Some thoughts on
Children of radium: A buried inheritance
Joe Dunthorne
Hamish Hamilton 2025
Carl Auer von Welsbach (1858-1929) was an Austrian chemist who discovered several elements and patented a new kind of gas light using a fabric mantle known as the Welsbach mantle (Auerstrumpf in German). The Auergesellschaft (originally called Deutsche Gasglühlicht AG, DGA or, as if to sound out the letters: Degea) was set up in 1892 to market this innovation in Germany. Osram was a later spinout from it.
The mantle in the original Auer gaslight typically contained thorium dioxide, and there are many other aspects of the company history that are a bit radioactive. During the Weimar Republic, it became a leading manufacturer of gas masks, which defined the company's identity to the extent that its in-house magazine was called Die Gasmaske. As research into the effectiveness of gas masks required the handling of all of the dangerous substances that the mask was meant to filter out of the air, the company had a good excuse to handle dangerous gases including those that had been used as chemical weapons in World War I and whose use was banned in Germany under the Versailles Treaty.
Under Nazi rule, the company was “aryanised” and affiliated with Degussa. Together with Goldschmidt AG, it set up a new company called Orgacid at Ammendorf near Halle in 1934, which produced chemical weapons including mustard gas “just in case”. Although Hitler famously rejected the use of chemical weapons at the front, there were some in the military who wanted to have the option if needed. And the research also fed into the mass murder conducted in the gas chambers of the concentration camps.
Meanwhile, at a separate site in Oranienburg, just north of Berlin, the company hoarded uranium for nuclear fission research. We now know that it was insufficient for atomic bombs, but during World War II, its presence earned the town a massive bombardment leaving it one of the most contaminated places to this day. (There's a brand new paper in PNAS Nexus showing the German atomic bomb project couldn't succeed, but I recall others reaching the same conclusion a few years ago when I wrote a feature about nuclear forensics.)
As if to put a bright smile on all these dealings with death, the Auergesellschaft also developed a radioactive toothpaste called Doramad, which was sold from 1940 until the end of the war. The news from Hiroshima and Nagasaki presumably along with the emerging fate of the "radium girls" dying horrific deaths from chronic radiation exposure made it sufficiently clear that this product wasn’t such a bright idea.
The toothpaste is also where Joe Dunthorne starts his exploration into his Jewish-German family’s involvement in this history. He knew that his grandmother grew up brushing her teeth with Doramad, and that her father had been in charge of developing it. Apparently, the family took stacks of the radioactive material with them as they emigrated to Turkey in time to avoid persecution for being Jewish. At the start, the author seems to have expected to find a romantic story of a lucky escape from the Holocaust, maybe like “When Hitler stole Pink Rabbit.” It turned out to be a very different story.
Siegfried Merzbacher (1883 - 1971), the author’s great-grandfather, left a memoir of several thousand pages which nobody had read. Hidden behind endless pages of irrelevant memories and information copied from encyclopaedias, Dunthorne discovered the admission that Merzbacher had taken part in chemical weapons research at Auergesellschaft and was also closely connected to the colleague Karl Quasebart who set up the production facility near Halle.
The presumed escape to Turkey, it turned out, was a relocation paid by Auergesellschaft, which also continued to pay part of his salary while he continued to work on chemical weapons in Ankara, and regularly corresponded with Quasebart. The notorious massacre conducted by Turkish authorities against the Kurdish village of Dersim in 1937-38 may well have been the result of this German-Turkish co-operation on chemical weapons, as the author finds out on visiting the location.
After the beginning of World War II, the contact was lost (Turkey remained neutral for most of the duration) and the Merzbachers were stripped of their German citizenship for being Jewish. Nevertheless, Siegfried Merzbacher helped out his old friend Quasebart after the war by testifying that he had always supported Jewish colleagues. It was just a bit unfortunate that he also helped to develop Zyklon B, the poison gas used in the Holocaust. Quasebart died before his denazification procedure was completed.
Although Siegfried Merzbacher and both his sisters got out of Germany in time, there are also Holocaust impacts on the family which the author reveals in the final part of the book. Siegfried’s sister, Elisabeth Kitzinger, ran a Jewish orphanage in Munich, which was so successful it eventually cared for children of all ages and even young adults, eventually accommodated in its own building with 20 rooms from 1926. After it was closed by Nazi authorities, Elisabeth’s close friends and long-term coworkers Alice Bendix and Hedwig Jacobi were deported with the last 12 children in their care and presumably murdered at Auschwitz.
The author stumbles through this minefield of moral complexity like an inquisitive but endearingly clueless family history researcher depending on luck more than on expertise, accompanied by snarky comments from his mother who, he writes, insisted on remaining anonymous. While the resulting book is a gripping read I feel the material deserves a more academic treatment. At the time of this writing, Siegfried Merzbacher does not even have a Wikipedia entry in German or in English. The genealogy is online, however, and his son, physicist Eugen Merzbacher (1921-2013) is in Wikipedia in nine languages. Heck, even Siegfried's father Eugen Merzbacher, his grandfather Abraham Merzbacher, and his nephew Ernst Kitzinger are in Wikipedia so I'm beginning to find it suspicious that Siegfried isn't.
I am sure Siegfried's life straddling the moral divides of the Holocaust would make a fascinating PhD project for a more expert historian.
PS I'm intrigued to see that a German translation has appeared the same year as the English original:
Kinder des Radiums: Auf den Spuren meiner jüdischen Familie Piper Verlag 2025
My brand new list of book reviews is here.
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