As you already know, the depression hit Germany in 1929. Between then and 1932, I.G. Farben laid off 46 percent of its workforce.1 That was accompanied by a reorganization of the company, during which Carl Bosch created three product divisions, or Sparten, into which all of the IG’s technical and commercial assets were placed. Sparte I, taken over by Bosch’s protegee (who had rebuilt the Oppau plant after the explosion in the twenties), Carl Krautch, housed the IG’s high-pressure hydrogenation businesses, nitrates and synthetic gasoline. Sparte II, under Fritz ter Meer, was responsible for the “traditional” IG products: dyes, pharmaceuticals, solvents, and assorted organic and inorganic materials. Sparte III was the explosives and other category, and you don’t need to remember it’s manager’s name, but in case I do, it’s Fritz Gajewski.2
When General Ludendorf attempted the Kapp putsch of March 1920, Carl Duisberg’s longtime friendship with the far-right General was considered an embarrassment to the IG. But after Hitler became the chancellor in 1933, every association the IG had with the Nazi party became an asset to cultivate.
Carl Bosch’s politics were clear: liberalism is pro-business. In 1924 he had bought a thirty-five percent share in the liberal newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung, which he sold in 1930 instead choosing to outright donate 1.4 million reichsmarks.3
The company politics of I.G. Farben, however, must be considered independent of any of its leaders, because as a corporate entity, its politics are determined not by ideology but by capital, and capital was caught up in the hands of Carl Bosch, who began to turn Ahablike, protecting his projects at Leuna at any price. The only argument for this was German self-sufficiency, which became an institutional value of the company, despite its myriad international dealings. The only moment in which such self-sufficiency would be required would be under a blockade, which means during a war. Otherwise, synoil was many times more expensive than normal gas. The moment at which the Aufsichstrat voted for the ter Meer plan, it was committed to resume the war.
With the opening of the East Texas oilfields, Bosch’s entire Synoil endeavor was undermined. What had appeared as a savvy investment in the future began to look like an inexcusable boondoggle, as the price of natural oil sank to seven pfennings per liter while German-synthesized coal methanol (to be accurate, rather than to true to how the substance was named at the time), had to be sold for no less than forty or fifty pfennings a liter.4 Bosch had a lot of power in the company, but companies such as his are designed so that profit has more power than any one person. Two committees were formed to evaluate the strategic prospects of the operations at Leuna. The first, headed by Friedrich Jaehne, the chief engineer of the company, determined that the production of fuel from coal could not be profitable in the foreseeable future. The second, Fritz ter Meer, clarified that it could only be operated profitably by way of government subsidy. Jaehne, wrote that he was “on principle against any kind of subventions by the State because this leads of necessity to influence by the State. It would be better to close the plant.” The executive committee voted to look for state subvention.5
At that moment, by official policy, every association the IG had with the Nazi Party was an asset that needed to be cultivated. The IG had been a target of Nazi propaganda, since many of its directors were Jewish, but the company had been able to find influential members of the Nazi party to intercede on its behalf and the attacks had calmed down.
Carl Krauch, who Bosch regarded as his most gifted protegee, had received a visit from General Erhard Milch, who, despite his Jewish father, was Hermann Goering’s right hand. Goering had been appointed Minister of Aviation, with secret orders to build a new airforce, the Black Luftwaffe. Milch asked Krauch if the I.G.’s synthetic oil was suitable for airplane fuel. Krauch assured him it was, and then formally delivered a report on the German motor fuel economy to Goering that proposed a four-year plan to expand the I.G.’s production of motor fuel more than three and a half times.6
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After the March 5, 1932 election, when the Nazis had gained 5.5 million votes, Bosch met with Hitler for the first time. Interests were aligned, and Hitler gave Bosch “absolute assurance” that his government would fully back the synthetic oil project. Only when business was concluded could Bosch try to intervene on behalf of his Jewish friend, Fritz Haber, who did not consider himself Jewish having converted to Catholicism early in his adult life. The Nazis were in the process of forcing Haber out of his position as head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in Dahlem.7 Bosch warned Hitler that if Jewish scientists were forced to leave the country, Germany would be set back 100 years in the fields of chemistry and physics. Hitler erupted, “Then we’ll work a hundred years without physics and chemistry!” and had Bosch thrown out.8
On December 14, 1933, with the personal approval of Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich signed a cost-plus agreement to buy all of Leuna’s synoil output as it expanded to produce 300,000 tons annually within four years. This fuel was about four times more expensive than gasoline, but Hitler and his machine were preparing for a war that would require indefinite self-sufficiency and cost no longer mattered.
The raw material of the most contention was rubber. Hjalmar Schacht, a holdover from the Weimar Republic, had emerged as Goering’s major rival. For Schacht, German self-sufficiency was a question of foreign exchange, not raw material, and so he opposed the expenditure on synthetic products that were multiples more expensive than their natural counterparts. The worldwide depression had driven the price of natural rubber to new lows, and rubber was extremely cheap. But for Goering, self-sufficiency was a question of preparing for war, and Germany needed synthetic replacements for as many materials as existed, at any cost. The dispute was resolved in Goering’s favor by an August 26, 1936 written order from Hitler, “a final solution of our vital necessities.” Carl Krauch became head of Goering’s research and development effort, with a staff composed entirely of I.G. men. Within ten years, Schact was dead in a Nazi concentration camp.
In 1937, all Jewish officials of the I.G. managing board were removed, and most of the remaining executives signed up for the Nazi party. Liberal market economics could no longer justify a single one of the I.G.’s projects – synthetic substitutes were only useful in the context of war. But in that context, the I.G. was indispensable. It produced almost all of the synthetic oil, synthetic rubber (buna), poison gases, magnesium, lubricating oil, methanol, plasticizers, dyestuffs, nickel and “thousands of other items necessary for the German war machine." But there was a key material that they were missing: Tetraethyl lead.
In the years since Bosch had handed Kettering a tube of iron carbonyl, TET had gained worldwide market share rapidly. By 1936, Ethyl’s product was used in 70 percent or more of the American market, and had successfully penetrated European gasoline as well. That year, the long-fought battle between Ethyl and public health advocates was definitively lost when the Federal Trade Commission ruled that all public criticism of leaded gasoline constituted “disparaging remarks” and would be considered an unfair trade practice.9 The IG managing directors, in the voice of August von Knieriem, to conduct modern war “without tetraethyl lead would have been impossible.10 Krauch, Knieriem, and Schmitz went to London to meet with officials of the Ethyl Export Corporation, affiliated with Standard (G.M. let Standard oversee Ethyl’s international affairs) and asked to borrow 500 tons of tetraethyl lead. More importantly, given the corporate logic of German self-sufficiency, I.G. approached Ethyl Gasoline Corp to buy license to build tetraethyl plants in Germany. Ethyl saw no reason to hesitate. The U.S. War Department saw no reason to object to the transfer of the tetraethyl production process to Germany, despite the rising tensions with Hitler’s government. Ethyl and I.G. formed a jointly owned company, Ethyl GmbH to build an operate tetraethyl plants. Knieriem reflected later at his war crimes trial, “Without tetraethyl lead, the present method of warfare would have been impossible. The fact that since the beginning of the war we could produce tetraethyl lead is entirely due to the circumstances that shortly before, the Americans presented us with the production plans, complete with their know-how.”11
Both Germany and the United States were worried about their rubber supply in time of war. The concern was exacerbated rather than relieved by the low price of rubber in the early 1930s; the depression had an even greater gravitational pull on the price of rubber than gasoline. This material circumstance created a fissure between capitalists and liberals (outside of the I.G.) and the ideologically driven nationalists and fascists. For German nationalists, now made flesh in the body of Adolf Hitler, the war had never ended, and was bound to resume again, and when it did, Germany wouldn’t be able to import rubber at any price. Weimar liberals, embodied in Hjalmar Schact, acting head of the Ministry of Economics and one of Hitler’s top financiers, saw “German self-sufficiency” was to be measured in the balance of foreign exchange, which called for austerity and efficiency during the rearmament. Goering declared that “rubber is our weakest point” and that the issue must be considered exclusively “from the standpoint of waging war.”12
Production of Buna used the same high-pressure process that the I.G. had perfected for nitrates and for synoil. In 1931, Carl Bosch and Friedrich Bergius shared the Nobel Prize, not for the Bergius process specifically but generally for innovations in high pressure chemistry. However, the product was just not good. German Army Ordinance found that Buna tires fell apart in the field and refused to place an order.
As the Nazis gained power, Bosch became more depressive, a condition he treated with alcohol, the familiar combination. To me, he is the embodiment of the liberal response to fascism; since both ideologies are in service of capitalism, they collaborate to build authoritarian businesses that operate on rigid hierarchies, and then once that becomes something ugly and hateful, their only response is to get out of the way.
In 1935, Carl Duisberg died. Bosch himself was starting to crumble under the years of high-pressure chemistry and his depression. He decided to resign as president of the Vorstand and take Duisberg’s vacated seat on the Aufsichstrat, the advisory committee. His official successor was from the accounting department, Hermann Schmitz, but his true successor was Carl Krauch. In 1936, Krauch joined Goering’s staff, as part of a committee of experts on raw materials and foreign exchange. He maintained his positions at the I.G., as head of Sparte II which contained the I.G.’s nitrate and synoil production. “In some ways, he had become Bosch’s alter ego.”13
In terms of raw materials, nothing turned out the way they thought it would, and yet everything ran just as expected. Buna never made a material contribution to the war machine. Leunawerke did contribute a reliable supply of aviation and motor fuel, until it became the target of a series of Allied bombing campaigns. However, it was never enough. And the Nazis were still able to get cheaper fuel from Standard, Phillips, Texaco, and Shell, who all went to some lengths to evade the embargo and do business with the Reich. The pursuit of Buna killed hundreds of thousands of people, and became a corporate façade to hide the killing of millions more.
On April 26, 1940, Carl Bosch died. He’d been severely depressed for years, and an alcoholic. A few months later, following the failed Battle of Britain, Hitler decided he wanted to attack the Soviet Union. That was always his plan and his motivation: as it would be in the Cold War that followed, anti-Bolshevism was his stated and exoteric goal, and his anti-Semitism was in service of it. But his generals refused, for the time being, because the war with Poland, France, and Britian had severely depleted stocks of fuel, rubber, and munitions. Hitler agreed to delay the attack, on condition that his I.G. men rapidly expand. Carl Krauch led the effort. He assigned Otto Ambrose the task of selecting a site for a new, massive Buna plant. As you already know, or perhaps suspected, he chose Auschwitz.
With Bosch gone, the I.G. had been ideologically purified to the extent that there was never any objection to using forced labor. There was some, but not enough, consideration that forced labor was less productive than paid work; at first they figured one forced worker to be worth 75% of a waged laborer, and then had to revise that downward as the conditions in the camp became completely intolerable. At the beginning, they were marching inmates from the death camp to the building site, around four miles each way. This was killing them too quickly, and so the I.G. decided to build—entirely on its own financing—its own prison camp. Paid for by the I.G., but staffed and run by the SS. There were four entities total at Auschwitz: Auschwitz I, the main vast concentration camp with thousands of inmates: Birkenau (Auschwitz II), the gassing chambers and crematory ovens: Auschwitz III, the I.G. Buna and synthetic fuel works, under construction (never finished): and Auschwitz IV, Monowitz, the I.G.’s own wholly-owned concentration camp.14
About Birkenau, the killing zone. As noted previously, Zyklon A was developed by a laboratory funded by Fritz Haber outside of the official remit of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and in violation of Versailles. The company that ended up with the monopoly on Zyklon B was Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Schaedlingsbekampfung (German Corporation for Pest Control) known in the trade as Degesch. It was owned 42.5 by I.G. Farben, but it was well known in the industry that I.G. dominated the company, and the other holders were just investors. Five of the eleven members of its supervisory board were from the I.G., including the chairman, Wilhelm Mann.15
Monowitz shows the world that the holocaust was not an exceptional event. Like the recent Jonathan Glazer movie, In the Zone illustrates, Auschwitz was a continuation of business as usual for the capitalist elite, albeit within a different political context — a context much more conducive to “business development.” Yes, many Jews died there, as did many Russian prisoners, many Communists, many Roma, all the disabled people, and so on. But from the top, from the corporate boardroom, it looked the same as any other business venture, all of which criminally exploit their workers. The conditions of labor at I.G. Auschwitz were different from but comparable to the conditions of the Indian and local laborers building the refinery at Aden (in present-day Yemen) for BP in the early 1950s. Both groups of workers were subject to racism, segregation, terrible or no food, poor living conditions, and more than occasional murder. We Jews are owed no more than every other victim of history, especially in the post-capitalist monopoly age. And being victimized one day does not give you a right to go victimize someone else the next.
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Oil won the war. This statement true whether it means that oil was the decisive factor in the outcome of the war, or if it means that oil was the victor itself.
The war against the Nazis was fought by two separate pools of oil that briefly allied: American oil and Soviet oil. Of the two, the Soviet was much more important, and its contestation was the very center of the war. The American bombing of Leunawerke was helpful, but it was the soviets who did the fighting and the suffering and the surviving and the winning. Their greatest and hardest-won success was in defense of the oil industry in Baku. Barbarossa required Hitler to win the southern caucuses, having finally been deprived of his fuel supply despite the apparent willingness of the Western majors to sell him oil, he needed Azerbaijan, and Stalingrad stood in his way and never yielded. That heroic effort, similar in character to what Palestinians engaged in right now, saved humanity from the thousand-year Reich. The suffering that regular people withstood was possible because they truly believed that they were bringing a better world into being. Iosif Stalin was the human embodiment of that hope. Not by being a dictator or a cult of personality, but by being the representative of a collective effort that included everyone, and that would result in prosperity for all.
Diarmuid Jeffreys, Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine. Macmillan, 2010. Chapter 6
ibid. ch. 5
The Wikipedia I used is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprimatur_GmbH but the info is in The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben.
The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben, top of chapter “I.G. Prepares Hitler for War.” Cites TWC, VII, p. 1309, NI-10, 551, memorandum of June 6, 1944 from August von Knieriem to Schmitz, Ambros, Buetefisch, et al.
Crime and Punishment cites NI-6765, affidavit of Friedrich Jaehne.
Crime and Punishment cites TWC, VII, pp. 571-572, NI-4718.
Daniel Charles, Master Mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare New York: HarperCollins, 2005 pg 224
This is recounted both in Crime and Punishment and Hell’s Cartel. The Crime and Punishment citation is Hearings before the Committee on Patents, United States Senate, 77th Cong., pp. 2912-2913, letter from F.A. Howard to F.H. Bedford, Jr., dated April 20, 1938.
Kovarik Dissertation pg 124
Crime and Punishment cites Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, Under Control Council No. 10 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1953). TWC, VII, p. 1309, NI-10, 551, memorandum of June 6, 1944 from August von Knieriem to Schmitz, Ambros, Buetefisch, et al.
Crime and Punishment cites TWC, VII, p. 1309, NI-10, 551.
Crime and Punishment takes these quotes from documents in the national Archives Collection, World War II Crimes Records, “Nuremberg, Industrialists”
Crime and Punishment 53
Crime and Punishment 96
Crime and Punishment 97, cites Hearings before the Committee on Patents, United States Senate, 77th Gong., 2d Session (1942), part I, Patents, p. 11, Farish testimony.