Speaker 1: To welcome bastards behind people bad about talk Evans Robert host,
Speaker 1: Hello boy, Sophie, I forgot the order of words go
Speaker 1: into and sentences briefly. That was wonderful. Um, I think
Speaker 1: people will get the gist of it. I think all
Speaker 1: you need is to present the proper words and the
Speaker 1: order doesn't really matter. This is like a do it
Speaker 1: yourself podcast. I just I throw the words at you.
Speaker 1: You you line them up right. Why do you think
Speaker 1: Yoda is so popular? That's exactly what I was going for, Sophie.
Speaker 1: Is Yoda? And like Yoda, I also train child soldiers.
Speaker 1: I know, I've met Harrison Well. Their little hands can
Speaker 1: reach into the hard to reach places of a rifle, um,
Speaker 1: which makes it a lot easier for them to do maintenance. Look,
Speaker 1: this isn't a podcast about white child soldiers are such
Speaker 1: a good idea. This is a podcast about the worst
Speaker 1: people in all of history and today. My guess is
Speaker 1: Francesca if yeah right, yeah, Francesca. I was on your show,
Speaker 1: which is which is has both a pod and a
Speaker 1: video component. Yes, and I apologize for that. I I
Speaker 1: like forced you to turn on your camera, but yeah,
Speaker 1: Roberts rushed it. It was It was rough, you know,
Speaker 1: seeing actually seeing your face. I don't people, I don't
Speaker 1: know if people are ready for just how like Disney
Speaker 1: Prince handsome you are, like, uh, that's a very nice
Speaker 1: way to say perpetually hungover. Thank you? Yeah yeah yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: and like you know, in a punk rock like Disney
Speaker 1: Prince but punk rock. Um yeah. That was the Bituation
Speaker 1: Room podcast. Everyone should check that out. And Robert was
Speaker 1: great and it was a great podcast. I had a
Speaker 1: lot of fun on it. Um And today we're gonna
Speaker 1: be bitch you wastioning about well, something else I want
Speaker 1: to keep. I want to actually keep the the exact
Speaker 1: topic of today's podcast a secret and tell the big
Speaker 1: reveal because it's gonna be it's gonna be a good time.
Speaker 1: Um not. How do you feel about babies? I feel
Speaker 1: like I've been asking that a lot. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't like where this is going already. Alright, alright,
Speaker 1: let me ask it easier question. How do you feel
Speaker 1: about Nazis? Oh? Bad, there you go, Nazis are bad. Nazis, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, just cutting edge, maybe a little too much, so, yeah,
Speaker 1: definitely too much cutting. That's fair to say about Nazi doctors. Um,
Speaker 1: this is a fun one because we're talking about Nazi doctors.
Speaker 1: But the most of what we're talking about a curse
Speaker 1: in like the nineteen sixties. So you're gonna have a
Speaker 1: good time with this one. You're gonna have a really
Speaker 1: good time with It's almost like there. They never suffered
Speaker 1: the full consequences of their crimes against humanity, and that
Speaker 1: is able to scatter throughout the world and keep on genociding.
Speaker 1: So that is a big aspect of what we're talking
Speaker 1: about now. I'm going to guess you and most of
Speaker 1: our listeners are broadly familiar with the story of a
Speaker 1: doctor named Joseph Mangola who was one of the worst,
Speaker 1: maybe the worst doctor there's ever been. He was the
Speaker 1: chief physician at Birkenau, which was a subcamp of Auschwitz
Speaker 1: UH and Mangela carried out selections, which meant he was
Speaker 1: part one of his jobs. He was one of a
Speaker 1: number of doctors who would determine who would go on
Speaker 1: to do labor at the camp and who would be
Speaker 1: killed immediately. Um. And he liked doing selections because he
Speaker 1: also got to pick out people who he thought would
Speaker 1: be most useful for the medical experiments that he was
Speaker 1: carrying out, and that mostly meant picking out twins. He
Speaker 1: had a whole thing for twins. It is weird. Um,
Speaker 1: we will talk about Mangela one of these days. It's
Speaker 1: like a grim singled out. Remember that show from the
Speaker 1: Jesus No, He's like you was twins? Um. I mean
Speaker 1: in some instances they did throw twins on there. It
Speaker 1: was more of a dating game, which I know that
Speaker 1: that Auschwitz was not about so alsotionately. If they had
Speaker 1: just sort of recon figured it to be about life
Speaker 1: and love and not you know, death, Um, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe uh, it could have been had something there. I mean.
Speaker 1: The horrible thing is that if you look at pictures
Speaker 1: of Dr Mangola from the Holocaust era, he does not
Speaker 1: look like you would expect. Um. He absolutely does not
Speaker 1: look like you know, some of the Dazzis have that
Speaker 1: have that strong war criminal vibe to them. To Mangola,
Speaker 1: Mingola looks like aggressively normal, to the point where it's
Speaker 1: it's actually deeply unsettling. I do stand up comedy, so
Speaker 1: I'm surrounded by a very very sweet faced boys. You're like, wait,
Speaker 1: you showed your junk to whom? Yeah, exactly Mingola would
Speaker 1: have killed in the l A stand up scenes, by
Speaker 1: which I mean that like swoop back hair situation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't call him as doctor death um, although maybe
Speaker 1: you would because it's always the aggressively normal looking guys.
Speaker 1: So Mangola is particularly famous because the experiments he can
Speaker 1: did on twins were so garishly vile. He would amputate
Speaker 1: like one twins limb, or infect one twin with the
Speaker 1: disease to see if it would transfer to the other
Speaker 1: in some way. At one point he killed fourteen twins
Speaker 1: in a single night by injecting their hearts with chloroform.
Speaker 1: He would also inject die into the eye color of
Speaker 1: one twin to see if it would change the color
Speaker 1: and the other twins eyes, just like Eli Roth style
Speaker 1: batshit nonsense like people talk about like well, you'll hear
Speaker 1: sometimes from people who have not studied the Holocaust enough
Speaker 1: like well, you know it was horrible, but they did
Speaker 1: get some like useful medical data out of it. Was
Speaker 1: like no, it's almost all nonsense, Like it was just
Speaker 1: people doing like like like completely bug fuck pointless shit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's deputizing like a thirteen year old kid with just
Speaker 1: all the hormones, like just like trying to hook up
Speaker 1: a rat to a balloon and seeing how high it goes.
Speaker 1: And then yeah, it was like all the kids who
Speaker 1: someone should have come to them when they were eleven
Speaker 1: years old and like, uh like torturing cats, and instead
Speaker 1: you give them like complete control over the life and
Speaker 1: death of thousands at a work camp. It's it was
Speaker 1: pretty bad, is what I'm saying about the Holocaust. That's awful.
Speaker 1: And and and I know you've had Matt Leeban who
Speaker 1: is my boyfriend, and he is actually a fraternal twin,
Speaker 1: and uh so I wish he was on his talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about this. But um, as he says
Speaker 1: on stage in a joke, you know, he cannot feel
Speaker 1: his twin sisters orgasms. So, uh no, you can't feel
Speaker 1: you might you might get you're sensitive to your twin,
Speaker 1: but you can't feel their pain. Yeah, And you could
Speaker 1: have asked them that as opposed to injecting die into
Speaker 1: their eyes to see if that did something, my God like,
Speaker 1: and there's the baby's a crying. Yeah, that's what babies do.
Speaker 1: Also they're in prison. Yeah, yeah, you've taken them from
Speaker 1: their parents. Mangela. This isn't really useful data. So Mangola
Speaker 1: deserves his infamy. Obviously he's the most famous of the
Speaker 1: Naxi Nazi doctors, but there were actually a shipload of
Speaker 1: doctors necessary to keep the third Reichs machinery of death
Speaker 1: humming along. For one thing, under like the rules the
Speaker 1: Nazis established for the concentration camps, well for the death camps,
Speaker 1: only doctors could actually deploy ziclon B into the gas chambers.
Speaker 1: Every time gas was deployed into a chamber, it was
Speaker 1: done by it by a physician. Um. That was like
Speaker 1: one of the rules that they stuck to very diligently.
Speaker 1: A great number of doctors were also involved in the
Speaker 1: Holocaust through pharmaceutical giant I G. Farbon Um. Who are
Speaker 1: the people who make aspirin they've turned into, I mean,
Speaker 1: one of the things they've turned into now is bear um.
Speaker 1: And one of the doctors who worked at IG Farban
Speaker 1: was a fellow named Otto Ambrose. Now Dr Ambrose had
Speaker 1: risen through the ranks of the company during the early
Speaker 1: Nazi years, and from nineteen forty one he headed up
Speaker 1: their search for a site to put new to put
Speaker 1: in new synthetic rubber and fuel plants. They settled on
Speaker 1: a Polish town named austwit Came, which became the site
Speaker 1: for Auschwitz aswiki and I guess is the the Polish
Speaker 1: version of the name Auschwitz. So IG Farban liked Auschwitz
Speaker 1: as a site because the s S was already building
Speaker 1: a amp there, and the s S agreed to give
Speaker 1: them slave labor to help run their chemical plants. Construction
Speaker 1: started in forty one. Auto Ambrose helped oversee this process
Speaker 1: and managed the factory through the war years. I G.
Speaker 1: Farban would rent Jewish slaves from the s S for
Speaker 1: three marks per day, four marks if the worker was skilled. Uh.
Speaker 1: In nineteen forty one, dr Ambrose wrote to the I. G.
Speaker 1: Farban board, our new friendship with the s S is
Speaker 1: proving very beneficial, so high ranking. So so are they
Speaker 1: are we building chemical plants to eventually do bad things
Speaker 1: to our own people? Like is it? Like a number
Speaker 1: of things. So the plants, specifically that Ambrose is working,
Speaker 1: they're attempting to because obviously Germany not great unnatural resources, right,
Speaker 1: That's why all of German history has been the way
Speaker 1: that it is so by hate, that's the main Yeah,
Speaker 1: and J K. Obviously, Angela, You're fine. So they're trying
Speaker 1: to make uh, synthetic rubber because they need rubber, but
Speaker 1: they don't have access to the actual raw material that
Speaker 1: makes rubber. Most of that comes from Africa in this period.
Speaker 1: And they're also trying to make synthetic gasoline because they
Speaker 1: need to be able to move their vehicles. But Germany
Speaker 1: does not have a lot of like in the territory
Speaker 1: they've conquered, doesn't have a lot of fuel. So that's
Speaker 1: part of what they're doing, trying to keep the war
Speaker 1: machine going. The other thing that the Nazis are trying
Speaker 1: to make at Auschwitz is sarah nerve gas, and dr
Speaker 1: Ambrose is one member of a team of four that
Speaker 1: vince sarah nerve gas, which is one of the deadliest
Speaker 1: nerve gases ever. And that's so they're they're making a
Speaker 1: mix of horrible chemical weapons UH and attempting to make
Speaker 1: different synthetic chemicals to allow the Nazi war machine to continue.
Speaker 1: They're amazing, it's gonna go in some surprising directions though,
Speaker 1: so high ranking I G. Farm employees at Auschwitz, like
Speaker 1: dr Ambrose, were allowed to purchase clothing that had been
Speaker 1: stolen from the people who were gassed, and the reason
Speaker 1: that this was a good deal for them was that
Speaker 1: Jews and other victims of the Holocaust were generally not
Speaker 1: told they were head to do the death camp, and
Speaker 1: they were just told they were being uh, they were migrating,
Speaker 1: they were being forcibly migrated. So they would generally wear
Speaker 1: their finest clothing because obviously you don't know if all
Speaker 1: of your luggage is gonna make it, You're gonna wear
Speaker 1: the best stuff you have so that you at least
Speaker 1: have it when you arrive at your new home. So
Speaker 1: a lot of times they're gassed in the finest clothing
Speaker 1: that they have access to, and then it's taken from
Speaker 1: their bodies and people like Dr Ambrose get to pick
Speaker 1: through it. That is the smallest but cruelest detail and
Speaker 1: the most insignificant part of Holocaust and death camps, but
Speaker 1: also such an annoying fuck you, Like that was my
Speaker 1: mom's necklace, that was my finest, like channel whatever jacket,
Speaker 1: and you're just gonna that's not okay, No, it's all
Speaker 1: I mean, it's the Holocaust. It's all pretty bad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess that's a good point. Yeah, it's a pretty
Speaker 1: good life. Though working at Auschwitz as an ig Farban manager. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: the factory produced basically nothing of value from the Nazi
Speaker 1: war machine. Again, one of the overwhelming themes here is
Speaker 1: that like they were bad at a lot of this stuff.
Speaker 1: Like this is like people over emphasized because the History
Speaker 1: Channel has done a million documentaries and like crazy Nazi
Speaker 1: weapons and Nazi say they fucked up more than they
Speaker 1: got things right, um, which is part of why they
Speaker 1: lost the war. Um. Yeah, that's why I think it's
Speaker 1: so messed up because there is lower Like I think
Speaker 1: anyone who's that into Nazi and and Nazism and the
Speaker 1: Third Reich and is like a little bit a little
Speaker 1: bit of a fanboy or girl, And I always like
Speaker 1: that line is so thin and weird. But like over
Speaker 1: inflating just how like amazing their medical you know, um,
Speaker 1: like innovations were. It's like, no, they were injecting children
Speaker 1: with chlora what at chloro form? Chloroform was one of
Speaker 1: the things they ejected children with, yeah, like and and
Speaker 1: found out nothing. Yeah, they got nothing out of that,
Speaker 1: I mean, and they had like a lot of their
Speaker 1: fucking their super weapons was just like huge wastes of
Speaker 1: resources that would have been better spent towards making I
Speaker 1: don't know, uh, not very sexy, but incredibly effective medium
Speaker 1: tank like the T thirty four that would have allowed
Speaker 1: them to you know, actually have more armor on the
Speaker 1: back like they were. Like, I'm a member of a
Speaker 1: very awkward group of people which are German history, military
Speaker 1: history and nerds who also have to repeat. But I'm
Speaker 1: not like in that way. Um So, in early nineteen
Speaker 1: forty five, the I G. Farban facility ash which was
Speaker 1: abandoned after heavy US bombing. And this is actually where
Speaker 1: Primo Levy, if you know anything about Primo Levy he is.
Speaker 1: He survives Auschwitz because he gets gets a gig working.
Speaker 1: He's a lab technician basically, and he gets a gig
Speaker 1: working in the IG Farban lab. But he's able to
Speaker 1: hide when they when they flee. Dr Ambrose, though, escapes
Speaker 1: the Russian army with the German soldiers who flee Auschwitz.
Speaker 1: Um and these soldiers take as many of their remaining
Speaker 1: prisoners as possible and lead them on a death march
Speaker 1: through the Polish winter just to try to get rid
Speaker 1: of the rest of them. When the war ended and
Speaker 1: the camps were liberated, the role of ig Farban and
Speaker 1: doctors like Ambrose and Mangela became clearer in NIVE. After
Speaker 1: Germany sued for peace, the Allied Command utterly dismantled German
Speaker 1: industry and put what remained under its authority. The stage
Speaker 1: intent was quote to render impossible any future threat to
Speaker 1: Germany's neighbors or to world peace. Um and I guess
Speaker 1: broadly you could say that was done well Germany. Great podcast, sir, Robert,
Speaker 1: I've really enjoyed myself. Of war we did, and all
Speaker 1: the bad people face consequences. Anyhow, what's this podcast again? Yeah? Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: as soon as they figured out dealt with that Nazi
Speaker 1: threat to world peace, a new threat to world peace
Speaker 1: presented itself, which was that the U S and the
Speaker 1: U S s R we're just just just just rubbing
Speaker 1: their dicks in anticipation of getting to kill each other,
Speaker 1: particularly the US. At this point, um and hawks within
Speaker 1: capitalist nations started agitating and preparing for a war against
Speaker 1: communist Russia as soon as the one against Germany ended,
Speaker 1: And it was decided by these guys that fully liquidating
Speaker 1: German industry would be a bad idea since most of
Speaker 1: that industry lay within the zone of Allied control, and
Speaker 1: they might need to use it for the next war.
Speaker 1: This is the same reason why a lot of German
Speaker 1: military leaders don't get punished to the extent that they
Speaker 1: should is there's this understanding like, well, these guys fought
Speaker 1: the Soviets. We're about to fight the Soviets, so who
Speaker 1: cares if they presided over a couple hundred thousand executions
Speaker 1: in Poland or whatever? You know, we need this guy, um,
Speaker 1: I mean, and therein lies the hypocrisy of war. Hey,
Speaker 1: they're good at mass murder. We might need them for
Speaker 1: we might need to murder some people. Yeah, one of
Speaker 1: I think one of the I mean, there's a number,
Speaker 1: and it happens on all sides, not just the United
Speaker 1: Like the United States and Russia both we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about this a bit. Both take a lot of Nazis
Speaker 1: to use. But like France does it, um, Britain does it,
Speaker 1: like fucking Norway does it, Like everybody's It's like the
Speaker 1: beanie babies of Nazis moment, like gotta call it them
Speaker 1: all and like you have like the doctor and then
Speaker 1: you get like the mad scientists at running factories. Yeah exactly.
Speaker 1: It's like a fucking it's like a rummage sale at
Speaker 1: the end of the third Reich, like, who needs an
Speaker 1: expert with questionable morality? Everyone? It turns out that's what
Speaker 1: states do. UM. I think the most offense, one of
Speaker 1: the most probably the most defensive example to me, would
Speaker 1: be Albert Speer, who was like Hitler's Hitler fucking loved
Speaker 1: this dude. By kind of the end of Hitler's life.
Speaker 1: Speer was his favorite Nazi and Albert Speer was an architect,
Speaker 1: which Hitler always wanted to be, and if he had
Speaker 1: probably could have been a decent architect. A lot of
Speaker 1: people say if he'd focused on the instead art school,
Speaker 1: But anyway, Hitler fucking loved architecture, loved Albert Speer. Spear
Speaker 1: would like make all these grand designs for like how
Speaker 1: how the German Reich was going to look after the war.
Speaker 1: Spear was also the head of War Production UM and
Speaker 1: the head, as a result of that, the head of
Speaker 1: the Nazi like slave labor program. He was. He was
Speaker 1: the one organizing where the slaves were going to make
Speaker 1: Nazi war production possible. Committed a lot of crimes against
Speaker 1: humanity that all got whitewashed and covered up because we
Speaker 1: decided we wanted Albert Spear's help planning our industrial economy
Speaker 1: in order to help fight the Soviets really hard. Yeah, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: great guy, Albert Spier. Um, I'm assuming. In nineteen forty seven,
Speaker 1: the Allied governments began a series of war crimes trials
Speaker 1: for twenty four directors and senior employees of IG Farban.
Speaker 1: Dr Ambrose was one of those men. He was sentenced
Speaker 1: to eight years in prison from mass murder and slavery,
Speaker 1: which seems light to me. I don't know, like eight
Speaker 1: years for mass murder and slavery kind of seems like
Speaker 1: maybe not enough, Like like I think I know people
Speaker 1: who got busted with Pott who did more than eight years,
Speaker 1: and I feel like slavery is a worse crime. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I'm back seat Nuremberg in here. Um, you're no,
Speaker 1: you're absolutely that that that's like, you know, we could
Speaker 1: use him in five and get down four. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: he was one of thirteen IG farbanmen who were convicted,
Speaker 1: and by nineteen fifty one he was released from prison
Speaker 1: like four years early. Uh. He was the beneficiary of
Speaker 1: a clemency grant so he could contribute to a build
Speaker 1: up of European industry in order to oppose the USSR,
Speaker 1: and I want to quote from a write up about
Speaker 1: this by the International Oncology Networks magazine, quote there are
Speaker 1: Recruitment of these experts was sanctioned by the US Joint
Speaker 1: Chiefs of Staff, who approved the systematic exploitation of scientific
Speaker 1: and technical knowledge developed in Nazi Germany in a classified
Speaker 1: memorandum titled Exploitation of German Scientists and Science and Technology
Speaker 1: in the United States. They described these men as chosen
Speaker 1: rare minds whose continuing intellectual productivity we which wished to use.
Speaker 1: And while the Soviet Union also worked hard in acquiring
Speaker 1: German expertise with the emerging Cold War, US Joint Chiefs
Speaker 1: of Staff supported every effort designed to guarantee that intellectual
Speaker 1: spoils were not to fall into Soviet hands. Hence, after
Speaker 1: defeating Nazi Germany in nineteen forty five Operation Overcast later
Speaker 1: renamed Operation paper Clip, more than sixteen hundred Nazi Germans
Speaker 1: were secretly recruited to develop armaments at a feverish and
Speaker 1: paranoid pace that came to define the Cold War. In addition,
Speaker 1: America sent hundreds of experts to Germany to guide the
Speaker 1: transfer of scientific and technical knowledge back to the United States.
Speaker 1: And with this transfer of scientific and technical knowledge, a
Speaker 1: large number of chosen Nazi scientists migrated to the United States. Others, however,
Speaker 1: remained in Germany, where they were ultimately recruited by German companies.
Speaker 1: You know, sometimes, um, most of us, when we fail,
Speaker 1: we actually you know, fail uh, and we have to
Speaker 1: suffer the consequences. Others others just fail up. And I
Speaker 1: feel like Nazis man they really knew how to fail up,
Speaker 1: and other people helped them. Yeah. I think the best
Speaker 1: known example of this was vern von Brown, who was
Speaker 1: probably the single man most responsible for the the US
Speaker 1: moon landing. UM. He was the guy who designed our rockets.
Speaker 1: He was the head of like a bunch of ship
Speaker 1: at Nasa UM. He also designed the V two rockets
Speaker 1: that were fired blindly at civilian targets in the uk.
Speaker 1: UM real piece of ship used slave labor to make
Speaker 1: a lot of rockets under the Germans. There is a
Speaker 1: great Verner von Brown's song against him that includes the
Speaker 1: line when the missiles go up, who knows where they
Speaker 1: come down? That's not my department, says Verner von Brown,
Speaker 1: good little song, real piece of shit. So this is
Speaker 1: you know what it reminds me of, Like there's a
Speaker 1: song that you learn in grade school called like dirt
Speaker 1: made my lunch. Dirt made my lunch. Thank you Dirt.
Speaker 1: Thanks a bunch for my salad. I'm a sandwich and
Speaker 1: my milk my lunch. Thank Anyway, the point is I
Speaker 1: feel like it's like Nazis made my launch. Nazis made
Speaker 1: my launch. Thank you Nazis. You're fucking the worst. But
Speaker 1: a bunch of technology. I mean, this is you know what.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry not to make this like super like politicize this,
Speaker 1: but I feel like you kind of see and I'm
Speaker 1: not drawing a one to one here, and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: get a lot of blowback for this, but you can
Speaker 1: edit this out. No, But I feel like when you
Speaker 1: talk about, you know, opposing the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory,
Speaker 1: a lot of people will be like, Israeli's have you know,
Speaker 1: Israeli technology has done a lot and you're like, so,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, Like these things are like
Speaker 1: sort of unrelated um and have cool technology and not
Speaker 1: an ethnic cleansing exactly exactly. Like, presumably those scientists could
Speaker 1: be doing the same work in a state that was not,
Speaker 1: i don't know, allowing armed settlers to gun down unarmed Palestinians.
Speaker 1: It was one example, but there's a lot of examples.
Speaker 1: For example, you could have a guy making sweet ass
Speaker 1: rockets and not using giant slave labor camps in order
Speaker 1: to build them. All of these things are possible. It's
Speaker 1: like the United States could have landed a man on
Speaker 1: the moon without rehabilitating a Nazi war criminal. Um. All
Speaker 1: sorts of things are possible without doing the terrible things
Speaker 1: that come with them. We just choose to do the
Speaker 1: terrible things because it's easier and we're lazy. But also, like,
Speaker 1: what about locking them up If they have like great
Speaker 1: like if they have incredible um skill and and and knowledge,
Speaker 1: you can still lock them up. They can work from prison,
Speaker 1: they can work from there. They'll produce the blueprints, you know,
Speaker 1: but they are under like they are not free. Was
Speaker 1: that never explored? No? No, no, no, no, you want
Speaker 1: them you want to keep them happy. Um, I don't
Speaker 1: know they I think they should have all been shot
Speaker 1: is kind of my attitude. I'm a big cow puittal
Speaker 1: punishment for members of the Third Reich kind of guy
Speaker 1: um So. The most enthusiastic of the of German companies
Speaker 1: when it came to hiring old Nazi war criminals was Grunental. Now,
Speaker 1: when the International Criminal Court went after I. G. Farbanu,
Speaker 1: Grunental was just a baby company. It had been formed
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty six, which technically gave it a clean
Speaker 1: record Visa v. Nazis. Right the war is over, West
Speaker 1: Germany becomes a thing. Grunental is started and it was
Speaker 1: a spin off company from an existing business run by
Speaker 1: the Vertz family for the last hundred or so years.
Speaker 1: The Vertices are your standard German pre war capitalist aristocracy.
Speaker 1: Their ancestor Andreas Verts founded the family firm in the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century. Initially is a soap and perfume business, it
Speaker 1: quickly became prominent, coming to dominate the local economy of Akin,
Speaker 1: a prosperous city in the North Rhine. Though the Wortzes
Speaker 1: were Catholic, they recognized Hitler for what he was, which
Speaker 1: is good for business. The family patriarchs joined the evil blood.
Speaker 1: There's no no that he was going to make him
Speaker 1: a lot of money, and he did yes, So they
Speaker 1: joined the party right away and they benefit right away.
Speaker 1: So it's important to understand the Nazis were just gangsters,
Speaker 1: and they offered bribes to the German capital holding class
Speaker 1: in exchange for their support. A lot of these bribes
Speaker 1: were dispensed via a process called Ariyanization, in which Jewish
Speaker 1: owned businesses were stolen by the government and handed over
Speaker 1: to Nazis. The Vertz family were given to competing perfume companies,
Speaker 1: one of which made the Tobacc perfume range that is
Speaker 1: still sold by the words firm today. So this company
Speaker 1: is given a Stoleish, stolen Jewish perfume business, and in
Speaker 1: two thousand and twenty one that that same family still
Speaker 1: owns that perfume range and profits from it. Um It's
Speaker 1: good ship. When the Nazis broke up by g Farban,
Speaker 1: the Vertices saw opportunity. Since making perfume and making various
Speaker 1: medicines use a lot of the same equipment, spinning off
Speaker 1: into a pharmaceutical company made sense. It also made sense
Speaker 1: to make use of the huge number of recently freed
Speaker 1: are never punished at all Nazis scientists who are now
Speaker 1: out of work in nt I hope this doesn't end
Speaker 1: in some kind of the Sephora line being problematic because
Speaker 1: you know it's on the label, like it's cruelty free.
Speaker 1: When you say that you don't perform any any tests
Speaker 1: on rabbits, I assume you also mean that this did
Speaker 1: not descend from a line of Nazi cosmetologists. I would
Speaker 1: say that cruelty free should should also include was never
Speaker 1: stolen by the Nazis and handed over to someone else. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that does count somewhere on the label. But anyway,
Speaker 1: continue this business was never owned by Nazis, Robert, You
Speaker 1: know what, Yeah, we would know what other businesses are
Speaker 1: not owned by Nazis unless it's a Volkswagen, unless it's
Speaker 1: a Volkswagen AD or like a BMW AD or a
Speaker 1: Mercedes AD or a Bear AD or an AD. For
Speaker 1: most of them, I mean not owned by Nazis but
Speaker 1: directly supporting the Nazis, like the Shell for example. Oh yeah, IBM,
Speaker 1: for sure, for goddamn sure, yes, absolutely, But unless it's
Speaker 1: any of those companies, definitely guaranteed not ever owned by Nazis,
Speaker 1: probably unless it's one like a company that's owned by
Speaker 1: one of those large like investment firms that had a
Speaker 1: lot of investments in Nazi Germany, which is pretty likely. Um,
Speaker 1: but you know, maybe not. Anyway, Ads, we're back. So
Speaker 1: in one Grunental hired Dr Ambrose, our friend who developed
Speaker 1: Sarah nerve gas and helped organize the death factories at Auschwitz.
Speaker 1: Years four years in prison reign, Yeah he did. He
Speaker 1: did his time. You know, that's just a year for
Speaker 1: every other guy he worked on the Sarah nerve gas
Speaker 1: project with. So they didn't mind that he'd worked at Auschwitz,
Speaker 1: and they were very impressed by his other professional credential.
Speaker 1: He quickly became chairman of the company's advisory committee. It's
Speaker 1: a good guy to have advising your company. The dude
Speaker 1: who advised the SS on how to make a death factory.
Speaker 1: Dr Ambrose was quickly joined by a number of other
Speaker 1: old party comrades. And I'm gonna quote from the book
Speaker 1: Silent Shock by Michael magazinek quote. Dr Hinz Baumcotter was
Speaker 1: a notorious s S doctor at the Saxon Housen concentration
Speaker 1: camp outside Berlin. In addition to overseeing executions and selecting
Speaker 1: prisoners for the gas chamber, he conducted experiments with injections, explosives,
Speaker 1: and chemicals. One such experiment saw prisoners strapped down and
Speaker 1: burned with phosphorus so that Baumcotter could test an experimental salve.
Speaker 1: Baumcotter was arrested after the war, charged with murder, and
Speaker 1: tried by the Soviets in Berlin in nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 1: He was convicted after a short trial, not a surprising
Speaker 1: outcome given his appalling record and the efficient Soviet approach
Speaker 1: to war crimes justice. Baumcotter was sentenced to life imprisonment,
Speaker 1: but served only eight years before the Soviets returned him
Speaker 1: to Germany. The exact point at which Grunenthal employed him
Speaker 1: is unclear, but Baumcotter was certainly working as a salesman
Speaker 1: in Grunenthal's Mounster office in nineteen sixty and sixty one.
Speaker 1: By this time he was facing another round of war
Speaker 1: crimes charges in a German court. In nineteen sixty two,
Speaker 1: after a trial in Munster, Balumcotter was convicted of being
Speaker 1: an accessory to murder and of several and of depraved indifference,
Speaker 1: and sentenced once more to eight years jail, the time
Speaker 1: he had already served in the Soviet another eight years.
Speaker 1: That not not really, because the time he already served
Speaker 1: in the USSR was taken into account and so he
Speaker 1: never went to jail again. He got time served for gitticide.
Speaker 1: It's good ship. No. I once thought that American police
Speaker 1: officers got off with murder very easily, and uh, turns
Speaker 1: out Nazi war criminals not nearly as easy as Nazis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's really fun is looking at how many erosts group
Speaker 1: and they were, those are the guys who played skeet
Speaker 1: shooting with literal babies, and how many of them survived
Speaker 1: the war, and how many of the ones that survived
Speaker 1: the war suffered any kind of legal penalties at all.
Speaker 1: As a spoiler, not most of them. Now, by which
Speaker 1: I mean thousands of them lived the rest of their
Speaker 1: lives is free minutes. So this is this is the okay,
Speaker 1: you believe in capital punishment for Nazis, and I'm with you,
Speaker 1: but I feel as though I'm coming off of I
Speaker 1: just watched the Epstein docs on Netflix. Anyway, another another bastard,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, death is way too easy, Like this
Speaker 1: is unfair. Death is unfair if you're that big of
Speaker 1: a piece of ship. There's nothing fair if you're Here's
Speaker 1: why I think just immediate execution. Democracy means some right
Speaker 1: wing ship holes are always going to get elected, and
Speaker 1: they are always going to want to use the Nazis
Speaker 1: rather than punish them, which is you get a lot
Speaker 1: of these guys getting nasty punishments and then get pardoned
Speaker 1: a couple of years later. So I think you just
Speaker 1: shoot them immediately when everybody's piste off. We don't have
Speaker 1: to like, yeah, we don't have to see all their
Speaker 1: paintings George W. Bush and hear his opinions on Afghanistan exactly.
Speaker 1: I mean, I feel the same about George W. Bush.
Speaker 1: But that's the story for another episode that Robert and
Speaker 1: I are on the same page here. Okay, let's keep going.
Speaker 1: Before you know, the cops are at my door. So
Speaker 1: I know you're thinking, wow, to Nazi war criminals, one
Speaker 1: of whom was on war crimes trials while working as
Speaker 1: a salesman for Grunenthal. That's a lot of Nazis at
Speaker 1: the company. But we're just getting started. Martin Staimler was
Speaker 1: another Grunental higher as a prominent pathologist during the Third Reich.
Speaker 1: He wrote articles in published studies proving the racial superior
Speaker 1: superiority of the German race. He was a popular proponent
Speaker 1: of the Nazi racial hygiene program, which ultimately resulted in
Speaker 1: the Holocaust. After Germany invaded Poland, he advised the SS
Speaker 1: on their population policy, which means it was his job
Speaker 1: to decide which chunks of Polish society to exterminate. Grunenthal
Speaker 1: put Martin Staimler in charge of their pathology department from
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty to nineteen seventy four. Grunental also hired Hans
Speaker 1: Burger Prince, who worked with Hitler's personal doctor Carl Brandt.
Speaker 1: Now if you're a Nazi, now where Brandt was the
Speaker 1: Hitler doctor who didn't give him a lot of methamphetamine.
Speaker 1: He wound up as the lead defend for the doctor's
Speaker 1: trial at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, and he was
Speaker 1: executed for his involvement in medical experiments on prisoners and civilians.
Speaker 1: Burger Prinz escaped any punishment for his role in working
Speaker 1: with Dr Brandt, and he went on to defend the
Speaker 1: Grunental company as an expert witness in court. The most
Speaker 1: famous Nazi hire of the Grunenthal Company was Dr Ernst
Speaker 1: Gunter Schenk. You can see him in the movie Downfall.
Speaker 1: Played by Christian Burkele, which means he was in the
Speaker 1: bunker with Hitler at the very end. Shank was the
Speaker 1: only member of Grunental who was a member of the
Speaker 1: s S. Several of them advised the s S. Shank
Speaker 1: was in the s s UH and he was in
Speaker 1: fact the official SS nutritional inspector. During the war, he
Speaker 1: developed an experimental protein sausage that was tested on three
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy concentration camp prisoners, killing dozens of them.
Speaker 1: Because apparently Shank was pretty bad at making sausage. He
Speaker 1: was actually captured by the Soviets and managed to survive
Speaker 1: ten years in their prisons. When he returned to West Germany,
Speaker 1: he was barred from working again as a doctor, but
Speaker 1: Grunental didn't care. They hired him any way. And then
Speaker 1: there's I need, I need, I need to learn more
Speaker 1: about the sausage. Is it like I feel like this
Speaker 1: is some hannibal shit, you know, where it's like actually
Speaker 1: made out of their loved one's brains and they're like
Speaker 1: eat it, you know, and they're like, oh, I think
Speaker 1: it's more bored. They were just trying to like make
Speaker 1: better military rations out of like synthetic ship. I don't
Speaker 1: know as much about the sausage as I should, but
Speaker 1: it was bad sausage, rubber and twin babies. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: get it. We've all been We've all had a bad sausage,
Speaker 1: but this one sounds like it was designed ironically. I've
Speaker 1: never had a bad sausage in Germany. Now other parts
Speaker 1: of the world that's been a different case. So uh.
Speaker 1: And then there's the guy who's going to be the
Speaker 1: main Nazi for our story today. Heinrich Muchter. Here's Newsweek quote.
Speaker 1: During the war, his expertise had been anti typhus work.
Speaker 1: Outbreaks of the disease in the army made finding a
Speaker 1: vaccination a high priority. Because typhus cultures cannot live outside
Speaker 1: a body, it was kept alive by injecting it into prisoners.
Speaker 1: Once injected with the disease, the prisoners could then be
Speaker 1: used to try out the vaccines to see if they worked.
Speaker 1: And Muchter's experiments were purportedly carried out in Auschwitz, buken
Speaker 1: Vald and Grodno, as well as at Krakau. Now Buchenwald
Speaker 1: was the main experimental center from Mukters typhus tests. One
Speaker 1: particular part of the camp. Block forty six was used
Speaker 1: by Nazi scientists to test treatments for not just typhus,
Speaker 1: but yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, and diphtheria. One Nuremberg witness
Speaker 1: recalled dreadful horror at the thought of Block forty six.
Speaker 1: Every person who quote went to Block forty six as
Speaker 1: an experimental person did not only have to expect death
Speaker 1: and under certain circumstances, a very long, drawn out, in
Speaker 1: frightful death, but also torture and the complete removal of
Speaker 1: the last remnants of personal freedom. This is what I'm
Speaker 1: saying about capital punishment for Nazis. It is a little
Speaker 1: bit too easy, but I hear you. We need like
Speaker 1: what would better things to have done to them? But
Speaker 1: I I'm just a fan of getting it done so
Speaker 1: because again, one of the things here, like and people
Speaker 1: who are big fans of the Soviet Union will point
Speaker 1: out rightfully that the Soviet Union killed a lot more
Speaker 1: Nazis who were captured, but most of the ones they
Speaker 1: killed were like normal soldiers who they starved to death. Again,
Speaker 1: you're going to be a piece of ship, be a talented,
Speaker 1: be a prominent piece of ship, because you're so prominent
Speaker 1: that Yeah, you're uncancellable, unkillable, because we have we have
Speaker 1: so far in the story two prisoners who did time
Speaker 1: and Soviet prisons, two doctors and then got out and
Speaker 1: went back to the West and did horrible things. Um,
Speaker 1: which I mean guy is this guy? Yeah? Now, all
Speaker 1: prisoners who were part of Muktar's typhus tests were given
Speaker 1: a particularly virulent strain of the of the disease of typhus.
Speaker 1: Half were injected with an experimental treatment and the other
Speaker 1: half were given no treatment at all. Quote, there were
Speaker 1: cases of raving madness, delirium. People would refuse to eat,
Speaker 1: and a large percentage of them would die. Those who
Speaker 1: experienced the disease in a milder form, perhaps because of theirs,
Speaker 1: because their constitutions were stronger, or because the vaccine was effective,
Speaker 1: were forced continuously to observe the death struggles of others.
Speaker 1: So that's what muktr does. He was part of a
Speaker 1: horrible engine of unfathomable human misery. But a keyword there
Speaker 1: is part. He wasn't a big face like Mingola. He
Speaker 1: wasn't the guy directly killing a bunch of people. He
Speaker 1: was one of a number of doctors organizing this horrific
Speaker 1: set of trials, and as a result, he got off
Speaker 1: nearly scott free. Polish authorities were only able to effectively
Speaker 1: charge him with mistreating prisoners and stealing scientific equivalent, and
Speaker 1: he was able to flee back to Germany across the
Speaker 1: Iron Curtain before he could face any kind of consequence
Speaker 1: for his work, and in nineteen forty six he became
Speaker 1: one of Grunental's first employees. Now, kind of by default,
Speaker 1: a lot of German companies in the postwar era wound
Speaker 1: up hiring former Nazis. It was kind of unavoidable in
Speaker 1: many cases because an awful lot of people joined the party,
Speaker 1: but Grunental was different. On time out, does anyone say
Speaker 1: time out? This is me saying to call him time
Speaker 1: out on Robert Evans, did he discover anything after torturing
Speaker 1: that many people. I don't think they figured out a
Speaker 1: typhus vaccine. Um, there we go. Yeah. I think German
Speaker 1: soldiers were still dyana typhus by the end of the war. Um.
Speaker 1: Now I mean not that it's any constellation. I guess
Speaker 1: if I or any of my relatives were in that
Speaker 1: like were performed on like rabbits in cages and injected
Speaker 1: with all kinds of horrible things. I feel like the
Speaker 1: last thing I would want is for then did go
Speaker 1: on and save German soldiers lives. I'd be like, no, no,
Speaker 1: no, no no, I don't want I don't want this help
Speaker 1: with advancements to come out of this ship at all. Well,
Speaker 1: I I guess the good news is that it did
Speaker 1: not work at all, because the first typhus vaccine was
Speaker 1: developed in the seventies there, so, uh, this did not work,
Speaker 1: but they didn't figure some other ship out We're going
Speaker 1: to talk about in a little bit. By the way,
Speaker 1: block forty six thirty six or forty six block forty
Speaker 1: six is like what every covid anti vaxer thinks that, like, yes,
Speaker 1: the vaccine is doing lenin. Have you sort of muck
Speaker 1: You're like, I think it's very different. It is. It
Speaker 1: is very different, especially since a lot of anyway, we
Speaker 1: don't need to talk about how other fringe sort of
Speaker 1: spiritual beliefs wind up dovetailing in the Nazism today. We
Speaker 1: talked about that a lot anyway, So again, a lot
Speaker 1: of German companies higher former Nazis, and hey, I should
Speaker 1: note if you're a former Nazi in this period. It
Speaker 1: obviously it means you made a horrible moral compromise. It
Speaker 1: doesn't mean you were a part of the of the
Speaker 1: direct part of the engineering of extermination. A lot of
Speaker 1: people just joined it to like get a promotion at
Speaker 1: like whatever bullshit gig they did in like the local government,
Speaker 1: or because they were a teacher or something. Not a
Speaker 1: good thing, but not the same as organizing a series
Speaker 1: of tortures, tortures medical experiments at Auschwitz Um. So obviously
Speaker 1: you were going to have a lot of former Nazis
Speaker 1: being hired in seven because there's millions of them. But
Speaker 1: Grunin Tall was different. Not only did Grunen Tal higher
Speaker 1: way more former Nazis than any other pharmaceutical company, but
Speaker 1: they had a weird tendency to hire former Nazi who
Speaker 1: had been directly involved with forced labor and concentration camps.
Speaker 1: One German historian, looking at a short list of Grunental
Speaker 1: staff in the nineteen sixties, said, it's absolutely astonishing that
Speaker 1: a small company should have such a concentration of convicted
Speaker 1: war criminals on its staff. Unusual even by the standards
Speaker 1: of post war Germany. So what German historian is like
Speaker 1: by the standards of everyone else in Germany, these guys
Speaker 1: hired a lot of fucking war criminals, unprecedented amounts. Grunental
Speaker 1: is like the worst in that in that field. Now,
Speaker 1: with their staff of war criminals in place, Grunental set
Speaker 1: to the important business of making medicine. One of their
Speaker 1: first products was a penicillin derivative, which proved to be
Speaker 1: massively toxic and was quickly pulled. They also marketed in
Speaker 1: tuberculosis here that was completely ineffective. There were some eventual successes,
Speaker 1: and eventually they become get rich off of pain killers.
Speaker 1: But as the nineteen fifties hit, Grunental was still on
Speaker 1: the lookout for a big product hit, something that can
Speaker 1: make a lot of money. On all of these patients
Speaker 1: say keep on dying? What what are we doing wrong?
Speaker 1: Like like is it the staff of love to murder?
Speaker 1: I don't know what kind of accent I'm doing it?
Speaker 1: It started out German. I don't know what it is anymore.
Speaker 1: Say Matt does a better accent. He does, he does
Speaker 1: a very good accent. But like, like you might look
Speaker 1: at your people. You just hired, bro, They who love
Speaker 1: to watch death and create death and you're trying to
Speaker 1: make what medicine, vaccines something that's not right. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's it's. Uh. Yeah. They're not great at the start,
Speaker 1: but they're looking for their big hit, and they decide
Speaker 1: that synthetic drugs are probably the wave of the future.
Speaker 1: Dr Heinrich Muchter put two of his staff doctors on
Speaker 1: the task of developing new synthetic antibiotics. Now, one of
Speaker 1: these guys, Dr Wilhelm Koon's, heated a commercially available chemical
Speaker 1: as part of his experimentation and created a brand new
Speaker 1: substance in fatalital glutamic acid imide. It would soon become
Speaker 1: better known by the name philidamide. You heard a plid mind? No,
Speaker 1: what is that? Oh no, it's much worse than that.
Speaker 1: A number of people will be going ah ship at
Speaker 1: this pointde is very famous. It's in It's in Billy
Speaker 1: Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire, among other things. Real famous.
Speaker 1: Dr start the fire. It started something now. Dr Kun's
Speaker 1: partner is said to have believed the new compound was
Speaker 1: a structural analog or a near copy of the kind
Speaker 1: of barbiturous that were commonly sold as sleeping pills based
Speaker 1: on this logic, the story goes, Grunental decided to carry
Speaker 1: out tests on rats to determine if the litamide might
Speaker 1: be something the company could market as a sleeping aid. Now,
Speaker 1: I say the story goes because this part is heavily debated.
Speaker 1: You may notice that it's kind of weird that doctors
Speaker 1: trying to make a new antibiotic would make a synthetic,
Speaker 1: barbituous analog and then immediately try to test it as
Speaker 1: a sleeping pill. Stuff like this does happen in medical development.
Speaker 1: Viagra started as like a heart medication, but it also
Speaker 1: does stuff that could be useful as a heart medication.
Speaker 1: It's a blood thinner um. But there are doctors who
Speaker 1: will note that it does really seem like phillidamide started
Speaker 1: as a result of antibiotic research, and that that's a
Speaker 1: weird claim to make. There are other suspicious things about
Speaker 1: the drugs origin. That first rat study on palidomide, the
Speaker 1: first study that Grudentald does on palidamide when they find
Speaker 1: it was based around what's called a jiggle cage, which
Speaker 1: is a special cage that tries to measure the amount
Speaker 1: of movement and drugged or undrugged rats to determine whether
Speaker 1: or not a substance sedates them. Basically, you you're giving
Speaker 1: them the drug and then you're shaking a cage and
Speaker 1: like the amount that they get agitated is like okay
Speaker 1: that either this sedative is working and they don't notice
Speaker 1: it or not. Right, jiggle cage sounds like a strip club,
Speaker 1: it does. The jiggle cage is a great strip club name.
Speaker 1: Actually yeah, um, Now, this particular study is very odd.
Speaker 1: One pediatrician who analyzed it, Dr widukind Lynn, described the
Speaker 1: experiment as having so little scientific value that it should
Speaker 1: not have been published. Quote. The author's claimed to have
Speaker 1: shown a sleep inducing effect, though no sleep was observed.
Speaker 1: Other pharmaceutical companies later tried and failed to replicate the
Speaker 1: tomide sedative property on animals, and they failed. Some suspect
Speaker 1: the rats study was fabricated in order to provide clean
Speaker 1: scientific evidence that the li might had promise as a sedative.
Speaker 1: But it is an extremely effective sedative for human beings.
Speaker 1: It just doesn't sedate rats. So why is it a
Speaker 1: big deal that this rat study showed it worked as
Speaker 1: a sedative in rats when it doesn't. If it does
Speaker 1: work as a sedative in human beings, what is the
Speaker 1: issue here, Well, the issue is that a lot of
Speaker 1: people suspect Dr Mukter and Grunental faked the rat study
Speaker 1: data because they already knew before Grudental was founded, that
Speaker 1: the litamide was an effective sedative. They just couldn't say why.
Speaker 1: They knew because the litamide had been initially developed during
Speaker 1: the Nazi era via experiments on concentration camp inmates. So
Speaker 1: they tested it on people, but they couldn't say that,
Speaker 1: so they needed to fabricate an animal study to be like,
Speaker 1: now we should test this on humans. Look, it puts
Speaker 1: rats to sleep. You can't say the cage jiggled a lot.
Speaker 1: The humans, I mean rats were trying to it out,
Speaker 1: I mean having a good sleeping sleep sleeping. Now, this
Speaker 1: is debated still, this is not a guarantee that had
Speaker 1: happened this way. There's a lot of argument as to
Speaker 1: whether or not the litamides started as a Nazi project.
Speaker 1: And before I read what I'm about to read, you
Speaker 1: should know that the jury is still out as to
Speaker 1: the origins of the litamide. That said, I'm now going
Speaker 1: to quote up from quote from a write up in
Speaker 1: by onco Zine, the magazine of the International Oncology Network
Speaker 1: as part of the Physician's Weekly Magazine network. Quote in
Speaker 1: his book Hitler's Laboratories, the Argentinian writer Carlos Dinnapoli states
Speaker 1: that he has discovered documents dated November nineteen forty four
Speaker 1: from I G. Farben which referred to a chemical agent
Speaker 1: with the same chemical formula as the litamide. According to DiNapoli,
Speaker 1: I G. Farban's director, Fritz Fritz Termier, sent a memo
Speaker 1: to Carl Brandt, the s S general who ran Hitler's
Speaker 1: ethan Asia program, explaining that a drug with number four
Speaker 1: five eight nine with the same characteristics as the litamide,
Speaker 1: had been tested and was ready for use. According to
Speaker 1: documents discovered after or World War Two, Mukta and Ambrose,
Speaker 1: working worked under the supervision of Joseph Mangola, referred to
Speaker 1: compound four five eight nine being tested on female prisoners
Speaker 1: in Auschwitz. In these Auschwitz files, researchers discovered correspondence between
Speaker 1: the camp commander and Bear liver clusim part of I G. Farban.
Speaker 1: The correspondence dealt with the sale of one and fifty
Speaker 1: female prisoners for experimental uses with a view to the
Speaker 1: planned experiments of a new sleep inducing drug. We would
Speaker 1: appreciate it if you could place a number of prisoners
Speaker 1: at our disposal. So there's real, real compelling evidence that
Speaker 1: the litamide was first experimented during the war on female
Speaker 1: slaves as a sleeping pill, and that doctor Muktr and
Speaker 1: dr Ambrose were a part of those tests, working under
Speaker 1: Joseph Mangola. Why were they women anything? That's like swomen
Speaker 1: who then go to sleep around men, especially Nazis, do
Speaker 1: don't like any of that. I mean, there was a
Speaker 1: decent amount of rape in these places. I think it
Speaker 1: might also have there's also a fact of like men
Speaker 1: are potentially more dangerous. Uh to keep his prisoners, you
Speaker 1: might want to just kill them in immediately or you're
Speaker 1: you're working them in. It's a labor camp, so you
Speaker 1: have the men doing physical labor, the women. You either
Speaker 1: kill them or you use their bodies for experiments. And
Speaker 1: that was up to dipshit number nine or whatever. Yeah, Mangla,
Speaker 1: I mean all of the Mangola, Ambrose, um uh Muktar
Speaker 1: are probably all taking turns doing this. It's a thing
Speaker 1: doctors do, like, it's doctors making the selections in a
Speaker 1: lot of cases. Again, the complicity of physicians in the
Speaker 1: third Reich is like an actually incredibly important story because
Speaker 1: most of them just like agree to be part of
Speaker 1: the machinery of death. It's a real problem in medical
Speaker 1: ethics now. So there's a lot of reasons to believe. Like, obviously,
Speaker 1: if you're grown and tall, you don't want to say,
Speaker 1: we know this is a great sedative because the doctors
Speaker 1: we hired tested it on enslaved Jewish women and at Auschwitz.
Speaker 1: You don't want to be saying that that's not a
Speaker 1: good not a good advertising campaign. Um, So you want
Speaker 1: to and say, oh, it works on rats, let's test
Speaker 1: it on humans for totally the first time. This is
Speaker 1: the first time it's ever been tried on people. Um Uh.
Speaker 1: Now there's other reasons to doubt Grunenthal's official story about
Speaker 1: the development of the litamide. For one thing, their initial
Speaker 1: patent application in nineteen fifty four mentioned that the drug
Speaker 1: had already been tested on humans before official tests began.
Speaker 1: Historical documents show that the company purchased the trade name
Speaker 1: that the litamide was sold under, Countergan, and presumably the
Speaker 1: drug itself, from Santa Fie, a French pharmaceutical company that
Speaker 1: was controlled by the Nazis during World War Two. Quote
Speaker 1: Grunenthal also claimed to have done multiple independent animal experiments
Speaker 1: showing absolutely no mutagenic effects and no birth abnormalities. However,
Speaker 1: in the late nineteen sixties, Grunenthal's documents regarding the history
Speaker 1: and development of phototamide were subpoenaed for the civil actions
Speaker 1: against the company. It was reported that virtually all documents
Speaker 1: that showed where and when animal research as well as
Speaker 1: clinical studies on humans were conducted, had been lost. So
Speaker 1: a lot of reasons to this fact that this was
Speaker 1: developed in concentration camps uh and then its origin was hidden.
Speaker 1: But that might not be the worst part of the litamide,
Speaker 1: which we're about to get to the worst part of
Speaker 1: the Yeah, anyway, it's not bad enough. I'm just like,
Speaker 1: I'm not triggered. And yet you know, we started off with,
Speaker 1: you know, killing babies, and I was kind of triggered,
Speaker 1: and I designed, don't I feel like you need to
Speaker 1: level up? Yeah, we're we're, we'll, we'll, we'll get the trigger.
Speaker 1: It's important to know, though, that there's a really good
Speaker 1: chance that Dr Mukt, who worked under Joseph Mangela, had
Speaker 1: tested this drug initially in concentration camps, and once he
Speaker 1: got grun in Tal to start testing the drug for
Speaker 1: widespread approval, he also had a vested interest in making
Speaker 1: sure it got approved and sold. Part of Dr Mukt's
Speaker 1: agreement with the company gave him a share in the
Speaker 1: profits of every drug Soul that he helped to develop.
Speaker 1: Whatever the truth of its origin, Grunental decided the litamide
Speaker 1: held a lot of promise as an alternative to barbiturates.
Speaker 1: And barbiturates are your traditional sleeping pills in this era,
Speaker 1: and they're really bad. Um, not that they don't have
Speaker 1: any like they do obviously they have medical uses, but
Speaker 1: they can kill your ass. Like people die from sleeping
Speaker 1: pills all the time, especially in this period. Like we've
Speaker 1: gotten a bit better at it now, but like barbiturates
Speaker 1: number one can be very addictive and again can fucking
Speaker 1: kill you. So and that's starting to be known in
Speaker 1: the fifties and early sixties that like, oh there's some
Speaker 1: real downsides to these sleeping pills. And so if you
Speaker 1: can make a sleeping pill that can't kill people, that's
Speaker 1: you make a funkload of money off that ship. And
Speaker 1: Dr Muktor basically was convinced green and tall, hey we
Speaker 1: can sell sleeping pills that don't have dangerous side effects.
Speaker 1: And to make the which is a big order for
Speaker 1: a Nazi to be like, hey, Nazis to try not
Speaker 1: to kill people. They're like I want to and like no, no,
Speaker 1: just just pull back on that almost kill them, don't
Speaker 1: kill them. Don't worry. He kills a lot more people.
Speaker 1: So to make the case that philidamide was safe, Dr
Speaker 1: Muktor's team fed increasingly absurd amounts of philidamide to a
Speaker 1: variety of animals and an attempt to establish it's l
Speaker 1: D fifty. And the l D fifty is the dose
Speaker 1: at which a drug will kill fifty percent of test animals. Right,
Speaker 1: it's generally just referred to as like, this is the
Speaker 1: potential fatal dose of a drug. Didn't know? That? Very
Speaker 1: cruel to keep you, I mean, you need to know it, right,
Speaker 1: it is. It's a horrible thing. But like you have
Speaker 1: to know what is a lethal dose of a substance
Speaker 1: you're giving people, You know, you do need to have
Speaker 1: an idea, no, of course, but but fifty of them
Speaker 1: or at least or half of at least yeah, because
Speaker 1: obviously everyone like one person can take a dose of
Speaker 1: cyanide that will kill them, and another person, like with
Speaker 1: medical treatment, could survive. There's never with this kind of ship.
Speaker 1: It's like the same thing. Some people get bitten by
Speaker 1: rattlesnakes and recover. Some people die very quickly for a
Speaker 1: variety of reasons. Um. Now, so yeah, Grunenthal testers try
Speaker 1: to find an LD fifty for the litamite and they say,
Speaker 1: we can't find it. It's impossible to kill animals with
Speaker 1: this stuff. There's a lot of debate as to whether
Speaker 1: or not those studies were valid, but that's what they say.
Speaker 1: So we I just we really need humans. I mean
Speaker 1: these rats and rabbits they're great, but you don't be
Speaker 1: really great humans. Well, they're more saying we can't kill
Speaker 1: animals with this, so people can take this and they
Speaker 1: won't o d Yeah. Yeah, there's no way to overdose
Speaker 1: on thalidomide, so we can sell it as like you
Speaker 1: can't die on this stuff, like all these other people
Speaker 1: are dying on barbiturates. So Gruen and tal, when they've
Speaker 1: got this kind of establishment for how they're going to
Speaker 1: market thalidomide, proceeds to what was the second round of
Speaker 1: human trials, probably assuming they've done human trials and concentration
Speaker 1: camp inmates, and this round of human studies was comparatively
Speaker 1: a lot more ethical, but it was still very problematic,
Speaker 1: perhaps due to the fact that Grunental's research division was
Speaker 1: run by Nazis. In Bone, one doctor treated forty children,
Speaker 1: many of whom were brain damaged, with huge doses of
Speaker 1: thalidomide over extended periods of time. Some kids received twenty
Speaker 1: times that recommended dose. None of the children's parents were
Speaker 1: informed of the study. The test showed that the liidamide
Speaker 1: was a very effective sedative, and a by effective, I
Speaker 1: mean it killed two babies. One of the babies had
Speaker 1: a congenital heart defect and one a three month old,
Speaker 1: suffered heart failure. In addition, one other child went to
Speaker 1: rarely blind. The doctor conducting this study decided these side
Speaker 1: effects had nothing to do with the litamide and gave
Speaker 1: an endorsement to Greenenthal. But it was safe. That doesn't
Speaker 1: seem like good science to me, But I'm not a doctor.
Speaker 1: It seems like killing two out of forty children is
Speaker 1: actually a pretty high death rate for a pill. But
Speaker 1: I don't know, is it not. It's not half though
Speaker 1: it is not half so it's safe. I guess it's okay.
Speaker 1: There were, of course, a lot of positive tests of
Speaker 1: the drugs. A number of testers, particularly adults it was
Speaker 1: tested on, did rave about its efficacy as a sleep aid.
Speaker 1: It does. It's an effective like sedative, and the fact
Speaker 1: that it had no hangover or other side effects. Some
Speaker 1: people say this, and a number of doctors back it up,
Speaker 1: and in adults it did seem to be pretty effective.
Speaker 1: But as this segment from the book's Silent Shock makes clear,
Speaker 1: there were problems from the beginning. One doctor reported that
Speaker 1: he had dropped the drug because of absolute intolerability. Among
Speaker 1: the side effects he noted was site slight parashesia or
Speaker 1: tingling or burning sensation, often caused by nerve damage. Responding
Speaker 1: to this report, Green and Tal's Heinrich Muchter conceded in
Speaker 1: a letter on third April nineteen fifty six that the
Speaker 1: litamide seemed a very strong sedative, which, if used in
Speaker 1: high doses over a long period, could cause disturbance in
Speaker 1: the nervous system. Such information was pushed under the rug
Speaker 1: or explained away. Dr Muktar did such a good job
Speaker 1: of manufacturing consent that other doctors in Grunental thought the
Speaker 1: litamide was safe. Some of his own staff members tried it,
Speaker 1: and one gave it to his pregnant wife. The fourth,
Speaker 1: first of what would be tens of thousands of the
Speaker 1: litamide babies, was born on Christmas Day nineteen fifty six
Speaker 1: without ears. In early nineteen fifty seven, the drug went
Speaker 1: on sale across Europe under the name countergan. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: went on sale after babies were born without yours. One
Speaker 1: baby could have been anything. Sometimes babies don't have ears. Look,
Speaker 1: who's to say, Who's to say it's God? Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: God's will or not Nazis will. But you know, either way,
Speaker 1: let's put it on the market. Now you're saying also
Speaker 1: that Moxer is getting us a percentage of everything. He
Speaker 1: gets a cut baby. So the economic incentive totally not
Speaker 1: a problem in the farma industry at all, to rush
Speaker 1: things out the door. No, it was not a problem
Speaker 1: then and it's not a problem now. So that vaccinated
Speaker 1: countergan a k philidamide became a bestseller. It was helped
Speaker 1: along by a recent string of deaths and life faltering
Speaker 1: injuries caused by barbituous sleeping pills. Grun and Tal's marketing
Speaker 1: campaign was based entirely around the fact that palidomide, unlike
Speaker 1: those competing pills, was totally safe. It's soon spread across
Speaker 1: the world. Michael mcgas nick rites it was this emphasis
Speaker 1: on complete and unprecedented safety that allowed philidamide to prosper
Speaker 1: in a crowded marketplace. The full page ads for dist
Speaker 1: of All, which was its name in Australia, placed by Distillers,
Speaker 1: which was the company that sold it there. In the
Speaker 1: Medical Journal of Australia at a time, a key information
Speaker 1: source for doctors, illustrates the marketing line. A small child
Speaker 1: is standing on a stool raiding the family medicine cabinet.
Speaker 1: The child has opened an unidentified bottle and the reader
Speaker 1: correctly surmises that an enormous, potentially fatal overdoses about to occur. Thankfully,
Speaker 1: though the advertisement can offer a happier ending. If the
Speaker 1: unnamed medicine is discival, there will be no tragedy. The
Speaker 1: child's life may depend on the safety of disc deval
Speaker 1: and advertisement shouts. Consider the possible outcome in a case
Speaker 1: such as this had the bottle contained conventional barbiturates. Doctors
Speaker 1: were urged year by year the barbituous claim amounting toll
Speaker 1: of childhood victims. Yet today it is simple to prescribe
Speaker 1: a sedative and hypnotic that is both highly effective and
Speaker 1: outstanding lee safe dis deval. The Littamite has been prescribed
Speaker 1: for over three years in Great Britain, where the accidental
Speaker 1: poisonings rate is notoriously high, but there is no case
Speaker 1: on record in which even the gross overdoses with disc
Speaker 1: devel has had harmful results. Put your mind at rest,
Speaker 1: depend on the safety of disc devel. They're literally advertising
Speaker 1: it by saying like, hey, your kids are gonna get
Speaker 1: into your medicine cabinet. If they eat your barbituous sleeping pills,
Speaker 1: they're gonna die. But they can take as much the
Speaker 1: litamite as they want. Harmless. The litamite to kids like candy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, why don't you put him next to the candy.
Speaker 1: Just put him next to Throw it in the candy bowl.
Speaker 1: It's the namie. It's safe. Look, put it. Stuff it
Speaker 1: in their teddy bears. They'll snuggle with it, numb num
Speaker 1: numb through the night. Put it in their bottle. Don't
Speaker 1: give him breast milk. Give him phillidamide. It's got everything
Speaker 1: a baby needs harmless. The litamide, so Grunental wasted no
Speaker 1: time in reaching out the thousands of doctors around the
Speaker 1: world in the first year or in nineteen fifty eight.
Speaker 1: So it comes, it goes on sale in nineteen nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty eight. They placed fifty ads in medical journals and
Speaker 1: sent out more than two thousand letters to doctors, plus
Speaker 1: fifty thousand mailers to doctors and pharmacists. By early nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty the litamide was the best selling sleeping pill in Germany.
Speaker 1: Mass use led to more problems. Of course, it became
Speaker 1: very clear that the litamide could cause a particularly horrible
Speaker 1: form of neuropathy or nerve pain. There was no treatment
Speaker 1: for it, and the damage could linger for months after
Speaker 1: the last dose of the litamide. Some people never recovered.
Speaker 1: Tens of thousands of Germans alone suffered long term nerve
Speaker 1: damage from litamide. This caused some doctors to suggest that
Speaker 1: the drugs should be pulled from the cell shelves. These
Speaker 1: were serious injuries, and no over the counter sleeping pill,
Speaker 1: which the litamide was, was worth that kind of risk.
Speaker 1: You can just buy this ship ship bro Yeah. In response,
Speaker 1: grin and tal did Nazi ship. They hired private detectives
Speaker 1: to spy on detractors, including doctors who complained about the drug.
Speaker 1: They bribed and threatened lawsuits to suppress bad press, and
Speaker 1: of course they lied like a cheap rug. At no
Speaker 1: point did they consider doing anything but going full speed
Speaker 1: ahead with sales. How many pens did they have to
Speaker 1: buy off these doctors and how many free pens? You know,
Speaker 1: lunches like we I've seen that today, but back then
Speaker 1: they are doing that. They're also there's a lot of
Speaker 1: doctors that get tricked into doing giving them set like
Speaker 1: giving their own families the litamide, and a lot of
Speaker 1: doctors who work at Grunental, a lot of junior researchers
Speaker 1: at Greenental give the litamide to their wives. And there's
Speaker 1: birth defects like it's actually Grunental employees suffer horribly as
Speaker 1: a result of the litamide. In nineteen fifty eight, a
Speaker 1: German doctor published a study on the linamite use among
Speaker 1: breastfeeding women. He concluded that it was safe for them
Speaker 1: to use, although this doctor was very clear that this
Speaker 1: was only for breastfeeding women, not pregnant women. As quote,
Speaker 1: it is my fundamental outlook never to give mothers to
Speaker 1: be sleeping drugs or sedatives. It is an old fact
Speaker 1: of experience in medicine that fundamentally mothers to be are
Speaker 1: not to be given barbituous opiates, sedatives, or hypnotics because
Speaker 1: these substances can't affect fetuses. So this doctor is just
Speaker 1: being like, hey, breastfeeding women sometimes of trouble sleeping. Is
Speaker 1: this safe for breastfeeding women? It is, And then he
Speaker 1: includes a long disclaimer saying not for pregnant women. Don't
Speaker 1: give this to pregnant women. Don't give any of these
Speaker 1: kind of ship to pregnant women. So especially like humans
Speaker 1: at small humans are still just dating. We're just like,
Speaker 1: that's all we're doing for like two years, is still
Speaker 1: just dating. He's I mean, I don't know that his
Speaker 1: research was wrong on that. I haven't heard that it
Speaker 1: was bad for breastfeeding kids. Um, it may not have
Speaker 1: crossed in that way, but that's it. He was very
Speaker 1: clear that this is just for breastfeeding women. Grun and
Speaker 1: Tall though, sees this study and they read it as
Speaker 1: a green light to sell pelidamite to pregnant women. In
Speaker 1: August of ninety said, now, even though he went out
Speaker 1: of his way to say, do not fucking giveness the
Speaker 1: pregnant women. In August of nineteen fifty eight, they send
Speaker 1: out extracts of the study which don't include that warning
Speaker 1: to more than forty German doctors, arguing that this proves
Speaker 1: the draw drug is quote harmless to mother and baby.
Speaker 1: So they cut out his warning and just throw in
Speaker 1: the parts of it that they can say. No, it's
Speaker 1: it's great for babies that are there, are great for fetuses.
Speaker 1: Give it to all the pregnant mothers you possibly can. Now,
Speaker 1: since many expectant mothers have difficulties sleeping, a lot of
Speaker 1: doctors started recommending this new pregnancy safe sleep aid to
Speaker 1: their patients. Tens of thousands of pregnant women and some
Speaker 1: forty six countries began taking palidomide. Meanwhile, evidence of the
Speaker 1: drugs danger continued to mount. In early nineteen fifty nine,
Speaker 1: a doctor became pregnant and asked another doctor who worked
Speaker 1: for grun in Tall whether or not philidamite solidomite was
Speaker 1: safe for her to take. The other doctor answered, of
Speaker 1: course it is, and in January of nineteen sixty the
Speaker 1: pregnant doctor gave birth to a child with malformations of
Speaker 1: the nose, lips, ears, hands, and feet from silent shock quote.
Speaker 1: Another doctor's wife had a baby with shortened arms after
Speaker 1: her husband was told by Grunental that the medication would
Speaker 1: be perfectly safe if taken during pregnancy. Later, the woman
Speaker 1: pressed for a divorce, accusing her doctor husband of having
Speaker 1: been too gullible. In Munich, Mrs H fell pregnant in
Speaker 1: October nineteen sixty and her husband, a general physician, asked
Speaker 1: a Grunental sales rep if he could safely give his
Speaker 1: wife Counterorgan. Their response was boiler prate. Boiler Prate contergan
Speaker 1: is totally non dangerous and frequently prescribed, especially during pregnancies.
Speaker 1: In July nineteen sixty one, Mrs H gave birth to
Speaker 1: a severely malformed baby. Her general practitioner husband believed Counterorgan
Speaker 1: was to blame. When he spoke with a prosecutor in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty three, he said he had thought he made
Speaker 1: his suspicions clear to a Grunentall sales rep after the
Speaker 1: July nineteen sixty one birth, but could not recall the
Speaker 1: reps name. So they're getting reports about this and they're
Speaker 1: not doing anything about it. Don't take Nazi meds. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it is hard not to Germany in this period. Yeah,
Speaker 1: no exactly, but yeah, I mean it's it's interesting because
Speaker 1: it is all just like oh, many pharmaceutical companies are
Speaker 1: like operate in a very like um, yeah, we're just
Speaker 1: gonna push the hell out of this and you know,
Speaker 1: a few male formations, a few babies without ears, and
Speaker 1: we're gonna sweep down under the rug and keep on rolling.
Speaker 1: Some babies aren't going to come out right, that's just
Speaker 1: the way it goes. But you're gonna sleep like a
Speaker 1: malformed baby. I'm so sorry. Um you also, can we
Speaker 1: just say this is really resuscitating ambient in my mind? Ye? Like,
Speaker 1: so on you go on a rant about you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know, without lungs, you know, like, yeah, this
Speaker 1: makes ambient just just come out swinging. Yeah, ambience sounds
Speaker 1: a lot better than philetamide, doesn't it. You know what
Speaker 1: is also better than phillidamite? God, the products and services
Speaker 1: that support this podcast better than philetamide, all of them.
Speaker 1: You know, it'll put you to sleep like a baby,
Speaker 1: these products and services, as opposed to having you be
Speaker 1: born without lungs like a paltamite baby, which is not
Speaker 1: as as desirable generally you want kids to have lungs.
Speaker 1: I'm not an expert. Ah, we're back and we're talking
Speaker 1: about so how many years are we talking about here
Speaker 1: that it's been on the market. It comes on the
Speaker 1: market in fifty seven. In nineteen sixty one, Grunental receives
Speaker 1: and they have started receiving information about about birthday formations
Speaker 1: and they're also the separate issue is nerve damage. So babies,
Speaker 1: you know, are being affected by this because they pregnant
Speaker 1: moms are taking it, but also people taking it adults
Speaker 1: are are are suffering serious nerve damage. One palidomide victim,
Speaker 1: it was reported in nineteen sixty one, had to be
Speaker 1: sent to a psychiatric hospital because they were just like
Speaker 1: driven out of their mind by severe nerve damage. Grunentental
Speaker 1: began to suspect that rival drug companies were collecting case
Speaker 1: studies of philidamide problems in order to damage sales. They
Speaker 1: hired a private detective to investigate, and he began spying
Speaker 1: on critics of the drug. He began became convinced that
Speaker 1: Merk was behind the whole thing. That same year, nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty one Grunittal Scent executives to East Berlin to try
Speaker 1: and arrange for palidomide to be sold in communist eats Germany. Thankfully,
Speaker 1: the East German health authorities had their ship more on
Speaker 1: the ball than their capitalist cousins. They declared the drug
Speaker 1: way too dangerous and refused to import it, which is great.
Speaker 1: So the Communists are like, no, this seems like a
Speaker 1: really horrible medicine. Um, seems like it's doing a lot
Speaker 1: of bad ship and we should not. Like we camp
Speaker 1: some Nazis, but we killed the We also killed more
Speaker 1: than you. Also, yeah, yeah, we are we do not
Speaker 1: once you're not the death pills. Oddly enough, and this
Speaker 1: is one of the only times in history this will
Speaker 1: be the case. The United States of America makes the
Speaker 1: same call as Communist Germany. Um, we don't allow this.
Speaker 1: There are some philidomite babies in the US. Some of
Speaker 1: the stuff gets over as like as testing pills basically,
Speaker 1: but it is never sold widely in the United States.
Speaker 1: And we owe this to an f DA official named
Speaker 1: Francis Kelsey. She was an extremely accomplished doctor who had
Speaker 1: worked as an editor for the Journal of the American
Speaker 1: Medical Association before being hired by the f d A.
Speaker 1: One month after starting the job, a salesman from a
Speaker 1: company affiliated with Grun and Tall came to her door
Speaker 1: with marvelous stories of a super safe, absolutely can't kill
Speaker 1: you sleep drug called the litamide. Now, at this point
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty West Germans were consuming one million doses
Speaker 1: of philidamide grun and Tal, Yeah, Grunin Tal in the
Speaker 1: American company they licensed with. We're looking at a fortune
Speaker 1: in potential profits if they could sell this in the
Speaker 1: United States, with so much money at stake and such
Speaker 1: widespread adoption overseas, u S approval was seen as a formality. Obviously,
Speaker 1: they're gonna let us sell this over there, And it
Speaker 1: would have been a formality if not for Francis Kelsey
Speaker 1: quote from the University of Chicago. Kelsey insisted on hard
Speaker 1: evidence to back the salesman's claims for the drugs safety
Speaker 1: and refused to be browbeaten after the initial In the
Speaker 1: initial application, Kelsey noted the reliance on anecdotal testimony in
Speaker 1: place of clinical data. She ran it by her husband,
Speaker 1: who then worked as a pharmacologist at the National Institutes
Speaker 1: of Health. One section of the submission he branded an
Speaker 1: interesting collection of meaningless pseudo scientific jargon, apparently intended to
Speaker 1: impress chemically unsophisticated readers. Elsewhere, he noted the very unusual
Speaker 1: claim that the litamide has no lethal dose. No other
Speaker 1: substance can make that claim, he wrote. Kelsey's concerns escalated
Speaker 1: when in February nineteen sixty one she saw a letter
Speaker 1: from a physician in the British Medical Journal reporting cases
Speaker 1: of periphery of peripheral neuritis nerve damage in the hands
Speaker 1: and feet among patients he treated with the litamide. She
Speaker 1: insisted that the burden of proof was on Grunental to
Speaker 1: show their drug was safe, and refused to approve the
Speaker 1: drug unless they could do that. The sales rep, enraged,
Speaker 1: called Kelsey's boss, Ralph Smith, and said that he that
Speaker 1: he considered the denial letter she'd sent him libellus like
Speaker 1: this is liabel for her to say that the litamite
Speaker 1: isn't safe. Haven't you seen her? Did you see the child?
Speaker 1: That kid got into all kinds of thealidomide And look
Speaker 1: at the smile, the smile. Look how happy is now? This?
Speaker 1: The palidomide rep asks the like asks Dr Kelsey's boss
Speaker 1: at the f D A, are you really going to
Speaker 1: back with this, woman says, and not let us sell
Speaker 1: forward of mind, And to to his credit, her boss
Speaker 1: is like, yes, of course I am. She's a very
Speaker 1: accomplished doctor and she's right though, it's just so scary that,
Speaker 1: like history and the lives of so many children in
Speaker 1: the like born in the sixties would have been at risk,
Speaker 1: had like yeah, some boss been like you know, uh
Speaker 1: sort of yeah, baited into that, like she's just a chick,
Speaker 1: like you're right, man, let's go forward. And I think
Speaker 1: in the eighties she gets a major national award for
Speaker 1: saving the country from philadamized like she's she's like, it
Speaker 1: really did come down to this one woman being like
Speaker 1: it seems like everything you're saying is a lie and
Speaker 1: this is extremely dangerous. No, thank you, um. And I
Speaker 1: don't know as much about the story in East Germany,
Speaker 1: but clearly there were people like her over there being like, no,
Speaker 1: this seems like a horrible thing, but it's interesting. And
Speaker 1: it's interesting because she's like, Okay, the literature and the
Speaker 1: things you provided all are really suss and so you
Speaker 1: have to wonder, like just how like fawning and glorious.
Speaker 1: They were like, it will make the strong stronger and
Speaker 1: the weak, well it will kill them. But it's yeah,
Speaker 1: you know they deserved it anyway, if you can't survive,
Speaker 1: you know, like like what kind of weird, over zealous
Speaker 1: you know, trial language were they using. I mean they're
Speaker 1: literally saying there's no fatal dose of this stuff, which
Speaker 1: Dr Kelsey's husband is like, well that's not true of anything.
Speaker 1: Everything has a fatal dose. Like they're clearly did not
Speaker 1: you proper research if they're saying ship like that. Um So,
Speaker 1: the company, the US company that partners with Gruen and
Speaker 1: Tall in this, keeps trying to get FDA approval for
Speaker 1: the lidamide, but Dr Kelsey successfully stymies every effort, and
Speaker 1: it's a good thing she did. In February of nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty one, a scientist at a u S firm partnered
Speaker 1: with Gruen and Tal had the brilliant idea that since
Speaker 1: the litamide was a sedative, it might stop women from
Speaker 1: miscarrying their babies. Now, there's a lot of sexinism sexism
Speaker 1: based into why he thought this. He believed that miscarriages
Speaker 1: were caused by women quote becoming emotional about their pregnancies
Speaker 1: and that quote habitual aborders could benefit from philidomide. So
Speaker 1: that's an idea of how it would have been sold
Speaker 1: in the US is like, this will stop you from
Speaker 1: having spontaneous miscarriages. Take all the philidomide you can. It'll
Speaker 1: make sure your babies come out good. Knew that, Like
Speaker 1: you know that. That's sort of like when you immediately
Speaker 1: said that it started being prescribed to pregnant women who
Speaker 1: couldn't who had trouble sleeping. It's like, okay, well, you've
Speaker 1: got a lot of sexist doctors walking them down that
Speaker 1: primrose path of like, oh, you're havn't you listen, little lady.
Speaker 1: You've got a little too many questions about just dating
Speaker 1: a life inside of you. You're gonna need to go nightnight. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're gonna need to Why don't you just sleep through
Speaker 1: the next couple of months. Here's a drug with no consequences.
Speaker 1: By late nineteen sixty one, the news had filled with
Speaker 1: hundreds of stories of infants born with severe deformations. Some
Speaker 1: had flippers for hands, others were missing their legs in
Speaker 1: pelvis entirely. And somebody's like, honestly like the pictures that
Speaker 1: people freak out over are these kids with like flipper hands.
Speaker 1: That's the best case because a lot of those kids
Speaker 1: are able to grow up and live normal lives. Right,
Speaker 1: they have to do some accommodations. But there's kids born
Speaker 1: without legs and pelvis is just no bottom half. There's
Speaker 1: kids born missing eyes, any born without with major internal
Speaker 1: malformations that make them that either kill them out right
Speaker 1: or make it them pot Like the best case scenario
Speaker 1: is that like, yeah, your hands come out a little
Speaker 1: bit different, but you're able to exist and like grow
Speaker 1: and live as a person. A lot of kids are
Speaker 1: born without again without like organs that they need to survive. Um,
Speaker 1: tell me that grooming grusinhal started went on in like
Speaker 1: marketed prosthetics. Hey we've got ears. No, it's it's thankfully
Speaker 1: not that story, Um, but it is that sad. So
Speaker 1: the reports had started to flood in by late nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty and we know that doctor mucktr personally was aware
Speaker 1: of at least a hundred and fifty cases by that date.
Speaker 1: When one British distributor of the drug complained to him,
Speaker 1: he responded, Hey, chill out, you're making money, like don't
Speaker 1: worry that some kids are coming out without lungs. Worry
Speaker 1: about how much money you're about to make. The first
Speaker 1: doctor to publicly expose the litamide and get through grinenthal
Speaker 1: spies and pr flax was an Australian doctor named William McBride.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty one, he published a letter in The
Speaker 1: Lancet laying out a clear connection between the litamide and
Speaker 1: birth defects. This led to massive public outcry, which was
Speaker 1: helped along by the thousands of children with birth effects
Speaker 1: that started popping up on the front page of newspapers.
Speaker 1: Grunenthal withdrew the drug on November nineteen sixty one. We
Speaker 1: don't know how many babies were born with the linamite damage.
Speaker 1: Untold numbers. Estimates say fifty thousand of women aborted their
Speaker 1: fetuses when the news broke, They're just like, well, I've
Speaker 1: been taking philidamite. I don't wow. We know at least
Speaker 1: two thousand babies died as and were born and couldn't
Speaker 1: survive because they didn't have things that people need um
Speaker 1: as a result of philidamite. At least two thousand and
Speaker 1: another ten thousand worldwide were born with birth defects. The
Speaker 1: real numbers for both maybe much higher. It was sold
Speaker 1: in some places for years after I got pulled out
Speaker 1: of others, including like Argentina, kept selling I think it too,
Speaker 1: like the nineties. There was of course a massive lawsuit
Speaker 1: nine grew Intal employee, and it's there are some uses
Speaker 1: for it, like philidamite is prescribed today in very specific cases.
Speaker 1: It has some medicinal causes, but not like it. It's
Speaker 1: not like a sleep age. How did it get Billy
Speaker 1: Joel here though? Oh there's just a line and one
Speaker 1: of his songs about children of philidamite. Um, it's a
Speaker 1: big story. All of these pictures of babies with different
Speaker 1: you know, very um like like people considered that would
Speaker 1: be gruesome deformations. These pictures are just on the front
Speaker 1: page of newspapers for months, like it's a it's a
Speaker 1: huge This is the stuff that like the National Inquirer
Speaker 1: just like has on file like that, let's put another deformed.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of exploitative aspects to this, but obviously
Speaker 1: it is a massive story. Um. And there was a
Speaker 1: major lawsuit. Nine grun in Tall employees were charged with
Speaker 1: intent to commit bodily harm and voluntary manslaughter. The prosecution
Speaker 1: gathered huge amounts of data. More than five thousand case
Speaker 1: histories that took six years to analyze, hundreds of witnesses,
Speaker 1: and seventy thousand pages of evidence were gathered. Among other things,
Speaker 1: the prosecution found a Grunentall doctor who testified that he'd
Speaker 1: seen mock up packaging for the drug with warning not
Speaker 1: for pregnant women, labels that executives at the company had
Speaker 1: mixed so that they could sell more thalami to pregnant women.
Speaker 1: One of the Grunentall lawyers was a fellow named Dr
Speaker 1: Joseph Neuberger. In November of nineteen sixty six, which is
Speaker 1: a couple of years into the whole trial process, he
Speaker 1: was made Minister of Justice for the German state where
Speaker 1: the trial took place. Three days before he took office,
Speaker 1: he wrote to the prosecutors, I would be personally obliged
Speaker 1: for a rapid execution, I e. I would appreciate it
Speaker 1: if you would end the trial before we actually have
Speaker 1: to go to court over this thing. So they're doing
Speaker 1: like discovery and whatnot. He doesn't want there to be
Speaker 1: a real trial. Quote from The Guardian, the last thing
Speaker 1: he did In the afternoon of the day he was
Speaker 1: sworn in, was meet with the prosecution in Aachen again.
Speaker 1: He asked them to stop action against Worts. He told
Speaker 1: them he was resigning as a solicitor for Worts unbecoming
Speaker 1: Minister of Justice. But then he discussed the case again
Speaker 1: and repeated his claims. His personal interest in defending words
Speaker 1: in the company persisted, adds to his company's representation. In
Speaker 1: the end, prosecutors met with defense lawyers, the grun in
Speaker 1: Tall corporate board, and no representatives of Philidamide victims. They
Speaker 1: worked out in agreement whereby the company paid what worked
Speaker 1: out to a couple of thousand dollars per victim, and
Speaker 1: all victims agreed never to sue again, and the state
Speaker 1: agreed that no grun in Tall employees would be charged
Speaker 1: with anything. Yeah, where was the German rock? And the
Speaker 1: judges are angry about this. They write their decision that
Speaker 1: had this gone all the way through trial, multiple Grunental employees,
Speaker 1: including Dr Mum, would have been sent to prison. That
Speaker 1: like they were guilty. This agreement that was made without
Speaker 1: the consent of the families is kind of fun. They
Speaker 1: just need to Yeah, I'm saying like we're you know
Speaker 1: she We just needed some like you know, like Mauthie
Speaker 1: Redhead and a boostier to come in and be like
Speaker 1: your family deserves justice, and people will be like, wow,
Speaker 1: she's hot and right in any way, Alas that is
Speaker 1: not what goes down. Instead, they get off pretty much
Speaker 1: scott free. It is worth noting what an outrageous profit
Speaker 1: former Nazi Heinrich Muchter made on the litamide between nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty two and nineteen sixty one. His salary was only
Speaker 1: fourteen four hundred marks per year. In nineteen fifty seven,
Speaker 1: the earth A Litamide went on sale, he received a
Speaker 1: bonus based on his share of sales of a hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty thousand arms. In nineteen fifty nine he received
Speaker 1: a two hundred thousand mark bonus. One his bonus was
Speaker 1: three hundred and twenty five thousand marks. Green and Tall
Speaker 1: is still a very profitable company today. They were eventually
Speaker 1: shamed into throwing another pittance at the litamide victims and
Speaker 1: like two thousand that same year. That same year, they
Speaker 1: made a public a policy to apology to the victims
Speaker 1: of their drug, and the CEO unveiled a bronze statue
Speaker 1: of a limbless child in front of the No, it's
Speaker 1: like the most fucked up part of it, Like, why
Speaker 1: would you think that would help? We took all those
Speaker 1: heinous photos and we just enshrined it and go and
Speaker 1: it's there forever. There's like flip flipper kid, that's like
Speaker 1: that is this will make it right. It's like it's
Speaker 1: so funny. It's like a weird like attempt at becoming
Speaker 1: woke for a farmer company to like lean into the
Speaker 1: birth defects that they caused. Like, no, dude, you're not
Speaker 1: like disability rights motherfucker you did this. You can't just
Speaker 1: champion children who don't have ears. Now, it's awesome and
Speaker 1: it's I need to read you an excerpt from his apology,
Speaker 1: because it's sure we've heard a lot of bad apologies
Speaker 1: the last couple of years. This might be the worst.
Speaker 1: This might be the worst apologies. Apple notes. We asked
Speaker 1: for forgiveness that for nearly fifty years we didn't find
Speaker 1: a way of reaching out to you, from human being
Speaker 1: to human being. We asked that you regard our long
Speaker 1: silence as a sign of the shock that fate paused
Speaker 1: in us. We wish the f Philidam my tragedy had
Speaker 1: never We didn't get we we denied you money and
Speaker 1: fought to make it illegal for you to sue us
Speaker 1: because we were so shocked at how badly we'd fucked
Speaker 1: you up. That's how it was. We were so scared
Speaker 1: of what we did to you that we couldn't do
Speaker 1: anything right to make it. Traumatized by the trauma. We're
Speaker 1: victims too, We're victims by how scary you look because
Speaker 1: of the things we did you Like gross Mason apology,
Speaker 1: incredible apology took them at least piece of shl pull
Speaker 1: our jaws off the ground once we saw what you
Speaker 1: look like, um like sixty years actually, oh my god. Okay,
Speaker 1: so was there a lot of money are we talking about?
Speaker 1: The company should be dissolved for the amount. I agree.
Speaker 1: I'm a big believer that, Um, when companies do stuff
Speaker 1: like this and this should be That should have been
Speaker 1: the case for cigarette companies, you know, when it was
Speaker 1: found that they've done all the ship. It should be
Speaker 1: the case for ex On Mobile and Shell and BP. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm on Santa well yeah, and um fucking uh Sackler
Speaker 1: Perdue Pharmaceuticals. That the actual right punishment indition to charges
Speaker 1: against the individuals. You you charge the company. Since corporations
Speaker 1: are human beings, you charge them with murder and you
Speaker 1: execute them. Um and and that means you literally dissolve
Speaker 1: and destroy that. There's one benefit two corporations being human
Speaker 1: beings that they can be executed. I I think the
Speaker 1: grun in Taal Corporation should have been dragged out behind
Speaker 1: a shed and shot with a bolt gun. Um. I have.
Speaker 1: It's hard for me to believe that this was the
Speaker 1: only medicine they marketed under false pretenses that killed people
Speaker 1: are lead to horrible birth defects. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: there's other complaints about the company, but yeah, it's hard
Speaker 1: to be up on the same leftlist. The Litamite, which
Speaker 1: is considered to be like one of the great up
Speaker 1: until fucking oxy was like the number one pharmaceutical disaster
Speaker 1: in in in history. Pretty much. Um, it's good ship.
Speaker 1: That's rich anyway, brought to you by Ambient. Look, Ambient,
Speaker 1: it's not the littamie you you will go on a
Speaker 1: sleep walking rage about I don't know lizard people, but look,
Speaker 1: it's not the little mine. It'll be funny for your friends.
Speaker 1: That's the terrible man so no one saw any more
Speaker 1: four year sentences. No, no, nobody. Nobody went to prison
Speaker 1: as a result of this. Dr Muktor retired wealthy, as
Speaker 1: are the rest of the Nazis who worked there. The
Speaker 1: good die young, the old bad guy very very The
Speaker 1: good die young because they're born without fucking crucial organs
Speaker 1: as a result of thelidamide poisoning. The full circle on
Speaker 1: Nazis killing babies is uh, I mean, yeah, it's incredible
Speaker 1: in this story. You just do um classic Nazis. Well, Francesco,
Speaker 1: that's going to do it for us here behind the
Speaker 1: bastards today. Thank you so much, Robert. Now I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go google these images of children and it's it's not great.
Speaker 1: I never, I mean because like a lot to be
Speaker 1: quite at frank them. I don't know, the birth defects
Speaker 1: or whatever that that go viral, Like people who don't
Speaker 1: have philidamite get the stuff like that as well. The
Speaker 1: thing that's particular, number one that's horrible is that these
Speaker 1: wouldn't have happened without philidamite, as opposed to just being
Speaker 1: some quirk of genetics that makes it happen. But the
Speaker 1: other thing is that like a lot of kids aren't
Speaker 1: able to live because they're born without things that they
Speaker 1: have to live. It's like one thing is like, yeah,
Speaker 1: your hands are different, we can figure out ways to
Speaker 1: make that work. Or like you don't have you know,
Speaker 1: you don't have all of your legs. We can figure
Speaker 1: out ways for you to live a full life. Um,
Speaker 1: if you're born without like lungs and shit, Um, it's
Speaker 1: more difficult. Uh, there's not really like an easy way
Speaker 1: to deal with that. Like, and that's in addition to
Speaker 1: the fact that Filiamite there was just a shipload of
Speaker 1: kids who would not have been born with any sort
Speaker 1: of of differences or difficulties if they had. This whole
Speaker 1: story is very like it is like if you give
Speaker 1: the mouse a cookie, but it's more like if you
Speaker 1: hire a Nazi scientists, Yeah, if you hire Nazi scientists,
Speaker 1: they will do Nazi He's probably going to do Nazi
Speaker 1: ship and then sort of because they are, it's it's,
Speaker 1: i mean, look Naxis. Yeah what did you expecting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's exactly the musical sting for the Letamide. We should
Speaker 1: I mean it should be like this is definitely the
Speaker 1: next chapter of like Understanding the Holocaust is also understanding
Speaker 1: what happens when you hire the people that did the
Speaker 1: Holocaust to do other things, which is why they all
Speaker 1: should have been tossed into a mass grave after being
Speaker 1: shot in the face. Oh you worked for that, You
Speaker 1: worked with the s S in any capacity. Off you
Speaker 1: go at the time to kill you. Unless you're like
Speaker 1: one of the nine s S guys who were secretly
Speaker 1: helping concentration campaign mats. There were a few of those dudes.
Speaker 1: Their stories are important, um, but unless you're one of those,
Speaker 1: Like again, like nine dudes, off you go put a
Speaker 1: bullet in your head. Exactly right. It's like, if you're
Speaker 1: going to be part of a murderous regime, work your
Speaker 1: way up, bro, because you know, if you're successful enough, again,
Speaker 1: you're gonna you're gonna land on your feet. I mean,
Speaker 1: the lesson here is you want to be mid level
Speaker 1: when you're when you're part of an organization that commits
Speaker 1: unprecedented war crimes, you want to be in the middle.
Speaker 1: You want to be like the Nougat Center in the
Speaker 1: snickers of crimes against humanity because then you don't know,
Speaker 1: everyone knows the peanut. Everybody like You're like, you're definitely
Speaker 1: gonna gets a peanut. Yeah, yeah, fucking I Comman as
Speaker 1: a peanut, right the funk Israel went after him like
Speaker 1: a spent so much money catching Aikman. Nobody's going after
Speaker 1: Dr mucktur because he's again nicely mid level. That's where
Speaker 1: you want to be, baby, Yeah, yeah again. Some advice
Speaker 1: to our listeners who are considering taking part in a
Speaker 1: genocidal death regime. Stick to the middle, baby, that's the
Speaker 1: safe place. The squeaky real occasionally gets hung after a
Speaker 1: war crimes tribunal. That's that's the lesson here, or occasionally, honestly,
Speaker 1: not that often. Um, you're probably fine if you're at
Speaker 1: the top of it either. We do not as a
Speaker 1: species like punishing war criminals. So that's good. That is good.
Speaker 1: This has been This has been fascinating. I've learned a lot.
Speaker 1: I got to sing a children, thank you you did
Speaker 1: you did so? Yeah, my god, what are you gonna?
Speaker 1: Plus let's plug the Obituation Room podcast for weekly little
Speaker 1: rundown of the news with some jokes and I Love
Speaker 1: You is less dark than this podcast, low bar. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true of most podcasts. Yeah, I'm such a fan, Robert,
Speaker 1: And it was so good to be on though. Man,
Speaker 1: someone's got to thank you for coming on. We have
Speaker 1: done a lot of horrible crimes against babies episodes recently.
Speaker 1: Um so so child soldiers arm a baby, y'all? Well, okay,
Speaker 1: well chill, Look, you have kids, right, they're going to
Speaker 1: find a way to have like a toy gun kids
Speaker 1: find a way into yours from real guns and have
Speaker 1: them fight your wars. Yeah, make all I'm saying, right,
Speaker 1: you're leaving money on the table if you're not weaponizing
Speaker 1: your children. That's all I would say. Right, already has
Speaker 1: caught onto that, Like I know, I know half of
Speaker 1: them clinics with bloody fetus signs are actual fetuses themselves.
Speaker 1: They are babies doing their parents work. Um yes, I'm
Speaker 1: more mean, like an army of babies to do like
Speaker 1: retribution on Nazis and Nazi profiteers. If you could train
Speaker 1: a baby to kill, they could get into like they
Speaker 1: could crawl through crawl spaces really easily. They can get
Speaker 1: into areas full size adults can't. And they're harder to
Speaker 1: hit if you're shooting back at them. Um, I think
Speaker 1: there's a lot of untapped potential in in So She's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we should probably probably call it for the week. But um,
Speaker 1: if you have, if you're a billion are listening to
Speaker 1: this and you want to invest in my private military
Speaker 1: contract incorporation that only hires children at the age of nine,
Speaker 1: hit me up, um at blackwater types, that's what we're
Speaker 1: calling it. Will little blackwater, little black water water but cute, yeah,
Speaker 1: little Haliburton. Yeah, why not just little versions of all
Speaker 1: the little ray theon, Babe, theon. We'll work it out,
Speaker 1: We'll work it out, all right. This has been behind
Speaker 1: the bastards. Thank you, Francesca. Check out the bituation room.
Speaker 1: Check out my novel at a t r book dot com.
Speaker 1: It's free. Yeah. My kittens are crying in the background. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well they're not going to get it, um, because I'm
Speaker 1: bad and seen