“Always Curious” is one of the birthday slogans for which Angela Merkel, in her recent celebratory visit, chided her hosts for failing to render in German. But “Always Curious” has been my mantra all year long. During the war Darmstadt was as thoroughly destroyed as any German city, yet my father never told me how the Royal Air Force had made it a target on a September night in 1944—a September 11, in fact. Appraising the city nine miles away from the edge of his palace grounds, the Prince of Hesse described how “the light grew and grew until the whole of the southern sky was glowing, shot through with red and yellow.” The raid killed eight thousand people, forced almost half the population into the countryside, and chased Niko’s uncle Wilhelm into that garden shed. It had taken centuries to build what those planes needed less than an hour to destroy. Three months later American B-17s would make a specific target of the Merck factory, dealing the second blow of a one-two punch.

  “When I think of Germany,” says one of the exile characters of W. G. Sebald’s imagination, “it feels as if there were some kind of insanity lodged in my head.” Germany never triggered anything like that in me. The country I came to know from visits during my youth was home to gentle aunts and uncles, cousins my own age engaged in my interests, and comfort food. Stunde Null is a problematic concept, for in seeking to lop off what has come before, it disrupts the continuities essential to memory and accountability. But the Merck cousins I’ve come to know best adamantly refuse to foreshorten remembrance. They include Harald Binder, an independent scholar who dedicates some of his Merck wealth to the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, which he founded in the Galician city of Lviv, in Ukraine. Harald’s institute is as pointed as possible a repudiation of his great-grandmother, the Ahnenerbe patroness Mathilde Merck.

  Of course, in a country where Stolpersteine are routinely vandalized, younger Germans aren’t entirely free of the viruses still coursing through the political bloodstream. Here this weekend is a family shareholder recently in the news for his involvement with Deutsches Kolleg, an antisemitic, racist “think tank” that rejects the Federal Republic and believes in the restoration of a Reich purged of immigrants and returned to its Nazi-era borders. A 2017 German TV documentary placed this relative at a meeting of the group’s directorate in Thuringia in July 2016. And it included footage of him joining American Klansman David Duke at two racist events during the mid-2000s—a gathering of Holocaust deniers in Teheran and Duke’s own European-­American Conference in New Orleans.

  Other family members assure me that he is shunned, but that’s cold comfort. A globally engaged company based in modern Germany came to realize that its first reaction to that ­documentary—a bloodless comment that Merck doesn’t concern itself with the private activities of its shareholders—wouldn’t fly. The family, Merck ultimately said in a statement several weeks later, “resolutely distances itself from these political views and associated ideologies.”

  Merck is using yet another English-language slogan to celebrate its birthday: “Imagine the next 350 years.” But I’m not quite ready to do so. Several weeks later I return to Darmstadt, to the firm’s corporate history department, to finish up with the first 350.

  The Merck archive has traced much the same morally compromised path as twentieth-century Germany. For three years during the early sixties it was run by Friedrich Wilhelm Euler, who even before the Nazis’ rise to power subscribed to theories of “racial hygiene” and conducted antisemitic genealogical research. During tricentennial festivities in 1968, Merck made no mention of the company’s relationship to the Third Reich. But by the late nineties the firm had begun to take up its past. It joined Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft (Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future), a movement launched by German businesses in 2000, to identify and compensate those conscripted into forced labor during the war, and in advance of the 350th anniversary the company commissioned four independent scholars to produce a history with an emphasis on the Nazi era. The archive to which I’ve come is now staffed by seven specialists whose instinct is to honor the historical record before protecting anyone in the family. The current director, Sabine Bernschneider-Reif, works in an office housing dozens of volumes of Mathilde Merck’s notorious diaries, and in 2015 she made them available unrestrictedly to graduate students at Darmstadt’s Technical University. History is what history is. And so, at a table one floor up from large-as-life blowups of family figures including Kurt and Tante Tilla, I set out unencumbered on the paper trail, come what may.

  Walter Brügmann, the fervent Nazi who served as Merck’s head of personnel through the end of the war, destroyed compromising employment records as the Americans closed in. Yet I still learn that female laborers forcibly brought from the east were paid only about 75 percent of a standard wage, which after deductions for food and lodging left them with no more than roughly forty Reichsmarks—about four dollars—a month. More cruelly, they were barred from air-raid shelters, which helps explain why so many died during the December 1944 bombing of the factory, in which all but one of the barracks for forced laborers were destroyed.

  For years Merck had produced hydrogen peroxide as a disinfectant or bleaching agent. With the war, it turns out the company entered into secret deals to supply that substance to German armaments factories for use in fuel for torpedoes, rockets, and jets. “If, after 1945, the Allies had more thoroughly investigated the company’s wartime activities—which conflicted with its prewar focus—Merck’s continued existence probably would have been endangered,” the 350th anniversary history concludes. “The American authorities would have found arguments for classifying Merck among the major industrial ‘warmongers.’”

  Karl Merck, the lead family partner through the war, was a Nazi Party member who held prominent positions with the National Socialist Motor Corps, the National Socialist League of German Technicians, and the Nazified German Chemical Society. On May 1, 1933—the day he, his cousin Fritz, and my great-uncle Wilhelm all joined the party—Karl presided over a companywide celebration of a day of national labor on the factory grounds that included the singing of the “Horst Wessel Song.” Returning to Darmstadt from the 1936 Nuremberg Rally, Karl used a company roll call to rhapsodize about the “tremendous honor and love that all show the Führer.” In 1939, the company’s by then Nazi-dominated Council of Trust was boasting that Merck “no longer even hires people who are one-quarter Jewish”—which is to say someone like my father, then about to begin his final year at boarding school.

  But even though cousin Karl was the active partner most central to the company during the Third Reich, it’s Wilhelm’s story that fascinates me most—for his relationships with both Karl, whom he answered to, and the most powerful figure in Merck’s modern history. To tell that story we have to go back to World War I and its consequential aftermath.

  Before being called up to the army in May 1915, Wilhelm Merck had begun work toward an engineering degree at the University of Dresden. With the armistice, the company put him in charge of technical matters at the factory and in 1921 named him an active partner. But Wilhelm and three cousins—the other hands-on family members of this ninth generation included Karl, Fritz, and Louis Merck—quickly realized how ill-prepared they were to lead. The war had interrupted their studies and upended the essence of the business they were being entrusted to run. Under the Treaty of Versailles, an industrial firm like Merck suffered much more than a business like the Kurt Wolff Verlag; every German pharmaceutical company was required to hand over half its inventory to the Allies as reparations, and for several years afterward sell another 25 percent at an extortionate fixed price. During the Ruhr crisis of 1923, in which French and Belgian troops occupied Germany’s industrial heartland and exacerbated the economic chaos that led to the hyperinflation that would peak that fall, Merck executives legitimately feared that foreign forces would advance on Darmstadt and seize the factory.

  To meet these challenges, the firm felt compelled for the first time to bring in substantial numbers of managers from outside the family. In 1923 Merck revamped its executive board, and in January 1924, to win the favor of desperately needed lenders, made a fateful decision. After long negotiations and despite much internal dissent, the company hired and gave a largely free hand to the chief of the local Darmstädter und Nationalbank, a decorated World War I officer named Bernhard Pfotenhauer. He’s in the middle of the front row in the photograph below, with Wilhelm to his right. As this newcomer overhauled the board’s role and streamlined management, “the family was largely reduced to the function of ‘constitutional monarchs.’” Pfotenhauer’s tenure would end only with the fall of the Third Reich.

  To study the Pfotenhauer era at Merck is to see how an opportunist exploited a crisis to get his hooks in the company and how, steeped in an ideology that prized and empowered autocratic behavior, he became in name and practice a Wehr­wirtschaftsführer, a “leader of military industry,” the title given to executives at those companies most solidly behind the Nazi war effort. But family members made this deal with the devil willingly, to avoid having to float public shares that would have diluted their wealth and diminished their power. “I am really overjoyed that we managed to get this Pf[otenhauer],” Wilhelm wrote Karl and Louis after the deal was struck. “Considering that he is only thirty-eight years old and is a really tip-top employee in financial matters, I believe he will truly do a lot for us.”

  In fact, the initial misgivings of others would be borne out. Pfotenhauer looked down on the family partners as dilettantes unworthy of responsibility, and beginning in 1933 he courted local Nazi capos like Jakob Sprenger, the Gauleiter of southern Hesse-Nassau. Studying and then emulating Hitler, he became infected with what another Merck executive after the war would call the “dictator mania.” US investigators concluded in late 1945 that Pfotenhauer “often overrode the active partners and owners; he pursued policies unknown to them, and generally ran the firm as he wished.” As one observer put it in a 1948 affidavit: “Just as a lasso thrower knows how to tie up a man from head to foot in a few seconds, so Pfotenhauer possessed the strange power and ability to paralyze many of those around him almost instantly so that they lost all their will and became soft putty in his hands.”

  Eventually even Wilhelm soured on Pfotenhauer and his high-handedness. Matters came to a head in December 1941, after Pfotenhauer clashed with Wilhelm and Louis Merck during a heated meeting. Four months later Karl Merck prevailed on both dissident cousins to accept relegation to the status of silent partners. But this only forced another impasse, for Karl also insisted that Wilhelm and Louis waive the right to rejoin the company as active partners in perpetuity, something neither was willing to do.

  Karl and Fritz Merck sided with Pfotenhauer, leaving Wilhelm and Louis outgunned. On May 29, 1942, Wilhelm was summoned to the Nazi Party Gauhaus in Frankfurt, where he found Karl and Pfotenhauer waiting for him. After the war Wilhelm said the Nazi economics official in the room that day had made clear to him the stakes—that he, Wilhelm, “knew what would happen if he didn’t sign” the waiver agreement. So he signed “under protest.” Louis did so the following day.

  Afterward, Pfotenhauer mopped up. He fired a longtime executive who had sent Karl a lengthy memo complaining about Pfotenhauer’s overreach. (After unsuccessfully taking his case to the local labor court, this employee found the Gestapo at his door.) Pfotenhauer also curtailed the power of the two remaining active family members, his putative allies Karl and Fritz.

  But Pfotenhauer’s fortunes were entirely bound up with those of the regime, and the Third Reich would soon be in steep decline. Pfotenhauer’s daughter Ursula testified after the war that the RAF’s bombing of Darmstadt in September 1944 had left him a “broken man.” On March 23, 1945—using Luminal, a barbiturate he took from a warehouse on the factory grounds—Pfotenhauer poisoned his wife, two of his daughters, and four of his grandchildren before shooting himself. He was unwilling, he had told a co-worker shortly beforehand, to face the prospect of “having to clean the shoes of an American Jew from tomorrow on.”

  Two days later American troops occupied the Merck factory, which was soon handed over to a US-appointed trustee.

  In a yellowing set of papers, I’m astonished to discover who became involved in the postwar intrigue surrounding the company. In early August 1947, upon his return to the United States from the trip that included his reunion with Niko and Maria at the Swiss border, my grandfather checked in with Merck & Co. CEO and founding Pantheon investor George W. Merck.

  You know that I have remained on very friendly terms with my first wife—your first cousin, Elisabeth Albrecht Merck [sic]—and as my oldest son is living with his mother you will not be astonished to learn that I accepted Elisabeth’s hospitality and stayed at her home in Munich. . . . On June 30 Wilhelm Merck and his cousin, Lisbet Merck Pfarr, came to see me. Mr. Günther John, the right hand of Dr. [Karl] Merlau, Trustee of E. Merck, Darmstadt, drove them in his car from Darmstadt to Munich. My talks with your relatives and Mr. John were quite interesting and I feel I should report to you about them.

  Kurt had learned that a coalition of Social Democrats and Communists in Hesse were making a target of the company. The German Mercks and the US-appointed trustee hoped that George W., who would appear on the cover of Time a few years later as the beau ideal of the responsible American CEO, might put in a word with their US overlords. “[The political left is] trying by all means to have the firm nationalized and to bring about a spectacular trial proving that for political or other reasons the Mercks should no longer be allowed to own the firm,” Kurt wrote. “Everything should be done to keep the firm as a private enterprise. . . . They do not ask for any material support, but for ideological support only.”

  In that same letter Kurt also addressed the March 1942 confrontation that led to the ouster of Wilhelm and Louis and consolidated Pfotenhauer’s power. “Mr. John pointed out that it would have been out of the question to throw out Pfotenhauer,” he reported. “He called Pfotenhauer a kind of ‘Himmler of Hessen’ and a man whose position in the Nazi Party was so strong that if the partners had tried to throw him out he would have easily managed to throw out the entire Merck family by party action, and nationalized the firm at once with himself dictator of the business.”

  Scarcely a year later, on September 1, 1948, the trustee unblocked Merck’s assets and returned the company to family control. The Allies’ victory had mooted the 1942 Gauhaus agreement, paving the way for Wilhelm to rejoin Karl and Fritz as active partners now that all had gone through the de-Nazification process and at least superficially patched up their differences. (Louis died in 1945.)

  The story I learn isn’t simply that fear of the Red Menace helped short-circuit full de-Nazification and return the firm to the family after the war. It’s that, back in the early twenties, Bern­hard Pfotenhauer rescued Merck Darmstadt from economic disaster; that accommodations to the man my grandfather called “the Himmler of Hessen” kept the company thriving and in my ancestors’ hands throughout the Third Reich; and that those compromises ensured that my father, in 1977, would have Merck shares to cash in. Down to the day I write this, I enjoy some of that wealth.

  Back in the company archives a day later, I find an undated, typewritten statement from Wilhelm Merck, clearly submitted for his de-Nazification hearing. To read it is to literally hear what Uncle Wilhelm had to say for himself.

  First of all, until 1933 I was neither politically active nor a member of any political party. At that time the situation in Germany forced me to choose sides politically—many people had to. I joined the Nazi Party in the belief that this organization could lead us to a better future. After all sorts of coaxing by acquaintances I joined the SS in September 1934. I did so because of the requirement that I belong to a [party] organization to continue my activity with what was then the Motorflugsportklub, which was subsequently subsumed by the DLV [Deutscher Luftsportverband]. As regards this I must note that I had been involved in flying gliders since 1911 and really enjoyed it. . . .

  Later I understood what [the SS] was really about. That is why I again tried to leave this organization, which was impossible unless you were kicked out for some offense.

  With the 1937 merger of the DLV and the Nationalsozialist­isches Fliegerkorps (NSFK), Wilhelm seems to say, he no longer needed to remain an SS member and tried to leave. “My activity in the NSFK was merely to give young glider pilots the opportunity to dedicate themselves to the sport,” he says. “I did not participate in any political or ideological training courses either actively or passively.”

  But the NSFK and the DLV before it were not recreational sports clubs. They were stalking horses for Nazi Germany to rearm in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. And Wilhelm goes on to concede that, shortly after the war began, he learned that he in fact had not disentangled himself from the SS, for his status in the NSFK led to his promotion to the rank of an SS-­Hauptsturmführer, or captain. “However,” he says, “I never took an oath to either the party or the SS, nor was I asked to take such an oath. . . . Very soon after the [Nazis’] seizure of power, I realized the essential goal of the party, with which I had never been in agreement. . . . I tried not to stand out in any case and also avoided appearing in public. . . . I believe I can assert with a clear conscience that I have never spoken to the collective workforce in the National Socialist sense, except for anniversaries of employees or workers, or participation in the training of managers.”

  Yet that’s not nothing. And in a 1939 speech to employees, Wilhelm vaunted “trust in our Führer” and Germany’s “undefeatable army,” adding, “We want to show at home that we want to and can fight if the Führer calls. Only a united people at arms, as in a vise, only determination leads to victory.” The historians detailed to Merck’s 350th anniversary history conclude that, even as he “tried to portray himself after 1945 as a non-political aesthete,” and “despite his heritage and social position,” Wilhelm “was not capable of keeping his distance from National Socialism.” Invoking testimony submitted to the de-Nazification tribunal by the Merck Works Council, an organization representing labor, the historians write: “He had ‘been there,’ had been a poor model for the employees and had ‘helped to build up the Nazi empire.’”