From article

The dark shadow of thalidomide is still with us. The original catastrophe maimed 20,000 babies and killed 80,000: war apart, it remains the greatest manmade global disaster. Now evidence has been uncovered that the pharmaceutical outrage – it is nothing less – was compounded by a judicial scandal that has suppurated all these years.

It is exposed in a large number of documents discovered in the state archives of North Rhine-Westphalia by a researcher for the UK Thalidomide Trust. The papers, which have been examined and authenticated by the international law firm of Ince & Co, speak to political interference that violated the constitutional division of power between the legislative, the executive and the judiciary. And more than half a century since the pill’s threat to an embryo was proven, the company that produced the first disaster has continued to sell the drug in parts of Latin America, on prescription only, where babies continued to be born with malformations similar to the survivors from the 1960s.

The criminal trial of employees of Chemie-Grünenthal, the German company that created and marketed thalidomide, opened in the pretty town of Alsdorf, near Aachen, on 27 May 1968. It promised to be comparable in scale and emotional intensity to Nuremberg. Thousands of deformed babies had died or been allowed to die. Many families with surviving children filed civil suits, but all the victims had to wait years without support because the criminal trial took precedence.

Grünenthal had insisted that it was blameless: the thousands of abnormal births were an act of God. It had the discreet support of the politically well-connected chemical industry, mindful that a conviction would raise insurance premiums. The North Rhine-Westphalia public prosecutors found the company obstructive. They had to seize the most important Grünenthal documents in police raids on its “bunker” and a company lawyer’s house.

It took them six years to examine 5,000 case histories: expectant mothers who had taken thalidomide and given birth to deformed and dead babies, and men and women who had suffered irreversible nerve damage. The bill of indictment they prepared against nine Grünenthal employees ran to 972 pages. In support, they had lined up 351 witnesses, 29 technical experts and 70,000 pages of evidence. There were 400 co-plaintiffs.

Nearly 700 people crowded the biggest space in the region, a “casino” in the premises of a mining company. Every day, the judges – three professional, two lay – lawyers and scientists, press and witnesses, passed by three deformed children nursed by Red Cross sisters while their mothers were inside hoping to learn why they had suffered.

Grünenthal came defiantly to court. Its battery of 40 lawyers, easily outnumbering the prosecution’s, did their best to delay. They several times threatened to walk out. Eighteen of them spent 12 days failing to shake the key testimony of the Hamburg paediatrician Dr Widukind Lenz, who had alerted Grünenthal to the tragedy.

It was reckoned that with court sittings three days a week the trial would take at least three years. It didn’t.

It was shut down on 18 December, 1970. The nine men charged with intent to commit bodily harm and involuntary manslaughter went free. The judges said this was with the explicit approval of the prosecution. They granted Grünenthal immunity from any further criminal proceedings. Silence was imposed on the 2,554 German families who had children with foreshortened limbs or no limbs; many had damaged organs, and some were blind. Their parents then had no alternative but to go along with a miserable compensation scheme contrived by the government and the company. It benefited Grünenthal far more than it did the victims.

What should have happened for justice to prevail was for the government to support the families while the criminal court tracked liability for an enormous crime. That was demanded by the West German Social Democratic party in opposition in 1962, but they forgot about it in government.

Instead, while the witnesses testified and endured cross-examination in noisy, angry scenes in the courthouse, the real action was elsewhere. The large number of private documents newly discovered in German state archives by the researcher for the UK Thalidomide Trust speak to government interference in the judicial proceedings.

On July 21, 1969, the documents show, Grünenthal directors and their lawyers met in secret with the federal health ministry. The principal defendant in the criminal trial had been excused attendance in court for health reasons, but he was there at this and other meetings: Grünenthal’s founder, Hermann Wirtz, a 71-year-old father of five, a member of a devout Catholic family socially prominent as philanthropists in Aachen. No victims or their representatives were present, nor were they advised of the meeting.

A follow-up note to the July meeting records that on 18 September, four federal ministries were involved in discussing an “overall solution”, meaning a high-level political intervention to stop the trial.

The most glaring conflict of interest detailed in the archives is of one Dr Joseph Neuberger (1902-1977). He was a partner in the law firm Neuberger, Pick and Greeven engaged by Chemie-Grünenthal. In November 1966, he personally took over the defence of Wirtz. Three weeks later, on December 1966, he acquired the power to control the prosecution.

How on earth could this happen? There was a political coup that led to an SPD/FDP coalition. Neuberger (SPD) got the job of minister of justice for North Rhine-Westphalia, a post he held from 1966-1972.

Three days before he took office, he wrote to the prosecutors to demand they stop proceedings against his client: “I would be personally obliged for a rapid execution.”

The last thing he did in the afternoon of the day he was sworn in was meet with the prosecution in Aachen. Again, he asked them to stop action against Wirtz. He told them he was resigning as solicitor for Wirtz on becoming minister of justice. But then he discussed the case again and repeated his claims. His personal interest in defending Wirtz and the company persisted, as did his company’s representation.

In February 1970, prosecution officials prepared working papers for and against discontinuing the trial. On 26 January, Grünenthal had offered a glimpse of what it had been brewing in the secret talks. It announced that if the 2,544 families would give up their civil suits for compensation, Grünenthal would contribute 100m Deutsche marks ($27m) to a fund. There was no mention of a deal with the government or ending the trial. The Grünenthal posture was packaged as one of concern for families. The company said it intended to fight the criminal trial and then fight civil actions and appeal. All this would take at least 10 years and meanwhile the children would have no money.

Here, then, was an attempt to lay the ground for closing the criminal trial. The discovered papers suggest the private argument had been going the other way. They include a draft for the prosecution which added up to an argument against closure. The papers are undated but the context suggests February 1970. They considered acquittals were unlikely. Only one argument was advanced in favour of ending the trial. It was that the sooner it was over, the sooner the victims could start civil suits for damages – but that would mean they would receive less compensation than if there had been convictions for negligence.

The papers said discontinuing the trial must meet three conditions. One, discontinuance had to be clearly in the public interest. Two, it had to be shown that the accused had a low degree of personal guilt. The document concluded neither of these two requirements had been met, but even if they had there was an insuperable third: discontinuance could not be considered for any case where “severe bodily harm” was “in the air”. Why then did the prosecutor, reporting to Neuberger, consent to the discontinuance of the criminal trial?

The state prosecutor Josef Havertz said “everything got worse” after Neuberger took over. “I was the only state prosecutor and I was drowning in the files. It wasn’t until the last year I was provided with two young prosecutors as assistants, and they went behind my back and betrayed the victims.”

Thalidomide tablets Thalidomide tablets Photograph: PR The betrayal was twofold. The first betrayal was of values. No civilized society can abandon finding out how thousands of babies died, how thousands were deformed, how thousands of adults were inflicted with irreversible nerve damage.

The second betrayal was that the trial was abandoned in circumstances that undermined the parents’ claims for damage, exactly as the ministry briefing had said would happen with premature closure. So not only did the German government of the day secure the release of Wirtz and his associates, but the German taxpayer, not the company, has ended up paying the lion’s share of compensation.

I only pasted half the article. Sounds like normal KM procedures with Covid 19 💉 too.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/14/-sp-thalidomide-pill-how-evaded-justice