Part I Deadly Side Effects: New Details Emerge in East German Drug Test Scandal

by  Nicola Kuhr t and Peter Wensierski

{Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan}

Huburt Bruchmüller believes he might "be the only survivor" of clinical trials of a medication performed in 1989 in one East German clinic. <https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/bild-899594-494878.html> Huburt Bruchmüller believes he might "be the only survivor" of clinical trials of a medication performed in 1989 in one East German clinic.

Until the fall of the Wall, Western pharmaceutical companies conducted drug trials in East German hospitals. More than 50,000 patients served as subjects, often without their knowledge, and many died. The human experiments haven't been fully investigated to this day despite fresh evidence of wrongdoing."
 

Nicole Preiss was nine when her mother died in 1986. The woman had been stricken by skin cancer, which was deemed benign at first. But there was something, a strange remark, that little Nicole didn't understand. Why on earth, her stone-faced father and grandparents had asked at the time, did the doctors administer "drugs from the Berlin Westapotheke pharmacy " to the woman? And why did her condition worsen considerably after that? Preiss, now 37, is still searching for answers today, still trying to understand what East German doctors did to her mother at a hospital in the city of Erfurt. She suspects the doctors tested a new drug from the West on their patient. "My mother's case was even presented in the lecture hall," says Preiss. But the treatment didn't do her any good. "There are too many secrets associated with her death, at the age of only 30," says her daughter, who is now seeking to finally gain access to the files and find answers to the questions of which drugs, which tests and which pharmaceutical companies played a role in her mother's death.
 

Some 50,000 Participated in Drug Tests

Preiss isn't the only one. Apparently at least 50,000 people in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany, served as test subjects for the Western pharmaceutical industry, often unknowingly. Drug manufacturers, *especially from West Germany, Switzerland and the United States*, engaged GDR hospitals to perform more than 600 clinical drug trials, some with fatal consequences. This emerges from *previously unknown documents*, to which SPIEGEL has gained access, *from the private archives of individual physicians, from the files of the former East German Health Ministry and the Ministry for State Security (Stasi), as well as the country's Institute for Drug Regulatory Affairs*.

The *East German institutions participating in the arrangement included internationally renowned university hospitals, like Charita Hospital in East Berlin, as well as more than 50 hospitals throughout the country, in such cities as Dresden, Erfurt, Halle, Jena and Rostock.

Virtually every major name in the pharmaceutical industry was involved, including Bayer, Schering, Hoechst, Boehringer, Pfizer, Sandoz and Roche. The companies administered everything produced in their research laboratories: chemotherapy drugs, antidepressants and heart medications, as well as other substances fresh from the laboratory, the effects of which were still largely unknown to scientists.

Human trials are among the darker chapters of the pharmaceutical industry's history. Medical progress has always claimed victims. But medical research becomes particularly dangerous to patients when efforts to benefit mankind are dominated by the quest for quick profits. When that happens, researchers overstep limits that should never be exceeded, jeopardizing the health and lives of subjects in the interest of improving a company's bottom line. Today drug manufacturers depend on emerging economies like India, China and Russia when they want to test new drugs quickly and inexpensively. In the 1970s and 80s, though, the ideal testing ground was conveniently nearby: in East Germany.

The mechanism is similar today to the way it was back then. Many patients don't know what their doctors are prescribing to them, regulators in partner countries dispense with thorough testing to secure urgently needed hard currency or modern medical technology, and a critical public hardly exists at all.
 

The West's Responsibility

The human trials that were conducted in East Germany on behalf of West German firms still haven't been fully investigated, although Germany's current coalition government of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) will address the issue on July 16th. The effort to come to terms with the former East German dictatorship should not consist solely of addressing the issues surrounding the country's notorious secret police, the Stasi, reads a motion for debate in the German parliament, the Bundestag. According to the motion, drug trials in East German hospitals demonstrate that "West German companies also profited," just as they did from forced labor in East German prisons. The lawmakers argue that, for this reason, "society and the scientific community should focus more heavily on" the West's responsibility.

But that is a responsibility that the former business partners have shirked until now. Hospitals are either unwilling to release their records on drug trials involving their patients or they have already destroyed them. This was Nicole Preiss's experience when she wanted to review her deceased mother's medical file, but she isn't the only one. Pharmaceutical industry leaders are being especially uncooperative. The data from the clinical trials are stored in their archives, and if a number of industry executives have their way, that's where they will stay. "

I don't want to see these kinds of investigations here," says Ulrich Vorderwülbecke. He is the *director of Research-Based Pharmaceutical Companies* (VFA) and has been working as a lobbyist for the last 30 years. "There have been no suspicions so far that something shady was going on," he adds. Vorderwülbecke suggests that an "outside authority," perhaps headed by the German Interior Ministry, should address the issue.

When individual companies are asked today about their former business practices in East Germany, they are suddenly overcome by amnesia.

"Well, that was a long time ago," they typically respond. Employees who might be able to provide information on the issue, they say, are no longer employed there, deceased or suffering from dementia. Some companies refuse to talk to journalists altogether.

Recruiting the 'Class Enemy

In the early 1980s, Fehrbelliner Strasse in Prenzlauer Berg, a neighborhood of East Berlin at the time, was a stronghold of East German opposition. It was home to civil rights activists like Bärbel Bohley, the Catholic congregation of Wolfgang Thierse, who is now the deputy president of the Bundestag, and a rehearsal space used by punk bands like Rosa Extra and Feeling B, a few members of which later formed the metal band Rammstein.

Other residents began noticing unusual activities taking place at Fehrbelliner Strasse 5. "We had no idea what was going on there, but *different cars with West German plates were parked outside every day," recalls Carlo Jordan, a member of the opposition who later became one of the founders of the Green Party in East Berlin.

The civil rights activists had no way of knowing that the East German health ministry had rented an apartment in the dilapidated building in 1983, which was used as a contact point for Western managers. It was officially known as the "Advisory Office for Drugs and Medical Devices" (BBA). According to visitor logs, which read like a who's who of the Western medical industry, there were weeks when up to 40 pharmaceutical industry representatives came to the office.

"Now you too can become one of our customers." Those were the words with which Joachim Petzold, the head of the advisory office, *recruited the drug manufacturers, from the West, otherwise known as the class enemy during GDR times, starting in 1983. It was a breakthrough: the institutionalization of a lucrative business relationship.

END Part I