Nazi Germany tied to Thalidomide tragedy
Film uncovers creators’ links to Third Reich as drug still marketed to developing world as leprosy treatment
Vancouver documentary director John Zaritsky thought he was done after making two films about Thalidomide, the devastating drug that caused tens of thousands of birth defects before being pulled from the market in the early 1960s.
But he’s back this year with a third film on the subject, the aptly-titled No Limits, which traces the developers of the drug to their origins as war criminals in Nazi Germany and carries the story on to today’s developing world, where thalidomide is still marketed as a treatment for leprosy — and where severely deformed babies are still being born as a consequence.
“It’s an accidental trilogy, I don’t like to repeat myself,” said Zaritsky, who won an Oscar in 1983 for the documentary Just Another Missing Kid.
No Limits gets its world premiere May 7 as part of Vancouver’s DOXA festival.
In 1989 Zaritsky made Broken Promises, which followed Canadian Thalidomide survivors and their fight to get compensation from the federal government for allowing the drug to be used in Canada. The drug was heavily marketed worldwide by German drug firm Grunenthal as a sedative for pregnant women, but a horrible side effect was that babies were frequently born with deformities that included missing or shortened limbs.
Zaritsky revisited the story in 1999’s Extraordinary People. But when a landmark lawsuit on behalf of an Australian Thalidomide survivor uncovered German court documents sealed for 40 years, Zaritsky returned to the story a third time.
“Criminal charges against the pharmaceutical company executives had been dropped, so the evidence that would have been used in the trial was sealed from public view,” Zaritsky said.
The documents revealed that Grunenthal knew months before putting Thalidomide on the market that their drug would produce malformed babies. “They still went ahead and made fortunes off the drug.”
Grunenthal, which still operates today, sent free samples to thousands of German doctors, and licensed the drug to companies around the world, including in Canada.
A little-known sidelight to the Thalidomide story that came to light in No Limits was that Grunenthal researcher Heinrich Mueckter, Thalidomide’s inventor, had been a doctor at the Buchenwald concentration camp, performing experiments on prisoners, and was convicted after the Second World War for his work there. Mueckter became a multimillionaire through Thalidomide sales.
As well, Grunenthal owner Herman Wirtz had been a member of the Nazi Party, and the company’s chairman had overseen construction of Auschwitz.
“He took over two Jewish-owned companies and used slave labour during the war,” the 70-year-old Zaritsky said. “I was a product of the Second World War, so Nazi war criminals creating the biggest drug scandal in history has a huge resonance with me.
“The great historical irony for me was, the very first people Adolf Hitler and the Nazis rounded up weren’t Jews, gays or Gypsies. They were disabled, the handicapped, to purify the race. Then after the war they were creating all these disabled children as a result of their pursuit of profits.”
While the global Thalidomide tragedy appeared to have been resolved when the drug was taken out of circulation in Europe and elsewhere in the early 1960s, Zaritsky details in his documentary how a small U.S. drug company has more recently multiplied its value by marketing the drug in the Third World as a treatment for leprosy, and in North America as a treatment for a rare cancer.
“Some cancer patients are being charged $10,000 a month for a drug that cost pennies in the 1950s,” he said. “It’s a terrible indictment of big pharma, past and present.”