Let's Talk About Thalidomide

Is Yoda? And like Yoda, I also train child soldiers. I know, I've met Harrison Well. Their little hands can reach into the hard to reach places of a rifle, um, which makes it a lot easier for them to do maintenance. Look, this isn't a podcast about white child soldiers are such a good idea. This is a podcast about the worst people in all of history and today. My guess is Francesca if yeah right, yeah, Francesca. I was on your show, which is which is has both a pod and a

video component. Yes, and I apologize for that. I I like forced you to turn on your camera, but yeah, Roberts rushed it. It was It was rough, you know, seeing actually seeing your face. I don't people, I don't know if people are ready for just how like Disney Prince handsome you are, like, uh, that's a very nice way to say perpetually hungover. Thank you? Yeah yeah yeah yeah, and like you know, in a punk rock like Disney Prince but punk rock. Um yeah. That was the Bituation

Room podcast. Everyone should check that out. And Robert was great and it was a great podcast. I had a lot of fun on it. Um And today we're gonna be bitch you wastioning about well, something else I want to keep. I want to actually keep the the exact topic of today's podcast a secret and tell the big reveal because it's gonna be it's gonna be a good time. Um not. How do you feel about babies? I feel like I've been asking that a lot. I don't know.

I don't like where this is going already. Alright, alright, let me ask it easier question. How do you feel about Nazis? Oh? Bad, there you go, Nazis are bad. Nazis, Uh, you know, just cutting edge, maybe a little too much, so, yeah, definitely too much cutting. That's fair to say about Nazi doctors. Um, this is a fun one because we're talking about Nazi doctors. But the most of what we're talking about a curse in like the nineteen sixties. So you're gonna have a

good time with this one. You're gonna have a really good time with It's almost like there. They never suffered the full consequences of their crimes against humanity, and that is able to scatter throughout the world and keep on genociding. So that is a big aspect of what we're talking about now. I'm going to guess you and most of our listeners are broadly familiar with the story of a doctor named Joseph Mangola who was one of the worst,

maybe the worst doctor there's ever been. He was the chief physician at Birkenau, which was a subcamp of Auschwitz UH and Mangela carried out selections, which meant he was part one of his jobs. He was one of a number of doctors who would determine who would go on to do labor at the camp and who would be killed immediately. Um. And he liked doing selections because he also got to pick out people who he thought would be most useful for the medical experiments that he was

carrying out, and that mostly meant picking out twins. He had a whole thing for twins. It is weird. Um, we will talk about Mangela one of these days. It's like a grim singled out. Remember that show from the Jesus No, He's like you was twins? Um. I mean in some instances they did throw twins on there. It was more of a dating game, which I know that

that Auschwitz was not about so alsotionately. If they had just sort of recon figured it to be about life and love and not you know, death, Um, you know, maybe uh, it could have been had something there. I mean. The horrible thing is that if you look at pictures of Dr Mangola from the Holocaust era, he does not look like you would expect. Um. He absolutely does not look like you know, some of the Dazzis have that

have that strong war criminal vibe to them. To Mangola, Mingola looks like aggressively normal, to the point where it's it's actually deeply unsettling. I do stand up comedy, so I'm surrounded by a very very sweet faced boys. You're like, wait, you showed your junk to whom? Yeah, exactly Mingola would have killed in the l A stand up scenes, by

which I mean that like swoop back hair situation. Yeah, you wouldn't call him as doctor death um, although maybe you would because it's always the aggressively normal looking guys. So Mangola is particularly famous because the experiments he can did on twins were so garishly vile. He would amputate like one twins limb, or infect one twin with the disease to see if it would transfer to the other

in some way. At one point he killed fourteen twins in a single night by injecting their hearts with chloroform. He would also inject die into the eye color of one twin to see if it would change the color and the other twins eyes, just like Eli Roth style batshit nonsense like people talk about like well, you'll hear sometimes from people who have not studied the Holocaust enough like well, you know it was horrible, but they did

get some like useful medical data out of it. Was like no, it's almost all nonsense, Like it was just people doing like like like completely bug fuck pointless shit. Yeah, it's deputizing like a thirteen year old kid with just all the hormones, like just like trying to hook up a rat to a balloon and seeing how high it goes.

And then yeah, it was like all the kids who someone should have come to them when they were eleven years old and like, uh like torturing cats, and instead you give them like complete control over the life and death of thousands at a work camp. It's it was pretty bad, is what I'm saying about the Holocaust. That's awful. And and and I know you've had Matt Leeban who is my boyfriend, and he is actually a fraternal twin, and uh so I wish he was on his talk

a little bit about this. But um, as he says on stage in a joke, you know, he cannot feel his twin sisters orgasms. So, uh no, you can't feel you might you might get you're sensitive to your twin, but you can't feel their pain. Yeah, And you could have asked them that as opposed to injecting die into their eyes to see if that did something, my God like, and there's the baby's a crying. Yeah, that's what babies do. Also they're in prison. Yeah, yeah, you've taken them from

their parents. Mangela. This isn't really useful data. So Mangola deserves his infamy. Obviously he's the most famous of the Naxi Nazi doctors, but there were actually a shipload of doctors necessary to keep the third Reichs machinery of death humming along. For one thing, under like the rules the Nazis established for the concentration camps, well for the death camps, only doctors could actually deploy ziclon B into the gas chambers. Every time gas was deployed into a chamber, it was

done by it by a physician. Um. That was like one of the rules that they stuck to very diligently. A great number of doctors were also involved in the Holocaust through pharmaceutical giant I G. Farbon Um. Who are the people who make aspirin they've turned into, I mean, one of the things they've turned into now is bear um. And one of the doctors who worked at IG Farban

was a fellow named Otto Ambrose. Now Dr Ambrose had risen through the ranks of the company during the early Nazi years, and from nineteen forty one he headed up their search for a site to put new to put in new synthetic rubber and fuel plants. They settled on a Polish town named austwit Came, which became the site for Auschwitz aswiki and I guess is the the Polish

version of the name Auschwitz. So IG Farban liked Auschwitz as a site because the s S was already building a amp there, and the s S agreed to give them slave labor to help run their chemical plants. Construction started in forty one. Auto Ambrose helped oversee this process and managed the factory through the war years. I G. Farban would rent Jewish slaves from the s S for

three marks per day, four marks if the worker was skilled. Uh. In nineteen forty one, dr Ambrose wrote to the I. G. Farban board, our new friendship with the s S is proving very beneficial, so high ranking. So so are they are we building chemical plants to eventually do bad things to our own people? Like is it? Like a number

of things. So the plants, specifically that Ambrose is working, they're attempting to because obviously Germany not great unnatural resources, right, That's why all of German history has been the way that it is so by hate, that's the main Yeah, and J K. Obviously, Angela, You're fine. So they're trying to make uh, synthetic rubber because they need rubber, but they don't have access to the actual raw material that makes rubber. Most of that comes from Africa in this period.

And they're also trying to make synthetic gasoline because they need to be able to move their vehicles. But Germany does not have a lot of like in the territory they've conquered, doesn't have a lot of fuel. So that's part of what they're doing, trying to keep the war machine going. The other thing that the Nazis are trying to make at Auschwitz is sarah nerve gas, and dr Ambrose is one member of a team of four that vince sarah nerve gas, which is one of the deadliest

nerve gases ever. And that's so they're they're making a mix of horrible chemical weapons UH and attempting to make different synthetic chemicals to allow the Nazi war machine to continue.

They're amazing, it's gonna go in some surprising directions though, so high ranking I G. Farm employees at Auschwitz, like dr Ambrose, were allowed to purchase clothing that had been stolen from the people who were gassed, and the reason that this was a good deal for them was that Jews and other victims of the Holocaust were generally not told they were head to do the death camp, and they were just told they were being uh, they were migrating,

they were being forcibly migrated. So they would generally wear their finest clothing because obviously you don't know if all of your luggage is gonna make it, You're gonna wear the best stuff you have so that you at least have it when you arrive at your new home. So a lot of times they're gassed in the finest clothing that they have access to, and then it's taken from their bodies and people like Dr Ambrose get to pick

through it. That is the smallest but cruelest detail and the most insignificant part of Holocaust and death camps, but also such an annoying fuck you, Like that was my mom's necklace, that was my finest, like channel whatever jacket, and you're just gonna that's not okay, No, it's all I mean, it's the Holocaust. It's all pretty bad. Yeah, I guess that's a good point. Yeah, it's a pretty

good life. Though working at Auschwitz as an ig Farban manager. Unfortunately, the factory produced basically nothing of value from the Nazi war machine. Again, one of the overwhelming themes here is that like they were bad at a lot of this stuff. Like this is like people over emphasized because the History Channel has done a million documentaries and like crazy Nazi weapons and Nazi say they fucked up more than they got things right, um, which is part of why they

lost the war. Um. Yeah, that's why I think it's so messed up because there is lower Like I think anyone who's that into Nazi and and Nazism and the Third Reich and is like a little bit a little bit of a fanboy or girl, And I always like that line is so thin and weird. But like over inflating just how like amazing their medical you know, um, like innovations were. It's like, no, they were injecting children

with chlora what at chloro form? Chloroform was one of the things they ejected children with, yeah, like and and found out nothing. Yeah, they got nothing out of that, I mean, and they had like a lot of their fucking their super weapons was just like huge wastes of resources that would have been better spent towards making I don't know, uh, not very sexy, but incredibly effective medium tank like the T thirty four that would have allowed them to you know, actually have more armor on the

back like they were. Like, I'm a member of a very awkward group of people which are German history, military history and nerds who also have to repeat. But I'm not like in that way. Um So, in early nineteen forty five, the I G. Farban facility ash which was abandoned after heavy US bombing. And this is actually where Primo Levy, if you know anything about Primo Levy he is. He survives Auschwitz because he gets gets a gig working. He's a lab technician basically, and he gets a gig

working in the IG Farban lab. But he's able to hide when they when they flee. Dr Ambrose, though, escapes the Russian army with the German soldiers who flee Auschwitz. Um and these soldiers take as many of their remaining prisoners as possible and lead them on a death march through the Polish winter just to try to get rid of the rest of them. When the war ended and the camps were liberated, the role of ig Farban and

doctors like Ambrose and Mangela became clearer in NIVE. After Germany sued for peace, the Allied Command utterly dismantled German industry and put what remained under its authority. The stage intent was quote to render impossible any future threat to Germany's neighbors or to world peace. Um and I guess broadly you could say that was done well Germany. Great podcast, sir, Robert, I've really enjoyed myself. Of war we did, and all

the bad people face consequences. Anyhow, what's this podcast again? Yeah? Unfortunately, as soon as they figured out dealt with that Nazi threat to world peace, a new threat to world peace presented itself, which was that the U S and the U S s R we're just just just just rubbing their dicks in anticipation of getting to kill each other,

particularly the US. At this point, um and hawks within capitalist nations started agitating and preparing for a war against communist Russia as soon as the one against Germany ended, And it was decided by these guys that fully liquidating German industry would be a bad idea since most of that industry lay within the zone of Allied control, and they might need to use it for the next war.

This is the same reason why a lot of German military leaders don't get punished to the extent that they should is there's this understanding like, well, these guys fought the Soviets. We're about to fight the Soviets, so who cares if they presided over a couple hundred thousand executions in Poland or whatever? You know, we need this guy, um, I mean, and therein lies the hypocrisy of war. Hey, they're good at mass murder. We might need them for

we might need to murder some people. Yeah, one of I think one of the I mean, there's a number, and it happens on all sides, not just the United Like the United States and Russia both we're gonna talk about this a bit. Both take a lot of Nazis to use. But like France does it, um, Britain does it, like fucking Norway does it, Like everybody's It's like the beanie babies of Nazis moment, like gotta call it them all and like you have like the doctor and then

you get like the mad scientists at running factories. Yeah exactly. It's like a fucking it's like a rummage sale at the end of the third Reich, like, who needs an expert with questionable morality? Everyone? It turns out that's what states do. UM. I think the most offense, one of the most probably the most defensive example to me, would be Albert Speer, who was like Hitler's Hitler fucking loved this dude. By kind of the end of Hitler's life.

Speer was his favorite Nazi and Albert Speer was an architect, which Hitler always wanted to be, and if he had probably could have been a decent architect. A lot of people say if he'd focused on the instead art school, But anyway, Hitler fucking loved architecture, loved Albert Speer. Spear would like make all these grand designs for like how how the German Reich was going to look after the war. Spear was also the head of War Production UM and the head, as a result of that, the head of

the Nazi like slave labor program. He was. He was the one organizing where the slaves were going to make Nazi war production possible. Committed a lot of crimes against humanity that all got whitewashed and covered up because we decided we wanted Albert Spear's help planning our industrial economy in order to help fight the Soviets really hard. Yeah, yeah, exactly,

great guy, Albert Spier. Um, I'm assuming. In nineteen forty seven, the Allied governments began a series of war crimes trials for twenty four directors and senior employees of IG Farban. Dr Ambrose was one of those men. He was sentenced to eight years in prison from mass murder and slavery,

which seems light to me. I don't know, like eight years for mass murder and slavery kind of seems like maybe not enough, Like like I think I know people who got busted with Pott who did more than eight years, and I feel like slavery is a worse crime. I don't know. I'm back seat Nuremberg in here. Um, you're no, you're absolutely that that that's like, you know, we could

use him in five and get down four. Yeah. So he was one of thirteen IG farbanmen who were convicted, and by nineteen fifty one he was released from prison

like four years early. Uh. He was the beneficiary of a clemency grant so he could contribute to a build up of European industry in order to oppose the USSR, and I want to quote from a write up about this by the International Oncology Networks magazine, quote there are Recruitment of these experts was sanctioned by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, who approved the systematic exploitation of scientific and technical knowledge developed in Nazi Germany in a classified

memorandum titled Exploitation of German Scientists and Science and Technology in the United States. They described these men as chosen rare minds whose continuing intellectual productivity we which wished to use. And while the Soviet Union also worked hard in acquiring German expertise with the emerging Cold War, US Joint Chiefs of Staff supported every effort designed to guarantee that intellectual

spoils were not to fall into Soviet hands. Hence, after defeating Nazi Germany in nineteen forty five Operation Overcast later renamed Operation paper Clip, more than sixteen hundred Nazi Germans were secretly recruited to develop armaments at a feverish and paranoid pace that came to define the Cold War. In addition, America sent hundreds of experts to Germany to guide the transfer of scientific and technical knowledge back to the United States.

And with this transfer of scientific and technical knowledge, a large number of chosen Nazi scientists migrated to the United States. Others, however, remained in Germany, where they were ultimately recruited by German companies. You know, sometimes, um, most of us, when we fail, we actually you know, fail uh, and we have to suffer the consequences. Others others just fail up. And I feel like Nazis man they really knew how to fail up,

and other people helped them. Yeah. I think the best known example of this was vern von Brown, who was probably the single man most responsible for the the US moon landing. UM. He was the guy who designed our rockets. He was the head of like a bunch of ship at Nasa UM. He also designed the V two rockets that were fired blindly at civilian targets in the uk. UM real piece of ship used slave labor to make

a lot of rockets under the Germans. There is a great Verner von Brown's song against him that includes the line when the missiles go up, who knows where they come down? That's not my department, says Verner von Brown, good little song, real piece of shit. So this is you know what it reminds me of, Like there's a song that you learn in grade school called like dirt made my lunch. Dirt made my lunch. Thank you Dirt. Thanks a bunch for my salad. I'm a sandwich and

my milk my lunch. Thank Anyway, the point is I feel like it's like Nazis made my launch. Nazis made my launch. Thank you Nazis. You're fucking the worst. But a bunch of technology. I mean, this is you know what. I'm sorry not to make this like super like politicize this, but I feel like you kind of see and I'm not drawing a one to one here, and I'm gonna get a lot of blowback for this, but you can

edit this out. No, But I feel like when you talk about, you know, opposing the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, a lot of people will be like, Israeli's have you know, Israeli technology has done a lot and you're like, so, you know what I mean, Like these things are like sort of unrelated um and have cool technology and not

an ethnic cleansing exactly exactly. Like, presumably those scientists could be doing the same work in a state that was not, i don't know, allowing armed settlers to gun down unarmed Palestinians. It was one example, but there's a lot of examples. For example, you could have a guy making sweet ass rockets and not using giant slave labor camps in order to build them. All of these things are possible. It's like the United States could have landed a man on

the moon without rehabilitating a Nazi war criminal. Um. All sorts of things are possible without doing the terrible things that come with them. We just choose to do the terrible things because it's easier and we're lazy. But also, like, what about locking them up If they have like great like if they have incredible um skill and and and knowledge, you can still lock them up. They can work from prison, they can work from there. They'll produce the blueprints, you know,

but they are under like they are not free. Was that never explored? No? No, no, no, no, you want them you want to keep them happy. Um, I don't know they I think they should have all been shot is kind of my attitude. I'm a big cow puittal punishment for members of the Third Reich kind of guy um So. The most enthusiastic of the of German companies when it came to hiring old Nazi war criminals was Grunental. Now, when the International Criminal Court went after I. G. Farbanu,

Grunental was just a baby company. It had been formed in nineteen forty six, which technically gave it a clean record Visa v. Nazis. Right the war is over, West Germany becomes a thing. Grunental is started and it was a spin off company from an existing business run by the Vertz family for the last hundred or so years. The Vertices are your standard German pre war capitalist aristocracy. Their ancestor Andreas Verts founded the family firm in the

nineteenth century. Initially is a soap and perfume business, it quickly became prominent, coming to dominate the local economy of Akin, a prosperous city in the North Rhine. Though the Wortzes were Catholic, they recognized Hitler for what he was, which is good for business. The family patriarchs joined the evil blood. There's no no that he was going to make him a lot of money, and he did yes, So they joined the party right away and they benefit right away.

So it's important to understand the Nazis were just gangsters, and they offered bribes to the German capital holding class in exchange for their support. A lot of these bribes were dispensed via a process called Ariyanization, in which Jewish owned businesses were stolen by the government and handed over to Nazis. The Vertz family were given to competing perfume companies, one of which made the Tobacc perfume range that is

still sold by the words firm today. So this company is given a Stoleish, stolen Jewish perfume business, and in two thousand and twenty one that that same family still owns that perfume range and profits from it. Um It's good ship. When the Nazis broke up by g Farban, the Vertices saw opportunity. Since making perfume and making various medicines use a lot of the same equipment, spinning off

into a pharmaceutical company made sense. It also made sense to make use of the huge number of recently freed are never punished at all Nazis scientists who are now out of work in nt I hope this doesn't end in some kind of the Sephora line being problematic because you know it's on the label, like it's cruelty free. When you say that you don't perform any any tests on rabbits, I assume you also mean that this did

not descend from a line of Nazi cosmetologists. I would say that cruelty free should should also include was never stolen by the Nazis and handed over to someone else. Yeah, I think that does count somewhere on the label. But anyway, continue this business was never owned by Nazis, Robert, You know what, Yeah, we would know what other businesses are not owned by Nazis unless it's a Volkswagen, unless it's a Volkswagen AD or like a BMW AD or a

Mercedes AD or a Bear AD or an AD. For most of them, I mean not owned by Nazis but directly supporting the Nazis, like the Shell for example. Oh yeah, IBM, for sure, for goddamn sure, yes, absolutely, But unless it's any of those companies, definitely guaranteed not ever owned by Nazis, probably unless it's one like a company that's owned by one of those large like investment firms that had a lot of investments in Nazi Germany, which is pretty likely. Um,

but you know, maybe not. Anyway, Ads, we're back. So in one Grunental hired Dr Ambrose, our friend who developed Sarah nerve gas and helped organize the death factories at Auschwitz. Years four years in prison reign, Yeah he did. He did his time. You know, that's just a year for every other guy he worked on the Sarah nerve gas project with. So they didn't mind that he'd worked at Auschwitz, and they were very impressed by his other professional credential.

He quickly became chairman of the company's advisory committee. It's a good guy to have advising your company. The dude who advised the SS on how to make a death factory. Dr Ambrose was quickly joined by a number of other old party comrades. And I'm gonna quote from the book Silent Shock by Michael magazinek quote. Dr Hinz Baumcotter was a notorious s S doctor at the Saxon Housen concentration

camp outside Berlin. In addition to overseeing executions and selecting prisoners for the gas chamber, he conducted experiments with injections, explosives, and chemicals. One such experiment saw prisoners strapped down and burned with phosphorus so that Baumcotter could test an experimental salve. Baumcotter was arrested after the war, charged with murder, and tried by the Soviets in Berlin in nineteen forty seven.

He was convicted after a short trial, not a surprising outcome given his appalling record and the efficient Soviet approach to war crimes justice. Baumcotter was sentenced to life imprisonment, but served only eight years before the Soviets returned him to Germany. The exact point at which Grunenthal employed him is unclear, but Baumcotter was certainly working as a salesman in Grunenthal's Mounster office in nineteen sixty and sixty one. By this time he was facing another round of war

crimes charges in a German court. In nineteen sixty two, after a trial in Munster, Balumcotter was convicted of being an accessory to murder and of several and of depraved indifference, and sentenced once more to eight years jail, the time he had already served in the Soviet another eight years. That not not really, because the time he already served in the USSR was taken into account and so he never went to jail again. He got time served for gitticide.

It's good ship. No. I once thought that American police officers got off with murder very easily, and uh, turns out Nazi war criminals not nearly as easy as Nazis. Yeah, what's really fun is looking at how many erosts group and they were, those are the guys who played skeet shooting with literal babies, and how many of them survived the war, and how many of the ones that survived the war suffered any kind of legal penalties at all.

As a spoiler, not most of them. Now, by which I mean thousands of them lived the rest of their lives is free minutes. So this is this is the okay, you believe in capital punishment for Nazis, and I'm with you, but I feel as though I'm coming off of I just watched the Epstein docs on Netflix. Anyway, another another bastard, and I'm like, death is way too easy, Like this is unfair. Death is unfair if you're that big of a piece of ship. There's nothing fair if you're Here's

why I think just immediate execution. Democracy means some right wing ship holes are always going to get elected, and they are always going to want to use the Nazis rather than punish them, which is you get a lot of these guys getting nasty punishments and then get pardoned a couple of years later. So I think you just

shoot them immediately when everybody's piste off. We don't have to like, yeah, we don't have to see all their paintings George W. Bush and hear his opinions on Afghanistan exactly. I mean, I feel the same about George W. Bush. But that's the story for another episode that Robert and I are on the same page here. Okay, let's keep going. Before you know, the cops are at my door. So I know you're thinking, wow, to Nazi war criminals, one of whom was on war crimes trials while working as

a salesman for Grunenthal. That's a lot of Nazis at the company. But we're just getting started. Martin Staimler was another Grunental higher as a prominent pathologist during the Third Reich. He wrote articles in published studies proving the racial superior superiority of the German race. He was a popular proponent of the Nazi racial hygiene program, which ultimately resulted in

the Holocaust. After Germany invaded Poland, he advised the SS on their population policy, which means it was his job to decide which chunks of Polish society to exterminate. Grunenthal put Martin Staimler in charge of their pathology department from nineteen sixty to nineteen seventy four. Grunental also hired Hans Burger Prince, who worked with Hitler's personal doctor Carl Brandt. Now if you're a Nazi, now where Brandt was the Hitler doctor who didn't give him a lot of methamphetamine.

He wound up as the lead defend for the doctor's trial at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, and he was executed for his involvement in medical experiments on prisoners and civilians. Burger Prinz escaped any punishment for his role in working with Dr Brandt, and he went on to defend the Grunental company as an expert witness in court. The most famous Nazi hire of the Grunenthal Company was Dr Ernst Gunter Schenk. You can see him in the movie Downfall.

Played by Christian Burkele, which means he was in the bunker with Hitler at the very end. Shank was the only member of Grunental who was a member of the s S. Several of them advised the s S. Shank was in the s s UH and he was in fact the official SS nutritional inspector. During the war, he developed an experimental protein sausage that was tested on three hundred and seventy concentration camp prisoners, killing dozens of them.

Because apparently Shank was pretty bad at making sausage. He was actually captured by the Soviets and managed to survive ten years in their prisons. When he returned to West Germany, he was barred from working again as a doctor, but Grunental didn't care. They hired him any way. And then there's I need, I need, I need to learn more

about the sausage. Is it like I feel like this is some hannibal shit, you know, where it's like actually made out of their loved one's brains and they're like eat it, you know, and they're like, oh, I think it's more bored. They were just trying to like make better military rations out of like synthetic ship. I don't know as much about the sausage as I should, but it was bad sausage, rubber and twin babies. Yeah, I get it. We've all been We've all had a bad sausage,

but this one sounds like it was designed ironically. I've never had a bad sausage in Germany. Now other parts of the world that's been a different case. So uh. And then there's the guy who's going to be the main Nazi for our story today. Heinrich Muchter. Here's Newsweek quote. During the war, his expertise had been anti typhus work. Outbreaks of the disease in the army made finding a

vaccination a high priority. Because typhus cultures cannot live outside a body, it was kept alive by injecting it into prisoners. Once injected with the disease, the prisoners could then be used to try out the vaccines to see if they worked. And Muchter's experiments were purportedly carried out in Auschwitz, buken Vald and Grodno, as well as at Krakau. Now Buchenwald was the main experimental center from Mukters typhus tests. One

particular part of the camp. Block forty six was used by Nazi scientists to test treatments for not just typhus, but yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, and diphtheria. One Nuremberg witness recalled dreadful horror at the thought of Block forty six. Every person who quote went to Block forty six as an experimental person did not only have to expect death and under certain circumstances, a very long, drawn out, in frightful death, but also torture and the complete removal of

the last remnants of personal freedom. This is what I'm saying about capital punishment for Nazis. It is a little bit too easy, but I hear you. We need like what would better things to have done to them? But I I'm just a fan of getting it done so because again, one of the things here, like and people who are big fans of the Soviet Union will point out rightfully that the Soviet Union killed a lot more Nazis who were captured, but most of the ones they

killed were like normal soldiers who they starved to death. Again, you're going to be a piece of ship, be a talented, be a prominent piece of ship, because you're so prominent that Yeah, you're uncancellable, unkillable, because we have we have so far in the story two prisoners who did time and Soviet prisons, two doctors and then got out and went back to the West and did horrible things. Um,

which I mean guy is this guy? Yeah? Now, all prisoners who were part of Muktar's typhus tests were given a particularly virulent strain of the of the disease of typhus. Half were injected with an experimental treatment and the other half were given no treatment at all. Quote, there were cases of raving madness, delirium. People would refuse to eat,

and a large percentage of them would die. Those who experienced the disease in a milder form, perhaps because of theirs, because their constitutions were stronger, or because the vaccine was effective, were forced continuously to observe the death struggles of others. So that's what muktr does. He was part of a horrible engine of unfathomable human misery. But a keyword there is part. He wasn't a big face like Mingola. He

wasn't the guy directly killing a bunch of people. He was one of a number of doctors organizing this horrific set of trials, and as a result, he got off nearly scott free. Polish authorities were only able to effectively charge him with mistreating prisoners and stealing scientific equivalent, and he was able to flee back to Germany across the Iron Curtain before he could face any kind of consequence for his work, and in nineteen forty six he became

one of Grunental's first employees. Now, kind of by default, a lot of German companies in the postwar era wound up hiring former Nazis. It was kind of unavoidable in many cases because an awful lot of people joined the party, but Grunental was different. On time out, does anyone say time out? This is me saying to call him time out on Robert Evans, did he discover anything after torturing that many people. I don't think they figured out a typhus vaccine. Um, there we go. Yeah. I think German

soldiers were still dyana typhus by the end of the war. Um. Now I mean not that it's any constellation. I guess if I or any of my relatives were in that like were performed on like rabbits in cages and injected with all kinds of horrible things. I feel like the last thing I would want is for then did go on and save German soldiers lives. I'd be like, no, no, no, no no, I don't want I don't want this help

with advancements to come out of this ship at all. Well, I I guess the good news is that it did not work at all, because the first typhus vaccine was developed in the seventies there, so, uh, this did not work, but they didn't figure some other ship out We're going to talk about in a little bit. By the way, block forty six thirty six or forty six block forty six is like what every covid anti vaxer thinks that, like, yes, the vaccine is doing lenin. Have you sort of muck

You're like, I think it's very different. It is. It is very different, especially since a lot of anyway, we don't need to talk about how other fringe sort of spiritual beliefs wind up dovetailing in the Nazism today. We talked about that a lot anyway, So again, a lot of German companies higher former Nazis, and hey, I should note if you're a former Nazi in this period. It obviously it means you made a horrible moral compromise. It doesn't mean you were a part of the of the

direct part of the engineering of extermination. A lot of people just joined it to like get a promotion at like whatever bullshit gig they did in like the local government, or because they were a teacher or something. Not a good thing, but not the same as organizing a series of tortures, tortures medical experiments at Auschwitz Um. So obviously you were going to have a lot of former Nazis being hired in seven because there's millions of them. But

Grunin Tall was different. Not only did Grunen Tal higher way more former Nazis than any other pharmaceutical company, but they had a weird tendency to hire former Nazi who had been directly involved with forced labor and concentration camps. One German historian, looking at a short list of Grunental staff in the nineteen sixties, said, it's absolutely astonishing that a small company should have such a concentration of convicted war criminals on its staff. Unusual even by the standards

of post war Germany. So what German historian is like by the standards of everyone else in Germany, these guys hired a lot of fucking war criminals, unprecedented amounts. Grunental is like the worst in that in that field. Now, with their staff of war criminals in place, Grunental set to the important business of making medicine. One of their first products was a penicillin derivative, which proved to be massively toxic and was quickly pulled. They also marketed in

tuberculosis here that was completely ineffective. There were some eventual successes, and eventually they become get rich off of pain killers. But as the nineteen fifties hit, Grunental was still on the lookout for a big product hit, something that can make a lot of money. On all of these patients say keep on dying? What what are we doing wrong? Like like is it the staff of love to murder? I don't know what kind of accent I'm doing it? It started out German. I don't know what it is anymore.

Say Matt does a better accent. He does, he does a very good accent. But like, like you might look at your people. You just hired, bro, They who love to watch death and create death and you're trying to make what medicine, vaccines something that's not right. Yeah, it's it's it's it's. Uh. Yeah. They're not great at the start, but they're looking for their big hit, and they decide that synthetic drugs are probably the wave of the future. Dr Heinrich Muchter put two of his staff doctors on

the task of developing new synthetic antibiotics. Now, one of these guys, Dr Wilhelm Koon's, heated a commercially available chemical as part of his experimentation and created a brand new substance in fatalital glutamic acid imide. It would soon become better known by the name philidamide. You heard a plid mind? No, what is that? Oh no, it's much worse than that. A number of people will be going ah ship at this pointde is very famous. It's in It's in Billy

Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire, among other things. Real famous. Dr start the fire. It started something now. Dr Kun's partner is said to have believed the new compound was a structural analog or a near copy of the kind of barbiturous that were commonly sold as sleeping pills based on this logic, the story goes, Grunental decided to carry out tests on rats to determine if the litamide might

be something the company could market as a sleeping aid. Now, I say the story goes because this part is heavily debated. You may notice that it's kind of weird that doctors trying to make a new antibiotic would make a synthetic, barbituous analog and then immediately try to test it as a sleeping pill. Stuff like this does happen in medical development. Viagra started as like a heart medication, but it also does stuff that could be useful as a heart medication.

It's a blood thinner um. But there are doctors who will note that it does really seem like phillidamide started as a result of antibiotic research, and that that's a weird claim to make. There are other suspicious things about

the drugs origin. That first rat study on palidomide, the first study that Grudentald does on palidamide when they find it was based around what's called a jiggle cage, which is a special cage that tries to measure the amount of movement and drugged or undrugged rats to determine whether

or not a substance sedates them. Basically, you you're giving them the drug and then you're shaking a cage and like the amount that they get agitated is like okay that either this sedative is working and they don't notice it or not. Right, jiggle cage sounds like a strip club, it does. The jiggle cage is a great strip club name. Actually yeah, um, Now, this particular study is very odd.

One pediatrician who analyzed it, Dr widukind Lynn, described the experiment as having so little scientific value that it should not have been published. Quote. The author's claimed to have shown a sleep inducing effect, though no sleep was observed. Other pharmaceutical companies later tried and failed to replicate the

tomide sedative property on animals, and they failed. Some suspect the rats study was fabricated in order to provide clean scientific evidence that the li might had promise as a sedative. But it is an extremely effective sedative for human beings. It just doesn't sedate rats. So why is it a big deal that this rat study showed it worked as

a sedative in rats when it doesn't. If it does work as a sedative in human beings, what is the issue here, Well, the issue is that a lot of people suspect Dr Mukter and Grunental faked the rat study data because they already knew before Grudental was founded, that the litamide was an effective sedative. They just couldn't say why. They knew because the litamide had been initially developed during

the Nazi era via experiments on concentration camp inmates. So they tested it on people, but they couldn't say that, so they needed to fabricate an animal study to be like, now we should test this on humans. Look, it puts rats to sleep. You can't say the cage jiggled a lot. The humans, I mean rats were trying to it out, I mean having a good sleeping sleep sleeping. Now, this is debated still, this is not a guarantee that had

happened this way. There's a lot of argument as to whether or not the litamides started as a Nazi project. And before I read what I'm about to read, you should know that the jury is still out as to the origins of the litamide. That said, I'm now going to quote up from quote from a write up in by onco Zine, the magazine of the International Oncology Network

as part of the Physician's Weekly Magazine network. Quote in his book Hitler's Laboratories, the Argentinian writer Carlos Dinnapoli states that he has discovered documents dated November nineteen forty four from I G. Farben which referred to a chemical agent

with the same chemical formula as the litamide. According to DiNapoli, I G. Farban's director, Fritz Fritz Termier, sent a memo to Carl Brandt, the s S general who ran Hitler's ethan Asia program, explaining that a drug with number four five eight nine with the same characteristics as the litamide,

had been tested and was ready for use. According to documents discovered after or World War Two, Mukta and Ambrose, working worked under the supervision of Joseph Mangola, referred to compound four five eight nine being tested on female prisoners in Auschwitz. In these Auschwitz files, researchers discovered correspondence between the camp commander and Bear liver clusim part of I G. Farban.

The correspondence dealt with the sale of one and fifty female prisoners for experimental uses with a view to the planned experiments of a new sleep inducing drug. We would appreciate it if you could place a number of prisoners at our disposal. So there's real, real compelling evidence that the litamide was first experimented during the war on female slaves as a sleeping pill, and that doctor Muktr and dr Ambrose were a part of those tests, working under

Joseph Mangola. Why were they women anything? That's like swomen who then go to sleep around men, especially Nazis, do don't like any of that. I mean, there was a decent amount of rape in these places. I think it might also have there's also a fact of like men are potentially more dangerous. Uh to keep his prisoners, you might want to just kill them in immediately or you're you're working them in. It's a labor camp, so you have the men doing physical labor, the women. You either

kill them or you use their bodies for experiments. And that was up to dipshit number nine or whatever. Yeah, Mangla, I mean all of the Mangola, Ambrose, um uh Muktar are probably all taking turns doing this. It's a thing doctors do, like, it's doctors making the selections in a lot of cases. Again, the complicity of physicians in the third Reich is like an actually incredibly important story because most of them just like agree to be part of the machinery of death. It's a real problem in medical

ethics now. So there's a lot of reasons to believe. Like, obviously, if you're grown and tall, you don't want to say, we know this is a great sedative because the doctors we hired tested it on enslaved Jewish women and at Auschwitz. You don't want to be saying that that's not a good not a good advertising campaign. Um, So you want to and say, oh, it works on rats, let's test it on humans for totally the first time. This is the first time it's ever been tried on people. Um Uh.

Now there's other reasons to doubt Grunenthal's official story about the development of the litamide. For one thing, their initial patent application in nineteen fifty four mentioned that the drug had already been tested on humans before official tests began. Historical documents show that the company purchased the trade name that the litamide was sold under, Countergan, and presumably the drug itself, from Santa Fie, a French pharmaceutical company that

was controlled by the Nazis during World War Two. Quote Grunenthal also claimed to have done multiple independent animal experiments showing absolutely no mutagenic effects and no birth abnormalities. However, in the late nineteen sixties, Grunenthal's documents regarding the history and development of phototamide were subpoenaed for the civil actions against the company. It was reported that virtually all documents that showed where and when animal research as well as

clinical studies on humans were conducted, had been lost. So a lot of reasons to this fact that this was developed in concentration camps uh and then its origin was hidden. But that might not be the worst part of the litamide, which we're about to get to the worst part of the Yeah, anyway, it's not bad enough. I'm just like, I'm not triggered. And yet you know, we started off with, you know, killing babies, and I was kind of triggered, and I designed, don't I feel like you need to

level up? Yeah, we're we're, we'll, we'll, we'll get the trigger. It's important to know, though, that there's a really good chance that Dr Mukt, who worked under Joseph Mangela, had tested this drug initially in concentration camps, and once he got grun in Tal to start testing the drug for widespread approval, he also had a vested interest in making

sure it got approved and sold. Part of Dr Mukt's agreement with the company gave him a share in the profits of every drug Soul that he helped to develop. Whatever the truth of its origin, Grunental decided the litamide held a lot of promise as an alternative to barbiturates. And barbiturates are your traditional sleeping pills in this era, and they're really bad. Um, not that they don't have any like they do obviously they have medical uses, but

they can kill your ass. Like people die from sleeping pills all the time, especially in this period. Like we've gotten a bit better at it now, but like barbiturates number one can be very addictive and again can fucking kill you. So and that's starting to be known in the fifties and early sixties that like, oh there's some real downsides to these sleeping pills. And so if you can make a sleeping pill that can't kill people, that's

you make a funkload of money off that ship. And Dr Muktor basically was convinced green and tall, hey we can sell sleeping pills that don't have dangerous side effects. And to make the which is a big order for a Nazi to be like, hey, Nazis to try not to kill people. They're like I want to and like no, no, just just pull back on that almost kill them, don't kill them. Don't worry. He kills a lot more people.

So to make the case that philidamide was safe, Dr Muktor's team fed increasingly absurd amounts of philidamide to a variety of animals and an attempt to establish it's l D fifty. And the l D fifty is the dose at which a drug will kill fifty percent of test animals. Right, it's generally just referred to as like, this is the potential fatal dose of a drug. Didn't know? That? Very cruel to keep you, I mean, you need to know it, right,

it is. It's a horrible thing. But like you have to know what is a lethal dose of a substance you're giving people, You know, you do need to have an idea, no, of course, but but fifty of them or at least or half of at least yeah, because obviously everyone like one person can take a dose of cyanide that will kill them, and another person, like with medical treatment, could survive. There's never with this kind of ship. It's like the same thing. Some people get bitten by

rattlesnakes and recover. Some people die very quickly for a variety of reasons. Um. Now, so yeah, Grunenthal testers try to find an LD fifty for the litamite and they say, we can't find it. It's impossible to kill animals with this stuff. There's a lot of debate as to whether or not those studies were valid, but that's what they say. So we I just we really need humans. I mean these rats and rabbits they're great, but you don't be

really great humans. Well, they're more saying we can't kill animals with this, so people can take this and they won't o d Yeah. Yeah, there's no way to overdose on thalidomide, so we can sell it as like you can't die on this stuff, like all these other people

are dying on barbiturates. So Gruen and tal, when they've got this kind of establishment for how they're going to market thalidomide, proceeds to what was the second round of human trials, probably assuming they've done human trials and concentration camp inmates, and this round of human studies was comparatively a lot more ethical, but it was still very problematic, perhaps due to the fact that Grunental's research division was

run by Nazis. In Bone, one doctor treated forty children, many of whom were brain damaged, with huge doses of thalidomide over extended periods of time. Some kids received twenty times that recommended dose. None of the children's parents were informed of the study. The test showed that the liidamide was a very effective sedative, and a by effective, I mean it killed two babies. One of the babies had a congenital heart defect and one a three month old,

suffered heart failure. In addition, one other child went to rarely blind. The doctor conducting this study decided these side effects had nothing to do with the litamide and gave an endorsement to Greenenthal. But it was safe. That doesn't seem like good science to me, But I'm not a doctor. It seems like killing two out of forty children is actually a pretty high death rate for a pill. But I don't know, is it not. It's not half though it is not half so it's safe. I guess it's okay.

There were, of course, a lot of positive tests of the drugs. A number of testers, particularly adults it was tested on, did rave about its efficacy as a sleep aid. It does. It's an effective like sedative, and the fact that it had no hangover or other side effects. Some people say this, and a number of doctors back it up, and in adults it did seem to be pretty effective. But as this segment from the book's Silent Shock makes clear, there were problems from the beginning. One doctor reported that

he had dropped the drug because of absolute intolerability. Among the side effects he noted was site slight parashesia or tingling or burning sensation, often caused by nerve damage. Responding to this report, Green and Tal's Heinrich Muchter conceded in a letter on third April nineteen fifty six that the litamide seemed a very strong sedative, which, if used in high doses over a long period, could cause disturbance in the nervous system. Such information was pushed under the rug

or explained away. Dr Muktar did such a good job of manufacturing consent that other doctors in Grunental thought the litamide was safe. Some of his own staff members tried it, and one gave it to his pregnant wife. The fourth, first of what would be tens of thousands of the litamide babies, was born on Christmas Day nineteen fifty six without ears. In early nineteen fifty seven, the drug went on sale across Europe under the name countergan. Yeah, it

went on sale after babies were born without yours. One baby could have been anything. Sometimes babies don't have ears. Look, who's to say, Who's to say it's God? Yeah, it's God's will or not Nazis will. But you know, either way, let's put it on the market. Now you're saying also that Moxer is getting us a percentage of everything. He gets a cut baby. So the economic incentive totally not a problem in the farma industry at all, to rush things out the door. No, it was not a problem

then and it's not a problem now. So that vaccinated countergan a k philidamide became a bestseller. It was helped along by a recent string of deaths and life faltering injuries caused by barbituous sleeping pills. Grun and Tal's marketing campaign was based entirely around the fact that palidomide, unlike those competing pills, was totally safe. It's soon spread across

the world. Michael mcgas nick rites it was this emphasis on complete and unprecedented safety that allowed philidamide to prosper in a crowded marketplace. The full page ads for dist of All, which was its name in Australia, placed by Distillers, which was the company that sold it there. In the Medical Journal of Australia at a time, a key information source for doctors, illustrates the marketing line. A small child is standing on a stool raiding the family medicine cabinet.

The child has opened an unidentified bottle and the reader correctly surmises that an enormous, potentially fatal overdoses about to occur. Thankfully, though the advertisement can offer a happier ending. If the unnamed medicine is discival, there will be no tragedy. The child's life may depend on the safety of disc deval and advertisement shouts. Consider the possible outcome in a case

such as this had the bottle contained conventional barbiturates. Doctors were urged year by year the barbituous claim amounting toll of childhood victims. Yet today it is simple to prescribe a sedative and hypnotic that is both highly effective and outstanding lee safe dis deval. The Littamite has been prescribed for over three years in Great Britain, where the accidental poisonings rate is notoriously high, but there is no case on record in which even the gross overdoses with disc

devel has had harmful results. Put your mind at rest, depend on the safety of disc devel. They're literally advertising it by saying like, hey, your kids are gonna get into your medicine cabinet. If they eat your barbituous sleeping pills, they're gonna die. But they can take as much the litamite as they want. Harmless. The litamite to kids like candy. Yeah, you know, why don't you put him next to the candy. Just put him next to Throw it in the candy bowl.

It's the namie. It's safe. Look, put it. Stuff it in their teddy bears. They'll snuggle with it, numb num numb through the night. Put it in their bottle. Don't give him breast milk. Give him phillidamide. It's got everything a baby needs harmless. The litamide, so Grunental wasted no time in reaching out the thousands of doctors around the world in the first year or in nineteen fifty eight. So it comes, it goes on sale in nineteen nineteen

fifty eight. They placed fifty ads in medical journals and sent out more than two thousand letters to doctors, plus fifty thousand mailers to doctors and pharmacists. By early nineteen sixty the litamide was the best selling sleeping pill in Germany. Mass use led to more problems. Of course, it became very clear that the litamide could cause a particularly horrible form of neuropathy or nerve pain. There was no treatment for it, and the damage could linger for months after

the last dose of the litamide. Some people never recovered. Tens of thousands of Germans alone suffered long term nerve damage from litamide. This caused some doctors to suggest that the drugs should be pulled from the cell shelves. These were serious injuries, and no over the counter sleeping pill, which the litamide was, was worth that kind of risk. You can just buy this ship ship bro Yeah. In response,

grin and tal did Nazi ship. They hired private detectives to spy on detractors, including doctors who complained about the drug. They bribed and threatened lawsuits to suppress bad press, and of course they lied like a cheap rug. At no point did they consider doing anything but going full speed ahead with sales. How many pens did they have to buy off these doctors and how many free pens? You know, lunches like we I've seen that today, but back then

they are doing that. They're also there's a lot of doctors that get tricked into doing giving them set like giving their own families the litamide, and a lot of doctors who work at Grunental, a lot of junior researchers at Greenental give the litamide to their wives. And there's birth defects like it's actually Grunental employees suffer horribly as a result of the litamide. In nineteen fifty eight, a German doctor published a study on the linamite use among

breastfeeding women. He concluded that it was safe for them to use, although this doctor was very clear that this was only for breastfeeding women, not pregnant women. As quote, it is my fundamental outlook never to give mothers to be sleeping drugs or sedatives. It is an old fact of experience in medicine that fundamentally mothers to be are not to be given barbituous opiates, sedatives, or hypnotics because these substances can't affect fetuses. So this doctor is just

being like, hey, breastfeeding women sometimes of trouble sleeping. Is this safe for breastfeeding women? It is, And then he includes a long disclaimer saying not for pregnant women. Don't give this to pregnant women. Don't give any of these kind of ship to pregnant women. So especially like humans at small humans are still just dating. We're just like, that's all we're doing for like two years, is still just dating. He's I mean, I don't know that his

research was wrong on that. I haven't heard that it was bad for breastfeeding kids. Um, it may not have crossed in that way, but that's it. He was very clear that this is just for breastfeeding women. Grun and Tall though, sees this study and they read it as a green light to sell pelidamite to pregnant women. In August of ninety said, now, even though he went out of his way to say, do not fucking giveness the

pregnant women. In August of nineteen fifty eight, they send out extracts of the study which don't include that warning to more than forty German doctors, arguing that this proves the draw drug is quote harmless to mother and baby. So they cut out his warning and just throw in the parts of it that they can say. No, it's it's great for babies that are there, are great for fetuses.

Give it to all the pregnant mothers you possibly can. Now, since many expectant mothers have difficulties sleeping, a lot of doctors started recommending this new pregnancy safe sleep aid to their patients. Tens of thousands of pregnant women and some forty six countries began taking palidomide. Meanwhile, evidence of the

drugs danger continued to mount. In early nineteen fifty nine, a doctor became pregnant and asked another doctor who worked for grun in Tall whether or not philidamite solidomite was safe for her to take. The other doctor answered, of course it is, and in January of nineteen sixty the pregnant doctor gave birth to a child with malformations of the nose, lips, ears, hands, and feet from silent shock quote.

Another doctor's wife had a baby with shortened arms after her husband was told by Grunental that the medication would be perfectly safe if taken during pregnancy. Later, the woman pressed for a divorce, accusing her doctor husband of having been too gullible. In Munich, Mrs H fell pregnant in October nineteen sixty and her husband, a general physician, asked a Grunental sales rep if he could safely give his

wife Counterorgan. Their response was boiler prate. Boiler Prate contergan is totally non dangerous and frequently prescribed, especially during pregnancies. In July nineteen sixty one, Mrs H gave birth to a severely malformed baby. Her general practitioner husband believed Counterorgan

was to blame. When he spoke with a prosecutor in nineteen sixty three, he said he had thought he made his suspicions clear to a Grunentall sales rep after the July nineteen sixty one birth, but could not recall the reps name. So they're getting reports about this and they're not doing anything about it. Don't take Nazi meds. Yeah,

I mean it is hard not to Germany in this period. Yeah, no exactly, but yeah, I mean it's it's interesting because it is all just like oh, many pharmaceutical companies are like operate in a very like um, yeah, we're just gonna push the hell out of this and you know, a few male formations, a few babies without ears, and we're gonna sweep down under the rug and keep on rolling. Some babies aren't going to come out right, that's just the way it goes. But you're gonna sleep like a

malformed baby. I'm so sorry. Um you also, can we just say this is really resuscitating ambient in my mind? Ye? Like, so on you go on a rant about you know, I don't know, without lungs, you know, like, yeah, this makes ambient just just come out swinging. Yeah, ambience sounds a lot better than philetamide, doesn't it. You know what is also better than phillidamite? God, the products and services that support this podcast better than philetamide, all of them.

You know, it'll put you to sleep like a baby, these products and services, as opposed to having you be born without lungs like a paltamite baby, which is not as as desirable generally you want kids to have lungs. I'm not an expert. Ah, we're back and we're talking about so how many years are we talking about here that it's been on the market. It comes on the

market in fifty seven. In nineteen sixty one, Grunental receives and they have started receiving information about about birthday formations and they're also the separate issue is nerve damage. So babies, you know, are being affected by this because they pregnant moms are taking it, but also people taking it adults are are are suffering serious nerve damage. One palidomide victim, it was reported in nineteen sixty one, had to be sent to a psychiatric hospital because they were just like

driven out of their mind by severe nerve damage. Grunentental began to suspect that rival drug companies were collecting case studies of philidamide problems in order to damage sales. They hired a private detective to investigate, and he began spying on critics of the drug. He began became convinced that Merk was behind the whole thing. That same year, nineteen sixty one Grunittal Scent executives to East Berlin to try

and arrange for palidomide to be sold in communist eats Germany. Thankfully, the East German health authorities had their ship more on the ball than their capitalist cousins. They declared the drug way too dangerous and refused to import it, which is great. So the Communists are like, no, this seems like a really horrible medicine. Um, seems like it's doing a lot of bad ship and we should not. Like we camp some Nazis, but we killed the We also killed more

than you. Also, yeah, yeah, we are we do not once you're not the death pills. Oddly enough, and this is one of the only times in history this will be the case. The United States of America makes the same call as Communist Germany. Um, we don't allow this. There are some philidomite babies in the US. Some of the stuff gets over as like as testing pills basically, but it is never sold widely in the United States. And we owe this to an f DA official named

Francis Kelsey. She was an extremely accomplished doctor who had worked as an editor for the Journal of the American Medical Association before being hired by the f d A. One month after starting the job, a salesman from a company affiliated with Grun and Tall came to her door with marvelous stories of a super safe, absolutely can't kill

you sleep drug called the litamide. Now, at this point in nineteen sixty West Germans were consuming one million doses of philidamide grun and Tal, Yeah, Grunin Tal in the American company they licensed with. We're looking at a fortune in potential profits if they could sell this in the United States, with so much money at stake and such

widespread adoption overseas, u S approval was seen as a formality. Obviously, they're gonna let us sell this over there, And it would have been a formality if not for Francis Kelsey quote from the University of Chicago. Kelsey insisted on hard evidence to back the salesman's claims for the drugs safety and refused to be browbeaten after the initial In the initial application, Kelsey noted the reliance on anecdotal testimony in

place of clinical data. She ran it by her husband, who then worked as a pharmacologist at the National Institutes of Health. One section of the submission he branded an interesting collection of meaningless pseudo scientific jargon, apparently intended to impress chemically unsophisticated readers. Elsewhere, he noted the very unusual claim that the litamide has no lethal dose. No other

substance can make that claim, he wrote. Kelsey's concerns escalated when in February nineteen sixty one she saw a letter from a physician in the British Medical Journal reporting cases of periphery of peripheral neuritis nerve damage in the hands and feet among patients he treated with the litamide. She insisted that the burden of proof was on Grunental to show their drug was safe, and refused to approve the

drug unless they could do that. The sales rep, enraged, called Kelsey's boss, Ralph Smith, and said that he that he considered the denial letter she'd sent him libellus like this is liabel for her to say that the litamite isn't safe. Haven't you seen her? Did you see the child? That kid got into all kinds of thealidomide And look at the smile, the smile. Look how happy is now? This?

The palidomide rep asks the like asks Dr Kelsey's boss at the f D A, are you really going to back with this, woman says, and not let us sell forward of mind, And to to his credit, her boss

is like, yes, of course I am. She's a very accomplished doctor and she's right though, it's just so scary that, like history and the lives of so many children in the like born in the sixties would have been at risk, had like yeah, some boss been like you know, uh sort of yeah, baited into that, like she's just a chick,

like you're right, man, let's go forward. And I think in the eighties she gets a major national award for saving the country from philadamized like she's she's like, it really did come down to this one woman being like it seems like everything you're saying is a lie and this is extremely dangerous. No, thank you, um. And I don't know as much about the story in East Germany, but clearly there were people like her over there being like, no,

this seems like a horrible thing, but it's interesting. And it's interesting because she's like, Okay, the literature and the things you provided all are really suss and so you have to wonder, like just how like fawning and glorious. They were like, it will make the strong stronger and the weak, well it will kill them. But it's yeah, you know they deserved it anyway, if you can't survive, you know, like like what kind of weird, over zealous

you know, trial language were they using. I mean they're literally saying there's no fatal dose of this stuff, which Dr Kelsey's husband is like, well that's not true of anything. Everything has a fatal dose. Like they're clearly did not you proper research if they're saying ship like that. Um So, the company, the US company that partners with Gruen and Tall in this, keeps trying to get FDA approval for the lidamide, but Dr Kelsey successfully stymies every effort, and

it's a good thing she did. In February of nineteen sixty one, a scientist at a u S firm partnered with Gruen and Tal had the brilliant idea that since the litamide was a sedative, it might stop women from miscarrying their babies. Now, there's a lot of sexinism sexism based into why he thought this. He believed that miscarriages were caused by women quote becoming emotional about their pregnancies

and that quote habitual aborders could benefit from philidomide. So that's an idea of how it would have been sold in the US is like, this will stop you from having spontaneous miscarriages. Take all the philidomide you can. It'll make sure your babies come out good. Knew that, Like you know that. That's sort of like when you immediately said that it started being prescribed to pregnant women who

couldn't who had trouble sleeping. It's like, okay, well, you've got a lot of sexist doctors walking them down that primrose path of like, oh, you're havn't you listen, little lady. You've got a little too many questions about just dating a life inside of you. You're gonna need to go nightnight. Yeah, you're gonna need to Why don't you just sleep through the next couple of months. Here's a drug with no consequences. By late nineteen sixty one, the news had filled with

hundreds of stories of infants born with severe deformations. Some had flippers for hands, others were missing their legs in pelvis entirely. And somebody's like, honestly like the pictures that people freak out over are these kids with like flipper hands. That's the best case because a lot of those kids are able to grow up and live normal lives. Right, they have to do some accommodations. But there's kids born

without legs and pelvis is just no bottom half. There's kids born missing eyes, any born without with major internal malformations that make them that either kill them out right or make it them pot Like the best case scenario is that like, yeah, your hands come out a little bit different, but you're able to exist and like grow and live as a person. A lot of kids are born without again without like organs that they need to survive. Um, tell me that grooming grusinhal started went on in like

marketed prosthetics. Hey we've got ears. No, it's it's thankfully not that story, Um, but it is that sad. So the reports had started to flood in by late nineteen sixty and we know that doctor mucktr personally was aware of at least a hundred and fifty cases by that date. When one British distributor of the drug complained to him, he responded, Hey, chill out, you're making money, like don't worry that some kids are coming out without lungs. Worry

about how much money you're about to make. The first doctor to publicly expose the litamide and get through grinenthal spies and pr flax was an Australian doctor named William McBride. In nineteen sixty one, he published a letter in The Lancet laying out a clear connection between the litamide and birth defects. This led to massive public outcry, which was helped along by the thousands of children with birth effects that started popping up on the front page of newspapers.

Grunenthal withdrew the drug on November nineteen sixty one. We don't know how many babies were born with the linamite damage. Untold numbers. Estimates say fifty thousand of women aborted their fetuses when the news broke, They're just like, well, I've been taking philidamite. I don't wow. We know at least two thousand babies died as and were born and couldn't survive because they didn't have things that people need um as a result of philidamite. At least two thousand and

another ten thousand worldwide were born with birth defects. The real numbers for both maybe much higher. It was sold in some places for years after I got pulled out of others, including like Argentina, kept selling I think it too, like the nineties. There was of course a massive lawsuit nine grew Intal employee, and it's there are some uses for it, like philidamite is prescribed today in very specific cases. It has some medicinal causes, but not like it. It's

not like a sleep age. How did it get Billy Joel here though? Oh there's just a line and one of his songs about children of philidamite. Um, it's a big story. All of these pictures of babies with different you know, very um like like people considered that would be gruesome deformations. These pictures are just on the front page of newspapers for months, like it's a it's a huge This is the stuff that like the National Inquirer just like has on file like that, let's put another deformed.

There's a lot of exploitative aspects to this, but obviously it is a massive story. Um. And there was a major lawsuit. Nine grun in Tall employees were charged with intent to commit bodily harm and voluntary manslaughter. The prosecution gathered huge amounts of data. More than five thousand case histories that took six years to analyze, hundreds of witnesses,

and seventy thousand pages of evidence were gathered. Among other things, the prosecution found a Grunentall doctor who testified that he'd seen mock up packaging for the drug with warning not for pregnant women, labels that executives at the company had mixed so that they could sell more thalami to pregnant women. One of the Grunentall lawyers was a fellow named Dr

Joseph Neuberger. In November of nineteen sixty six, which is a couple of years into the whole trial process, he was made Minister of Justice for the German state where the trial took place. Three days before he took office, he wrote to the prosecutors, I would be personally obliged for a rapid execution, I e. I would appreciate it if you would end the trial before we actually have to go to court over this thing. So they're doing like discovery and whatnot. He doesn't want there to be

a real trial. Quote from The Guardian, the last thing he did In the afternoon of the day he was sworn in, was meet with the prosecution in Aachen again. He asked them to stop action against Worts. He told them he was resigning as a solicitor for Worts unbecoming Minister of Justice. But then he discussed the case again and repeated his claims. His personal interest in defending words

in the company persisted, adds to his company's representation. In the end, prosecutors met with defense lawyers, the grun in Tall corporate board, and no representatives of Philidamide victims. They worked out in agreement whereby the company paid what worked out to a couple of thousand dollars per victim, and all victims agreed never to sue again, and the state agreed that no grun in Tall employees would be charged with anything. Yeah, where was the German rock? And the

judges are angry about this. They write their decision that had this gone all the way through trial, multiple Grunental employees, including Dr Mum, would have been sent to prison. That like they were guilty. This agreement that was made without

the consent of the families is kind of fun. They just need to Yeah, I'm saying like we're you know she We just needed some like you know, like Mauthie Redhead and a boostier to come in and be like your family deserves justice, and people will be like, wow, she's hot and right in any way, Alas that is not what goes down. Instead, they get off pretty much scott free. It is worth noting what an outrageous profit former Nazi Heinrich Muchter made on the litamide between nineteen

fifty two and nineteen sixty one. His salary was only fourteen four hundred marks per year. In nineteen fifty seven, the earth A Litamide went on sale, he received a bonus based on his share of sales of a hundred and sixty thousand arms. In nineteen fifty nine he received a two hundred thousand mark bonus. One his bonus was three hundred and twenty five thousand marks. Green and Tall

is still a very profitable company today. They were eventually shamed into throwing another pittance at the litamide victims and like two thousand that same year. That same year, they made a public a policy to apology to the victims of their drug, and the CEO unveiled a bronze statue of a limbless child in front of the No, it's like the most fucked up part of it, Like, why would you think that would help? We took all those heinous photos and we just enshrined it and go and

it's there forever. There's like flip flipper kid, that's like that is this will make it right. It's like it's so funny. It's like a weird like attempt at becoming woke for a farmer company to like lean into the birth defects that they caused. Like, no, dude, you're not like disability rights motherfucker you did this. You can't just

champion children who don't have ears. Now, it's awesome and it's I need to read you an excerpt from his apology, because it's sure we've heard a lot of bad apologies the last couple of years. This might be the worst. This might be the worst apologies. Apple notes. We asked for forgiveness that for nearly fifty years we didn't find a way of reaching out to you, from human being to human being. We asked that you regard our long silence as a sign of the shock that fate paused

in us. We wish the f Philidam my tragedy had never We didn't get we we denied you money and fought to make it illegal for you to sue us because we were so shocked at how badly we'd fucked you up. That's how it was. We were so scared of what we did to you that we couldn't do

anything right to make it. Traumatized by the trauma. We're victims too, We're victims by how scary you look because of the things we did you Like gross Mason apology, incredible apology took them at least piece of shl pull our jaws off the ground once we saw what you look like, um like sixty years actually, oh my god. Okay, so was there a lot of money are we talking about? The company should be dissolved for the amount. I agree.

I'm a big believer that, Um, when companies do stuff like this and this should be That should have been the case for cigarette companies, you know, when it was found that they've done all the ship. It should be the case for ex On Mobile and Shell and BP. Yeah, I'm on Santa well yeah, and um fucking uh Sackler Perdue Pharmaceuticals. That the actual right punishment indition to charges

against the individuals. You you charge the company. Since corporations are human beings, you charge them with murder and you execute them. Um and and that means you literally dissolve and destroy that. There's one benefit two corporations being human beings that they can be executed. I I think the grun in Taal Corporation should have been dragged out behind a shed and shot with a bolt gun. Um. I have.

It's hard for me to believe that this was the only medicine they marketed under false pretenses that killed people are lead to horrible birth defects. I mean, I think there's other complaints about the company, but yeah, it's hard to be up on the same leftlist. The Litamite, which is considered to be like one of the great up until fucking oxy was like the number one pharmaceutical disaster in in in history. Pretty much. Um, it's good ship.

That's rich anyway, brought to you by Ambient. Look, Ambient, it's not the littamie you you will go on a sleep walking rage about I don't know lizard people, but look, it's not the little mine. It'll be funny for your friends. That's the terrible man so no one saw any more four year sentences. No, no, nobody. Nobody went to prison as a result of this. Dr Muktor retired wealthy, as

are the rest of the Nazis who worked there. The good die young, the old bad guy very very The good die young because they're born without fucking crucial organs as a result of thelidamide poisoning. The full circle on Nazis killing babies is uh, I mean, yeah, it's incredible in this story. You just do um classic Nazis. Well, Francesco, that's going to do it for us here behind the bastards today. Thank you so much, Robert. Now I'm gonna go google these images of children and it's it's not great.

I never, I mean because like a lot to be quite at frank them. I don't know, the birth defects or whatever that that go viral, Like people who don't have philidamite get the stuff like that as well. The thing that's particular, number one that's horrible is that these wouldn't have happened without philidamite, as opposed to just being some quirk of genetics that makes it happen. But the other thing is that like a lot of kids aren't able to live because they're born without things that they

have to live. It's like one thing is like, yeah, your hands are different, we can figure out ways to make that work. Or like you don't have you know, you don't have all of your legs. We can figure out ways for you to live a full life. Um, if you're born without like lungs and shit, Um, it's more difficult. Uh, there's not really like an easy way to deal with that. Like, and that's in addition to the fact that Filiamite there was just a shipload of kids who would not have been born with any sort

of of differences or difficulties if they had. This whole story is very like it is like if you give the mouse a cookie, but it's more like if you hire a Nazi scientists, Yeah, if you hire Nazi scientists, they will do Nazi He's probably going to do Nazi ship and then sort of because they are, it's it's, i mean, look Naxis. Yeah what did you expecting. Yeah,

that's exactly the musical sting for the Letamide. We should I mean it should be like this is definitely the next chapter of like Understanding the Holocaust is also understanding what happens when you hire the people that did the Holocaust to do other things, which is why they all should have been tossed into a mass grave after being shot in the face. Oh you worked for that, You worked with the s S in any capacity. Off you

go at the time to kill you. Unless you're like one of the nine s S guys who were secretly helping concentration campaign mats. There were a few of those dudes. Their stories are important, um, but unless you're one of those, Like again, like nine dudes, off you go put a bullet in your head. Exactly right. It's like, if you're going to be part of a murderous regime, work your way up, bro, because you know, if you're successful enough, again,

you're gonna you're gonna land on your feet. I mean, the lesson here is you want to be mid level when you're when you're part of an organization that commits unprecedented war crimes, you want to be in the middle. You want to be like the Nougat Center in the snickers of crimes against humanity because then you don't know, everyone knows the peanut. Everybody like You're like, you're definitely

gonna gets a peanut. Yeah, yeah, fucking I Comman as a peanut, right the funk Israel went after him like a spent so much money catching Aikman. Nobody's going after Dr mucktur because he's again nicely mid level. That's where you want to be, baby, Yeah, yeah again. Some advice to our listeners who are considering taking part in a genocidal death regime. Stick to the middle, baby, that's the safe place. The squeaky real occasionally gets hung after a

war crimes tribunal. That's that's the lesson here, or occasionally, honestly, not that often. Um, you're probably fine if you're at the top of it either. We do not as a species like punishing war criminals. So that's good. That is good. This has been This has been fascinating. I've learned a lot. I got to sing a children, thank you you did you did so? Yeah, my god, what are you gonna? Plus let's plug the Obituation Room podcast for weekly little rundown of the news with some jokes and I Love

You is less dark than this podcast, low bar. Yeah, that's true of most podcasts. Yeah, I'm such a fan, Robert, And it was so good to be on though. Man, someone's got to thank you for coming on. We have done a lot of horrible crimes against babies episodes recently. Um so so child soldiers arm a baby, y'all? Well, okay, well chill, Look, you have kids, right, they're going to find a way to have like a toy gun kids find a way into yours from real guns and have

them fight your wars. Yeah, make all I'm saying, right, you're leaving money on the table if you're not weaponizing your children. That's all I would say. Right, already has caught onto that, Like I know, I know half of them clinics with bloody fetus signs are actual fetuses themselves. They are babies doing their parents work. Um yes, I'm more mean, like an army of babies to do like retribution on Nazis and Nazi profiteers. If you could train a baby to kill, they could get into like they

could crawl through crawl spaces really easily. They can get into areas full size adults can't. And they're harder to hit if you're shooting back at them. Um, I think there's a lot of untapped potential in in So She's like, yeah,

we should probably probably call it for the week. But um, if you have, if you're a billion are listening to this and you want to invest in my private military contract incorporation that only hires children at the age of nine, hit me up, um at blackwater types, that's what we're calling it. Will little blackwater, little black water water but cute, yeah, little Haliburton. Yeah, why not just little versions of all the little ray theon, Babe, theon. We'll work it out,

We'll work it out, all right. This has been behind the bastards. Thank you, Francesca. Check out the bituation room. Check out my novel at a t r book dot com. It's free. Yeah. My kittens are crying in the background. Yeah, well they're not going to get it, um, because I'm bad and seen