Carl Duisberg - Work

Work

During WWI, the German army faced a great threat, ammunition-shortage. Indeed, the nitrates that were crucial for the production of gunpowder could not be imported anymore due to the blockade by British navy. As a result, the German chemical firms (BASF and Bayer among others) were pushed to successfully synthetise nitrates. However, because of the war, shortage in manpower arose and Carl Druisberg advised Max Bauer a new solution. In November 1916, on advice from Carl Druisberg, kaiser's troops began the deportation of more than 60 thousands of people from occupied Belgium : taken from their homes at gunpoint, they were put in trains for transport to German mines and factories. Complaints from influential neutral countries, especially the USA, put an end to it. Also, in 1916, General Wilhelm Groener was appointed by General Ludendorff to reduce inflation. He proposed that increases in costs could be absorbed by the chemical community. When Duisberg heard the proposition, he successfully influenced the German government for Groener's removal.

In the 1920s, dye industry leaders, led by Carl Duisberg of Bayer and Carl Bosch of BASF, successfully pushed for the merger of the dye makers into a single company. In 1925, the companies merged into the Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG or IG Farben (Syndicate of Dye Makers).

This huge corporation, which soon included related industries such as explosives and fibers, was the biggest enterprise in all of Europe and the fourth largest in the world, behind General Motors, United States Steel and Standard Oil of New Jersey.

In 1926, IG Farben entered into a non-competition arrangement with Jersey Standard for oil and chemicals while agreeing to cooperate on the development of synthetic rubber (though Jersey Standard later came under fire from the U.S. federal government because of evidence that the Germany company was impeding its progress in this crucial area).

Although Carl Bosch, the head of IG Farben's managing board, opposed the anti-semitism of the Nazis, the company gave financial support to Hitler and (without Bosch, who resigned in 1935) became indispensable to the German military effort during World War II. The company used slave labor, locating one of its synthetic rubber facilities in Auschwitz to be near the captive labor supply of the infamous concentration camp. Lethal gas made by IG Farben was used in the death camps. After the war, a group of IG Farben executives were convicted of war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials. Several years later, in 1952, the company was divided into several independent firms, including BASF, Bayer and Hoechst. (IG Farben survived as a shell company and remains one today.)