This is the story of the megacorporation that supplied the Nazis with most of their tools of destruction. It’s probably the most horrifying case of corporate greed in history.
Today, Germany’s most famous export is luxury automobiles. But until World War 2, it was chemicals. The Germans had long been innovators in that field and by the turn of the 20th century, companies such as BASF, Hoechst, and Bayer, plus several smaller firms, dominated the market for dyes and were expanding into specialty markets such as pharmaceuticals, photographic film, and, as I’ve mentioned before, fertilizer.
In 1904, Carl Duisburg, head of Bayer called for a merger of all of Germany’s chemical industry, inspired by the example of Standard Oil on a trip stateside. His dream was not yet realized, but that year, he managed to form a profit pool with BASF and the smaller firm Agfa in the form of an IG which translated into English as “community of interest”.
In December 1925, Duisburg’s ambitions were achieved. BASF, Hoecht, Bayer, Agfa, Chemische Fabrik Griesheim-Elektron, and Chemische Fabrik vorm. Weiler Ter Meer merged to create Interessen‐Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG or IG Farben for short. The new company was absolutely massive. It was the 4th largest company in the world behind General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and US Steel and the largest company outside of the United States.
Ironically, IG Farben was not initially popular with the far right. They did not like how several members of the supervisory board were Jewish and considered to be part of “the Jewish Conspiracy”. It found more favor with the center-right German Peoples’ Party. And the animosity was reciprocated, Karl Bosch, the company’s chairman, would be a critic of the Nazis until the day he died in 1940.
In 1932, as the Weimar Republic fell ever further into chaos due to the Great Depression and voters gravitated toward the extreme left and extreme right, the people who ran IG Farben, like most of Germany’s elites, learned how to stop worrying and start loving the Nazis, because, hey, they kept the communists away. They were a large backer of the Nazis’ 1933 election campaign. And they would soon get their 30 pieces of silver.
Hitler wanted Germany to be totally self sufficient. Germany did not have nearly enough domestic oil sources to sustain Hitler’s envisioned army during a time of war. Germany did however have more than enough coal. IG Farben had made strides in processes to synthesize liquid fuels from coal. As such, they prospered once the Nazis started restricting oil imports and subsidizing synthetic fuel production. They also managed to synthesize rubber, another vital war material.
With this type of mutually beneficial relationship, Farben was happy to comply with the aryanization laws. The company dismissed all of its Jewish employees.
Now we come to IG Farben’s greatest source of notoriety. In 1922, a company called Degesch discovered a new type of pesticide made from hydrogen cyanide that they called Zyklon B. In 1930, Degesch was bought by IG Farben. Starting in 1942, Zyklon B became the preferred method of killing the inmates in the Nazis’ extermination camps. And management knew about it. It was also discovered that employees for Bayer conducted medical experiments on inmates at Auschwitz. This company was a horror show.
Needless to say, the company’s guilt did not go unnoticed by the allies. 24 senior executives were tried at Nuremburg with 13 being convicted, many of them sadly being able to find cushy corporate jobs after being released from prison.
As for IG Farben itself, it could not be allowed to keep operating after all the atrocities it had enabled. It was broken up into its 6 constituent companies in 1952. The company’s Frankfurt headquarters served first as the HQ for the Allied occupation government, then as the CIA’s European offices, and since 1998 it has been owned by the University of Frankfurt.
Germany’s dominance of the chemical industry withered away after the war as American competitors like Dow and DuPont swept away their market share.
Today IG Farben is long gone, leaving behind only its former headquarters, the surviving successor firms, and several million corpses.