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JUNE 2017 | The Surgical Technologist | 263 The Drug Companies of Nazi Germany American pharmaceutical companies were full of German influence during the 1940s. German-born scientists and chemical engineers emigrated to the US after WWI and brought great advancements to the industry. The invention of numerous drugs from aspirin to meperidine (Demerol) can be credited to German intellectual prowess. Sulfanilamide, the first antibiotic used by the US in WWII, was developed in Germany in 1932. The successful mass-production of penicillin in the US is highlighted by the fact that the Germans could not accom- plish this same task. Despite the fact that IG Farben, the German government’s drug manufacturing parent organiza- tion, was at its height of industrial and economic power, it could never mass-produce penicillin for its own troops. The Nazi’s even attempted to steal the original mold from Fleming’s British laboratory. Penicillin remained unattainable for Germany, likely due to the lack of coordination between industries and agencies that the Americans excelled at. The Germans were desperate for penicillin for all the same reasons that the Allies were. Even though IG Farben had amassed immeasurable wealth through its expertise in the mass-production of so many other things such as truck tires (a reason Germany and other nations wanted to occupy the rubber tree-growing islands of the Pacific) and vitamin tablets, peni- cillin frustrated them. Still, IG Farben was a significant source of funding for Hitler’s regime. When Hitler’s concentration camps became a source of human research subjects, IG Farben took part in horrific experiments on prisoners. The companies also pro- duced massive amounts of chemical weapons. When the Allies won the war, IG Farben’s participation in those atrocities would lead to its executives being convicted of war crimes at the Nuremburg Trials of 1947. The task of injecting surgical patients with penicillin fell to nurses and corpsmen (surgical technicians). The histori- cal account of Sgt James K Sunshine, an army corpsman/ surgical technician, at a Normandy field hospital just after D-Day describes the role penicillin played in post-operative infection control. “The Ward Tent: A quiet night. Sixty men fresh out of surgery are sleeping on canvas Army cots. I have drawn ward duty, and dutifully go from cot to cot with a syringe loaded with penicillin, thrusting it quickly into each man’s buttock. It’s a real wakeup call, but most of them are too sick to care.” The creators of penicillin were honored internation- ally with lavish award ceremonies and earning their faces on stamps and coins as well as earning the Nobel Prize. Yet, it was truly a collaborative effort among British and American scientists with the sacrifices of the US civilians on the homefront that lead to one of the greatest victories of WWII. The collective efforts of these two nations not only produced a single drug, but opened a new frontier in the war on infectious disease. As American GIs fought across Europe and the Pacific, a new frontier of research into infec- tion control was opened up by scientists at home. When 1.7 Modern antibiotics are tested using a method similar to Fleming’s discovery. Photo credit: CDC