Did my Jewish great-grandfather make chemical weapons for the Nazis? Author Joe Dunthorne on a dark legacy
The novelist was researching his grandmother’s escape from Nazi Germany when he came across a startling confession made by her father at the end of his life...
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.
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