'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.'
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 Life and Look, and we got Bourbon from the Americans in exchange for British duffle-coats.
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 is some fratting with the Germans,' Greenpa
rish said to me in the mess. 'Among the other ranks.'
'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.
THE INVISIBLE VICTORY Page 26