It would be a historical irony of the first order if a British microbiologist's claim that Hitler survived an assassination attempt in 1944 with the help of penicillin made by the Allies were accepted.
"If the Nazi leader had died from bacterial infection of his many wounds, the Second World War would have been over a year earlier, saving millions of lives," says Milton Wainwright of the University of Sheffield in the research and science magazine New Scientist.
Hitler reportedly received multiple injuries after a bomb in a suitcase exploded next to his desk. Research reveals first-hand evidence that he was subsequently administered penicillin by his personal doctor, Theo Morell. The antibiotic may have saved his life.
He contends that Morell would only have risked giving Hitler the drug if he were confident that the antibiotic would cure and not kill him.
"My research shows that Morrell, in a very dodgy position as Hitler's doctor, would only have used pure stuff," Wainwright says adding that the only reliable penicillin was that made by the Allies.
Wainwright explains, "Germans and Czechoslovakian teams had tried to manufacture it, without much success."
The Germans may have got their hands on the drug through diplomatic bags as Allies were sending antibiotics to various countries or it might have been confiscated from some prisoners of war, he says.
Though it is hard to give foolproof evidence that penicillin saved Hitler's life, the death of his notorious henchman, Reinhard Heydrich -- the butcher of Prague -- due to septicaemia after surviving a car-bomb assassination attempt strongly hints that it was penicillin that saved the German dictator, he concludes.
