On February 27 the IG deposited RM 400,000 in the Nazi Party’s accounts, far and away the largest donation made by any firm. Interestingly, Bosch does not seem to have discussed the payment in advance with his colleagues (presumably because he couldn’t see the point). It certainly did not come up at the next scheduled meeting of the company’s Central Committee, the most appropriate forum for any retrospective debate; the minutes from March 2 show only that a general political discussion took place. Bosch’s feelings can therefore only be guessed at. He was presented with a clear choice—back a promised return to stability and a climate in which business could carry on or face a devastating civil war. Hitler’s threat was blackmail, but there didn’t seem to be any option other than to pledge the IG’s support.
That night the Reichstag building burned to the ground. A young Dutch vagrant, Marinus van der Lubbe, was found alone on the premises with matches and lighters. Loosely affiliated with the Communist Party, he had decided on his own initiative to strike against one of the supreme symbols of the bourgeois order. During the resulting public hysteria, whipped up by a barrage of Nazi propaganda, a Marxist revolution suddenly seemed imminent. Angry mobs took to the street with the brownshirts to the fore, keen to vent their fury against their hated opponents. Protected and encouraged by the police—now controlled by the Nazis—the storm troopers were freed of all restraints and the violence quickly escalated into a bloodbath. All over Germany, Communists, Jews, and Social Democrats were attacked and beaten in their homes and in the street, before being arrested and imprisoned. It was a time for settling old scores and anyone who had ever spoken out against Hitler was now a target.
The election that followed took place in an atmosphere of manifest terror. While the parties of the left were more or less paralyzed by state-sponsored intimidation, the Nazis were able to blanket the nation with propaganda and mount huge rallies, thanks to the massive largesse bestowed on them by IG Farben and others. The result was only ever going to go one way. The Nazi share of the vote increased to 44 percent and its number of Reichstag delegates rose from 196 to 288 (in a parliament of 647 seats). This still wasn’t the absolute mandate that Hitler wanted, but the Nazis now had far more popular support than any other party. When the party’s seats were combined with the 52 won by its coalition partner, the nationalist DVNP, Hitler’s government had a slim majority. It was enough, Hitler reassured his cabinet two days after the vote, and in any case, his lack of an absolute mandate would soon cease to matter. The nature of the current “emergency” was such that he felt confident of pushing through the constitutional changes that would allow the government to bypass the president and the Reichstag.
A few days later, standing beneath a giant swastika banner in the Knoll Opera House, a temporary home for the country’s fatally wounded legislature, Hitler introduced the Enabling Act, which would allow the government to rule by decree. It was a coup de grace to the old order. A desperately brave but doomed attempt by Otto Wels, the chairman of the Social Democrats, to mobilize his fellow deputies against the proposed legislation was howled down by massed ranks of Nazi storm troopers.* With the Communists nullified (as presiding officer Hermann Göring had illegally declared their votes to be invalid) and the depleted and demoralized ranks of the Center Party unwilling or unable to do any more than try to preserve the independence of the country’s Catholic Church, it was left to the SPD to oppose a law that would see the permanent suppression of civil rights and democratic liberties. The act was passed by 444 votes to 94. From that moment on, Germany’s descent into the repressive and brutal dictatorship of the Third Reich was inevitable.
Having played such a significant part in the final chapter of Weimar democracy, IG Farben now set out to solidify its relations with the new regime. A few weeks later the cartel increased its financial donations, responding with alacrity to requests for money from local and national Nazi Party officials. By the end of 1933 the IG had handed over RM 4.5 million in contributions to one fund or another. In the meantime, Bosch began looking for ways to extract a dividend from the company’s investment. After all, having sold its soul to the devil, the combine should at least get something in return—and what Bosch wanted more than anything was to save the IG’s synthetic fuel program.
In less than a year the ink would be drying on a deal of truly Faustian proportions.
7
ACCOMMODATION AND COLLABORATION
On March 29, 1933, William Mann, head of pharmaceuticals, wrote to executives at all IG Farben’s offices abroad and overseas. Marked “personal” and “strictly confidential,” his letter said:
The national revolution in Germany, which represents a natural reaction to the muddled state of affairs of recent years, and not least to Marxist-Communist agitation, has developed with unparalleled peace and order. The present German government has a right to claim that it has won a victory against Bolshevism, the enemy of the entire world, a victory which will benefit not only Germany but all civilized peoples of the earth. It carried out this battle in a manner which clearly demonstrated the will for self-discipline and the readiness to submit to firm leadership. It is all the more regrettable that some—very few—unimportant incidents which, practically speaking, were unavoidable in view of a government revolution of such tremendous proportions, have been taken up by a large part of the foreign press as an occasion to disseminate atrocity propaganda against Germany, with the slogan “Combat German Goods!”
Since our immediate business interests have also been affected by these political developments, we feel it is important, for this reason, but especially because of our duty as Germans, to tell you explicitly for our part as well, that the contents of all atrocity tales being spread abroad about mistreatment of political opponents and Jews are in no way in keeping with the facts.
We therefore urgently request you, immediately upon receipt of this letter, to contribute to the clarification of the actual facts in a manner which you deem suitable and adaptable to the special conditions of your country, either by visiting leading personalities of the country and editors of influential papers or by distributing circulars to doctors and the rest of your clientele. We request in particular that you emphasize as effectively as possible the part of this letter that states there is not a true word in all the lies and atrocity stories being disseminated abroad.
Signed MANN
Head of the Pharmaceutical Sales Combine
IG Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft
For all its size and complexity, the IG could be surprisingly nimble when its interests were threatened. Within a fortnight of the Nazis’ assumption of power in March 1933, the concern—or at least one part of it—was taking steps to insulate itself from the international fallout.
This looked set to be considerable. Foreign newspapers had been watching events in Germany with alarm and their reports about the anti-Semitic violence of the storm troopers and the systematic arrest and torture of the Führer’s political enemies had generated such widespread public outrage abroad that many were now calling on their governments to place an embargo on German exports. Typically, Hitler reacted to these protests by blaming his opponents for spreading false and malicious propaganda and got his retaliation in first by scheduling a preemptive nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses for April 1. Concerned about the looming cycle of reprisals and counter-reprisals, and its implications for trade, which was just beginning to recover after many lean years, some exporters were anxious to try to defuse the situation and the more enterprising among them wrote reassuring letters to their contacts overseas.*
Few of these correspondents can have showed as great a disregard for the facts as the IG’s pharmaceuticals chief. By any stretch of the imagination Wilhelm Mann’s analysis was a whitewash of events. Circulated to seventy-five Bayer sales agents around the world, his letter’s central message—that Nazi persecution of political opponents had been exaggerated to the point of invention—was patently absurd, bordering on the kind of
black-is-white doublespeak that George Orwell would later hold up to ridicule. The letter begs important questions about whose interests Mann thought he was serving—his own or his employer’s.
To a degree, the document probably reflected Mann’s personal concerns and prejudices. The previous year he had been the first IG director to join the Nazi Party, and although he had let his membership lapse, he hastily rejoined when Hitler became chancellor. It is possible that he was embarrassed by his temporary loss of faith and wanted in some on-the-record way to compensate for any damaging impression his recusancy might have caused. It is also conceivable that he genuinely believed what he was saying, that the foreign media’s stories about the mistreatment of political opponents and Jews were really nothing more than the smears and slanders and atrocity propaganda that Hitler claimed them to be. But if this is what Mann felt, it amounts to willful blindness. As Victor Klemperer noted in his diary at around this time, evidence that the new regime was ruthlessly exploiting its power was hardly difficult to find: “Day after day … provincial governments trampled underfoot, flags raised, buildings taken over, people shot, newspapers banned, etc., etc. Yesterday the dramaturg Karl Wolf dismissed ‘by order of the Nazi Party’—not even in the name of the government—today the whole Saxon cabinet, etc., etc. A complete revolution and party dictatorship. And all opposing forces as if vanished from the face of the earth.” If a minor professor in Dresden could see so clearly what was going on in Germany, then a senior executive of the nation’s largest and most powerful company could hardly avoid noting it, too.
Nor could the rest of the IG’s management team. The cartel had already given large sums of money to the Nazis and was in the process of giving more, which in theory (if not yet in practice) made it one of the party’s most important sponsors. At the same time the company had reason to feel vulnerable to official measures the government took against the Jews, since there were still several in senior positions around the firm. In the circumstances, any action that affirmed the IG’s stand with the government made sense. In any case, the letter must have been authorized. Although, as a senior executive, Mann enjoyed a large degree of autonomy within the IG’s labyrinthine administrative structure, he would certainly have had to obtain clearance from at least some of his fellow directors for a communiqué of this sensitivity. The fact that this was forthcoming speaks volumes about the situation the company was now in and the uncertainty that many of its top managers were feeling about the best way to move ahead. Perhaps more disturbingly, it raises the distinct possibility that some of them sympathized with Mann’s point of view.
Carl Bosch, however, did not share these sympathies. The IG boss may have had his faults but he was no anti-Semite. Many of his closest colleagues were Jewish or of Jewish ancestry, including his secretary, Ernest Schwarz, several members of the concern’s supervisory board, and many of its top scientists. So was one of his oldest friends, Fritz Haber, who discovered synthetic ammonia and whose work had led to one of Bosch’s greatest personal triumphs during the Great War. Indeed, Haber’s treatment at the hands of the Nazis would have already brought home to Bosch how bad things were getting.
A few days after Hitler’s speech in the Knoll Opera House and the passage of the Enabling Act, uniformed Nazis had begun taking up senior positions in all areas of public life. Their immediate aim was to purge German society and culture of Jewish and socialist influences and they set about forcing the resignation or dismissal of non-Aryan civil servants, hospital doctors, academics, administrators, teachers, and anybody else of Jewish descent (a classification so narrowly defined as to include even those with only one Jewish grandparent) who held a publicly funded post. One of their principal targets was the world of science and technology and in a matter of weeks thousands of Jewish university lecturers and researchers and hundreds of professors were thrown out of their jobs and deprived of their livelihoods, in a program of racial cleansing that was shamefully uncontested by most of their Aryan colleagues and students.
In April 1933, despite his conversion to Christianity and the faint possibility that his war service might grant him an exemption from dismissal, Fritz Haber realized that he had no choice but to yield to the growing pressure and stand down from his chair at the University of Berlin. In a brief and dignified letter of resignation he stated that although he had always done his best to be a good German and had tried to put his country first, he accepted that now he had no choice but to go abroad. In truth, he felt totally betrayed. Once one of the nation’s most revered scientists, he had been ignominiously rejected by the fatherland he had served so diligently. Even a tree planted in his honor by his colleagues in the courtyard of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was chopped down and burnt by the Nazis. As he wrote to a friend, “I am bitter as never before. I was German to an extent that I feel fully only now and I find it odious in the extreme that I can no longer work enough to begin confidently a new post in a different country.” Two months later, a broken man, he left for England.* He was part of an extraordinary exodus of scientific talent that included Albert Einstein and sixteen other Jewish Nobel laureates.
Carl Bosch saw Haber’s departure and the loss of other leading scientists as a dreadful blow to Germany’s prestige and capabilities and was determined to try to persuade the new authorities that their policies were misconceived. Academic research had always been fundamental to the nation’s scientific achievements and the IG had regularly sponsored, promoted, and benefited from the work of the various bodies run under the auspices of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. A policy that deprived the country of its finest talent was nothing short of lunacy. But Bosch’s attempts to lobby the various ministries came to nothing and in the absence of an official change of heart he could do little to persuade the Jewish scientists he knew personally that it was worth staying to ride out the storm. His only recourse was a direct appeal to Hitler himself.
As it turned out, the opportunity was not long in coming. Bosch had wanted to meet the Führer in order to follow up on Hitler’s September 1932 discussion with the IG’s Heinrich Gattineau and Heinrich Bütefisch on the subject of synthetic oil. Having sanctioned a large donation to the Nazi Party prior to the election, Bosch thought it now made sense to find out if the new chancellor was still as keen on man-made fuel as he had previously seemed to be. In May Bosch finally got a call inviting him for talks.
At first the meeting went smoothly. Hitler reiterated his interest in IG Farben’s great project and to Bosch’s relief promised that his government would give it its full backing. The IG could go ahead with expanding Leuna safe in the knowledge that German self-sufficiency in strategically important raw materials was at the heart of the regime’s plans for the future. Then Bosch, as delicately as he could, raised the “Jewish question.” Perhaps the Führer didn’t realize the potentially damaging consequences of his policies, he suggested. If more and more Jewish scientists were forced abroad, German physics and chemistry could be set back a hundred years. To his alarm, Hitler erupted in fury. Obviously the businessman knew nothing of politics, he snarled. If necessary, Germany would “work one hundred years without physics and chemistry.” Bosch tried to continue but Hitler rang for an aide and told him icily, “The Geheimrat wishes to leave.”*
From that moment on Bosch was persona non grata in Hitler’s circle. The two never met again and the Führer refused to attend any events where he knew the IG boss would be present. Some men would have found this state of affairs deeply disturbing and would have tried to effect a reconciliation or at least keep a low profile, but to Bosch’s great credit, he refused to let it bother him. Secure, perhaps, in the belief that Hitler’s antipathy toward him personally was not going to get in the way of the Nazis’ support for the IG’s synthetic fuel program, he continued quietly with his efforts to defend Jewish scientists and even tried to persuade some non-Jewish Nobel laureates to argue on their behalf. His labors met with little success. A timorous attempt by a few Aryan scientists to organize
a petition against the dismissals petered out in the face of widespread Nazi hostility and Hitler’s intractability. When Max Planck, the physicist, by no means a fervent anti-Nazi, tried to persuade the Führer of the merits of hanging on to Fritz Haber and the others—by explaining that it was only sensible to distinguish between those Jews with value and those without—Hitler again flew into a rage. “A Jew is a Jew,” he said. “All Jews cling together like burrs. Wherever one Jew is, other Jews of all types immediately gather.” Slapping his leg repeatedly to emphasize his points, he shouted so violently that Planck left, emotionally drained by the experience.
Unable to do much more on the national stage, Bosch sought instead for ways to look after his closer Jewish associates, discreetly paying compensation to some of those driven out of the country and arranging overseas postings, within the company, for some key IG staff in the hope that saner times would return. Ernest Schwarz, for example, was sent to work in New York, while Edwin Pietrkowski, Bosch’s deputy chairman at the Chemical Industry Association, was given a job in Geneva. When Fritz Haber died, unexpectedly, in January 1934, while visiting family in Basel, Switzerland, Bosch thumbed his nose at the authorities by helping to organize a memorial service at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute—in defiance of an explicit government prohibition—and then asked as many of the country’s leading scientists and academics as he could think of to attend. The invitees included government officials and military servicemen who had worked with Haber, although very few of the civil servants now employed in Nazi-controlled ministries turned up. Max Planck, who gave a valedictory address to the audience of five hundred or so, had no choice but to open the proceedings with a Nazi salute—a hesitant one, it should be noted.
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