The Academic-Industrial Symbiosis in German Chemical Research, 1905-1939

Jeffrey Johnson

Center for German and European Studies, University of California at Berkeley

May 1997

Abstract

This paper discusses academic-industrial relations in German chemical research from 1905 to the eve of World War II, considering four periods: the decade before World War I, the years of total war and postwar crisis (1916-1923), the renewed crisis (1929-1933), and finally the Nazi years. These periods saw, respectively, the creation of academic-style research laboratories with substantial industrial support; the emergence of industrially-funded organizations to subsidize chemical literature and educational institutions (as well as research); reductions in support for these organizations and in subsidies for contracted academic collaborators, but the expansion of postdoctoral fellowships funded by I.G. Farben; and finally the politicization and militarization of the academic-industrial symbiosis under National Socialism.

Jeffrey Allan Johnson, Dept. of History, Villanova University

[Working Paper from Conference on the German Chemical Industry in the Twentieth Century Center for German and European Studies, University of California, Berkeley, March 1997]

Despite common assertions that the German chemical industry achieved world leadership during the late nineteenth century in large part because of its symbiotic relationship with German academic chemists -- whereby I mean a close, mutually profitable relationship of cooperation on many levels --, many aspects of that cooperation and the origins of industrial research itself remain obscure, their details only beginning to emerge from industrial and academic archives. ₁ With few exceptions, the twentieth-century development of the academic-industrial symbiosis after 1914 is even more obscure. ₂ Critical developments in the shaping and reshaping of the symbiosis occurred in four periods: the decade before World War I, the later war years and postwar crisis from 1916 to 1923, the political-economic crisis years from 1929 to 1933, and finally the Nazi years after 1933.

The characteristic results of these changes, which extended the institutional scope of the academic-industrial symbiosis, were the creation of academic-style research laboratories with substantial industrial support during the first period; the emergence of industrially-funded organizations to support chemical literature and educational institutions (as well as research) during the second period; the cutting-back of support for such organizations, along with contractual subsidies for individual academic chemists, during the third period, while the I.G. Farben monopoly moved toward directly subsidizing academic assistantships for potential future employees; and finally the politicization and militarization of the academic-industrial symbiosis under National Socialism. (Note that I will not here consider the chemical industry's contributions to research or academic institutions in general, only those specifically relating to chemistry.) After a brief review of the prewar decade, which I have already discussed in another work, ₃ I shall consider in more detail developments from 1916 to the 1930s. Although academic chemistry in Germany did receive significant support from industry as a result of these developments, especially from the dye chemical firms that in 1925 formed I.G. Farben, in the process a form of institutional patronage was created that was far more centralized than before and gave the leaders of the I.G. a strategic position in the leadership of the supporting institutions, thus conferring on themselves tremendous potential influence on the development of academic chemistry in Germany. What was the impact of industrial influence on that development, and how in turn did this affect the process of industrial innovation? Could productivity have improved in certain fields, but at the cost of greater theoretical conservatism? I shall consider this question in my conclusion.

1. From the turn of the century to 1914

The crucial transition during the prewar decade was to be from subsidies by individual firms for individual researchers toward collective subsidies for chemical laboratories, organizations, or the profession as a whole. This transition in turn arose out of a simultaneous move from competition toward consolidation in the industry, so that the leaders of the concentration movement, which first peaked around 1905, were also leaders of the subsidizing organizations.

At the turn of the century, the academic-industrial symbiosis still primarily consisted of its classical core, which had developed in the course of the nineteenth century, mainly in the coaltar dye industry. That core lay in a threefold relationship: the personal ties between industrial chemists and their former mentors or fellow students in academe, exemplified in the relationship of A. W. von Hofmann and Carl Martius of the AG für Anilinfabrikation (Agfa) dye works, ties that were in part maintained by professional organizations like the Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft (German Chemical Society, fd. 1867) and the Verein Deutscher Chemiker (Association of German Chemists, fd. 1887 as the Deutsche Gesellschaft für angewandte Chemie); the interchange of expertise for research support, which often occurred as a direct outgrowth of personal connections (and even direct research collaboration) and took the form of research results or expert opinions provided by the academic chemists in return for money, chemicals and other supplies, and sometimes assistants, originally in an informal way but increasingly through formal consulting contracts; and thirdly the educational link, whereby academics supplied trained manpower to a growing, science-based industry. ₄

Academic chemists did not, however, necessarily benefit directly from all the expertise being accumulated within the industry as it developed its own in-house research capabilities. During the 1890s, a period when the academic interest in the classical organic chemistry of relatively simple compounds (including dyes) was at its most intense, Eugen Bamberger, who had been trained by the old master of dye compounds Adolf von Baeyer, confessed to his friend Carl Duisberg, research director at the Elberfelder Farbenfabriken (Bayer Dye Factories), that the hoped Duisberg's company would eventually publish some of its dye secrets so that academic chemists could use them. Duisberg, who had worked very hard to catch up to older and larger companies such as the BASF and Hoechst by developing in-house research as well as by cultivating contractual relationships with as many leading academic chemists as possible, replied that patent law and commercial reasons made it impossible to publish most in-house work, except perhaps in twenty years. ₅ Indeed, the massive internal history of the firm compiled some fifteen years after this correspondence was printed for internal use but not published, in part apparently because the directors felt it contained too many trade secrets. Thus much of industrial dye research had already become "internalized" and independent of academic chemists. ₆

One can get some sense of the relative significance of in-house and external collaboration for the dye companies before 1914 from the annual reports of the Agfa corporation in Berlin to its Aufsichtsrat (supervisory board), which indicate the sources of the company's patent registrations. Although among the first to establish its own research laboratory, Agfa was the smallest of the top five dye corporations and was perhaps therefore potentially more dependent on outside academic research. As late as 1909 43 percent of Agfa's patent registrations (mainly for dye processes) came from the work of "auswärtiger Mitarbeitern" (outside collaborators under contract) as well as other inventors outside the firm, yet the proportion had been much lower at the beginning of the decade, and the significance of such outside research fell off rapidly in the next three years (cf. Table 1).

Table 1: Sources of inventions for Agfa's German patent registrations, 1901-1912^*, ₇

By the turn of the century, not only had the academic-industrial symbiosis begun to be attractive to other fields, which sought to emulate the coal-tar dye model, but the very success of the coal-tar dye symbiosis had led to growth that was beginning to transform the basis for the symbiosis. In particular, the leading dye firms had finally achieved commercially viable syntheses of the most important vegetable dye, indigo, as well as the introduction of an important new synthetic dye group, the vat dyes. As dye companies intensified their research efforts without further corresponding major breakthroughs, it became clear that the emerging "mass production" in dye research was expensive and provided limited returns, so that outside academic collaborators would be increasingly unlikely to offer what the dye industry itself could not produce (see Table 2). Accordingly, the companies were becoming increasingly diversified in their product lines, developing or at least considering processes in related fields of pharmaceuticals, photochemicals, bio-organic chemicals, and inorganic or electrochemicals. This required collaboration with chemists in subfields that were less familiar to their technical directors, such as physical chemistry or biochemistry, and was thus inherently riskier through in some cases (fixation of atmospheric nitrogen, synthetic rubber) it offered enormous potential returns. The rapidly growing firms were also becoming more bureaucratic in their organization, while minimizing competition through mergers and cooperative agreements, which peaked with the formation of two major competing groups, the "Little I.G." (Agfa-BASF-Bayer) and Hoechst-Cassella (later also including Kalle) following Carl Duisberg's proposal to organize a dye trust in 1903. The larger pharmaceuticals firms followed suit with their own Pharma I.G. Moreover, the nature of academic chemical research itself had changed, both intellectually and institutionally. Inevitably, the academic-industrial symbiosis would change as well. Over the three decades beginning about 1904-05, the pattern of academic-industrial relations was reshaped by a series of reorganizations and reforms carried out by academic and industrial chemists, businessmen, and key government bureaucrats, often in concert, but sometimes in opposition as their interests clashed. Nevertheless the leading role on the industrial side continued to be played by men who had been trained as chemists and retained a sense of identity with and loyalty to science. Duisberg and E. A. Merck both took leading roles in the Association of German Chemists; Arthur von Weinberg of Cassella would recall that during fifty years in the industry he had always kept his original resolution "to stay loyal to science" and to emphasize the dye industry's "chemical foundation as a main point." ₈

Table 2: Numbers of new dyes tested and marketed by leading dye firms ₉

To some extent the businessmen in the German Chemical Industry Association (Verein zur Wahrung der Interessen der chemischen Industrie Deutschlands, fd. 1877) had helped to promote the expansion of chemical research facilities in German universities during the 1890s by exerting political pressure on the parsimonious Prussian Finance Ministry to approve the money to build a new, large institute for Emil Fischer in Berlin. This was, however, chiefly an isolated tribute to Fischer's scientific prestige and to his commercial and personal ties to industrial circles. During this period, however, a precedent for a more formal type of academic-industrial collaboration in support of chemical institutions emerged when the Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft (German Chemical Society) sought to recruit industrial contributions to build its new headquarters in Berlin, the Hofmann House. Because these did not suffice to pay for the building, a Hofmann-Haus-Gesellschaft (Hofmann House Society) was formed by a small group of wealthy businessmen who agreed to contribute substantial loans to be repaid at low interest. This organization represented the first collective industrial investment in the German chemical profession. As the Chemical Society in the 1890s under Fischer's leadership had centralized and expanded its literary enterprises, taking over the Beilstein guide to the literature of organic chemical compounds and the Chemisches Zentralblatt (chemical abstracts journal), there was no immediate need for further industrial subsidies because the scale of the literature was still relatively small, but it was growing rapidly (the total number of known organic compounds doubled and then doubled again from about 1890 to 1910), while the Society's membership was not.

During the prewar decade, following the first wave of industrial consolidation and in response to pressure by the Prussian and Imperial German governments to supplement official funding for academic research along the lines of an "American model" of business endowments for scientific institutions, academic chemists and business leaders (many themselves trained as chemists) cooperated to create three Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes (KWIs) for research in general chemistry, physical chemistry and electrochemistry, and coal research, within the framework of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft (KWG, est. 1911), which represented a new form of private (mainly industrial) funding organization. The scientific work in these institutions was to be "free research," i.e. what was later called basic research, and the organizations to fund them were to represent the industry as a whole, featuring limited risk and cost to individual firms in the development of fields which offered a significant possibility of long-term payoffs yet were not necessarily likely to produce directly patentable processes or products in the short term. This came at a time when the industry itself was exploring new fields, e.g. synthetic rubber (Bayer) and synthetic ammonia (BASF); of these, only the latter involved a successful collaboration with academic chemists. ₁₀ Although the academic proponents' original idea had been for a unified Imperial Chemical Institute (Reichsanstalt), divisions within the chemical industry and between it and heavy industry made this impossible; each of the three new institutes was funded by a different source. The dye industry's funds went mainly to the KWI for Chemistry through the Association for the Promotion of Chemical Research (Verein zur Förderung Chemischer Forschung, known from 1908 to 1913 as the Verein Chemische Reichsanstalt); the KWI for Physical Chemistry (directed by Fritz Haber, academic developer of the BASF's ammonia process), was funded by the Prussian government and Leopold Koppel (a gasworks executive in Berlin) through his Koppel Foundation; finally, the coal institute was separately funded by the coal industry and the city of Mühlheim. ₁₁

The discussions over the creation of a Reichsanstalt also brought out the need for research grants to individual academic scientists, which led to the creation of a small fund in the Association of German Chemists as well as a larger fund based on the contribution of Cassella's Leo Gans to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft (the Cassella directors had refused subsidize the initial plan for a Reichsanstalt). Moreover, Cassella supported the chemotherapeutic research of Paul Ehrlich in Frankfurt, and the 60,000 marks it might otherwise have used for the Reichsanstalt went to the German Chemical Society instead to form the core for a literature endowment to support the publication of the exponentially-growing Beilstein enterprise. ₁₂ The debate over the founding of national chemical laboratories had thus produced the seeds of national funds not only for research laboratories, but also for literature and research fellowships. All three of these ideas would provide models for later, much larger funds during the postwar era.

II. Organizational reform in total war and its aftermath (1916-1923)

a. Consolidation during the war

During the war began a move toward the creation of new industry-supported academic research institutes and grants institutions, made this impossible; each of the three new instcoming like the prewar reforms in the wake of a major move toward industrial consolation, in this case the organization of the so-called "expanded I.G.," a loose merger of the previously competing major dye groups along with the remaining large independent producers, including the Griesheim-Elektron electrochemicals firm, in 1916. This occurred in the context of a war in which chemistry had already gained tremendously in status as a pillar of the German war effort. The export-oriented dye firms had more than made up for the loss of their world dye market by transforming themselves into producers of nitrates, explosives, and chemical weapons, turning their talents from peaceful international competition to war. ₁₃ Meanwhile, the KWIs which had emerged before the war proved to be extremely useful centers for war-oriented research as Fritz Haber was given a free hand by the military and the KWG to transform Dahlem into a center for chemical warfare research and development, and the KWI for Coal Research in Mülheim became a model research center for strategic raw materials. From these experiences emerged ideas for a series of industry-based KWIs in other branches, ₁₄ as well as the Kaiser Wilhelm Stiftung für Kriegstechnische Wissenschaft (KWKW -- Kaiser Wilhelm Foundation for Military and Technical Science), funded by Leopold Koppel with 2 million marks and principally organized by Fritz Haber with the cooperation of the Prussian government and the military. Its purpose was to coordinate academic research on behalf of the military and to establish what Haber hoped would be a lasting relationship between industry, science, and the military. Emil Fischer, Nernst, and Haber all chaired KWKW committees related to their special areas. ₁₅

On the industrial side War Corporations were formed in strategically significant branches of industry, in part as voluntary associations of the major producers and in part with the support and coordination of the military and the Imperial government. Their main purpose was to secure necessary raw materials and substitutes (Ersatzstoffe) for war production, and for the most part they made no effort to promote research, although some did have academic specialists as advisors. For example, the Kriegsschmieröl G.m.b.H. (War Lubricating Oil Corporation) did set up a Scientific Advisory Board whose members include Carl Engler of Karlsruhe College of Technology, Germany's leading petroleum specialist, and Franz Fischer of the KWI for Coal Research. Unfortunately, the common cause occasionally suffered when the scholars involved came into conflicts that in part arose from their representation of competing industrial interests, e.g. the coal vs. the lignite producers. ₁₆ The dye industry was able to achieve considerable unity of interest at an early stage as the BASF undertook to produce ammonia and to convert it into nitrates for explosives, and all the other leading companies set up various types of facilities for military production.

b. Consulting relationships and patents

Recognizing the likelihood that it would be extremely difficult for them to recover their lost markets after the war, especially in view of the enthusiastic efforts by their chief opponents (British, French, and later the Americans) to set up their own dye production facilities, the dyeworks organized their I.G. as a means of enhancing postwar competitiveness. For the duration of the war they had to practically suspend their dye (and pharmaceutical) research efforts, and the unusual conditions greatly diminished academic research in non-military-related areas as well, thus leaving only a tiny remnant of the old prewar academic-industrial research connection in operation. One must exercise some caution in dealing with the first set of figures (Table 3 a), in that so-called "war patents" were not publicly registered, so that these numbers exaggerate the actual decline of inventive activity. Moreover, the drop-off in total patents is in part attributable to the reduction in numbers of potential foreign patentees among Germany's wartime opponents. Unfortunately the earlier patent statistics I have used do not distinguish between German and non-German sources. During the inflation after the war, there was a steady revival of in-house patent activity as well as (at least in Agfa) a temporary increase in the proportion of patents based on outside collaboration, perhaps because it took time for the industrial researchers to readjust to peacetime work (Table 3 c, d). By 1924, however, the dye laboratories were again producing large numbers of dyes; Agfa's labs, for example, produced fewer new dye compounds than before the war, but marketed a higher percentage of them, suggesting that the research techniques had become more precise and efficient.

The enhanced support from industry in the early 1920s was especially helpful to academic collaborators hard-pressed by the inflation. From 1921 on, for example, Griesheim-Elektron provided financial support and an assistant for Karl Schaum, the professor of physical chemistry at Giessen. Schaum thanked the firm's director for support "well beyond the contract" (even though he had not yet produced any "fruits" for the factory), calling it a "sign of the understanding of industry both for the condition of academic teachers as well as for the significance of the relations between praxis and laboratory work." Of course, in return Schaum had to submit his publications to the firm in advance, and the assistant was supposed to work only on behalf of the firm. ₁₇ Yet as industrial research facilities continued to develop during the interwar period, the relative insecurity of academic positions made industrial jobs increasingly tempting for young academic chemists. Thus the organic chemist Richard Willstätter eventually complained to Carl Duisberg that the quality of academic chemistry was suffering because "the best men are in industry." ₁₈

Table 3 a. Total numbers of German patent registrations in dyes, pharmaceuticals, photochemicals, electrochemical processes, and related fields ₁₉

Table 3 b. Sources of inventions for Agfa patent registrations, 1913-1919 ₂₀

Table 3 c. Sources of inventions for Agfa patent registrations, 1920-1926

Table 3 d. Numbers of dyes tested and marketed by Agfa, 1920-1926 ₂₁

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c. Reshaping the chemical funding organizations

Nevertheless the dye corporations' war profits, coming from their ability to cover more than three-quarters of the military's explosives needs by the end of the war, ₂₂ provided capital that could be used to enhance the academic-industrial symbiosis in a different form. Chemical education was the first beneficiary. In 1916 came the founding of the Liebig-Stipendien-Verein (Liebig Fellowships Association), with Carl Duisberg as chair and both academic and industrial chemists on the fellowship review board, including Emil Fischer. In the fall of 1918, just before war's end, Duisberg set up the Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Förderung des chemischen Unterrichts (Degun, German Society for the Promotion of Chemical Education), whose task would be to collect industrial contributions to supplement the official budgets of academic chemical training laboratories. The motivating expectation for this organization was that a huge influx of chemistry students, four years of school graduates in one, would flood into the academic teaching laboratories after the war, and that the state ministries of education would be unable to provide sufficient funds to the laboratory directors to cope with the emergency situation. This expectation proved to be correct. Duisberg's principal academic ally was Fischer's former student, Alfred Stock, an inorganic chemist who in 1916 became permanent scientific member of the KWI for Chemistry in Dahlem, which he would take over as director in 1921. In December 1917 Duisberg's Association of German Chemists had forwarded a memorandum by Stock to Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, the recently appointed Prussian minister of education; while referring to the Liebig fund as an example of industrial readiness to support science, Stock's memorandum also called for massive increases in government aid to chemical education after the war, taking as a basic assumption that the ratio of students to assistants should not exceed 20/1, the approximate prewar figure. ₂₃ The latter prospect clearly did not excite the bureaucrats. In the spring of 1918 Stock then undertook on behalf of the government and the Verband der Laboratoriumsvorstände an deutschen Hochschulen (Association of [Chemical] Laboratory Directors in German Higher Education, fd. 1897 as a private examining group) to survey the prospective postwar financial needs of all 96 academic chemical institutes in German higher education, to verify expected shortfalls in their regular official budgets simply for education, excluding research expenses (cf. Table 4). These issues were discussed at meetings of chemical industry representatives called by Schmidt-Ott, who made it clear that the state governments would not be prepared to cover the extra postwar costs; industry was expected to cover the academic deficits.

Table 4: Estimates (June 1918) of the extra costs of postwar academic chemical training (to be covered by industrial contributions) ₂₄

In the field of chemical literature, the fiftieth anniversary of the Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft in 1917 brought the creation of an Industrial Jubilee Fund which by 1918 had collected 2 million marks to subsidize the main chemical reference publications (the Zentralblatt abstracts journal, the Beilstein handbook of literature on organic compounds, and the Gmelin handbook of inorganic compounds). This fund seemed huge by prewar standards, but by 1920 postwar inflation was already making it look small.

It is interesting to consider how clearly the German planners, notably Carl Duisberg but also many other industrial and academic chemists involved, foresaw the necessity of massive postwar subsidies for chemical science -- even on the assumption that Germany would win the war. They anticipated the postwar inflation, and they also anticipated a major "cold war" in chemistry, especially against the Americans with their huge financial resources. Even if the latter threat was played up partly for the rhetorical purpose of rallying contributions, just as it had been used before the war to get support for the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft, the Germans had already seen the lengths to which their competitors would go, e.g. the American confiscation of German patent rights and formerly German-owned companies. Yet as most of the Germans still anticipated a victory almost to the bitter end of the war, they could not foresee how drastic the postwar political-economic crisis would be. When the collapse came, however, Duisberg kept his head. Using the slogan that German recovery could come only through scientific research and the best possible training of the next generation, firmly opposing the proposal by Hoechst's (non-chemist) representatives to the I.G. board to dissolve the Degun, and moving as quickly as possible to gather in corporate pledges before their first-quarter 1919 earnings reports came in, Duisberg was able to ensure the initial financial security of the Degun and thus secure industrial subsidies for academic chemical training. ₂₅

One can see here a degree of continuity with the prewar period in personalities, institutions, and views. The major differences were first, the clear recognition brought by the war that even "peacetime chemistry" could easily become a military weapon; second, the extreme heightening of international scientific tensions that the integration of the scientists into the war had brought about; and third, the financial catastrophe for science that Germany's loss of the war would bring. The first two differences made it easier to persuade industry (and the educational bureaucracy) to support academic chemistry on nationalist grounds, even while German scientific communications with former colleagues and friends abroad would be disrupted during and for a time after the war; and the last made it essential for academic chemists to seek major increases in subsidies from industry (and if possible from government). Another difference, whose full significance only gradually became clear, was the continuing exponential increase in the scale of international chemical research in the postwar era; this would in turn make the task of maintaining the competitiveness of German academic chemistry increasingly difficult. The large war profits of the industry, together with a republican tax policy that favored industrial philanthropy more than before the war, also helped make it easier for the companies to make initial endowments. ₂₆ Even so, Duisberg and his allies did not easily persuade those directors who identified themselves as businessmen rather than as chemists.

As the initial postwar crisis broke and deepened in early 1919, with the creation of a German republic tottering on the edge of civil war, the savings of the old middle class already eroding along with what little faith they might have had in the new government, some of the intellectual leaders of the old regime tried to move to provide national subsidies to German scientists. In 1920 Fritz Haber and Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, the last of the Prussian monarchy's education ministers and one of the bureaucrats who had played a central role in the establishment of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, organized the Notgemeinschaft der deutschen Wissenschaft (Emergency Community of German Science), ₂₇ which like the much smaller prewar Gans Endowment for chemistry was to funnel government research grants to all fields of German science. The Notgemeinschaft was to be supported by industry as well, through an Endowment Association of German Industry led by Carl Friedrich von Siemens of the Siemens electrical concern, but industry was to have little control over the actual allocation of grants. Schmidt-Ott with his dictatorial leadership was to make the Notgemeinschaft a surrogate of the old Prussian educational bureaucracy, and specialized academic grants committees in each field were supposed to ensure that the funds were put to the best scientific use, based on professional criteria. By placing the main emphasis on national government funding and on an industry-wide (rather than specialized) grants organization, Haber hoped to avoid subjecting academic scientists to what he called "the hopeless prospect" of "an industrial autocracy in scientific work," which he feared would result if they were continually forced to beg for subsidies from businessmen. ₂₈ Haber had by this time been confronted with a particularly distressing example of "industrial autocracy," as Carl Duisberg used his influence and the political-economic weight of the I.G. firms to prevent Haber from being appointed Emil Fischer's successor as professor and director of the First Chemical Institute at the University of Berlin. Duisberg claimed that to put a physical chemist at the top of Germany's largest chemical institute would complete the "downfall of the great German chemical industry, already sealed by the war and the peace treaty." ₂₉

In the same year, however, Carl Duisberg and his friends in the chemical industry established three new funding organizations whose express purpose was to ensure that the chemical industry would be able to direct its support for academic science according to its own judgment. To Arthur von Weinberg of Cassella, as to Duisberg, the Notgemeinschaft was an "overcentralization" that would "damage the common effort to help," and it would be "much better if the various industries act separately, handling research institutes separately from higher education." ₃₀ In this spirit, the three new organizations, named respectively after Justus Liebig, Adolf von Baeyer, and Emil Fischer (who had just died in 1919), were to support chemical education, literature, and research respectively. ₃₁ All the new associations were based on the funding organizations that had emerged before and during the war, but with some significant differences. In each case, their administrative boards consisted of academic and industrial chemists, but the chairmen were all leading industrialists of the I.G. Members provided capital endowments or paid annual dues on the model of the prewar Verein Chemische Reichsanstalt, which had acted like a scientific corporation in which larger investors received more voting shares, up to a limit of ten; but the postwar funding organizations took this principle much farther, conferring multiple votes on members in proportion to their investments and thus attracting large sums, with the lion's share coming of course from the leading I.G. firms themselves.

The Verein zur Förderung chemischer Forschung, which supported the KWI for Chemistry, was reorganized into the Emil-Fischer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung chemischer Forschung (Emil Fischer Society for the Promotion of Chemical Research), under Weinberg; its purview was in theory broadened to include Haber's KWI for Physical Chemistry as well as occasionally deserving researchers in other institutions, but in practice only the KWI for Chemistry received support. Meanwhile, the Jubilee Endowment of the German Chemical Society was integrated into the new Adolf Baeyer Gesellschaft zur Förderung der chemischen Literatur under Carl Bosch of the BASF; its purpose was to subsidize the publications of the Society. Finally, Duisberg himself consolidated the Liebig-Stipendien-Verein with the Degun to form the Justus-Liebig-Gesellschaft zur Förderung des chemischen Unterrichts, whose initial, ambitious goal was to subsidize every institute for academic chemical training in German higher education. Here, ironically, the Verband der Laboratoriumsvorstände was represented on the board and worked in direct cooperation with the chair, Duisberg, whose 1890s campaign for a state examination had been terminated by the Verband's founding. ₃₂

Alfred Stock's postwar fundraising appeals to industry on behalf of academic chemical science were explicitly nationalist and power-oriented, leaving behind the prewar ideal of peaceful competition. To Hoechst, for example, he echoed Francis Bacon's oft-quoted equation of knowledge and power, giving it an economic twist calculated to appeal to businessmen. " `Scientia est potentia': `science is power und economic strength.' Bacon's word must especially encourage our oppressed fatherland, because almost all other sources of its strength have been overwhelmed." ₃₃ But what did the businessmen expect to gain by supporting chemical science? An older Marxist argument claimed essentially that the monopolistic leaders of the chemical industry were transforming academic chemical laboratories into extensions of their own research departments. ₃₄ This is exaggerated. In 1920 Duisberg, the key organizer of the postwar system, explained his expectations to Ernst Beckmann, then still director of the KWI for Chemistry: "In my opinion one should not see the tasks of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes as solving important problems for industry, but rather as opening new perspectives through free scientific research. Whether and how industry utilizes these new perspectives for its own purposes should be the business of industry alone and not influence the direction of scientific research." ₃₅

By the end of 1920 the chemical industry had established endowments of 10-20 million marks for each of the three main funding groups -- an amazing capital investment by prewar standards, considering that the entire Kaiser Wilhelm Society had had only about fifteen million marks' endowment when the war broke out; but it would nevertheless all vanish in the coming hyperinflation. As the inflation intensified to its climax in late 1923, however, the industrial funding organizations did provide substantial aid to German chemical science in the emergency. How effective was this aid?

It is worth comparing the grants strategy of the Notgemeinschaft, under Haber's influence, to the approach taken by the Duisberg-led Liebig-Gesellschaft. The Liebig-Gesellschaft awarded grants to almost all German chemical institutes in 1920, 1921, and 1922 (the last grants allocated in September); fellowships were also given during this period, but by 1922 the funds had shrunk so that few new ones could be awarded. In October 1922 the organization agreed not to award any more institute grants except in special cases (three only in 1923-24); this policy was continued in 1923, when it became clear that several institutes had tried futilely to use their previous grants as reserves, which were then wiped out by the hyperinflation. However, in 1922 a policy of lending money to institutes to establish apparatus "lending stations" (Leihstellen) for labs was set up to help students cope with escalating costs. ₃₆ In moving toward subsidizing the costs of apparatus through lending, the Liebig-Gesellschaft was perhaps unconsciously following a wiser policy developed earlier for the Notgemeinschaft by Fritz Haber. This strategy was to subsidize individual laboratories not with money, but with specific pieces of expensive apparatus in response to specific applications. Moreover, the apparatus was not awarded outright, but on loan, remaining property of the Notgemeinschaft for future use. This approach left the organization with an increasingly valuable stock of equipment that could be reused for other purposes, ₃₇ admittedly an approach that lent itself more to the thinking of a physical chemist, who required much expensive apparatus, than an organic chemist like Duisberg, who thought mainly in terms of vast quantities of chemical reagents. This was only one aspect of the differences between Duisberg's thinking and Haber's. To Duisberg, physical chemists were mainly theorists, not productive chemists, so that when the organic chemist Richard Willstätter opened a section for physical chemistry in this Munich university chemical institute during the first years after the war, Duisberg told him that "we have to export compounds now, not theories." As Willstätter wryly recalled, "Haber's ammonia synthesis did not happen to strike him just then." ₃₈

As stabilization was achieved in the fall of 1923, with the big endowments gone the way of wartime paper profits and new money much harder to come by, the industrial funding groups were forced to modify their strategies and reduce their subsidies. The Liebig-Gesellschaft's endowment survived in a small fragment of 100,000 Rentenmark (RM) after being put into stocks. Although this capital was raised in increments to 250,000 RM by 1926, the society was now chiefly dependent on annual dues rather than interest from its endowment. ₃₉ The Liebig-Gesellschaft could no longer award general subsidies to all academic chemical institutes, but it did continue the older policy of awarding fellowships to promising male assistants who might otherwise be forced to leave school and find a job in industry (until 1932 the organization followed a deliberate policy of excluding women from these assistantships). ₄₀ About seventy-five to eighty of these grants were awarded each year, which not only helped the recipients to extend their postdoctoral training, but also improved both the training of the younger students who worked with them and the overall research productivity of their laboratory directors. ₄₁ Apparently still concerned about industrial hegemony, Haber took Duisberg's line by advocating a competing national fund for the Notgemeinschaft to provide postdoctoral fellowships, which in 1925 he identified along with apparatus as the two most critical areas needing increased support for German scientific research. ₄₂

With stabilization Carl Bosch's Baeyer-Gesellschaft, whose capital had been reduced to a not-so-grand total of 60,000 RM, also put pressure on the German Chemical Society, "in order to bring the greatest economy into its literary enterprises while maintaining their significance for scientific specialists." This proved to be much to be much easier said than done; even with support from the Baeyer group during good years, the society ran chronic deficits (e.g. 30,000 RM on total costs of about 235,000 RM in 1927, more than half connected with the Zentralblatt). ₄₃

The Fischer-Gesellschaft, also chronically short of funds even during the relative prosperity of the late 1920s, likewise cut back on its support for the KWI for Chemistry in Dahlem, shutting parts of the institute after the mercury-poisoning illness of Alfred Stock in 1924 forced him to suspend his research (though it did temporarily support him with a subsidy of 10,000 RM for two years after he moved to Freiburg); ₄₄ after this it provided full support only for the radioactivity researches of Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn, who in 1928 took over the director's post, which he would hold through the coming war. This decision eventually proved correct with the discovery of fission.

Obviously the willingness of the chemical industry to invest in scientific chemistry through these organizations had its limits. From 1925, the directors of the new I.G. Farbenindustrie trust made it clear that they were "in no way" (keineswegs) prepared to satisfy all the growing demands of the scientists, even before the Great Depression hit in the early 1930s. As Arthur von Weinberg stated in 1928, "The chemical industry spends half a million marks every year for the Liebig, Baeyer, and Fischer Societies alone and both directly and indirectly supports science in far larger amounts besides." ₄₅ Impressive sums indeed, but within a short time they would be considerably reduced by economic crisis.

III. From postwar stabilization to renewed political-economic crisis, 1925-1933

a. Consulting relationships, in-house research, and patents

In the dye industry, as in many branches of the German economy, stabilization in 1924 brought some contractions in the white-collar staff, including chemists. Following the consolidation of the looser "expanded I.G." into I.G. Farben in 1925, there was growing pressure toward limiting research costs and centralizing research in the main laboratories of the biggest of the former independent firms, i.e. the BASF (Ludwigshafen and Oppau), Bayer (Elberfeld and Leverkusen), and Hoechst, at the expense of smaller facilities such as Agfa (except for photochemical research). This reduced the overall amount of research work in the latter even before the full-scale depression hit in the early 1930s. The I.G.'s Technical Committee repeatedly analyzed the costs of its laboratories, in an attempt to regulate and limit expenditures per chemist. Sparte 2, the main group for the traditionally research-intensive areas of dye chemistry and related fields, was a major target for cost savings, as innovations in these fields no longer seemed to offer the same returns as before. Total expenditures for experimentation in this group fell from 38.4 million marks in 1928 to 22.2 million in 1933. In Ludwigshafen, the eight laboratories of the old BASF saw budget cuts from 5.66 million (1929) to 3.63 million (1932). Despite a slight increase in the numbers of chemists employed in these labs (from about 100 to about 120, cuts in support staff and materials lowered expenditures per chemist by 46 % (55,800 to 30,200 marks) before additional cuts in 1933. ₄₆

Experimentation costs for Sparte 1, the hydrogenation group with its big basic research laboratory in Oppau, were slashed from 105.2 million marks in 1927 to 81.5 million in 1929, and by 1933 to 11.5 million, little more than a tenth of the 1927 figure. The Oppau laboratory was drastically reduced, its chemists either let go or distributed to other labs. In Sparte 3, the main group for photographic products and artificial fibers, experimentation costs were cut from 6.5 million marks (1929) to 2.7 million (1932), with additional cuts expected in 1933. ₄₇

Patent activity dropped off accordingly, bottoming in 1933 after peaking in 1930 (see Table 5a); although it remained well above the levels of the prewar and early 1920s, before World War II the patent department at Ludwigshafen (largest of the I.G. patent facilities), never again registered as many patents as it had in 1930. In part the unusual increase in the Ludwigshafen activity after 1925 may be ascribed to the elimination of internal competition among the formerly independent corporate units, which involved the thorough rationalization of production and sales in the Sparte 2 areas (Hoechst, for example, had registered more patents than Ludwigshafen in 1925, but afterwards always far fewer; cf. Table 5 a). At the same time, however, research and innovation also declined throughout the I.G., at least as reflected in patents. This trend also affected academic-industrial consulting relationships, which peaked in 1930 (despite some contraction by individual plants such as the former Agfa) and then contracted by 1931 (cf. Table 5 b). Unfortunately I have not yet found an enumeration of the actual subsidies to academic collaborators as such except in 1931.

Table 5 a: German patent registrations from the BASF/I.G. Ludwigshafen and I.G. Hoechst plants and the entire I.G. Farben corporation, 1913/1925-1933 ₄₈

Table 5 b: Number and costs of academic collaborators of I.G. Farben ₄₉

For the pharmaceuticals industry between the wars, recent research has demonstrated some interesting contrasts between the Bayer and Hoechst traditions. Bayer's in-house pharmaceuticals research had made the company relatively independent of external academic collaboration well before World War I, while Hoechst's tradition was based more on cooperation with academic researchers, notably with Ludwig Knorr (antipyrin during the 1880s, then during the prewar decade with Paul Ehrlich (especially the products Salvarsan and Neo-Salvarsan for chemotherapy of syphilis). After Ehrlich's death (1915), Hoechst could not find other academic collaborators as productive as Ehrlich and accordingly began during the 1920s to move toward the Bayer pattern of specialized, in-house pharamaceuticals research and innovation. From 1926, I.G. Farben developed its pharmaceuticals research organization to reflect the Bayer tradition, not Hoechst's style of industrial-academic collaboration, which gradually diminished, to the dismay of the Hoechst pharmaceutical chemists who suspected the Bayer people of stealing their collaborators. In fact, it appears rather that potential academic collaborators were "being turned away." While this trend may have resulted from a managerial strategy rather than a fundamental change in scientific standards, as Wimmer argues with reference to Schering as well as I.G. Farben, ₅₀ one can also argue that the increasing complexity of bio-organic compounds during this period made the development of in-house research practically unavoidable for most firms. This can be seen in the Merck corporation, whose directors' initial hopes for significant returns from collaboration with academic scientists (in the early 1920s their research facilities had still been very modest) were generally disappointed; one of Merck's former laboratory chiefs recalled that of ten professors of chemistry and two of pharmacology, "only the collaboration with [Adolf] Windaus [in Göttingen] brought a success. Windaus had something concrete to offer [with his vitamin compounds] and not just conceptions and talk." The latter applied to prominent academics such as Richard Willstätter (synthetic cocaine), Richard Kuhn, Karl Freudenberg, and Otto Diels, who received considerable financial support but returned nothing "concrete." A major problem was in trying to scale up from methods that worked with small samples in a biochemical laboratory to commercial production processes. A notation in the annual report of 1920 reflected a frequently recurring experience: "we can no longer produce many chemical products, as soon as we try to produce them in large quantities." Like the other firms, Merck was increasingly forced to develop its own products in-house, adding to its staff and enlarging its laboratory facilities; thus in pharmacy, somewhat later than in dyes, the locus of invention shifted from the academic to the industrial laboratory. ₅₁

b. Changes in industrial demand for research chemists

The economic crisis also forced the chemical industry, led by I.G. Farben, to cut severely their academically-trained staffs. This is in contrast to the policy followed during the immediate post-World War I crises, when the industry enlarged its staffs of chemists rather than contracting them. In the case of the Ludwigshafen plant, the core factory of the BASF, the number of academically-trained chemists peaked in 1929, then lost a quarter of its strength by 1933 (cf. Table 6 a) (compare Association of German Chemists' surveys that show a drop in the number of chemists in the chemical firms surveyed from 4971 in 1930 to 4152 in 1933 (including a decline in the number of women from 71 to 41). ₅₂ Table 6 b shows that recruitment to the BASF's main laboratory dropped off even more sharply after 1929 (it had peaked in 1927), falling from 19 to 2 in 1930. In 1932, the main laboratory hired no new chemists at all. When recovery began in 1933, a new political factor was present to distort academic-industrial relations: the National Socialist regime.

Table 6 a: I.G. Ludgwigshafen (BASF) chemists on Dec. 31 of year:

Table 6 b: Number of chemists entering Ludwigshafen Hauptlaboratorium in year: ₅₃

The combination of declining industrial demand for trained chemists as well as for academic chemical research, plus the government budget cuts resulting from the economic crisis (in Saxony this was described as a "financial catastrophe"), clearly had a negative effect on the development of academic research. Certainly efforts to expand and modernize research facilities were weakened, as the old pattern of building new institutes for newly hired chemists became virtually impossible during the crisis years. ₅₄

c. Effects on industrial subsidies for academic chemistry

Consider now the problem of industrial subsidies for academic chemistry, looking first at institutions. With the creation of I.G. Farben in 1925, that corporation's dominant role in each of the three funding associations was instantaneously confirmed not simply by the fact that all three presidents were leaders of the I.G., but above all by the associations' constitutional provision awarding votes to members in proportion to the amounts of their contributions. As the hyperinflation had peaked in 1922-23, these leaders had decided to tie the annual dues of the I.G. firms to the total number of their workers and employees, which directly tied support for academic chemistry to the economic health of the dye industry. ₅₅ Thus, their initial, relatively small reductions in staff during the first year of stabilization in 1924 had a negative effect on the funding organizations. While this was followed by a beneficial expansion during the late 1920s, during the early 1930s it quickly became clear that the I.G.'s formula for supporting the three chemical organizations would prove disastrous to their financial health at a time when they were already losing members and regular dues. I.G. Farben's directors laid off nearly half of their total staff (46 %) between 1929 and 1932, a much higher proportion than the smaller firms of the rest of the chemical industry (29 %) or of German industry overall (which suffered "only" 33 % unemployment). ₅₆ As a result the I.G.'s dues to the Liebig, Baeyer, and Fischer societies dropped from more than 308,000 marks in 1929 to no more than 191,000 marks (possibly less) in 1932. ₅₇

The effect of this dramatic drop in support was to compound already existing deficits in the chemical funding organizations, forcing them to further limit their work, although the I.G. did respond to the crisis with some special grants and loans to supplement the regular dues. Nevertheless, the Berichte of the German Chemical Society had to cut its published size by one-quarter in 1932. The Baeyer-Gesellschaft had previously made it possible to the German abstracts journal, Chemisches Zentralblatt, to increase in size by about 50 % from 1926 to 1930 while increasing the number of journals covered by 300 %, a necessary response to the rapid growth of the discipline during the 1920s. But even covering some 1,100 journals, the Zentralblatt with its 3,500 subscribers remained behind the American Chemical Abstracts with its 1,500 journals, 15,000 subscribers, and $50,000 annual subsidy (equivalent to 200,000 marks) from the American chemical industry. The German journal was forced to cut costs in various ways and to raise its subscription fees by 50 %, despite the consequent loss of subscribers and the worry that this would further limit chemists' access to world chemical literature at a time when academic and industrial libraries were forced to cancel subscriptions to many foreign journals. Even after the cuts, its deficit was at least 120,000 marks, compounding the financial problems of the Deutsche Chemische Gesllschaft. ₅₈

The Fischer-Gesellschaft was also forced to reduce its support for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, whose deficits (e.g. 41,000 marks in 1929) forced it to limit its activity to the radioactivity research of its director Otto Hahn and his long-term colleague Lise Meitner. Carl Duisberg insisted on maintaining these scientists because he believed their research was unique -- a view perhaps justified by the eventual discovery of nuclear fission --, whereas others continued to argue in vain to maintain the original conception of the institute as a central research laboratory for all fields of chemistry. Maintaining the latter, however, was financially impossible even before the crisis beginning in 1929. ₅₉

In 1932, Carl Duisberg reported to the Liebig-Gesellschaft's board that the number of members and with them the society's income was shrinking steadily. The society had been providing about seventy or eighty fellowships per year to male chemistry students during the late 1920s and early 1930s. In this case, the I.G. adopted a special policy to forestall some of the worst effects of cutbacks, by agreeing in 1932 to supplement the Liebig Fellowships through an additional special grant of 100,000 marks (adding another 200,000 marks in 1934) to allow first fifty, then one hundred additional students to remain in school as additional assistants on "I.G. Emergency Fellowships" (Notstipendien) during the crisis, when it was clear that they could not find jobs. The I.G. would be able to hire them later, and better trained. ₆₀

One can get a sense of the I.G.'s changing pattern of support for academic chemistry from 1929 through its own summaries of the total costs of subsidies to academic collaborators "& Ges." (presumably meaning "Gesellschaften," professional societies -- though it is not clear if the Baeyer, Fischer, and Liebig societies are included here) as compared to internal costs such as laboratories. In view of the problems noted above, it is worth noting that while both fell during the crisis, the I.G. actually cut its subsidies to academics less than its own internal laboratory costs (cf. Table 7).

Table 7: Costs of subsidies to outside collaborators and organizations ("Wiss. Mitarb. u. Ges.") vs. laboratory costs by main groups (=Sparten), 1929-1933 (Mill. RM.) ₆₁

IV. Impact of National Socialism on academic-industrial relations

In the past, those scientists who could not follow an academic career, whether because of discrimination or simply a lack of positions, could turn to industry, as many had done in the past. From 1933 to 1938 this outlet was, however, gradually closed off for scientists whose political or racial status became suspect to the National Socialists, as well as for many women. Nazi regimentation did not stop in governmental offices or professional organizations, but extended into the factories as well. Those, like I.G. Farben, which were initially regarded by some Nazis as "Jewish" organizations (and by a decree of January 1938 would have been so designated unless they purged their supervisory boards), were placed under growing pressure to conform to the new racial policies. Despite some initial resistance by the older generation of leaders including Duisberg, Bosch, and Weinberg, as well as some younger ones like Fritz Gajewski, head of Sparte 3 and director of the Wolfen film plant, the corporation eventually did conform. ₆₂ Weinberg, who was of Jewish origin, eventually died in a concentration camp. Dismissals of academic chemists have recently received greater attention from historians, showing that they were on the same order as those in physics; more than one hundred German chemists were eventually forced to emigrate. ₆₃ There is little evidence as yet that many dismissed academics were able to find positions in private industry in Germany, and it appears that in most cases such positions would have been temporary at best; even for an international firm like I.G. Farben, by 1938 it was no longer possible to evade anti-Semitic laws by simply transferring "non-Aryan" colleagues to foreign branches. ₆₄

Moreover, as National Socialist legislation deprived "non-Aryan" scientists of their positions and their rights, I.G. Farben's relationships with such scientists among its external scientific collaborators correspondingly deteriorated. For example, in 1934 the I.G. cut in half its assistantship subsidy for Prof. Hermann Mark in Vienna, who only two years earlier had been one of its leading researchers in Ludwigshafen. ₆₅ Two former academic collaborators of Hoechst and Griesheim who were dismissed had to negotiate with the I.G. about the continuation or termination of their relationship, with the possibility of a "transition period" for the second, the only one receiving a financial subsidy; but the records do not show the results of the negotiations. ₆₆

A well-known case, which became a focus of controversy after the war, is that of Richard Willstätter, ₆₇ to whom Carl Duisberg had "several times" offered a position on the board of the Bayer corporation; however, Willstätter had flatly refused Duisberg's offers, including the direction of the KWI for Chemistry, telling him he "had no desire to be dependent upon the I.G." or Duisberg. ₆₈ Willstätter later recalled his "relations" with the original Bayer company as "excellent," but noted that after "a Jew no longer had any legal rights, ... I bitterly regretted this link with big industry." ₆₉ Willstätter had made various agreements with Bayer and later with I.G. Farben to share profits on various medicinal compounds that he and his students (including Duisberg's son Walther) had produced in his Munich laboratory; as late as 1928, four years after Willstätter's resignation in protest against anti-Semitism in his faculty, I.G. Farben was still willing to make a "fair agreement" with him regarding Avertin, an anesthetic. "Later," however, "in my time of need [probably referring to the period shortly before his emigration to Switzerland in 1939], when it was no longer honorable or profitable to consider my interests, my correspondence with the large firm's executives became unpleasant." ₇₀ The implication is the "unpleasant" correspondence related to patent royalties for Avertin and perhaps other compounds. If a Nobel Prizewinner could suffer, lesser Jewish chemists hardly fared better, but until full details concerning contractual relationships from this period are available, one can only guess at the the extent of the problems here.

The other side of the picture is the effect on academic chemistry of I.G. Farben's integration into National Socialist autarky policies, culminating in the Four Year Plan of 1936. While there were unquestioned benefits from the Four Year Plan for I.G. Farben, how did its development affect academic-industrial relations? This is a problem whose implications I am still investigating, but it certainly appears that organic chemists, e.g. Hermann Staudinger, perceived as early as 1933 the likely direction of Nazi policies and offered their support in the time-honored pattern of creating synthetic substitutes for products that would otherwise have been imported. Staudinger, reviving his research on a synthetic pepper substitute from the First World War, approached the I.G. in Hoechst for support in 1933, but his request for a subsidy of 10,000 RM was rejected. But on the basis of an enthusiastic memorandum to the Baden ministry advocating the further development of synthetic rubber, he did however gain approval for enlarging his laboratory, and the Hoechst directors agreed to provide him with equipment and suggestions. ₇₁ The case of Hermann Staudinger provides an example of a scientist who, because of his criticism of German poison gas in the First World War, was politically suspect, but evidently received some protection as a result of his ties to industry. However, this came at a price. He was still placed under various restrictions on his foreign travel and his contacts with Jewish scientists. Rather than debating with Jewish scientists with whom he disagreed, like Mark or K. H. Meyer (former research director at Ludwigshafen), he was told by one industrial patron, Hoechst's director Kränzlein, in accordance with the new Nürnberg Laws not to "keep arguing with Jews" and instead to have nothing to do with them. Staudinger thereupon complied with this, rejecting a further offer by the Bayer director Hörlein to mediate between him and Meyer. ₇₂

The new regime moved quickly to promote an "Aryanized" version of the relationship between science and technology, using a rewritten myth-history to justify the elimination of "non-Aryans" from present institutions. There was of course some reluctance on the part of industrial leaders such as Carl Bosch to dismiss or deny the contribution of significant chemists of Jewish descent such as Fritz Haber, a man on whose research Bosch had built his career. An anecdote describes Bosch's futile attempt in spring 1933 to dissuade Adolf Hitler from dismissing Jewish scientists by arguing that it would set physics and chemistry back one hundred years; "Dann wird das Reich eben einmal die nächsten hundert Jahre ohne Physik und Chemie auskommen," Hitler is supposed to have snapped back. ₇₃ By 1934, however, the chemical industry itself had begun to participate directly in the process of historical revision. The Verein Deutscher Chemiker revoked its honorary memberships for "non-Aryans." In 1934 an industrial exhibition "Deutsches Volk - Deutsche Arbeit," included an aryanized version of the development of the chemical industry, albeit still featuring the scientific laboratory as the source of success in industrial chemistry. ₇₄ The process of expunging "non-Aryans" from the past culminated in popular works such as Karl Alois Schenzinger's notorious pseudohistorical novel Anilin (1937), which sold some four million copies. In promoting an aryanized mythhistory of the German dye industry and the academic chemists who worked with it, it managed to describe the creation of synthetic indigo without mentioning the two men who had done most to achieve the initial synthesis, but who were also of Jewish descent: Adolf von Baeyer and Heinrich Caro of the BASF. ₇₅ One wonders what the directors of I.G. Farben might have thought if they read this book, particularly given the I.G.'s continuing support for the Baeyer-Gesellschaft under its old name at least until 1935. ₇₆

The leaders of the chemical industry, most of whom before 1933 had not been especially pro-Nazi, attempted to respond positively to criticism from the party by stressing the value of chemistry and the chemical industry for the nation, both in public exhibitions and direct discussions with the new regime's leaders, as noted above. Ultimately they chose to make their accommodation with the regime by dismissing "non-Aryans" on their staffs, including foreign affiliates, and by taking advantage of emerging policies to promote their own interests in developing synthetic chemical processes that would prove useful in case of another war, leading ultimately to the central role played by chemists in shaping the Four Year Plan of 1936 with its autarky policy. The advent of the Four-Year Plan made it possible for I.G. Farben to undertake further expansion, but at the cost of tailoring that expansion to the potential needs of a war economy. The areas in which I.G. Farben's research efforts concentrated during the late 1930s involved the development of large-scale technologies such as synthetic rubber, for which there would be relatively limited demand for the old style of organic-chemical research. ₇₇ Moreover, while recovery in industrial research and in the hiring of chemists overall began in 1934, peaking in 1938, it is difficult to measure the actual extent of research activity because evidently the reversion to quasi-wartime conditions (presumably with greater emphasis on secrecy) meant that the hiring of additional chemists did not necessarily produce equivalent results in patent activity. Even the peak year of the Nazi period, 1938, when the number of BASF chemists finally surpassed the previous high points of hiring and total employment, did not reach the previous peak of patenting in 1930 (cf. Table 8 a, b, c, where the previous peaks in each case are indexed as 100). Moreover, except in the hydrogenation group, academic subsidies did not keep pace with the I.G.'s renewed investments in its laboratories, or even recover to the 1929 level, reversing the trend during the economic crisis before 1933, as the I.G. increasingly cut its ties to academic chemists in its old core research areas (cf. Table 8 d).

Table 8 a: Number of registrations for German patents from the I.G. Ludwigshafen plant in year: ₇₈

Table 8 b: BASF chemists on Dec. 31 of year:

Table 8 c: Number of chemists entering BASF Hauptlaboratorium in year: ₇₉

Table 8 d: Costs of subsidies to outside collaborators and organizations ("Wiss. Mitarb. u. Ges.") vs. laboratory costs by main groups (=Sparten), 1929/1933-1939 (Mill. RM.) ₈₀

Concluding observations: the academic-industrial symbiosis and chemistry

During the first four decades of the twentieth century, Germany's academic-industrial symbiosis in chemistry developed in a pattern of alternating crisis and reform. The basic core relationships that had developed during the late nineteenth century continued to exist, albeit not always to flourish equally well; specific details of relations between individual firms and academic chemists, even for the I.G. firms, are difficult to trace throughout the period. What can be more easily traced is the new phenomenon of collective industrial subsidies for academic chemistry. Movements toward concentration in the chemical industry, themselves a response to perceived crisis, evidently also played a crucial role in promoting such collective subsidies; it appears that as the research-intensive components of the industry became more centralized, the emerging collective perspective among industrial chemists correspondingly inclined them toward collective support for academic chemistry. This trend was, moreover, encouraged by the reluctance of the national and state governments to subsidize the exponential growth of a discipline whose work, both in research as well as education, seemed so directly to benefit an unusually profitable and successful industry.

The first wave of institutional reforms, during the decade before 1914, followed the first wave of mergers amidst a widespread perception of potential crisis in the dye industry as well the cries of academic chemists to provide more support for neglected fields. Disputes within the profession and the industry as to the reality of the crisis limited the response, but the movement nevertheless laid a basis for later developments. These likewise followed the wartime merger that produced the expanded I.G., this time in a period of undisputed crisis which became increasingly severe with what Germans liked to call the "unfortunate outcome of the war." By 1920 decisive action by academic chemists and industrial chemist-leaders, particularly Carl Duisberg, had erected the main institutional framework for collective industrial subsidies to academic teaching, literature, and research. Although the following hyperinflation evaporated the big endowments built on paper war profits, industrial support continued into the economic and political crisis of the 1930s, albeit on a reduced scale. At least until 1933 the I.G. sought to cut its subsidies to academe less than its own laboratory costs, but this pattern did not continue after Nazification, the Four-Year Plan, and the departure of an older generation who had risen at a time of smaller scales and more personal academic-industrial ties. By this time the tendencies toward rationalization in the I.G.'s management were evidently also being applied to academic subsidies, which never fullly recovered from the 1930s crisis. It must be concluded that, for a variety of reasons, the new generation of managers no longer saw as much need to subsidize academic chemistry. Two major considerations might have motivated them to limit their ties to academe: in the first place, the steadily increasing scale of internal research capabilities, even in the "traditional" areas of collaboration such as dyes and pharmaceuticals, made academic input increasingly less significant. The better the in-house researchers could master these areas, the more routine the work of innovation became. At the same time, the technological evolution of large-scale processes from ammonia to synthetic fuels and synthetic rubber likewise made academic input dispensable, since many of the problems involved mainly technical work remote from an academic laboratory, and in any case close collaboration was required between the works chemists and in-house laboratory chemists. Yet an increasingly internalized, routinized and bureaucratized process of industrial innovation ran the risk of closing itself off to the academic input that could, as Duisberg had told Beckmann in 1922, open "new perspectives through free scientific research." ₈₁

Of course, the managers could always argue that by recruiting the best young academic chemists, they were allowing for a steady influx of new ideas from academe. Yet German academic chemistry's dependence upon industrial subsidies had become a decidedly mixed blessing. Much was positive; prewar subsidies helped to create research institutes for fields that were then relatively neglected by the universities, such as physical, inorganic, and radioactivity chemistry, and support for Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner's work led ultimately to the payoff of nuclear fission. Similarly, the Liebig-Gesellschaft's subsidies for chemical higher education in the immediate postwar period probably helped many academic chemists get through the inflation, although perhaps less cost-effectively than the Notgemeinschaft's policy of purchasing and lending equipment. Nevertheless the Liebig's subsequent policy of providing fellowships for assistants, expanded by the I.G. during the Depression, provided crucial postdoctoral training for promising young chemists, albeit long discriminating against women (ironically, the I.G. fellowships finally supported women during the 1930s, at a time when National Socialists were trying to get women out of technical occupations). ₈₂ With the Baeyer-Gesellschaft's support, German chemical literature could compete more effectively, but ultimately it could not keep pace with the global exponential expansion of the discipline.

To what extent chemistry's theoretical development was affected by the changing academic-industrial symbiosis is another difficult question. Chemistry certainly suffered from the Germans' exclusion from the international scientific discourse during and immediately after the war, an exclusion heightened by the militarization of chemistry. The interwar theoretical conservatism of many German chemists (as noted for example by Robert Kohler in regard to bond theory), ₈₃ may well also have been confirmed by the financial support and influence they were receiving from industry, with its tendency to emphasize practical results rather than theoretical innovations. After National Socialism reversed a short-lived return to internationalism during the later 1920s, at least some leading chemists (cf. Kränzlein's admonition to Staudinger, noted above) promoted the dangerous illusion of intellectual as well as economic autarky - as if German scientists could safely ignore "Jewish" ideas. Particularly insofar as this attitude might have encouraged Germans to neglect such theoretical issues as the application of quantum theory to chemical bonding, the long and even short-term effects were certainly negative, even in "practical" organic chemistry. ₈₄

Notes

Note 1: Cf. most recently Carsten Reinhardt, "Forschung in der chemischen Industrie: die Entwicklung synthetischer Farbstoffe bei BASF und Hoechst, 1863-1914" (Dr. phil. Diss., TU Berlin, 1995); Wolfgang Wimmer, "Wir haben fast immer was Neues": Gesundheitswesen und Innovationen der Pharma-Industrie in Deutschland, 1880-1935 (Berlin, 1994); Anthony S. Travis, The Rainbow Makers: The Origins of the Synthetic Dyestuffs Industry in Western Europe (Bethlehem, Pa., and London/Toronto, 1993); and Die Allianz von Wissenschaft und Industrie: August Wilhelm Hofmann (1818-1892), ed. Christoph Meinel and Hartmut Scholz (Weinheim, 1992). Walther Wetzel, Naturwissenschaft und chemische Industrie in Deutschland: Voraussetzungen und Mechanismen ihres Aufstiegs im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1991) is almost entirely based on published sources. Back.

Note 2: Wimmer, Wir haben, is useful for pharmaceutical research in Bayer, Hoechst, and Schering, as will be John Lesch's forthcoming book on the sulfa drugs (cf. John E. Lesch, "Chemistry and Biomedicine in an Industrial Setting: the Invention of the Sulfa Drugs," in Chemical Sciences in the Modern World, ed. Seymour H. Mauskopf (Philadelphia, Pa., 1993)); Gottfried Plumpe, Die I. G. Farbenindustrie AG: Wirtschaft, Technik und Politik 1904-1945 (Berlin, 1990) and Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge and New York, 1987) cover mainly the political-economic development of I.G. Farbenindustrie AG (henceforth: I.G. Farben), with little attention to the scientific-technological side, but see Ulrich Marsch, "Strategies for Success: Research Organization of German Chemical Companies and IG Farben until 1936," History and Technology, 12 (1994), 23-77; Paul Forman, "The Helmholtz Gesellschaft: Support of Academic Physical Research by German Industry after the First World War," unfortunately remains unpublished; for industrially-supported research institutes see Manfred Rasch, Geschichte des Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituts für Kohlenforschung 1913-1943 (Weinheim, 1989), and Ulrich Marsch, "Industrieforschung in Deutschland und Groβbritannien: Betriebsinterne und Gemeinschaftsforschungen bis 1936" (Dr. phil. Dissertation, Univ. of Munich, 1996). Back.

Note 3: Jeffrey A. Johnson, The Kaiser's Chemists: Science and Modernization in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990). Back.

Note 4: Jeffrey A. Johnson, "Academic Chemistry in Imperial Germany," Isis, 76 (1985), 500-524, on 506. Back.

Note 5: Bamberger to Duisberg (15 Dec. 1894), Duisberg to Bamberger (20 Dec. 1894), in Duisberg Papers, Bayer-Archiv, Leverkusen. Back.

Note 6: Cf. Reinhardt, "Forschung"; for the somewhat later, parallel development in pharmaceutical chemistry, see Wimmer, Wir harben. Back.

Note 7: Source, Table 1: Bayer-Archiv, Jahresbericht an den Aufsichtsrat der Agfa, 1902; Bundesarchiv (henceforth: BA) Potsdam, 80IG1, AW379: Jahresbericht an den Aufsichtsrat der Agfa, 1910, p. 185; AW380, Jahresbericht an den Aufsichtsrat der Agfa, 1912, p. 151. Back.

Note 8: Weinberg to Duisberg (4 July 1933), in Duisberg Papers. Back.

Note 9: Source, Table 2: Bayer-Archiv, Jahresbericht an den Aufsichtsrat der Agfa, 1902; Jahresbericht an den Aufsichtsrat der Agfa, 1913, p. 134; BA Potsdam, 80IG1, AW379: Jahresbericht an den Aufsichtsrat der Agfa, 1910, p. 170; AW380, Jahresbericht an den Aufsichtsrat der Agfa, 1912, pp. 133-134; Werksarchiv Hoechst, 2/001-14, Verwaltungsbericht für das Jahr 1904, p. 86; 2/001-15, Verwaltungsbericht für das Jahr 1905, p. 105; 2/001-21, Verwaltungsbericht für das Jahr 1911, p. 108. Back.

Note 10: On ammonia see Dietrich Stolzenberg, Fritz Haber: Chemiker, Nobelpreisträger, Deutscher, Jude (Weinheim/New York, 1994), pp. 133-197; for problems in Bayer's 1910-11 collaboration with Carl D. Harries on rubber, and on Bayer's problems with a biochemical approach to rubber production (1910-12), see Carl D. Harries and Max Delbrück files, Duisberg Papers, Bayer-Archiv. Back.

Note 11: Cf. Johnson, Kaiser's Chemists; for the relationship between Emil Fischer and Duisberg that largely developed out of their mutual interest in these research institutes, see Dietrich Stolzenberg, "Scientist and Industrial Manager: Emil Fischer and Carl Duisberg," paper in this conference. Back.

Note 12: Johnson, Kaiser's Chemists, p. 102. Back.

Note 13: For nitrates see Margit Szöllösi-Janze, "Losing the War, but Gaining Ground: The German Chemical Industry during World War I," paper in this conference; for chemical warfare see L. F. Haber, The Poisonous Cloud: chemical Warfare in the First World War (New York, 1986); Stoltzenberg, Fritz Haber, pp. 223-325; Johnson, Kaiser's Chemists, pp. 180-196. Back.

Note 14: Cf. Marsch, "Industrieforschung." Back.

Note 15: Manfred Rasch, "Wissenschaft und Militär: Die Kaiser Wilhelm Stiftung für kriegstechnische Wissenschaft," Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 1/91, 73-120. Back.

Note 16: See correspondence from 1917 between Fritz Frank (of the Kriegsschmieröl GmbH) and Franz Fischer (of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Coal Research, Mühlheim) in BA Potsdam [since transferred to Berlin], 87.39: Kriegsschmieröl GmbH (afterwards "Mineralöl-Versorgungs-Ges."), Nr. 123: Professor Dr. [Franz] Fischer (Sept 1916 - Jan. 1920). Back.

Note 17: Schaum to Direktor (17. Feb. 1922), and Vertrag (22 Jan. 1921), in Werksarchiv Hoechst, 2/21 15: Griesheim, Mitarbeiter Allgem., Prof. Schaum, Giessen. Back.

Note 18: Cited in Hans-Joachim Flechtner, Carl Duisberg: von Chemiker zum Wirtschaftsführer (Düsseldorf, 1959), p. 288. Back.

Note 19: Source, Table 3 a: Bayer-Archiv, 5/E.a.24, Agfa: Jahresbericht an den Aufsichtsrat der Agfa, 1913, Bl. 154; BA Potsdam, 80IG1, AW382: Agfa: Jahresbericht an den Aufsichtsrat der Agfa, 1916 (Berlin, April 1917), Bl. 121; AW383: Agfa: Jahresbericht an den Aufsichtsrat, Bl. 126; note: "I.G." figures to 1915 include the "little I.G." of Agfa, BASF, and Bayer, plus the Hoechst-Cassella-Kalle group; from 1916 the figures are for the "expanded I.G." Back.

Note 20: Source, Table 3 b: Bayer-Archiv, 5/E.a.24, Jahresbericht an den Aufsichtsrat der Agfa, 1913, Bl. 162; BA Potsdam, 80IG1, AW381: Jahresbericht an den Aufsichtsrat der Agfa, 1915 (Berlin, April 1916), Bl. 127, 131; AW383: Jahresbericht an den Aufsichtsrat der Agfa, 1917 (Berlin, April 1918), Bl. 129-131; AW384: Jahresbericht an den Aufsichtsrat der Agfa, 1919 (Berlin, Mai 1920), Bl. 140-142. Back.

Note 21: Source, Tables 3 c & d: BA Potsdam, 80IG1, AW385: Jahresbericht an den Aufsichtsrat der Agfa, 1920, p. 149; AW386: Jahresbericht an den Aufsichtsrat der Agfa, 1921, p. 220; AW387: Jahresbericht an den Aufsichtsrat der Agfa, 1922, pp. 163, 238, 240; AW389: Jahresbericht an den Aufsichtsrat der Agfa, 1924, p. 196; AW390: I.G. Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft, Werke: Afga, Jahresbericht, 1926, p. 236. Back.

Note 22: Cf. Szöllösi-Janze, "Losing the War". Back.

Note 23: Anon. [Stock], "Deutschlands Chemie," in Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz (GStA), Abteilung Merseburg [now in Berlin-Dahlem], Rep 76 Vc, Sekt. 1, Tit. XI, Teil I, Nr. 74: Die Justus Liebig-Gesellschaft zur Förderung des chemischen Unterrichts, 1. [einziger] Bd. (April 1918 [Dez. 1917] - Dez. 1934 [Jan. 1935]), Bl. 7-15, here Bl. 13. Back.

Note 24: Alfred Stock, "Die künftige Sicherstellung des deutschen Hochschul-Chemieunterrichts: verfasst im Auftrage des Verbandes der Laboratoriumsvorstände an deutschen Hochschulen" (June 1918), p. 8, in GStA Merseburg, Rep 76 Vc, Sekt. 1, Tit. XI, Teil I, Nr. 74, Bl. 40-45RS [also Bl. 89-94RS]; "Die hier angemeldeten Bedürfnisse . . . beziehen sich nur auf die Unterrichtstätigkeit, nicht aber auf die wissenschaftliche Forschungstätigkeit." (p. 8, Bl. 43RS). Back.

Note 25: See esp. Duisberg to Alfred Stock (7 Feb. 1919), in Stock Correspondence, Duisberg Papers. Back.

Note 26: The tax situation was somewhat complicated by a law that exempted philanthropic organizations set up by October 1, 1919, but organizations set up after that date had to apply for tax exemptions, which took time and assistance from the Prussian Kultusministerium to obtain. See correspondence of the Baeyer and Fischer funding societies (for which, see below) with the Reichsministerium der Finanzen, esp. letter of 28 April 1921 to the ministry, and the ministry's letter of 29.12.21, in GStA Merseburg, Rep 76 Vc, Sekt. 2, Tit. XXIII, Litt. A, Nr. 127: Die Adolf Baeyer- und die Emil Fischer-Gesellschaft in Berlin, 1 vol. (1. Juni 1920-[1932]), Bl. 31-38, 96. Back.

Note 27: See most recently Ulrich, Marsch, Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft: Grundung und frühe Geschichte, 1920-1925, Frankfurt am Main/New York, 1994. Back.

Note 28: Haber to Schmidt-Ott, (2. August 1920), in: GStA Pr. Kulturbes. Berlin-Dahlem, Rep 92 (Nachlass Schmidt-Ott), Bd. 2 (Konstituierung u. Organisation der (Notgemeinschaft 1920). Back.

Note 29: Duisberg to Adolf v. Harnack (26 Feb. 1920), in Bayer-Archiv, 46/9.1 (Nr. 148): Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, Besetzung der Emil-Fischer Professur an der Berliner Universität. Back.

Note 30: A. v. Weinberg to Duisberg (11.5.20), Bayer-Archiv, Emil-Fischer-Gesellschaft: Vorarbeiten zur Gründung. Back.

Note 31: Duisberg even set up a fourth organization, based on the prewar Göttinger Vereinigung, to support applied physics and mathematics. Cf. Paul Forman, "The Helmholtz Gesellschaft." Back.

Note 32: Cf. Hartmut Scholz, Zu einigen Wechselbeziehungen zwischen chemischer Wissenschaft, chemischer Industrie und staatlicher Administration, sowie deren Auswirkungen auf die Entwicklung der wissenschaftlichen Chemie in Deutschland . . . Dissertation B, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 1990. Back.

Note 33: Stock to Hoechst (5.11.1921), in: Werksarchiv Hoechst 71, Wiss. Ges., KWI für Metallforschung (1920-31). Back.

Note 34: Cf. Heike Reishaus-Etzold, "Die Einflussnahme der Chemiemonopole auf die "Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft z. F. d. W. e. V." während der Weimarer Republik," Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsqeschichte, 1 (1973), 37-61. Back.

Note 35: Duisberg to Beckmann (27.2.20), in: Bayer-Archiv, 141, KWG-KWI f. Chemie: Verwaltungsausschuss, Allgemeines. Back.

Note 36: GStA Merseburg, Rep 76 Vc, Sekt. 1, Tit. XI, Teil I, Nr. 74, Bl. 306, 324. Back.

Note 37: Cf. "IV. Apparate- und Material-Ausschuss," Dritter Bericht der Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft . . . (1923-24) (Halle/S, n.d.[1924?]), pp. 29-33, in GStA Merseburg, Rep 76 Vc, Sekt. 1, Tit. XI, Teil 1, Nr. 67: Notgemeinschaft der deutschen Wissenschaft, Bd. 2 (Mai 1924-Aug. 1925), Bl. 39-41. This is not to say that Haber ruled out monetary grants to chemists; as chairman of the "Japan-Ausschuss" during the last year of the inflation and for a year thereafter, he led in the distribution of highly flexible research grants from an unexpected foreign source, donations in (non-inflating) yen by the Japanese businessman Hajime Hoshi. See "V. Japan-(Chemie-) Ausschuss," Dritter Bericht, pp. 33-35 (Bl. 41-42), and Haber to the Japanausschuss and Krüss (19 March 1925), noting the termination of Hoshi's grants due to losses in the Tokyo earthquake (Bl. 340-340RS). Back.

Note 38: Cf. Richard Willstätter, From My Life: the Memoirs of Richard Willstätter, trans. Lilli Hornig from the second German ed. [Weinheim, 1958] (New York, 1965), p. 310. Back.

Note 39: "Niederschrift über die zweite Vorstands- und Verwaltungsratssitzung . . ." (15 Sept. 1922), Bl. 307-309RS, here 308RS; "Niederschrift über die Sitzung des Vorstandes . . . der Justus-Liebig-Gesellschaft . . .," (9. Okt. 1925), Bl. 341-344RS, here 342RS; financial statement (31. Dez. 1926), Bl. 365.}. Back.

Note 40: See Jeffrey A. Johnson, "German Women in Chemistry," forthcoming in 2 parts, 1895-1925 & 1925-1945, in NTM, 1998. Back.

Note 41: Cf. Bewilligte Liebig-Stipendiengesuche (Justus-Liebig-Gesellschaft Microfiche), in Bayer-Archiv. Back.

Note 42: Fritz Haber, "Zum Antrage der Notgemeinschaft...auf Bewilligung eines Sonderfonds von 5 Millionen Mark für 1925," in GStA Merseburg, Rep 76 Vc, Sekt. 1, Tit. XI, Teil 1, Nr. 67, Bd. 2, Bl. 418-419RS. Back.

Note 43: "Niederschrift der Sitzung des Vorstandes und Verwaltungsrates sowie der Hauptversammlung der Adolf Baeyer-Gesellschaft" in Berlin (8. Nov. 1923), in: GStA Merseburg, Rep 76 Vc, Sekt. 2, Tit. XXIII, Litt. A, Nr. 127, Bl. 170; financial statement for 1924 (31. 12. 24), Bl. 204; "Niederschrift über die Sitzung des Verwaltungsrats..." (11. Nov 1927), Bl. 260-269, here 265. Cf. "Bilanz am 31. Dezember 1927," Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen Gesellschaft, 61/A (1928), 54. Back.

Note 44: "Niederschrift der 5. Hauptversammlung der Emil-Fischer-Gesellschaft..." (25. Jan. 1927), in GStA Merseburg, Rep 76 Vc, Sekt. 2, Tit. XXIII, Litt. A, Nr. 127, Bl. 242-244. Back.

Note 45: E.-Fischer-Ges., "Niederschrift der 8. Hauptversammlung" Berlin (7. Dez. 1928), in GStA Merseburg, Rep 76 Vc, Sekt.2, Tit. XXIII, Litt. A, Nr. 127, Bl. 289RS. Back.

Note 46: BASF Arch. D 05/2a, Forschung IG - Kosten, 1930-1936, "Sparmassnahmen 1930-1933," "Korreferat zum Referat des Herrn Dr. Struss..." (22.3.1933), pp. 1-4, 16; Bayer-Archiv, 4/B. 14.3.10, I.G. Farbenind. AG, General- u. Ergänzungskosten Hauptgr. 1-3, Versuchskosten Hauptgruppe 1-3 (graphic, Tea Büro A, 1.6.38). Back.

Note 47: BASF Archiv, D 05/2, IG AG, Forschungs-Statistiken, Etat für Wissensch. Laborator. 1927-1930, "Versuchsunkosten 1927-1929" (Tea-Büro, 10.4.30); D 05/2a, Forschung IG - Kosten, 1930-1936, "Versuchskosten der Hauptgruppe 3 (Wolfen, 22.3.1933, Betriebskontrolle der Kunstseidefabriken"; Bayer-Archiv, 4/B. 14.3.10, Versuchskosten Hauptgruppe 1-3 (graphic, Tea Büro A, 1.6.38). Back.

Note 48: Source, Table 5 a, for BASF: BASF Arch., E 05/1, Erfindertätigkeit in der BASF, Statistiken von 1877-1940, Patentabt. Lu., "Deutsche Anmeldungen 1913-1940" (March 27, 1942). For Hoechst and I.G.: "Entwicklung der Entnahme von Patenten durch die I.G.," in BA Potsdam, 80IG1, A1066 (Patentkommission Jan. 1931-Nov. 1937), Bl. 137; this shows minor variations from the BASF figures in some years, but the same general pattern. Back.

Note 49: Source, Table 5 b: Lists in Werksarchiv Hoechst, 2/21, 15: Griesheim, Mitarbeiter Allgem., Prof. Schaum, Giessen; 1931 is the only year in which a complete, detailed cost breakdown is available. Back.

Note 50: Wimmer, Wir haben, p. 326; quotation is on p. 279, using the term "abgwimmelt"; for problems with external collaborators in each firm see pp. 233-283, 299-311. Back.

Note 51: Dr. Zima, "1920-1958: Ein Bericht über Xb bis Fo 1, 2 und 3" (15 Sept. 1958), pp. 13, 16-17, 29-31, 34, 69, and list following p. 70, in Archiv, E. Merck, Darmstadt. Back.

Note 52: "Statistik der Chemiker," Zeitschrift für angewandte Chemie, 46 (1933), 377-381. Back.

Note 53: Source, Tables 6 a & b: Curt Schuster, "Die Geschichte des Hauptlaboratoriums 1938-1957," list, pp. 235-238; Table, p. 244; in BASF Archive. Back.

Note 54: Quotation is from Min. für Volksbildung (von Seydewitz) to Prof. Burkhardt Helferich (9 July 1931), in the Staatsarchiv Dresden, Nr. 10183/88: Neubau eines Chemischen Insituts [at Leipzig Univ.] 1928-1932, Bl. 159-160. Back.

Note 55: Extract from minutes, expanded I.G. (9 Dec. 1922), and subsequent correspondence from Jan. 1923; amended statutes of Fischer Gesellschaft from "Niederschrift der 3. Hauptversammlung ..." (22 Oct. 1923), in Bayer-Archiv, 46/14: Emil-Fischer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der chemischen Forschung (15. Juni 1920- [1955]). Back.

Note 56: Hayes, Industry and Ideology, p. 42. Back.

Note 57: "Grössere Jahresbeiträge 1932...," in BA Potsdam, 80IG1, A4010, BI. 13. Back.

Note 58: "Niederschrift über die Sitzung des Verwaltungsrats und der Hauptversammlung der Adolf Baeyer-Gesellschaft" (in Baden-Baden, May 8, 1931), [also for 1932] in GStA Merseburg, Rep 76 Vc, Sekt.2, Tit. XXIII, Litt. A, Nr. 127, Bl. 322-323 & 346. Back.

Note 59: E.-Fischer-Ges., "Niederschrift der 8. Hauptversammlung" (Berlin, Dec. 7, 1928); E.-Fischer-Ges., "Niederschrift der 9. Hauptversammlung" (Baden-Baden, Sept. 27 1929), in GStA Merseburg, Rep 76 Vc, Sekt.2, Tit. XXIII, Litt. A, Nr. 127, Bl. 289-290; 294-295RS. Back.

Note 60: Duisberg to Mitglieder des Verwaltungsrates der Justus-Liebig-Gesellschaft (22. Okt. 1932), in GStA Merseburg, Rep 76 Vc, Sekt. 1, Tit. XI, Teil l, Nr. 74, Bl. 458-462. Niederschrift über die 71. Sitzung des Arbeits-Ausschusses (7.9.32), Niederschrift über die 84. Sitzung des Arbeits-Ausschusses (6.4.1934), in BA Potsdam, 80IG1, A1170: Arbeitsausschuss des Vorstandes (Januar 1930 - November 1934), Bl. 144-146, 58-64. Back.

Note 61: Source, Table 7: Bayer-Archiv, 4/B. 14.3. 10, I.G. Farbenind. AG, General- u. Ergänzungskosten Hauptgr. 1-3, Versuchskosten Hauptgruppe 1-3, graphics (graphic dated Tea-Büro A, 21/4.33, displays the costs by groups in 1/4 of the annual cost; I have multiplied these by 4 to get the numbers here; costs for the complete I.G. are in a separate graphic giving only total annual figures, hence there are some numerical discrepanices with the group costs given here. I have calculated percentages to aid in comparison; subsidies were not included within the laboratory costs. Group 1 was hydrogenation, 2 was dyes, pharmaceuticals, etc., 3 was fibers, etc. Back.

Note 62: Peter Löhnert and Manfred Gill, "The Relationship of I.G. Farben's AGFA Filmfabrik Wolfen to its Jewish Scientists and to the Scientists Married to Jews in the Years 1933-1939," paper in this conference. Back.

Note 63: Cf. Ute Deichmann, "Chemistry in Nazi Germany: the Expulsion of Jewish Scientists and its Impact on Chemical Research in Germany and the Host Countries," presentation at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (Dec. 17, 1996). Back.

Note 64: Cf. Löhnert and Gill, "Relationship." Back.

Note 65: Minutes, Direktionssiztung in Ludwigshafen, 1934/Nr. 15 (20 June 1934); cf. Dir'stzg (5 Oct. 1932), in Bayer-Archiv 4/C. 14.2, Abschriften der Niederschriften ... [Betriebsgemeinschaft Oberrhein] (17.12.1930-14.02.1935). Back.

Note 66: Minutes, Vorstands-Sitzung am 18. September 1933 in Höchst a./M., in Bayer-Archiv, 4/C 15.2, Abschriften der Niederschriften ... [Betriebsgemeinschaft Mittelrhein]. Back.

Note 67: Jonathan Wiesen, "The Richard Willstätter Controversy: Chemistry and Memory in the Early Federal Republic," paper in this conference. Back.

Note 68: Duisberg to Willstätter (25 July 1931), Bayer-Archiv, Duisberg Papers: Willstätter Correspondence. Back.

Note 69: Willstätter, From My Life, p. 369. Back.

Note 70: Willstätter, From My Life, p. 350; see also 348-349. Back.

Note 71: Minutes, Vorstands-Sitzung am 18. September 1933 in Höchst a./M.; minutes, Vorstandssitzung am 9. Oktober 1933, both in Bayer-Archiv, 4/C 15.2, Abschriften der Niederschriften ... [Betriebsgemeinschaft Mittelrhein]; Cf. Hermann Staudinger, "Der Aufbau und die Aufgaben der chemischen Universitätsinstitute" (n.d. [1933]), copy in Werksarchiv Hoechst. Back.

Note 72: Kränzlein to Staudinger (3 June 1936), Staudinger to Hörlein (9 June 1936), Staudinger Papers, D II 15.12 & 15.14 (old catalog, ed. Claus Priesner), in Deutsches Museum (revised catalogue in preparation). For Staudinger's political problems see Yasu Furukawa, "Staudinger's Scientific Activities and Political Struggles" (in Japanese), Kagakushi, 20 (1993), 1-19, summary in Furukawa, "Staudinger, Polymers, and Political Struggles," Chemical Heritage, 11/1 (Winter 1993-94), 4-6; and for his 1934 denunciation by Martin Heidegger, see Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt/New York, 1988) pp. 201-208. Back.

Note 73: Karl Holdermann, Im Banne der Chemie: Carl Bosch, Leben und Werk (Düsseldorf, 1953), pp. 271-273. Back.

Note 74: Cf. "Die vier Leitgedanken der Chemie-Ausstellung," Chemische Industrie, 57, Nr. 16 (21 April 1934), 289-290. Back.

Note 75: Karl Alois Schenzinger, Anilin (Berlin, 1938), p. 225 and passim; cf. Michael Keas, "Karl Aloys Schenzinger's Novel, Anilin: Chemistry and Chemical Technology in Nazi Literaturpolitik," Ambix, 39 (1992), 127-140. Back.

Note 76: I have not yet been able to determine what happened afterwards. Back.

Note 77: Peter J. T. Morris, "The Development of Acetylene Chemistry and Synthetic Rubber by I.G. Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft, 1926-1945" (Ph. D. thesis, University of Oxford, 1982). Back.

Note 78: Source, Table 8 a: BASF Arch., E 05/1, Erfindertätigkeit in der BASF, Statistiken von 1877-1940, Patentabt. Lu., "Deutsche Anmeldungen 1913-1940" (March 27, 1942). Back.

Note 79: Source, Tables 8 b & c: Curt Schuster, "Die Geschichte des Hauptlaboratoriums 1938-1957," list, pp. 235-238; Table, p. 244; in BASF Archive. Back.

Note 80: Source, Table 8 d: Bayer-Archiv, 4/B. 14.3.10, I.G. Farbenind. AG, General- u. Ergänzungskosten Hauptgr. 1-3, Versuchskosten Hauptgruppe 1-3, General-Unkosten (table 1934-1937, dated Tea-Büro A, 1.6.38), General-Unkosten Gesamt-I.G. (graphic dated Tea-Büro A, 16.5.39, incl. 1929, 1932, 1936-1939 and projections to 1943); breakdown for Hauptgruppen not given after 1937. I have calculated percentages to aid in comparison; subsidies were not included within the laboratory costs. Group 1 was hydrogenation, 2 was dyes, pharmaceuticals, etc., 3 was fibers, photo, etc. Back.

Note 81: See note 35 above. Back.

Note 82: Correspondence re Renate Guttmann, in Bewilligte Liebig-Stipendiengesuche, I. Ser. 1932, A-K (Justus-Liebig-Gesellschaft Microfiche 2.33, Nr. 5), in the Bayer-Archiv; cf. Jeffrey A. Johnson, "German Women in Chemistry," and "Frauen in der deutschen Chemieindustrie, von den Anfängen bis 1945," in "Aller Männerkultur zum Trotz": Frauen in Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften, ed. Renate Tobies (Frankfurt a.M. and New York: Campus-Verlag, forthcoming 1997). Back.

Note 83: Robert E. Kohler, "The Lewis-Langmuir Theory of Valence and the Chemical Community, 1920-1928," Historical Studies in the Physical Science, 6 (1975), 431-468, here 445-451. Back.

Note 84: For example, a limited understanding of the implications of quantum chemistry helped to delay I.G. Farben's wartime laboratory work on synthesizing aviation fuel until Dr. Emma Wolffhardt began to use space-filling, quantum-based molecular models she had borrowed from a physicist. They were unfamiliar enough that she was asked to lecture at other I.G. laboratories to demonstrate the techniques. Cf. Johnson, ""German Women in Chemistry, 1925-1945," forthcoming. Back.