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Description by Dave Emory
Like Ambruster’s
Treason’s Peace, Josiah DuBois’s
The Devil’s Chemists highlights how the
I.G. Farben chemical firm manipulated trade relationships to the advantage of
the Third Reich. In addition, the book illustrates how corporations, businessmen
and politicians beholden unto the firm’s non-German cartel partners assisted
that manipulation, as well as the postwar rehabilitation and exoneration of both
I.G. and its most important personnel. Those personnel are the primary focus of
Josiah Du Bois’s The Devil’s Chemists.
In addition, DuBois emphasizes the damage done to America’s international
credibility by its postwar preservation of I.G. Farben and other Axis/fascist
cartels.
One cannot understand the history of the 20th century without understanding the
role played in world events of the time by the I.G. Farben company, the chemical
cartel that grew out of the German dyestuffs industry. Comprising some of the
most important individual companies in the history of industrial capitalism, the
firm has dominated the dyestuffs, chemical and pharmaceutical industries before
and during World War II. The companies that grew out of I.G.’s official
dissolution after the war—Bayer, Hoechst, BASF, and Agfa continued to be
decisive in world markets. Among the many products developed by I.G. or its
member companies are aspirin, heroin, Novocain, methadone (originally named
Dolophine in honor of Adolph Hitler) and Zyklon B (the poison gas used in the
extermination centers of World War II.)
Both the Ambruster and DuBois texts set forth the international scope and
economic impact of the company, its role as the spine of the industrial
war-making economy of the Third Reich and the firm’s elevation of Hitler to his
position of power. As one observer noted, “Hitler was Farben and Farben was
Hitler.” Much of the impact that the company wielded derived from its
international dominance of the chemical, rubber, petrochemical and
pharmaceutical industries through its cartel arrangements with partner firms in
other countries. Farben’s foreign counterparts had much to do with letting the
company and its executives—many of them war criminals of the first order—off the
hook after World War II.
Farben’s cartel partners abroad constituted an inventory of the wealthiest and
most powerful corporations in the world. In the United States, the major firms
with which Farben did business included: Du Pont, the Standard Oil companies,
General Motors, Ford Motor Company, Union Carbide, Dow Chemical and Texaco. In
turn, these corporate giants wielded controlling political influence in the
United States through the elected and appointed officials in their sway.
Attempts at reducing Farben’s influence in the United States before and during
World War II, as well as efforts at holding the company and its top executives
to account for their crimes after the war were neutralized by the cartel’s
corporate hirelings. Many of names of the combatants on both sides are important
and, to older and better-educated readers, familiar. Farben exerted a profound
influence in other countries as well.
Behind the actions of many world figures prominent in the mid-20th century, we
can observe the effects of their relationship to I.G. As discussed in
The Nazis Go Underground, Neville
Chamberlain was a major stockholder in Imperial Chemicals, I.G.’s major cartel
partner in the United Kingdom. Chamberlain’s “weakness” in the Munich summit
with Hitler assumes a different light when evaluated against his holdings in
Imperial. In
Falange, Alan Chase describes
Wilhelm von Faupel, the prime mover behind the establishment of the Spanish
Falange and its international component, the Falange Exterior. Faupel derived
much of his considerable influence within the Third Reich from his status as an
“I.G. General.”
In The Devil’s Chemists, DuBois details
the war crimes trials of key I.G. personnel and, in so doing, illustrates the
pernicious nature of the cartel system Farben embodied and successfully,
ruthlessly exploited. On page “x” of the preface, DuBois explains: “ . . . In
condensing 150 large volumes of testimony within one average-size book, a great
deal of material has necessarily been eliminated. Nevertheless, I believe that
every significant aspect of this historic criminal trial has been brought to the
attention of the reader. . . .”
DuBois relates how “anti-Communism” was used to mask and exonerate the I.G.
defendants who are the focal point of the book. On page 355, DuBois writes that:
“ . . . Yet the two judges accepted the fiction that Farben was the
simple prototype of ‘Western Capitalism.’ By implication, this placed the Ter
Meers and Schmitzes alongside the stockholders and directors of many
international firms whose policies sometimes stood out clearly against war. . .
.This commercial stereotype reached its greatest exaggeration in the case of Max
Ilgner. The Tribunal rewrote into innocence even the aggressive deeds he
admitted, raising the clear implication that any society could be filled with
such men with no danger whatever to the peace of the world. Having been
sentenced to three years for plundering Ilgner was given credit for the time he
had spent in jail and was released immediately after the judgment was read. . .
.”
Published in 1952, the DuBois text reflects the anxiety provoked in the West by
the German “Ostpolitik” that is the primary focus of T.H. Tetens’
Germany Plots with the Kremlin.
Noting blossoming German trade with the former Soviet Union in the early 1950’s,
as well as the proposals by some German political figures to assume a position
of neutrality, many observers pushed to appease the residual Reich elements at
every opportunity. Many in positions of influence in the United States felt that
the possibility that Germany might align itself with the USSR mandated a
Carte Blanche attitude on the part of
the US diplomacy.
DuBois discusses one of the most serious outgrowths of the preservation of the
cartels in Japan and Germany and the Cold War policy of establishing right-wing
“bulwark” states to guard against the spread of communism. Preserving the
dominance of fascist economic interests alienated those who had suffered under
the yoke of Axis occupation. “ . . . In the Far East, as well as in Europe, the
United States has backed other totalitarian-minded groups [in addition to the
I.G.] as a ‘bulwark’ against communism. By the end of World War II, the peoples
of China, Korea, Indo-China, and the Philippines had suffered for years under
the ‘New Order for Asia’ sponsored by the Japanese equivalent of Farben, the
Zaibatsu cartels. These cartels by force of arms won a stranglehold on the
economies of these countries. Instead of rebuilding the Far East generally as
fast as we could, we have peddled the fear that Russia would rob and plunder the
people, while at the same time we backed the very forces which had already
robbed and plundered them. The Zaibatsu cartels are as strong as ever. In
Indo-China, we have backed the collaborators of the ‘Japanese New Order.’ In
South Korea, faced with a variety of truly democratic choices, we backed Syngman
Rhee and the few landowners and cotton millers who had cast their lot with the
‘New Order’ gang. . . . Can we expect millions of former vassals in Asia to
rally around their erstwhile totalitarian oppressors? Can we rally Europe solely
around the fear of Soviet enslavement while we deliberately sustain the forces
which twice in recent history have enslaved that continent? On the answer to
these questions depends our survival.” Indeed. (For more about the restitution
of the Zaibatsus, see FTR#’s 290, 426.)
Like the Ambruster, Martin Manning, and Borkin & Welsh texts,
The Devil’s Chemists provides a window
into a realm of corporate political economics that continues to wield a decisive
role in world affairs.
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From Historian Mark E. Spicka
In The Devil's Chemists, Dubois
expound[s] on the belief that the United States had not learned the correct
lesson from the 1930s and 1940s. The United States' support of the
reconstruction of West Germany and its alliance with I. G. Farben in the postwar
world would backfire horribly. "If World War III breaks out" he wrote, "they [I.
G. Farben executives] will be fighting for Soviet Russia, not for the West. And
in treating such groups as friends, we are losing true friends all over the
world." Dubois implied that the tribunal's judgments against I. G. Farben in
Nuremberg had been light in order to build up Germany and use it as a "bulwark
against Communism."