-Caveat Lector- An excerpt from: The Devil's Chemists - 24 CONSPIRATORS OF THE INTERNATIONAL FARBEN CARTEL WHO MANUFACTURE WARS Josiah E. DuBois, Jr. & Edward Johnson (collaborator) ©THE BEACON PRESS 1952 BOSTON First Edition - 374pps - Only edition ----- PART ONE TOTALITARIAN INDUSTRY- THREAT TO WORLD PEACE? 1. Easier Hats and Wild Horses THIS IS THE STORY of twenty-four geniuses who changed the face of the earth. The most brilliant men in Europe, they headed the industry known to the newspaper reader as "I. G. Farben." I. G. Farben first subdued nature in ten thousand ways, then shipped the marvelous products of that victory across the seven seas. Its business has touched the life of every man and woman in the world. Often an unrecognized guest, it has visited every American home, with dyes, plastics, fabrics. If Farben did not make your bathroom fixtures, your shaving mug, or even your razor, your wife surely owes much of her prettification — from Easter hat to synthetic stockings — to I. G. Farben. Long before the age of plastics and nylons, I. G. Farbenindustrie was known to many Americans as simply the world's best druggist. Every reputable pharmacy, every physician's bag, every good family medicine cabinet, stocks some of Farben's 6000 medicines. The firm invented a drug that is still the best cure for epilepsy. They made atabrine, the quinine-substitute for treating malaria. And from the aspirin tablet alone, I. G. Farben made a vast fortune. But the founders were not concerned merely with balance sheets. They drew their inspiration from the gurgling of water, the perfume of damp earth, and every vegetable and mineral in the earth. Could health, personal beauty — yes, even universal brotherhood — be created by two dozen men of dynamic chemical genius? They believed it could. By 1925, they had nursed food from and lands, made fats and fuels from coal and water, and were dreaming of making copper out of clay. A few years later, their talents crowned a combine that overshadowed even the giant United States corporations. From the sun — a competitor in nurturing such things as cotton — they had learned many economies of mass production. Now the sun shone with subservient benevolence on a fabulous industrial empire, from the Rhineland to the Hudson Valley to the muddy Yangtze River. I. G. Farben's holding companies and plants then blanketed Europe, its house banks and research firms and patent firms clustered around every important commercial center in both hemispheres. This success did not curb their seemingly strange vision. The Farben "president" transferred millions of dollars into other hands on faith alone. On faith he transferred the legal ownership of a $100,000,000 U. S. combine to a friend in Switzerland. This combine was the old American I. G. Chemical Corporation. From 230 Park Avenue, New York City, its main office governed five subsidiaries, all producing marvels of modem chemistry. They were the Ozalid Corporation of Johnson City, the General Dyestuffs Company, the old Hudson River Color Works, the Agfa-Ansco factory which manufactured cameras and films, and a research plant in Pennsylvania. Dyes were the basis of American I. G. Chemical's entire business, just as dyes were the financial and scientific wellspring of all the Farben companies. Yet in a brief memo Farben's president let the American I. G. go. This poetic magnanimity — unless it concealed a desperate gamble of some kind — was more typical of an artist- scientist than of a financial wizard. One might not have been surprised at a show of generosity from, say, the Farben director who founded the photo-chemistry whose cameras were sold around the world under the Agfa-Ansco trademark. He had helped to develop color photography, too. At the trial, he testified: "I did not like to see beauty just in a dark room somewhere. I wanted to see my child, or some fish or game I had caught, in color -to see it in all its beauty. And we succeeded." So, even at their trial, these men did not think as robber barons are supposed to think. Exclaimed another of the directors on the witness stand: Chemistry is a dynamic science. Thank goodness, every people is inventive. The effects of everyday life are noticed in everything we see — fibers, everything that is dyed, plastic articles, and parts of automobiles and radios. It was the climax of my life when Dr. ter Meer sent me to the forests of Ceylon and the Malay States, to study how nature produces rubber. These studies were so enlightening that Dr. ter Meer entrusted me with the on-the-spot management of synthetic rubber development. We were dealing with the unknown.... That was Dr. Otto Ambros -a member of I. G. Farben's florstand, or board of directors — speaking. To his mentor, Dr. Friedrich ter Meer, all the natural substances like rubber were "wild horses that must be broken to the reins." But mankind was no wild horse to him, if Dr. ter Meer's witnesses were telling the truth. During the first World War, Dr. ter Meer had owned a dyestuffs plant near the French border, and French prisoners of war who still recalled working there called him "Director Bon." Ambros apparently was a good man, too; younger than Ter Meer, he enjoyed similar respect from many French workers during the second World War. For two years after the war ended, he worked for the French government; several times they refused to give him up. "The first stages of the collapse promised everything but that I would be arrested," Ambros told the court with a smile. It was the same smile that had greeted the vanguard of American soldiers that rolled into Gendorf, Bavaria, in 1945. They noticed him immediately. Even when he stopped smiling, his lips munched pleasantly under a prematurely gray moustache. The other townsfolk protested innocence in various degrees of cunning and sophistication, while Ambros seemed to lend his Bavarian folksiness without obligation. He sniffed the air deeply. He was like a rabbit who had come out of the near-by hills, standing alertly on its hind legs, watching with devilish friendliness these taller beings straggling warily around the town. The G.I.'s liked him, but the commanding officer wanted to know why he was wearing a fancy suit among the jerkined. What were his rank and serial number? His name, the man said, was Ambros, and he had no rank or serial number. He was a "plain chemist." Although he was a German, he had many French friends; in fact, he had lived at Ludwigshafen, only forty kilometers from the French border, which made him very nearly a Frenchman. The commanding officer was suspicious. A few days later an advance detail of General Patton's army arrived in Gendorf. The two C.O.'s, after putting their heads together, ordered the "plain chemist" held for questioning. If he was almost a Frenchman, what was he doing here, way over on the other side of Germany? Ambros answered that he'd had "no reason to flee" and every reason to be in Gendorf. As a director of 1. G. Farbenindustrie, he had been in charge of a synthetics factory here. They inspected the factory, peeking into vats of soaps and detergents. Lining the walls of Ambros' office were spectrum cards exhibiting the many-colored lacquers also made there. Every day troops arrived who had not washed for a month. Some of their vehicles were faded and dirty. Not only was this fellow a welcome quartermaster, but working for him were the best of all character witnesses — refugees from the concentration camps across the Polish border. He had brought them here, and while they didn't talk much, they worked hard for him and said nothing to refute his claim that he had picked them all and trained them so that, when they returned home, they would have skilled professions. Ambros stayed in Gendorf for a few more months. Higher commanders rolled into town and had him picked up to answer more significant questions. The factory was underground. He pointed out that most of the underground factories in Germany had been bombed; surely the Allied air forces would have bombed this one if it had had any strategic value! He referred to his activity here as dedicated to "once more preparing, for the coming peacetime industry." He passed soap out to the soldiers personally -it was good to have somebody dropping gifts in their hands for a change. The brass felt the same way when he issued cleaning agents and paints for the vehicles. They were not scientists, but any scientist worth his salt could talk about technical things simply and with a smile. This fellow Ambros could tell you how to make a hundred wonders from one chemical element: ethylene oxide. He knew more about rubber than anything else. A syntheticrubber factory had much in common with him: civilized, neat, more reminiscent of perfected nature than of Man. A rubber plant had to be absolutely clean; a speck of dust mingling with the liquid rubber could mean a blowout on the highway some day. To plan a rubber factory, you did not begin with materials,- you put your finger to the wind, because the wind had to blow in the right direction to take off the carbide dust so that it "would not be thrown in your neighbor's face." The judges of the court listened as the soldiers had, as if waiting for a twig to crackle. Somehow the fortunes of war had placed this picture of a spotless industrial installation in a horrible setting, beside a river (not the calm Hudson or the turbulent Rhine) that ran red with a dye no chemist could synthesize. There sprawled the buna-rubber plant, and three kilometers away was a concentration camp. Surely this good-natured, earthy chemist had nothing to do with that! One of Farben's top employees, assistant to both Dr. ter Meer and Dr. Ambros, was testifying: In my compartment there was a man, a working man, and he told with loud voice to the other men and wives in the compartment that in Auschwitz concentration camp people — people were burned in a crematorium (he said not the word "crematorium") and in large numbers. And then the whole air in Auschwitz was filled with the smell of death. I was very deeply impressed and I sprang up and said he should not say such lies. The prosecutor pressed the witness for more details: Q. And the smell of burning flesh was known at the buna plant — you understood him to say that? All right, go ahead, what did you do when you heard that? A. I sprang up and said, "They are lies," and he said, "No, they are not lies; there are 10,000 men or more at Auschwitz and all of them know it." Q. You say, then, that in the beginning of 1942 you heard of Auschwitz concentration camp, about the burnings and cruelties going on there, and you learned that from an open discussion on the train ride? A. Yes, he said it to all present. There were 10 or 15 in the compartment, and they all heard it. Q. Were you convinced when the workman said, "No, they are not lies?" A. No, I was not convinced.... Q. In the summer of 1943 you visited Auschwitz again. Did it occur to you that you should investigate it then? A. I asked in Auschwitz a responsible man, the chief engineer Heidebroek. Q. What did you ask him? A. He said it was true. I can give you from Frankfurt the exact date. Q. You reported to the chief engineer what the workman said on the train, and the chief engineer said what the workman had said was true? A. Yes. . . . I think he also told me that the people were gassed before they were burned. Q. Then in the summer of 1943 you knew that people were being burned and gassed? A. Yes. Q. Is this your statement, Dr. Struss: "After I spoke to Heidebroek I was convinced that the situation at the Auschwitz concentration camp was as bad as they had told me, but I was hoping that it was not true"? Is that a fair statement? A. Yes, that is a fair statement. I had only I per cent of hope that it was not true. A few months before this witness, Dr. Struss, told his story, of the judges of the court had summed up his reaction to I. G., Farbenindustrie: "This is simply a big business concern the like of which there are many throughout the world." The judge had not yet heard of Struss's conversation on the train, nor had he heard the many witnesses for the prosecution who had worked at Farben's buna plant in Poland. But he had been hearing for weeks about a web of interests more influential than any ever spun by Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, or Fisk -about acts of aggression and conquest on a scale difficult to comprehend. No, there was only one 1. G. Farbenindustrie. But if a judge who tried the facts firsthand could not believe his ears, what might one expect of other intelligent men? My understanding of Farben has developed in the last ten years, during which seven government missions abroad have carried me through fifty countries. Farben first came forcibly to my attention on a mission to Latin America in 1941. I met Farben in North Africa in 1943, in France in 1944, and in Europe and Asia from 1945 through 1948. During the war a report had crossed my desk in Washington from a town in Poland called Auschwitz. The men who wrote the report had spent two years in Auschwitz before their escape. At three o'clock every morning, they were herded with hundreds of others to a tremendous plant, several kilometers square, called "Buna." At noon they sucked up a little turnip soup. The evening meal — "evening" was eleven o'clock at night -was a crust of bread. When I read this report in 1944, I speculated as to whether this "Buna" plant in Poland was a Farben venture. I too found it hard to believe. pps. 3-8 ===== 2 Anything Intact Was Beautiful DECEMBER 1946 -a long time ago reckoned by the hours of one, national futility that have since gone by. December 1946 — there was a lot of war going on. The Jewish underground in Palestine was attacking Tel Aviv; in Iran the leftists fought the government with sticks and stones and leaflets and broken-down tanks salvaged from larger armies. But the Cold War hadn't yet been named. Although threats between nations were commonplace, Andrei Vishinsky, speaking a few days before at Madison Square Garden, had said that the "capitalist" and "socialist" systems could get along together. And Molotov announced that Russia would not veto any United Nations provisions for international inspection of arms. As the air cleared for one false moment, the average citizen, long tossed on a sea of suspicion, looked about for a tiny raft of faith. I was looking, too, I suppose. One day early in that month, I was standing at my office window in Camden, New Jersey, when the phone rang. Ordinarily, to me the weather is little more than a guide for what to wear; yet let that afternoon come back — as it often does -and I see too clearly the lines of roofs and doorways through a fog scowling down to the gutters. I have to think twice to realize that even the later consequences weren't foreshadowed by two consecutive moments at the window. Although the phone call was the most far-reaching of my life, I don't recall it very well. I answered it, of course. Then I was back at the window sensing the ethereal exaggeration of roofs and doorways, walls whole and larger than they really are. It wasn't quite time for the shops to be decorated in evergreen and neon, the Walt Whitman Hotel to be girdled by colored lights. Still, I saw the coming season in squat buildings and dirty streets. For a long time, I had spent most of my holidays in a crumbling scene, and I had come to a time when anything intact was beautiful. My secretary came in to announce that the client in the outer office was impatient. Whatever the matter was -a will to prepare, a divorce, a deed — I handled it before going into the adjoining office to face my brother Herb. He looked up from his desk. Behind tortoise-shell glasses he blinked slowly as he always does to hide his incessant curiosity. "Washington just called," I said. "The government wants me to come back." His face was still tanned from Army life — he'd been discharged a few months before. But his tan did not hide the deeper color of anger. "I thought you were fed up. You just got home a couple of mo <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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