Penicillin

[MattDay]

In a current film called "The Downfall", a German doctor is shown administering Penicillin. I always understood the Germans did not have Penicillin during WW2. Can anyone clarify this?

[Stevee]

Fleming discovered Penicillin in 1928 and it was being used as an antibiotic by 1940. So it is possible

[Hippy]

It was rather scarce at the time, and in Europe there was a thriving black market in rather suspect substances claiming to be penicillin.

[Octavius]

Here is a very detailed link:

http://www.socgenmicrobiol.org.uk/pubs/micro_today/pdf/080307.pdf

read it at your pleasure!

[Peter Pedant]

I havent read the link yet.

Adam von Trott zu Solz (der daaaah!) gave my late father a copyof the Lancet when Dad was just about to be repatriated at Rouen (but never was) in the early forties which was the original report in the Lancet.

By early 1945, still a POW, a Russian doctor, Chicki-chick (because no-one could proounce his proper name) came around to the Brits and an unfamiliar interpreter reported 'Il veut les champignons'

So it is possible but unlikely.

See The Third Man - for further details of the balck market in this

[Peter Pedant]

[Jan 1945 my father wrote from the point of view of his POW camp which I think at that time was either Eichstatt VIIB  or Nurnberg Langwasser XIII] In the New Year I had my first experience with penicillin. The Germans demanded to be shown the results and I had no hesitation in telling them all I knew as I had seen the first description of it in the Lancet lent to me by their Foreign Office in 1943. All the doctors in the camp were interested and although I only had a little, I let the Russians have so it was mixed by our orderlies and the Russians called for it every day. One day, a strange one appeared and Nick (the Serbian surgeon) laughed and  said�..