Project MUSE

The fact that Germany failed to produce sufficient penicillin to meet its military requirements is one of the major enigmas of the Second World War. Although Germany lost many scientists through imprisonment and forced or voluntary emigration, those biochemists that remained should have been able to have achieved the large-scale production of penicillin. After all, they had access to Fleming's original papers, and from 1940 the work of Florey and co-workers detailing how penicillin could be purified; in addition, with effort, they should have been able to obtain cultures of Fleming's penicillin-producing mold.There seems then to have been no overriding reason why the Germans and their Axis allies could not have produced large amounts of penicillin from early on in the War. They did produce some penicillin, but never in amounts remotely close to that produced by the Allies who, from D-Day onwards, had an almost limitless supply.

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