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IG Farben (short for Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG) was a German conglomerate of companies formed in 1925 and even earlier during World War I. IG Farben held nearly a total monopoly on the chemical production, later during the time of Nazi Germany. Farben is German for "paints", "dyes", or "colors", and initially many of these companies produced dyes, but soon began to embrace more and more advanced chemistry. The founding of the IG Farben was a reaction to Germany's defeat in the First World War. Before the war the dyestuff companies had a near monopoly in the world market which they lost during the conflict. One solution for regaining this position was a large merger.
IG Farben consisted of the following major companies and several smaller ones.
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During the planning of the invasion of Poland and Czechoslovakia, IG Farben cooperated closely with the Nazi officials and directed which chemical plants should be secured and delivered to IG Farben.
IG Farben built a factory for producing synthetic oil and rubber (from coal) in Auschwitz, which was the beginning of SS activity and camps in this location during the Holocaust. At its peak in 1944, this factory made use of 83,000 slave laborers. The pesticide Zyklon B, for which IG Farben held the patent and which was used in the gas chambers for mass murder, was manufactured by Degesch (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung), a company owned by IG Farben.
Of the 24 directors of IG Farben indicted in the so-called IG Farben Trial before a U.S. military tribunal at the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, 13 were sentenced to prison terms between 1½ and eight years.
Due to the severity of the war crimes committed by IG Farben during World War II and the extensive involvement of the management in the Nazi atrocities, the company was considered to be too corrupt to be allowed to continue to exist, and the allies considered confiscating all of its assets and putting it out of business. Instead, in 1951, the company was split up into the original constituent companies. The four largest quickly bought the smaller ones, and today only Agfa, BASF, and Bayer remain, while Hoechst merged with the French Rhône-Poulenc Rorer to form Aventis, now based in Strasbourg, France.
Even though the company was officially liquidated in 1952, it continued to be traded on the German stock exchange as a trust, holding a few real estate assets, until it was finally declared bankrupt on November 10, 2003 by its liquidators, after contributing 500,000 Deutschmarks (160,000 British pounds or 233,000 American dollars) towards a foundation for former slave laborers under the Nazi regime and the remaining property, worth 21 million Deutschmarks (6.7 million British pounds or 10 million American dollars) going to a buyer. During this lengthy period, the holding company had been continually criticized for failing to pay any compensation to the slave laborers, which was the stated reason for its continued existence after 1952. The company, in turn, blamed the ongoing legal disputes with the former slave laborers as being the reason it could not be legally dissolved and the remaining assets distributed as reparations. Each year, the company's annual meeting in Frankfurt was the site of demonstrations by hundreds of protesters.
Mentions in Fiction
See also
Sources
- Borkin, Joseph (1978). The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben. New York: Free Press. 1978. ISBN 0029046300, available for download in Australia (as it is out-of-print) see this link (http://www.soilandhealth.org/copyform.asp?bookcode=030311).
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