be as clean-living, as honest, as decent, as religious as the rest of us. Your Nazi mind was terribly shuttered. They performed what we regard as utterly ghastly deeds, because they saw them as perfectly natural, and even essential, under the Nazi Darwinism of survival of the strongest. The fact that it was an insane doctrine is surely beside the point? It was the only one they knew. And of course, the lurid light of war does rather tend to encourage human excesses.'

'What about the still small voice of conscience?'

'Conscience? Does it exist, in the popular sense? I am strongly inclined to the Freudian view of conscience.' Pudgy finger-tips together, he leant back on the comfortable if worn upholstery of our first-class _wagon lit_ dining car in the immense self-satisfaction of specialized knowledge. 'Freud explains conscience in terms of the super-ego, equating it with the judgements passed down to the child from the parents. But the all-pervading Nazis were of course the parents. The German people were their docile children. Particularly, of course, the younger ones, who did most of the damage. I'm sure you must agree? Human morals are not bestowed by God-about whom Freud is equally interesting. And human behaviour is by and large instilled by the methods of conditioning.'

'You mean, we learn to distinguish right from wrong as Pavlov's dog learned to salivate at the sound of its dinner-bell?'

'Fundamentally, yes,' he said with crushing assurance.

I was beginning to dislike Greenparish. We had first met less than twelve hours previously, on the departure platform of Liverpool Street Station. He had stuck out his hand and said, 'I'm Greenparish.' He was about my age, short, stout and balding, standing amid a cluster of suitcases, bags and boxes. We both wore battledress, without badges of rank. I had a red FIAT flash on my shoulders, which seemed to set me above the Red Cross but below War Correspondents. Greenparish's job was denazification. ('Dreadful word,' he would say with a shudder.) He was a psychologist who had written books and articles about the Nazi mentality from the snugness of a Cambridge college. The only Nazis he had met in his life had been sitting safely behind British barbed wire.

I made my second arrival in Germany on the Monday of August 6 in the summer of 1945. Everyone was wondering how to clean up the abattoir of Europe, while the sun warmed our delusions of permanent peace and promptly returning prosperity. The war had ended in Germany with a whimper, in Japan with a bang. A tribunal was to sit in Nьrnberg to try the important Nazis, whose photographs as shabby and sagging men I could still hardly believe in the newspapers. Only Hitler's joke, Franz von Papen, achieved any style, with a Tyrolean hat and a wry smile under the eyes of a steel-helmeted American military policeman.

Holland was flooded. Germany was flat. Large towns had vast open spaces with no wall higher than a man, small ones had disappeared altogether. People lived in the rubble like maggots in a corpse. Fraternization with Germans, just speaking to them, was strictly forbidden us. Even the objective Nazi Albert Speer thought this inhuman conduct in any victor. But the concentration camps had been overrun, and if Hans Frank, Hitler's Governor-General of Poland, was to write before _he _was hanged, 'A thousand years shall pass and this guilt of Germany will not have been erased,' there would have been nobody that summer to disagree with him.

We reached Cologne after nightfall. I had heard that the Cathedral survived, and saw excitedly the twin spires soaring against the sky. Greenparish fussed over his luggage. 'Surely there's somewhere one can get a meal?' he kept complaining, searching the ruined Hauptbahnhof. We had been given bully beef sandwiches and tea on the train. 'After all, the Army is responsible for us, and I don't see why I should be subjected to the inconvenience of hunger.'

We set off in a jeep driven by a British corporal, making a long detour to cross the Rhine. Cologne in the darkness of its bumpy, bomb-cracked cobbles seemed in reasonable shape, and only when returning in daylight I found it a skeleton, every building roofless and gutted. The autobahn took us past the Bayer pharmaceutical works at Leverkusen, once with the huge blue advertisement which I had noticed from Jeff Beckerman's Cord. The factory was intact, spared by the Allied guns after Field Marshal Model changed his mind about using it in the final scramble as an artillery base.

'You gents got any cigarettes?' the corporal asked cheerfully over his shoulder.

'Neither of us smokes,' replied Greenparish coldly.

'You'll be entitled to a ration, or you can scrounge some. Fags is gold-dust in Germany. You can get anything for them. Listen, Governor-' The expert on the Nazi mind winced. 'You can get anything at all,' the corporal insisted. 'A bike, the family wireless, a grand piano.'

'I have no necessity for such luxuries,' said Greenparish.

'Length of cloth for the wife, bottle of schnapps, nice suite of furniture.' He drove single-handed, lighting one of his own inestimable valuables. 'You can get a Frдulein for ten Woodbines.'

'I do not indulge myself with young women,' Greenparish told him severely.

'Well, her mother then, if you prefer it,' the corporal returned accommodatingly. 'Best keep your heads down, gents. The ferries sometimes has the habit of stretching a steel cable across the autobahn. It's their Resistance Movement, what they calls the Werewolves. Though I don't think it adds up to much. A lot of them is as glad to be rid of Hitler as we are. Still, a wire would make a nasty mess of your haircut, wouldn't it?'

Greenparish glared at me uneasily.

We approached Wuppertal from the Dьsseldorf road. The streets were unlit and shattered, and I recognized nothing. But as we turned right, my excitement burst out with the cry, 'Why, it's the Zoo!'

'I reckon they've eaten all the animals,' said the driver, jumping out as we were halted by a sentry.

'That fellow's not very respectful,' complained Greenparish.

'He probably fought his way here from Normandy. We're only useless civilians.'

'I really don't understand why I should do without my dinner. After all, the war is over.'

I discovered the next morning that Wuppertal too was mostly demolished. The brewery had gone. The final air-raids had created a hurricane of fire which had boiled the tar from the streets. Like other embattled towns, parts of it were almost untouched. The Allied Armies had commandeered the entire fashionable area where twelve years before I lodged-furniture, paintings, grand pianos and all-simply evicting the inhabitants. We messed with the British Army, in a stone-built mansion which I faintly remembered. It had later belonged to the rich owner of an 'aryanized' textile works, everywhere now scratched by boots, filled with the sound of American Forces Network from Munich and somebody always playing ping-pong.

I went eagerly in search of the Dieffenbachs, but their house was one of the unlucky ones, blank eyed, burnt out, dead. I stood wondering sombrely what had happened to the family. Then I noticed the centipede's legs astride the river Wupper, and one of the familiar cars sailing peacefully beneath them. Having survived the Kaiser, the Schwebebahn had outlasted Hitler. I thought that Greenparish might be able to draw some parallel with German politics and German technology.

The first man it was my duty to interrogate was Gerhard Domagk.

I had been in Wuppertal a fortnight. One of the nearby commandeered houses had been turned into offices, with trestle tables and filing cabinets and metal-framed chairs. There were red-capped military policemen stamping about with revolvers, but I managed to shoo them away. Domagk had not changed greatly. His close cropped hair was no greyer and no thinner. He still wore his neat triangular bristle of moustache. He had lost weight, but so had everyone in Germany. He was poorly dressed, but he had worn old clothes even when the shops were full of new ones.

'You are Gerhard Johannes Paul Domagk?' I started reading formally in German from a manilla file. He stood facing me across the trestle table with understandable wariness. 'You were born at Lagow, in the Province of Brandenburg, on October 13, 1895? Your parents were Paul Domagk, schoolmaster, and his wife Martha, maiden name Reimer?'

He nodded silently. I motioned him to sit. 'You don't remember me?' I asked unsmilingly.

He stared, but shook his head. 'How is your daughter? She must be about sixteen now.'

Domagk looked at me with even more suspicion. It occurred to me that he imagined I was about to screw information from him by threatening his family. It was a fear well-justified by the rule just lifted from Germany. In the last stages of the war, the whole families of deserters were shot as a matter of course.

'Her arm recovered, so I heard,' I continued. 'Yes, I heard that after our countries were at war. I heard at the same time that you were arrested by the Gestapo.'

His blank stare was followed by a look of amazement and a slow smile. 'You and that American with the beautiful car-'

'You remember? Herr Elgar. I visited your labs.' I nodded in the direction of the I G Farben works. The factory had been bombed, but the research department was almost intact. 'I went in the American's car to fetch the 'Protosil' tablets for your daughter. Now I can make a confession. I stole a second phial of the tablets which I happened to find there.'

He was hugely relieved at being faced by an enemy he knew. 'I don't think the loss was noticed in the agonizing circumstances,' he replied.

The atmosphere thawed as we talked for a while about his child's illness. I offered him a Woodbine. 'I remember how I feared for my daughter's life,' he reflected. 'It still amazes me how the world now accepts complete recovery in such cases as a matter of course.'

'My loot ended in good hands. Yours was the first "Prontosil" ever used by Colebrook to treat puerperal fever. Though unfortunately without the success of your daughter's case.'

'Of course, I read everything Colebrook had to say about sulphonamide. His work at Queen Charlotte's Hospital was most impressive. The progress of his patients was closely checked by the bacteriological laboratory, which we never achieved with our earlier trials here in Wuppertal.'

'Have you still your painting by Otto Dix?'

Domagk smiled again. 'Otto Dix…he was called "subversive" by the Ministry of Propaganda, though I heard he went away somewhere and continued to paint exactly as he felt. Yes, I kept that picture from my laboratory. It remained discreetly in my home, even after my arrest. Though what has happened to the painting now…"

He had been evicted from his house in Walkьrieallee. When I had strolled to inspect it, half a dozen bored GIs were amusing themselves playing football in the garden, one of them wearing over his combat dress Domagk's evening tail suit.

Domagk stared with interest round the room which he could not leave without my permission. But before starting my interrogation, I had a more pressing question. 'Is Dr Dieffenbach still in Wuppertal?'

The answer was a look of horror. 'But didn't you know, Herr Elgar? Dr Dieffenbach and his wife were both taken away by the SS. It was in 1941, about Christmas time. They both died in a concentration camp.'

'Oh, God! And the daughter-'

'Frдulein Gerde kept her post in the school throughout the war. But last March or April, when everything started to disintegrate, she disappeared. Where she is now, who can say? Families are separated all over Germany. There are plenty of people here in Elberfeld whose relatives are in the Russian Zone, and there's no knowing if they'll ever meet again. I heard a rumour that she had been arrested by the British. But there are rumours everywhere about everyone. The boy was killed you know. In the attack on Liege in 1940.

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.'