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.
38
Today I retired. The afternoon of my sixty-fifth birthday saw a pleasant little ceremony in the great hall of Arundel College, where I was presented with a leather-bound book of congratulatory essays from my colleagues. The affair was managed by Hargreaves, both efficiently and enthusiastically. Elizabeth looked charming, and even our two sons managed an air of amiable sufferance.
The swords forged in the decade of the thirties were sheathed or shattered in the next. Now we have much better ones. I have seen only three truly significant happenings in my lifetime. The Nazis, and the toppling of their _horrid king, besmear'd with blood Of human sacrifice, and parents' tears._ Secondly, the invention of drugs to kill the germs which have prowled so dangerously round man ever since he evolved to intrude into their atmosphere on earth. And atomic fission, which keeps the world alive by frightening it to death. There is nothing like war as a stimulant of technical progress.
In Bunyan's day, tuberculosis was the Captain of the Men of Death. But whenever their captain falls, he is replaced by another. 'Malignant Fever' carved on old tombstones has been replaced in our ignorance by 'malignant disease'. I might myself have achieved the fourth significant event by producing the cure for at least some cancers. But I lost my enthusiasm for cancer research. It was replaced by doubt that the prolongation of life in our overcrowded and quarrelsome planet was an activity as saintly as we thought. Dogmagk felt the same about sulphonamides in the days of Hitler. Florey did about penicillin in the war.
The cubs of Hitler now purr in well-fed contentment. Himmler's death mask has a glass case in the Black Museum of Scotland Yard. We British become our old selves again when an excavator discovers a forgotten Nazi bomb, when we can evacuate our houses, drink tea together, and sing songs of happy cheer like William Blake's child on a cloud. And what do I conclude, who have been close enough to kiss the smiling and murderous faces of our century?
I can only agree with a voice of the 1930s, Susan Stebbing-_Human beings are too fine in their highest achievements to justify despair._
Leaving the hall afterwards, David Mellors came up to me, grinning. 'Do you remember in Germany after the war, when you desperately wanted some penicillin? You pinched it from my office when I left you alone for a minute. I did that on purpose, you know. I'm not such a fool as I look, boy.'
