Attacking the Devil - Harold Evans and the last Nazi War Crime

In 1968, five years before Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein blew the Watergate scandal wide open and brought down the Nixon regime, a team of British investigative journalists at the Sunday Times - led by the charismatic and unflinching Harry Evans - began an investigation and campaign which is today held up as one of the great achievements of twentieth-century journalism.

Now, from this Friday (January 22), Attacking The Devil - the incredible story of that ground breaking investigation - is to be told on film.

Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s tens of thousands of expectant mothers took thalidomide, a defective morning sickness remedy, one of the last remnants of the Nazi science experiments of the 1940s. Little did they know that thalidomide was attacking their unborn child’s nervous system. Many of the victims were stillborn and the survivors were born with severe physical or mental disabilities, or both.

Then editor of the Northern Echo, Harry Evans was one of the first journalists to seriously ask how a drug this destructive ended up on the market, and why, given the obvious devastation it had caused, no compensation was forthcoming from those responsible.

In 1967 Evans was appointed editor of the Sunday Times, where he assembled a crack team of investigative journalists, with whom he launched a campaign to expose the truth behind the thalidomide scandal and seek justice for its victims.

Evans and his team were confronted with a distressed and disunited group of parents of thalidomide sufferers, a criminal justice system entirely unsympathetic to the media, and a litigious, obfuscating, occasionally brutal and callous opposition in the form of German pharmaceutical giant Chemie Grünenthal, whose strong-arm Realpolitik threatened to deprive thalidomide sufferers of any compensation whatsoever.

Attacking The Devil, which won the main award at the Sheffield Doc/Fest, is directed and produced by Jacqui Morris and David Morris, the team behind 2012’s BAFTA-nominated McCullin, the biographical film of seminal photojournalist Don McCullin. The story is also set to be dramatised as a major feature film by Hollywood giants Harvey and Bob Weinstein.

As well as Sir Harold Evans, the film includes moving accounts from several thalidomide survivors of their search for an understanding of their condition and a sense of normalcy, and the role of the Sunday Times investigations in helping them on this quest.

Attacking The Devil will be released in UK Cinemas 22nd January, watch trailer...