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Hello, you're listening to the Witness History podcast from the BBC World Service with me Louise Adaggo.

Today we're going back to the 1960s

and a trial that followed one of the biggest pharmaceutical scandals

in post-war Europe.

Solidamide was a drug which had been marketed in dozens of countries as a new wonder drug.

But instead it began to emerge.

The drug was causing thousands of children to be born with serious, often fatal birth defects. In 2016 I spoke to the wife of the main prosecutor at the

trial who herself had had a Thalidomide baby after she took a single pill

during her pregnancy.

It's May the 27th, 1968, and in the dock in a makeshift courtroom in Western Germany are employees of the German pharmaceutical company

Kemi Grunental which manufactured the drug Philidomide.

For the biggest trial that Germany has seen since Nuremberg, the little town of

Alsdof has no courtroom large enough. So the trial is being held in the Casino Anna,

formerly a miner's dance hall. The seven accused were all employed by Grunantal the makers of Thalidomide.

Jointly, they're accused of criminal negligence in selling a product that caused death, injury, and

embryonic damage. A verdict of guilty could not only send them to jail for 10 years,

...