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,
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
But I grew uncomfortable, playing a part in Hogarth's picture of Calais Gate, his fat friar fingering the immense raw joint of English beef while the ragged and skinny populace enviously sup their bowls of thin soup. I was forbidden to exchange a friendly word even with my German bat-woman, who cleaned my room, polished my shoes, laundered my clothes and neatly mended them.
She was a handsome blonde who reminded me of Gerda, and I discovered that she was a Luftwaffe general's daughter, glad enough to earn the wages of the conquerors. It must have been the first employment of her life-two and a quarter million British misses and madams put their hair in snoods and went to work making tanks and aircraft, but Hitler refused Albert Speer at his Ministry of War Production to let Nazi womanhood dirty her hands with machine oil. The Fьhrer's notion that woman's place is in the home helped lose Germany the war.
'I hear there
'They use the word to mean another very similar.'
He wrinkled his nose. 'At least the powers that be have taken my point sufficiently to relax the rules for my little conversazione. One's problem of re-educating the Nazis is of opening sufficient windows. Hitler was to them simply the idealized embodiment of their group-identification. Surely you agree? One must let them know that other standards prevailed outside Germany. Not, of course, that there seems a single Nazi left in Germany today,' he added resignedly. 'They would all seem to have vanished from the face of the earth, like the swastika flags and SS uniforms and those ghastly muscular neo-Classical statues of pagan dimwits.'
The party was for the Saturday evening of December 2. Greenparish had transported a don from his own Cambridge college to lecture on English Literature, to be followed by Greenparish explaining the relationship of man to society. The don was a short, jumpy, birdlike man with large round glasses, always shaking hands and smiling and apologizing for his presence. Our colonel recognized it all as the familiar politicians' lunacy, but allowed use of a room with crystal chandeliers and cream and gold moulded walls, now badly knocked about. Greenparish had invited about thirty guests from the re-emergent Elberfeld Literary Circle. They were mostly middle-aged and elderly, and uncertain whether to be submissive, arrogant or frightened. All arrived dressed in their best, though everyone's best right across Europe was growing threadbare after six years.
On a long table against the wall were set bully beef sandwiches, sausage rolls, bottles of hock and cigarettes in glasses. Greenparish meant refreshments to be taken during the discussion of points raised by the speakers, in the manner of those spirited, sly, chattering little parties of Grange Road, Boars Hill and Hampstead. But the guests fell on the food at once, slipping sandwiches into handbags and pockets for their families, helping themselves to the wine, baring the table in two or three minutes.
'This isn't what I intended at all,' muttered Greenparish crossly. 'I honestly felt that tonight would see an achievement of mind over stomach. Look how those cigarettes simply
I stood in the corner, neither eating nor drinking. In those disordered times in Germany, you developed a suspicious eye for anyone who looked out of place. I had observed aloof from the others a man with the double distinction of being young and having an air about him. He was fair, pallid, sharp faced, with pale blue eyes, in a green high-buttoned sportsman's jacket, check trousers and stylish brown and white shoes. He caught my eye. After a minute or two, he approached and said in English, 'Mr Elgar, I believe?'
'How did you know my name?'
'A lot of people in Wupertal know you, Mr Elgar.' He spoke with the singsong precision of a man who has
