My grandmother grew up brushing her teeth with radioactive toothpaste. The active ingredient was irradiated calcium carbonate, and her father was the chemist in charge of making it. Even before it was available in shops, he brought tubes home to his family. Under the brand name Doramad, it promised gums “charged with new life energy” and a smile “blindingly white”. Their apartment was so close to the factory that she fell asleep listening to the churning of the autoclave.
When they were forced to leave Germany in 1935, they took tubes of it with them, their suitcases gently emitting alpha particles as they travelled a thousand miles east. During the war, she learned that the toothpaste her Jewish father helped create had become the preferred choice of the German army. A branch factory in occupied Czechoslovakia ensured that the troops pushing eastwards, brutalising and murdering, burning entire villages to the ground, could do so with radiant teeth.
Not that she ever told me this. What I knew about my grandmother’s life had all come secondhand, anecdotes worn smooth with each retelling. When my mother gave me a ring for my wedding, she told me it had “escaped the Nazis” in 1935. I looked at the oval bloodstone, black with flecks of red, picturing their getaway with the unique clarity of someone untroubled by having done any research. It was my uncle who gave me a poster of the smiling, yellow-haired Doramad girl, glowing from the inside. I pinned it above my desk and began to write about my grandmother’s childhood. The project was going well – until an intervention from the person whose actual life it was.
I tried to interview my grandmother at her home in Edinburgh. This was more than a decade ago. Sitting in a low chair, wearing a fuzzy woollen jumper that made her seem out of focus, she let me know that I was not ready. Whatever questions I asked were not the right ones, and I remember her yawns becoming increasingly aggressive until at last she said, “Look, why don’t you just read a book about it?” Some months later, I tried once more, explaining that I had now read a book about it – an award-winning and nuanced cross-generational memoir about a wealthy Jewish family’s persecution and migration from Odesa to Vienna to Paris, a masterpiece of the form and perhaps a template for how to approach her own life story, and which it turned out she had already read and hated. She handed it straight back, saying, “No, it wasn’t like that.” So what was it like? I didn’t dare ask again.
It wasn’t until two years after her death, during a family get-together, that I ventured into her old bedroom. I would like to say I started nosing around in order to feel close to her again, but the truth was probably nearer to the opposite. It was only now she was gone I felt able to ask more questions about her life, safe in the knowledge she would not answer back. I knew that somewhere in her room was a collection of documents known as “the family archive”. I imagined a crumbling bundle of letters hidden beneath a loose floorboard but found a drawer neatly labelled with a luggage tag: family archive.
I laid out all the documents on her bed, feeling her disapproval emanate from the walls. I picked up the heaviest document, “The Memoirs of Siegfried Merzbacher” – her father – which I knew was the foundational text of our family history. In the black-and-white photo on the cover, the chemist behind Doramad toothpaste looked jolly and relaxed, a stack of documents under one arm and luxurious bags under his eyes. My mum and her siblings had only happy memories of their grandpa, who they described as warm, soft, “grandpa-ish” and “totally benign”. I flicked through his unpublished and unpublishable block of A4, renowned among my relatives largely because so few of us had managed to read it. Even my dad, the most studious person I know – a historian of the 17th-century Dutch empire – thought it “a bit of a slog” and admitted that he’d skimmed it. And this was the heavily abridged English translation – 519 pages, single-spaced. No one still living had got through the German original: nearly 2,000 typewritten pages.
I knew my great-grandfather had worked on his memoir for the last decade or so of his life, tapping away while smoking thousands of unfiltered cigarettes. He was still adding footnotes – clarifying details about his scientific work with numerous carcinogens – when he died, surprising no one, of cancer. That was in 1971. Forty years later, his son – while living in a retirement community – spent two years abridging and translating the memoir into English and then died a week after completing it. And so, holding this spiral-bound document in both hands, I knew that it was half a century in the making, an end-of-life project for two generations of my family – and this may explain why I immediately put it down again.
I started instead by working through my grandmother’s many interviews. There were four hours with the Anne Frank Centre, a short BBC documentary about German Jews living in Scotland, footage from a project called Refugee Voices and an unreleased audio recording. She rarely enjoyed being interviewed, but in this last one she sounded especially sour. The interviewer’s questions kept circling two years in particular – and I could guess why: 1935 was when she and her family fled to Turkey, leaving behind most of their belongings, their money tied up in blocked bank accounts; 1936 was when they came back with a plan. Under the cover of the Summer Olympics in Berlin they conducted a heist on their own home.
My grandmother was 12 years old. Bunting lined the streets, each individual cobblestone gleamed and even the city’s construction sites had been beautified, their garlands of oak leaves doused in chemical preservative to keep them looking healthy throughout the Olympic fortnight. Goebbels called it a “festival of joy and peace”. It was reported that mosquitoes had been completely eradicated from the athletes’ village and, instead, the lake was now populated with 200 storks. Berlin was smiling so hard you could hear its teeth squeak.
Her father drove them out to their old apartment in Oranienburg, a small town on the edge of Berlin. He was a 53-year-old chemist who smoked so much that the whole right-hand side of his moustache had turned the colour of rust. My grandmother crawled into the thick air of their attic and passed down photographs, letters, jewellery – including my wedding ring – all of which were quietly carried downstairs, past the eye peering from a crack in the second-floor door, out to the street where the car was waiting. She watched from the back seat as her father steered them south through the centre of Berlin, past gliding yellow trams, sports fans with flags around their shoulders, past the rows of long swastika banners that led towards the stadium – the whole street turned red, like staring down a throat – at the sight of which her father’s driving became suddenly self-conscious, each corner taken with elaborate care, and it was only many hours later that she, her family and an unusually heavy briefcase were waved across the border into Czechoslovakia.
At least that’s how I understood it, having listened to my family’s stories and added a little colour of my own. But now I heard the interviewer pressing my grandmother for details. Did she feel threatened or scared? Did they witness or experience any antisemitism? Could she offer more specifics? She recognised the tone of someone digging for trauma and her voice hardened, but still he persevered. Eventually she did offer more details, but they were not ones I was expecting.
They had, she explained, travelled to and from Germany on the Orient Express – “two days and two nights of eating”. This was the first moment when I sensed my version of events coming under threat from facts. Most of their belongings had already gone with them to Turkey in 1935, she continued, including a Bechstein grand piano, and what they left behind in Berlin was all in storage.
When they returned in the Olympic summer, they stayed for a full five weeks, mostly to spend time with relatives. They had French lessons with a teacher who opened the door each day and said, “Children, would you like a pretzel?” There was no heist on their own home, no getaway car, no race to the border. It wasn’t even clear if they visited their old apartment. It was true about the blocked bank accounts but not much else. Her description mostly resembled a summer holiday. When the interviewer finally said he had no more questions, her chair scraped back and she said, “Oh, thank God.”
What made listening to this even worse was that the interrogator was me. This was the interview from 2012, the one where she told me to read a book about it, which I had taped but had never actually played back – for understandable reasons. The recording began with my grandmother halfway through a sentence while I fumbled with the Dictaphone. “Sorry,” I said, interrupting, “I realised it wasn’t on. Who … who … who killed themselves?” What followed was a masterclass in incompetence, an interview so embarrassing that, even now, I could only listen to it for a few seconds at a time, pausing regularly to do breath work. It was easy to see why I had given up on the idea of writing about her. What was harder to comprehend was how I had managed to forget most of what she had actually told me, and work my way back to the story I preferred to believe in.
It was then I started reading my great-grandfather’s memoir, hoping to replace my comforting fantasy with something meaningful and true. It was slow going and, even after 400 pages, I had only just reached the point at which my grandmother was born. I kept checking the page numbers, trying to work out how Siegfried was going to fit in a full and satisfying account of her childhood, the country’s descent into totalitarianism, raising a Jewish family in the Third Reich, escaping to Turkey, the 1936 Olympics – and the war.
It was only at the very end of the manuscript that I understood why he had been dragging his feet. It turned out that the memoir was, in one sense, an extended confession. Or, more accurately, it was 506 pages of clearing his throat – then 13 pages of saying it. The memoir ended with an admission that he had betrayed his “most sacred principles” and never recovered from the guilt.
IIn July 1926 – after proving his talents with radioactive toothpaste – my great-grandfather had accepted a promotion to the protection department of his company, Auer, producing gas masks. The downside of this promotion was that it brought him in contact with the military. Still, Siegfried told himself that his research would ultimately save lives. Plus the wages were better. He and his wife, Lilli, were well aware that the recent years of hyperinflation had wiped out all their savings. One Christmas, Siegfried’s bonus had been paid in the stable currency of potatoes.
The masks had to meet strict military standards, a fact that Siegfried was reminded of each morning when his two bosses arrived from the head office in Berlin. Professor Quasebart was known among colleagues for his ‘“extraordinarily favourable” relationship with the military. His right-hand man was Dr Hermann Engelhard. In 1928 they introduced Siegfried to their latest project.
Quasebart and Engelhard were building a secret laboratory for the development of new chemical weapons. The project was funded by the military but would be designed and run by Auer. As an expert in defending against poisons, Siegfried had also, inevitably, become an expert in their production – so he was asked to be the laboratory’s director.
Siegfried knew that making chemical weapons was in clear violation of Article 171 of the Treaty of Versailles. According to Siegfried’s memoir, the German military had “no plans whatsoever to produce these substances industrially or keep them in stock” but simply wanted to be well prepared in case they might later decide to. They wanted to be ready – in the event of another war – to manufacture poisons on a massive scale. It was, in his understatement, “a ticklish question” as to whether this already violated the Treaty of Versailles.
His older sister’s husband – a lawyer who he considered “one of the most principled and honest people I have ever known” – said he should accept the directorship because otherwise they would just find a different chemist with fewer scruples. By this rationale, he could even frame his decision as ethical. Siegfried took the job.
He set about ordering equipment for his laboratory, which was built on the banks of the river in Oranienburg. The building was divided into three large rooms. In the back room they made sulphur mustard – mustard gas – a blistering agent which could burn its victims from the inside. The middle room was for diphenyl arsine chloride – AKA Clark I – a vomiting agent. The front room was for diphosgene, a powerful respiratory poison. At the end of each day, he and his colleagues would weigh a sample of diphosgene, inspect it for purity, then pour it into the soft earth by the river – the same water in which Siegfried’s children sometimes swam, albeit upstream. He was confident that the chemical would be quickly neutralised in the river. “It’s possible that the fish felt something,” he wrote, “but I doubt it.”
He often worried about Lilli and the children living so close to the laboratory – and downwind. Siegfried knew too well that accidents could happen, because they were sometimes his fault. Once, while stirring flakes of sodium into an arsenic trichloride solution – trying to make a new vomiting agent – he added too much, too quickly, then heard a hissing noise followed by an explosion. He ran from the room and watched through the glass as the vent sucked out the noxious vapour, releasing it into the air above Oranienburg. Their apartment on Lindenstrasse was a minute’s walk away. At night, where once he lay in bed, eased to sleep by the distant churning of the autoclave, he now stood at his daughter’s bedroom door, listening to her breathe. Siegfried continued working with chemical weapons even after the Nazis came to power in 1933. During that time, one of his bosses, Dr Engelhard, repeatedly reassured him that he would come to like Hitler eventually. He just needed to “know him better”.
I read the final pages of Siegfried’s memoir with a growing sense of alarm. I could not call any of this a family secret since it was right here, on very white paper, with half a dozen bound copies distributed among my relatives. And yet I could not recall a time in which anyone had actually mentioned it. Perhaps I had chosen to forget. This, as I would come to learn, was an inherited talent.
* * *
I managed to convince my wife to join me on what I pitched as a city break with a little light research thrown in. I watched her expression as we took the S-Bahn north, the Berlin skyline slowly giving way to deep forest. As I would learn, there was a reason that Oranienburg had been so popular with military industrialists. It was only half an hour from the city but it felt like another world.
On the day we visited, the southern part of the town was being evacuated because a half-tonne second world war bomb had been found buried in the banks of the Havel; a hundred police officers and firefighters established the perimeter. We walked towards the local archive where we met Christian Becker, a tall and cheerful man who talked about the bomb in the river as we might talk about the weather. We learned that this was the 209th explosive found in this town since German unification in 1990, and experts estimated that as many as 400 more remained beneath the ground.
The archivist talked us through the many reasons that Oranienburg had been a particular target during the war. It was not just Siegfried’s chemical weapons laboratory. Oranienburg was nicknamed “the SS town”. Here they had the headquarters that controlled all the concentration camps in Germany. There was also the gas mask factory in which my great-grandfather worked, as well as a warplane manufacturer, the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and a secret facility producing uranium oxide for the Nazis’ atomic bomb project. This was the quiet town in which Berlin hid its secrets.
When the local people of Oranienburg started to rebuild after the war, they filled the numerous bomb craters with whatever material was readily available, which in this instance was the monazite sand which lay around the grounds of the factory. This was the mineral from which my great-grandfather and his colleagues extracted thorium to use in their radioactive toothpaste. This explained why the foundations of Oranienburg were now both explosive and radioactive. It was not unusual for the bomb disposal team to wear hazmat suits while digging.
Walking back through the quiet streets, we tried not to think about the homes built on radioactive sand or the unexploded bombs beneath our feet. It didn’t help that my wife was pregnant. I thought of my great-grandmother approaching her due date, brushing her teeth with Doramad. Next week we would be going for our “anomaly scan”. We envisaged the doctor asking, “So remind me why you spent a long weekend in Germany’s most radioactive town?”
* * *
It was a strange coincidence that, as I was coming to terms with Siegfried’s career in chemical weapons, my mother was putting together our family’s application to reclaim German nationality as descendants of victims of Nazi persecution. She would send me letters from the office of Heinrich Himmler, documenting the groundless revocation of Siegfried’s citizenship, and I would send her articles about his employers training the SS. She found documentation of the moment when he was given the additional first name Israel – as part of a law to ensure all Jews had Jewish-sounding names and could not hide behind German ones like Siegfried – while I listed which of his colleagues turned up in the Nuremberg trials.
My mum told me that there was nothing ideological about her decision to apply for German citizenship. She said it was mainly just something to keep her busy during retirement. While my father had got big into watercolours, she was seeking formal reconciliation with the country which had tried to systematically eliminate her forebears. This was the moment when we became accidental research partners – albeit pulling in different directions. We were fortunate that my grandmother was no longer alive to see what we were doing. It’s hard to know which she would have disliked more: the idea of us becoming “naturalised” Germans or my plan to go back to Oranienburg with a Geiger counter and a shovel.
This is an edited extract from Children of Radium by Joe Dunthorne, published by Hamish Hamilton on 3 April.
