IG Farben Revisited: Industry and Ideology Ten Years Later

Abstract

This paper summarizes what the author considers to be the main contributions of his book, INDUSTRY AND IDEOLOGY: IG FARBEN IN THE NAZI ERA (1987), to the current state of research on the history of the German chemical industry; identifies ways in which other researchers have advanced our knowledge during the past decade; and suggests several directions in which historians might profitably turn their attention. In general, the author argues for renewed empirical concentration on clarifying the technical, personal, and financial determinants of the decisions of particular chemical firms, since the history of the industry is, after all, the aggregate of such decisions.

Peter Hayes, Dept. of History, Northwestern University

I am thankful for this occasion to return my attention to scholarly matters that overlap with my current research but are no longer identical with it. To conduct a Bilanzaufnahme of writing on the German chemical industry both before and since my own book on IG Farben appeared is a gratifying experience, since it entails not only assessing whatever contribution I have made, but also highlighting the substantial advances on our knowledge that others have achieved. The process of looking back is seldom free of regrets, however, and mine in this instance relect my sense at the distance of ten years that Industry and Ideology may have helped close more questions than it opened. It resolved perhaps a generation of predominant concerns about the history of the German chemical industry and, I hope, in this way served the field well. But it largely left to others the task of turning our attention in new and fruitful directions.

We may best gauge how far our subject has come by considering the state of the literature on it at the end of the 1970s, when Industry and Ideology began to take shape. The highpoints were a cluster of useful but dated German dissertations, several studies from the 1930s of international cartels, J. J. Beer's monograph on German dyestuffs, Ludwig Haber's two solid surveys of the international chemical industry, two outstanding corporate histories of ICI and WASAG, two hagiographical biographies of Carl Duisberg and Carl Bosch, an array of antagonistic or apologetic publications about IG Farben, some informative but uncritical Firmengeschichten, and two tightly focused, modern, and professional analyses, those of Thomas Parke Hughes and Hellmuth Tammen. ₁ That was about it. Not only rather sparse, this literature was also highly inflected. At worst overtly partisan in seeking to indict or rehabilitate its subjects, it was heavily shaped, even at best, by realization of the chemical industry's complicity--especially but not only in Germany--in chemical warfare and the generation of other means of mass destruction. Indeed, such concerns, reinforced by family history, drove L.F. Haber's outwardly disinterested researches, which culminated later in the publication of his The Poisonous Cloud. ₂

The IG Farben AG had central, not to say prototypical importance in all these narratives, usually as the worst case scenario to be accounted for, but also as a standard of behavior and accomplishment against which to be compared or as a brush with which to be tarred. For its history--like, it long seemed, German history--had climaxed at Auschwitz, where the concern appeared to have engaged in the most heinous sort of vertical integration, as it profiteered off the forced labor of inmates on its factory building site before it cashed in on the murder of these and other prisoners with Zyklon B, the product of a subsidiary, at nearby Birkenau. Most people who approached the history of the chemical industry in Germany regarded accounting for this horror as the central task, and the usual explanations mirrored those for Germans' complicity in general: compulsion or rapacity, usually, especially among commentators from outside of West Germany, the latter.

If I had a central objective by the time I was ready to present my findings regarding IG Farben, it was to break out of this polarized, predominantly diabolizing narrative. I sought to show that the concern's evolution both before and after 1933 was the product of decisions made on the basis of endogenous (i.e., firm-specific) and exogenous (societal and political) considerations by deliberative people--people who were time- and place-bound, but not from another intellectual or moral universe. Devotees of Flash Gordon might appreciate the reference if I say that I was reacting to an "Emperor Ming" view of IG Farben and its history. A more contemporary allusion might make the point better. I was writing against the static and reductionist view of Germans and German history that Daniel Goldhagen recently has repopularized. ₃ Instead of proceeding from a dubious identity of interests between the concern (or the chemical industry in general) and the Nazi Party and regime, I tried to demonstrate that Farben's descent into complicity with the program of arms, autarky, aggression, and annihilation was both gradual and conditioned. It occurred over time and in a series of responses to an increasingly politically structured and narrowed set of choices. It was neither preordained nor spontaneous, on the one hand, but also neither quite compelled nor accidental, on the other.

This argument involved me in a series of assertions--most of them negative ones--that were once somewhat daring but are now close to being commonplace among specialists. In another decade, they may actually begin to be incorporated in the textbooks. Permit me to list the most important ones.

First, neither dreams of conquest nor ideological affinity drove IG Farben into cooperation with Nazism. Instead, the nexus between firm and regime took shape around the intersection of a costly failure of the concern's historic development strategy with the onset of the world economic downturn. The failed attempt to repeat the cost-effective, coal-based syntheses of indigo and ammoniak with one of gasoline, coupled with the immaturity of synthetic rubber or buna as a back-up product, made Farben eager for the sort of state assistance that it had enjoyed during World War I and that the Nazis, once in power and intent on autarky, could offer. The fateful flaw of Farben's leaders was not rampant greed or nationalism, but a preference for giantism in product development that made for dependence on government aid. ₄

Second, this marriage of convenience developed after, not before Hilter's appointment as Chancellor. The chemical industry, including IG Farben, was almost as severely politically demoralized during the Depression as German industry as a whole, almost as divided and ineffectual in its efforts to influence the electoral process. ₅ Still, it clung to the phantom of forming a Buergerblock of moderate parties and to bedrock liberal economic principles, such as free trade, for as long as doing so remained politically practical.

Third, the marriage did not produce general enthusiasm for or confidence in Nazi economic policy during the 1930s. Most of Farben's leaders hoped in the early years of Nazi rule merely to ride the policies of rearmament and autarky as post horses, until the regime's readiness to buy IG's synthetic fuel, fibers, and rubber had enabled the firm to reduce their unit production costs to a level at which they could compete in international markets. To these men, as to many German industrialists, Nazi economic policy was acceptable only as a series of transitional, stopgap measures, which were bound to revert to normal practice once Germany achieved military parity and economic recovery, and which would entail disastrous economic consequences if continued beyond that point. Thus, even some of the managers most eager to demonstrate their co-operativeness toward the Nazi regime, such as Max Ilgner and Georg von Schnitzler, saw Farben's and Germany's long-range future better served by a program of targeted foreign investment than by one of bloc-building and autarky. It is worth noting in this connection that recent research has indicated how widespread the misgivings about Nazi economic policy were among German corporate leaders in the period 1936-39, how apt my choice of the heading "The Nervous Years" for this time frame was. ₆

Fourth, Farben's marriage of convenience with the regime proved a decidedly old-fashioned union in terms of the distribution of authority. Almost without exception, whenever the firm's policy preferences diverged from those of the regime--e.g., over "Aryanization," the advisability of autarky, the economic organization of the New Order, increasing the German female labor force, and a host of lesser matters--the regime prevailed. Its was to propose, Farben's to dispose. Indeed, the most usually cited instance of the concern's influence in Nazi Germany, the Four Year Plan, turned out to have been an instrument of the militarization of IG Farben rather than the `Farbenization' of economic policy-making. Thanks to Gottfried Plumpe's researches, we now know that Harold James' general argument to the effect that Nazi economic policy aggravated the ossification of German industrial development applies to IG Farben as well. In particular, the firm's plastics and synthetic fibers divisions sacrificed attention to products with long-range commercial prospects in order to concentrate on turning out those the regime needed immediately. ₇ Overall, the transformation of IG's sales from 70% on traditionally consumer-oriented products and 30% on all others in 1933 to the reverse ratio ten years later amounted to an especially crass example of the Nazi practice of "strip-mining the economy" for short-term gains. ₈

Perhaps the best illustration of all of these points is the history of IG Farben's synthetic rubber or buna development from 1925 to 1945, a history whose most dreadful aspect led to a fifth unconventional argument of my book, which I have refined and supplemented in several recent essays. ₉ Contrary to prevalent assumptions, the presence of the concentration camp in Auschwitz probably had little to do with the concern's decision in early 1941 to build a huge factory just east of that town, but that decision had much to do with the subsequent development of the camp into a center of mass murder. IG Farben opted for the Auschwitz location because it alone satisfied three criteria: (1) it complied with the regime's insistence on siting a new buna plant in Silesia and thus deprived the government of a possible reason to break Farben's monopoly over this lucrative product; (2) it lay near necessary supplies of water, coal, and lime and athwart far-reaching river and railroad connections; and (3) it was flat and expansive enough to permit the construction of a vast integrated installation to turn out not only buna but many related, saleable by-products of acetylene chemistry. In the eyes of Farben's managers, only a site of which (2) and (3) could be said would enable the concern eventually to offset the high costs of (1). In this context, the prospective labor supply was a matter of secondary importance, since it would have to be imported to almost any location in sparsely settled Silesia. That circumstance helps explain both why the site was selected before the prospect of using camp labor emerged and why the firm's leaders scarcely batted an eye when it did. Thereafter, however, the desire to provide the concern with workers and to lure other industrial customers to the region stoked Heinrich Himmler's interest in expanding the camp, while the need to demonstrate progress on the construction prompted Farben's managers to engage in ever more brutal treatment of the enslaved labor force, a trend that was duplicated by other German industries in 1942-44. ₁₀ In other words, in the context of the Nazi dictatorship, long-term commercial calculations weighed in favor of barbaric decisions on the part of IG Farben, which, in turn, encouraged the Nazi Reich's barbarism. Similarly, the concern's desire to stave off the regime's demand that the output of "civilian" products, such as aspirin and film, be transferred to competitors' underused plants in occupied Europe also encouraged Farben to seek out forced laborers for its factories in Germany proper. ₁₁

If these are the central interpretive accomplishments of my book, it must be admitted that they add up to an extensive revision of the pre-existing narrative of the history of the German chemical industry in the Weimar and Nazi periods, but not to a major departure from it. In the years since the publication of Industry and Ideology, however, a number of other researchers have begun to lay the basis for analyses that reach out beyond the questions that preoccupied me. To date, it seems to me that their works fall into two broad categories. The first encompasses those studies that extend our knowledge forward and backward from the history of IG Farben and which take up some important, less primarily political issues than I did, notably the underpinnings of inventiveness and the post-1945 institutional and ideological transitions within the chemical industry. Jeffrey Johnson and Ray Stokes are the foremost American practitioners in this vein. ₁₂ To them, one now must add Jonathan Wiesen, whose research is illuminating the mentalities of German industrial leaders in the aftermath of Nazi era, and Rainer Karlsch, who is laying bare the fate of the chemical industry in the Soviet zone of occupation. ₁₃

The second group of newer works consists of those that deepen our knowledge of developments and decisions by focusing on either of two vital elements in the industry's history: the technical and the personal. Indeed, a salutary turn toward the technical has taken place in the literature of late, a trend toward writing detailed histories of specific product lines and toward recovering particular states of the art at given moments so that we can grasp the context in which the industry's leaders, most of whom saw themselves primarily as scientists and engineers, forged their strategies. Noteworthy in this connection are Ray Stokes' illuminating work on the consequences and implications of the change in the industry's feedstock from coal to oil after World War II; Peter Morris' writings on acetylene chemistry, which throw doubt especially on IG Farben's efficiency in promoting research; John Lesch's fine forthcoming study of the history of sulfa drugs; and Anthony Travis's recent volume on the origins of the synthetic dyes industry. ₁₄ We are also witnessing, though less explicitly as yet, a rediscovery of the importance of attention to the personal factor in the history of the chemical industry. Despite some recent works in business history that downplay the decisiveness of individuals to the course of policy, such as Neil Gregor's otherwise fine forthcoming work on Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich, the examples of such figures as Berthold Beitz and Paul Reusch remind us of the capacity of particular leaders to evade or deflect the trends of events, even in Nazi Germany. ₁₅ Besides, outcomes are not the only matters of interest to a historian. As the example of Fritz Roessler of the Degussa corporation suggests, understanding how individuals interpreted the realities surrounding them can give us access to the tone and texture of an era, to a knowledge of what could not have happened. ₁₆

Despite these obvious signs of progress, much remains to be done in writing the history of the German chemical industry. Two distinct lines of inquiry impress me as especially promising and necessary. My book pointed the way toward one of these, but the suggestion has not been taken up adequately, I believe. We need to take far greater interest in the financial aspects of the industry, to learn much more about their influence on developments. Mark Spoerer's recent dissertation on corporate profits in Nazi Germany, which argues that they were, in fact, higher than in the prosperous years of the late 1920s, may be open to challenge, but it also suggests how one can enter this highly pertinent realm of analysis and the sorts of conclusions to which that can lead. ₁₇

As to the second direction in which research should move, I am struck that the most obvious course remains the most necessary to pursue. We badly need more disinterested analytical histories of important firms, of Degussa and Henkel above all, but also of Schering and Merck, the Ruettgerswerke and Deutsche Solvay, and Bemberg and Vereinigte Glanzstoff. The only such work currently in the offing, so far as I know, is a dissertation on Schering by Christopher Kobrak of the Ecole Superieure de Commerce de Paris. It promises not only to explain such specific matters as why that Berlin firm became the first major one in Germany to employ Jewish forced labor in 1940, but also to demonstrate the general value of a business school professor's perspective. Taking his cue from Alfred Chandler (although Scale and Scope does not quite demonstrate the courage of the author's convictions in this regard), Kobrak is in the process of using the example of Schering to indicate that German chemical companies may have failed to exhibit an organizational innovation to match their technical inventiveness. Of course, the firm that cries out for detailed treatment, especially during the Nazi period, is Degussa, in view of its ties to the regime via Henkel, its invention and co-ownership of Zyklon B, its adroit navigation of the occupation period, its postwar success, and its well stocked archive.

Corporate histories, however, have fallen out of favor among specialists on both sides of the Atlantic, so there is no telling how long we shall have to wait for the essential monographs to appear. This is all the more unfortunate today, as the Ruhr is being repastoralized and the workings of technologies and markets are fulfilling at least some of Henry Morgenthau's dreams, since we may be coming to recognize that chemicals, not coal, iron, and steel, have proven to be the quintessential modern German industry, the one whose study continues to pay the highest dividends in understanding the changing course of modern German history.

Notes

Note 1: For a survey of the literature, see Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. xiv-xviii, 1-5. Back.

Note 2: L. F. Haber, The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Back.

Note 3: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hilters' Willing Executioners (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). Back.

Note 4: For an elaboration of the effects of this preference, see Peter Hayes, "Carl Bosch and Carl Krauch: Chemistry and the Political Economy of Germany, 1925-1945," Journal of Economic History, v. 47 (1987), pp. 353-63. Back.

Note 5: For further development of this argument, see Peter Hayes, "David Abraham's Second Collapse," Business History Review, v. 61 (1987), esp. pp. 462-68, and "Fritz Roessler and Nazism: The Observations of a German Industrialist 1930-37," Central European History, v. 20 (1987), esp. pp. 67-74. Back.

Note 6: See Richard Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 183-200, 211-12; and, on Kimmich, Lothar Gall et al., Die Deutsche Bank 1870-1995 (Muenchen: Beck, 1995), pp. 332-33. Back.

Note 7: See Gottfried Plumpe, Die I. G. Farbenindustrie AG: Wirtschaft, Technik und Politik 1904-1945 (Berlin, 1990), pp. 296-338, and Harold James, The German Slump (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Back. chemicals, not coal, iron, and steel, have

Note 8: See Hayes, Industry and Ideology, pp. 165-66, 326-27. Back.

Note 9: See Peter Hayes and Hans Deichmann, "Standort Auschwitz: Eine Kontroverse über die Entscheidungsgründe für den Bau des I. G. Farben-Werks in Auschwitz," 1999: Zeitschrift für Sozialgeschichte, v. 11 (1996), pp. 79-101; Peter Hayes, "IG-Farben und IG-Farben Prozess. Zur Verwicklung eines Grosskonzerns in die nationalsozialistischen Verbrechen," in Fritz Bauer Institut (ed.), Auschwitz: Geschichte, Rezeption und Wirkung. Jahrbuch 1996 (Campus, 1996), pp. 99-121; and idem., "Die IG Farben und die Zwangsarbeit von KZ-Häftlingen im Werk Auschwitz," in Hermann Kaienburg (ed.), Konzentrationslager und deutsche Wirtschaft (Lesko & Budrich, 1996), pp. 129-48. Back.

Note 10: See Neil Gregor's Forthcoming study of Daimler-Benz (Yale University Press, 1998). Back.

Note 11: See Peter Hayes, "La stratégie industrielle de l'I.G. Farben en France occupée, Histoire, Economie, et Société, v. 11 (1992), pp. 493-514. Back.

Note 12: Jeffrey Johnson, The Kaiser's Chemists: Science and Modernization in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); and Raymond Stokes, Divide and Prosper: The Heirs of I.G. Farben under Allied Authority, 1945-1951 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Back.

Note 13: See Jonathan Wiesen, "Overcoming Nazism: Big Business, Public Relations, and the Politics of Memory, 1945-50," Central European History, v. 29 (1996), pp. 201-26; Rainer Karlsch, "Von der Schering AG zum VEB Berlin Ghemie," in Johannes Baehr and Wolfram Fischer (eds.), Wirtschaft im geteilten Berlin (Berlin: 1995); and their respective contributions here. Back.

Note 14: Raymond Stokes, Opting for Oil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Peter Morris, "The Development of Acetylene Chemistry and Synthetic Rubber by I.G. Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft: 1926-1945" (D. Phil. Dissertation, University of Oxford, 1982); and Anthony Travis, The Rainbow Makers (Bethlehem, Pa.: 1993). Back.

Note 15: See Bernd Schmalhausen, Berthold Beitz im Dritten Reich (Essen: Peter Pomp, 1991). Back.

Note 16: See Hayes, "Fritz Roessler and Nazism," Central European History, v. 20 (1987), pp. 58-79. Back.

Note 17: Mark Spoerer, "From Paper Profits to Armaments Boom: the Profitability of German Independent Stock Corporations 1925-41" (Ph.D. Dissertation, Bonn, 1995). Back.