A FORMER Nazi doctor grew rich promoting the drug that caused the world's worst medical disaster, a British thalidomide expert says.

Research by Dr Martin Johnson, chief executive of Britain's Thalidomide Trust, shows Heinrich Muckter was paid huge bonuses before thalidomide was exposed in 1961 as the cause of thousands of deaths and terrible birth defects.

Dr Johnson's information, seen by the Herald Sun and shared by lawyers in several countries, is likely to generate compensation claims by hundreds of surviving victims, many with missing limbs and other catastrophic injuries.

Melbourne lawyer Peter Gordon, his former firm Slater & Gordon, and UK and US lawyers will, in a global class action, ask courts in at least four countries to examine the past of Grunenthal, the company that developed thalidomide in post-war Germany.

Courts will hear that in one year, it paid Muckter 22 times his annual executive salary, after thalidomide was rushed on to the market without proper testing in the 1950s.

Among other Nazis linked with Grunenthal was convicted war criminal Otto Ambros - later retained as an adviser by the British firm that sold the drug here in Australia.

Lawyers for hundreds of alleged victims, never compensated, will lead evidence suggesting Grunenthal wrongly assured distributors, doctors and the public its new sedative, patented in 1954, was safe for pregnant women.

This was despite its chemical similarity to drugs known to harm embryos and the absence of any testing on pregnant mammals. It also ignored the birth - on Christmas Day, 1956, well before thalidomide's official release - of a baby without ears, to the wife of a Grunenthal worker given samples of the drug.

Also, an eminent German scientist refused to test the drug on pregnant women, telling the company it was too dangerous.

The drug was subsequently sold in 46 countries under dozens of brand names, and used in medicines to treat headaches, colds and asthma, as well as morning sickness. The most common brand in Australia and the UK was Distaval, distributed by Distillers, later taken over by Diageo.

Thousands of babies were stillborn, died soon after birth, or suffered deformities - including missing limbs and internal defects that often proved fatal before adulthood. Thousands more survived to endure lives of misery and now face old age without any support.

A dossier of documents collected from Australian and European archives suggests federal and state governments and medical authorities were apathetic if not negligent, and this allowed Grunenthal and its distributors not to be blamed for the tragedy. It shows:

THE Commonwealth failed to recall thalidomide and discouraged the media from warning the public.

SIX months after Dr William McBride revealed, in November 1961, the drug was causing a birth defect epidemic, the Commonwealth health department knew almost nothing about it.

TEN months after Dr McBride warned the world, no Australian state had withdrawn it and the Commonwealth health minister said he would not order them to do so.

A YEAR after Dr McBride's warning, Victoria's health minister said he would not ban it, because the medical profession had urged him "to use my influence to allay this alarm rather than increase it".

In January 1963, MP Jim Cairns and Opposition leader Arthur Caldwell wrote to the Commonwealth health minister to warn that the public had no idea that other drugs also contained thalidomide.

Publicity was so limited the drug was still for sale in Melbourne suburban chemists in mid-1962.

rulea@heraldsun.com.au

Originally published as Nazi link to thalidomide disaster