IG Farben corporation, Hitler’s allies

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This video is a called ARCHITECTURE: IG Farben in Berlin Express.

From British daily The Morning Star:

Hitler’s helpers

(Monday 30 June 2008)

Hell’s Cartel; IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine by Diarmuid Jeffreys
(Bloomsbury, £20)

JOHN GREEN reviews Diarmuid Jeffrey’s meticulous narrative on the rise of Hitler-supporting chemical cartel IG Farben.

The Anglo-Saxon world has a morbid fascination with all things to do with Hitler and nazism. Analyses or clarifications about how fascism comes about, though, are few and far between.

Marxists see fascism as the last resort of capitalism in acute crisis, but this has never been taken on board by mainstream historians. That’s why explanations of Hitler’s rise to power have invariably ignored the part played by big business.

In his book Hell’s Cartel, Diarmuid Jeffreys attempts to clarify the central role played by the giant chemical conglomerate IG Farben in financially supporting Hitler and fuelling his war machine.

He argues that he is “filling a gap” in the literature on this subject, ignoring the fact that the socialist countries dealt with this in detail. The renowned GDR feature film Council of the Gods provides a vivid account of the role of IG Farben in Hitler’s rise to power, but gets no mention. Jeffreys’s sources are virtually all Western.

At Nuremberg, for the first time in history, not only were chief nazis on trial but also some of the top managers of German industry. This sent shockwaves through the boardrooms of capitalist companies everywhere and raised the question of where culpability begins and ends.

Some defendants called for the prosecution of the US Standard Oil Company, which did business with IG Farben during the war.

The trial of the IG Farben and Krupp managers was the last of its kind. They ceased abruptly as the cold war against Bolshevism took centre stage and former nazis were transformed into useful allies.

IG Farben was allowed to remain as a holding company, but those formerly under its wing, such as Bosch, Bayer and Hoechst, again became powerful chemical companies on the world stage.

In this book, Jeffreys takes us back to the 1850s to give us a potted history of the German chemical industry. Bayer, for instance, began as a small dye-making company in Engels‘s home town of Barmen on the Rhine.

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