The Invisible Victory

37

It was almost two years later. I was having dinner with Jeff Beckerman at Munich in the middle of December, 1947. He had been driven in a US official car 150 miles from Stuttgart to meet me.

'Seeing you here's saved two precious days,' he declared jovially. 'Now I can cancel the Savoy and pick up the _Queen Mary_ from Cherbourg.'

'So Britain's not worth visiting any longer?'

'Commercially, no,' he replied frankly. 'Attlee's government may be swell for the British working man, but it doesn't exactly encourage anyone to try making any dough.'

Jeff lit a cigar between courses. He was still fatter, in a civilian suit like myself, with a flashy tie. We were both staying the night at a hotel run by the American Government for the flock of officials and businessmen at the time gently cropping its way across Germany. It was a warm, comfortable, well-stocked oasis in a city still dark, cold and damaged.

Our table was by an upstairs window, and I could look over the Marienplatz by the Munich Rathaus, where about noon on November 9, 1923, Hitler and his Brownshirts picked up Julius Streicher on their way to the Feldherrenhalle, where the Nazi revolution came to grief under the muzzles of the police carbines. In his triumphal days, Hitler ceremoniously retraced the route, Gцring, Ribbentrop and the rest all marching in jackboots along the tramlines.

I recalled the official photographs Ainsley had shown me, taken at Nьrnberg in the early hours of October 16, 1946. The same Nazis were lying on top of plain black-painted coffins against a background of brick, the cut nooses still round their necks, each body neatly labelled with an adhesive strip. Ribbentrop wore a dark striped suit and stylish tie, Keitel's face was a mask of blood, Frick wore the sporty tweed jacket he had affected during his trial, and Gцring having pre-empted the hangman lay on an Army blanket with his right eye a little open, looking at the camera with a wink of death.

We talked about prewar days in Wuppertal. I told him of Gerda, with a child from some unknown SS Schьtze. She could never know that I had brought her the penicillin. But she had written effusively thanking me for the bar of chocolate. 'Did you really have a contact with the German generals before the war?' I asked Jeff with curiosity. 'You remember, when you would have prevented the whole thing if the Foreign Office man hadn't fobbed you off with teacakes.'

'Sure I had.'

'Was it Gerda herself? I often thought so.'

'No, but you know him. Herr Fritsch.' I frowned. The name meant nothing. 'The manager of the brewery, who always wore a wing collar.'

'But he was a nonentity!'

'He'd have liked you to think so, for safety's sake. He'd dropped the "von". He was related to Werner von Fritsch, who was Army Commander in Chief before Hitler got rid of him in the spring of 1938. He resigned after some homosexual scandal had been cooked up by the Nazis. Who knows? If they'd taken me seriously in London, you and I might be sitting here now amid scenes of peace and prosperity.'

I was still mystified over Jeff's urgency to see me. 'I'm flattered you drove all this way,' I told him.

'You needn't be. It's a matter of business. I came to Munich with a specific purpose. To ask if you'll work for me again.'

'But I've already got a job. I'm going to be a professor.'

'Professor"!' He did not hide his contempt.

'Besides, I can't possibly move to the States. For domestic reasons.'

'The job isn't in the States. It's right here in Germany. I'm restarting operations in a big way. You think I'm crazy?'

'Of course I do. Germany's just a scrap heap from the North Sea to the Alps. They're even talking of demolishing what's left of the factories and turning the country into the biggest farm on earth.'

'Sure. But Germany can't go on being the poor-house of Europe for ever. Germany's a country with a future. Look what's happened already. We re-established the Lдnder, putting back the calendar to the peaceful days of little kings and cuckoo-clocks before Bismarck. We found enough Weimar politicians who'd somehow kept out of trouble under Hitler-there weren't any left alive who'd stood up to him. We even put up Communists, for God's sake. Then we let them have elections, back in 1946. Nothing like starting training in democracy early.'

'Hitler was democratically elected,' I reminded him.

'He would not be elected again. When your guts are ripped out, you're in no mood to try charging the enemy. Listen, it's going to be like this. The Four-Power Council has been deadlocked for months. Right? The Russians would like to extend Communism to the Rhine, we'd like to extend Democracy to the Vistula. Those are two impossibilities. So the Russians will eat their share of the Germans like cannibals. We shall invite our share to sit down and halve the goodies. The western Lдnder will have to combine into a new Republic sooner or later, just to face up to the Russians.'

The German orderly in a white jacket brought our steaks. 'And that German technology!' Jeff murmured admiringly. 'I suppose you knew the US division of your FIAT collected 200,000 pages of trade secrets from Leitz Optical alone? And 600,000 pages on dyes, synthetic rubber, plastics and so on from I G Farben? Truman has ordered the information sold to US industry at nominal prices. Our FIAT had a budget of almost four million bucks, but I reckon it was money well spent. You British didn't really get into it,' he admonished me. 'I guess it's your old trouble. War is OK, but trade is ungentlemanly.'

I asked what the job would be. 'Organizing my interests. I trust you. You speak German. You know the Germans.'

'Can't the Germans organize themselves?'

'They couldn't under the Nazis. Hitler's organization was terrible, just a lot of overlapping agencies all at each other's throats, with no directives but a vague idea of carrying out the Fьhrer's will. I expect they'll improve on it when they haven't to worry about a knock on the door at four in the morning. The salary could be about what your Prime Minister gets, old man.'

'I'm sorry. But I'd rather stay at home in the British Empire.'

Jeff looked exasperated. 'What British Empire? Roosevelt wanted to see the end of it, and he did. You British have ended the war with no money, no power, and no influence. Only thousands of millions of coloured people who want to see the back of you as soon as possible. And you're putting up a statue to Roosevelt in Grosvenor Square. That's gentlemanly to the limit!'

Like most Britons, I still did not see the truth which Ainsley had prophesied in his club. Nettled, I said, 'Well, we still count in Europe.'

'The whole of Europe's now just little kings and cuckoo-clocks. There's only two powers in the world, the Russians and us. And we've got the bomb.'

'Besides, I'm getting married,' I added as an unanswerable objection.

'I thought you were married?' Jeff grumbled.

'I got divorced. I'm marrying that girl with the soldier's gas mask I brought to the Savoy. The one who married a close friend of mine. It's all very gentlemanly.'

'Think it over. Telephone me in New York if you change your mind.'

'Honestly, I'd rather be a professor.'

Jeff grunted. Suddenly remembering, he took out his pocket-book and handed me a newspaper cutting. 'Did you ever come across that guy in Wuppertal?'

The cutting came from a recent _New York Times,_ headed _German "Scientist" Gets 5-year Term._ It was a short, bald story of Count von Recklinghausen, a rocket engineer from Wuppertal, who had been cleared of Nazi guilt by the Allied Control Commission and been flown to America with several hundred other scientists. He was in trouble through selling New Yorkers shares in his non-existent family engineering business, and found to be neither a count nor a scientist but a journalist from Hamburg with a police record for swindling. He had apparently reached the United States through forged documents and exploiting the rivalries between various Allied organizations. I hoped that Rudi's flattering letter from Hitler was a forgery, too. I decided to post the cutting to Greenparish anonymously.

'What shall we do for the rest of the evening, old man?' Jeff asked me. 'Go find some women wrestling in mud?'

I left early the next morning in a US Army jeep for Nьrnberg. I was going to renew another old acquaintance.

Since the previous May I had been following the trial of 23 top men from I G Farben. It was an all-American show, in the Nьrnberg Palace of Justice, where the Nazi bosses had been tried expediently, if not entirely logically. I recognized the courtroom at once from the photographs in the newspapers during 1946. To the left of the dock was a booth for three or four young men and women, the interpreters, every word spoken having to pass from microphone to earphones, through their heads. To their left stood the witness chair, opposite it across a dozen yards of bare floor the desks of the lawyers. Facing the dock, raised well above it, sat the four American judges in their black gowns-Shake, Moms, Herbert and Merrell. Everywhere stood armed American military policemen in their white-painted steel helmets, the 'snowdrops' who had become as familiar in a hundred grimy and remote British towns as the bobby.

I spotted Hцrlein at once among the dark-suited prisoners. Fourteen years of war and 28 months of imprisonment had scarred him less than I expected. He was then 65, he had lost some weight, and when he turned his head I noticed that he had shaved off his moustache. He still wore his round glasses.

The Court was Military Tribunal Six, the trial the United States of America v Karl Krauch _et al._ I had seen a copy of the indictment in London. Through Archie, our affairs being _very _gentlemanly indeed. But his marriage was dead, and he was relieved to keep the divorce between friends. He would have found some stranger intruding into Elizabeth's affections deeply hurtful.

The charges were sweepingly formidable. The first count was the planning, preparation, initiation and waging of wars of aggression and the invasions of other countries. The second, plunder and spoliation. The third, slavery and mass murder. Four, membership of the SS. Five, conspiracy to commit crimes against the peace. Professor Hцrlein escaped only count four.

I had timed my arrival at Nьrnberg for Hцrlein's own turn to face the music. That was Thursday morning, December 18, 1947. I found quickly that he had an excellent German counsel, Dr Otto Nelte. His first point to the judges was of Hцrlein's relative ignorance about his fellow-directors' business. 'The administrative structure of I G Farben was so decentralized as to render it virtually impossible for an individual member of the board to be informed of the activities of the others,' the lawyer insisted. The judges were not overimpressed.

'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.

The inaudible, diminutive, shy deadpan Scot was taken equally to the warm heart of American lecture audiences and the icy one of the American Press. From the whole world he gathered academic medals and academic gowns. He was particularly fond of the Spanish one, so gorgeous that he was said to be mistaken in Madrid for the new cardinal. Madrid named a street after him, where appropriately parade the putas-he suspected that he would be remembered as the man who made vice safe for the masses. He would distribute small medallions of the famous mould to his eminent new acquaintances, such as the Pope. 'God wanted penicillin, so he invented Alexander Fleming,' he was supposed to have told an American lady. But it was an impossible utterance from a man like Fleming. He never used a sentence of more than half a dozen words in his life.

I was too busy at Arundel College to revisit Nьrnberg that summer. I only read a transcript of the Military Tribunal's verdicts. (From Archie again.) The Presiding Judge, G. C Shake, had declared, 'The defendants now before us were neither high public officials in the civil government nor high military officers. Their participation was that of followers and not leaders. If we lower the standard of participation to include them, it is difficult to find a logical place to draw the line between the guilty and the innocent among the great mass of German people. We find none of the defendants guilty of the crimes covered by counts one and five, of preparing and waging war.'

I skipped through the typewritten pages until I found Hцrlein's name. 'We cannot impute criminal guilt to the defendant Hцrlein from his membership of the I G Farben board of directors. He is acquitted of all the charges under count two of the indictment.' That covered plunder and spoilation. The Judge continued with count three, slavery and mass murder.

'The evidence does not warrant the conclusion that Hцrlein had any persuasive influence on the management policies of Degesch, the organization proved to have supplied Zyklon-B gas to concentration camps, or any significant knowledge of the uses to which its production was being put. We are of the opinion that the evidence falls short of establishing his guilt on this aspect of count three. Concerning the evidence of inhumane experiments, we may say without going into detail that the evidence falls short of establishing guilt on this issue beyond a reasonable doubt. Applying the rule that, where two reasonable inferences may be drawn from credible evidence, one of guilt and the other of innocence, the latter must prevail, we must conclude that the prosecution has failed to establish that part of the charge.'

So Hцrlein was free.

But one of the four judges dissented. Judge P M Herbert had said, 'The responsibility for the utilization of slave labour, and all incidental toleration of mistreatment of the workers should go much further. And should in my opinion lead to the conclusion that all the defendants in the case who were members of the board of directors are guilty under count three.'

In the New Year of 1949 Judge Herbert told the _New York Times,_ 'The destruction of important Farben records at the direction of certain of the defendants probably deprived the prosecution of certain essential links in its chain of incriminating evidence, and leaves one with the feeling that the result might have been different if the complete Farben files were available to the war crimes prosecutors.'

The _New York Times_ unearthed that one of the defence lawyers had been charged with improper action over the disappearance of records, but had been cleared. Some of Hцrlein's fellow defendants had sentences of imprisonment, finally confirmed by the Military Governor of the US Zone on March 4, 1949. Hцrlein himself went back to Wuppertal. Perhaps he was doubly lucky. 'For being in a position to know and nevertheless shunning knowledge creates direct responsibility for the consequences,' wrote the ghost who stepped from Spandau, Albert Speer. Hцrlein enjoyed for five years a life of expanding prestige and prominence, as chairman of the new Farben company to run the works which I had first entered on the cold Saturday of January 1933.

Last summer I went back again. Like all slim blondes, Gerda has not aged too emphatically. She still coaches a few private pupils. She is still unmarried. Her daughter is another pale blonde, busily running an advertising agency with her husband in Frankfurt. Gerda told her she was the daughter of a gallant Army officer, whom she had met, loved, and lost without trace in the explosion which blew the Nazis into history.

In Wuppertal I heard one bat squeak in the black caverns of the past. I came across the affidavit sworn by Gerhard Domagk for Hцrlein's defence at Nьrnberg. 'When in October 1939 I was awarded the Nobel Prize, Professor Hцrlein called to my attention that Hitler had prohibited that German scientists accept this prize. He advised me to approach the Ministry of Culture. I took the warning by Professor Hцrlein that serious difficulties might arise for me out of this matter not seriously enough. It did not prevent me from writing several letters of thanks which I considered necessary. The result was that in November, 1939, I was arrested by the Gestapo. When Professor Hцrlein learned about this incident through my wife he went to great pains to obtain my release.'

Domagk signed that in Wuppertal on January 20, 1948, six weeks after he had at last been presented with his Prize in Stockholm. His evening tail suit, essential for the ceremony, was never the same after the GIs had played football in it. Domagk wore the ancient tail suit he had been married in twenty years before, which through the privations of recent years still fitted him. He refused the offer of a new suit tailored in Stockholm. He wanted to appear a true representative of postwar Germany. He received the medal and the decorative folder signed by King Gustav. But under the Nobel regulations, the additional 30,000 dollars, if unaccepted at the time of the award, returns automatically to its funds. He never got the money.