The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben

Required reading for “For The Record” listeners, second only to Manning, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben charts the stellar rise of Germany’s chemical and dyestuff industries, as well as those of the Ruhr and Rhineland’s mining and steel, both spawned as global economic powerhouses by preexisting international trade restrictions and the German hording of patent rights. Covers also the Reich’s 1918 military defeat; the High Command’s long-term vision; the flowering and withering of Carl Bosch’s scientific and manufacturing genius; the consolidation of the banking, heavy and chemical industries (not to mention German society) coming to fruition under Hitler and Nazi policy.

Also included are astounding descriptions of the slave labor and mass murder in Auschwitz and elsewhere, the administration of which was shared by I.G. Farben’s top management and Himmler’s S.S.

Having become familiar with the special relationship between I.G. Farben and Standard Oil of Jersey as investigator for a Senate Special Committee, author Joseph Borkin later headed the Patent and Cartel Section of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, co-authoring Germany’s Master Plan in 1943. “After the war, when I read the transcript of the trial of the I.G. war criminals at Nuremberg, I knew that someday I would write the present book.”  (more...)

The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben

More essential reading:

Treason’s Peace — German Dyes and American Dupes

The Devil’s Chemists — 24 Conspirators of the International Farben Cartel Who Manufacture Wars

...which is all very interesting since Louie Verrecchio has fingered Ronaldo Hermann Schmitz, a former Deutsche Bank Executive Director, in the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI:

Money, sex and modernism

Hermann Schmitz, CEO of I.G. Farben, member of the administrators' council of Deutsche Bank

The old man (above), a close associate of Martin Bormann, died in 1960. Meanwhile, the American branch of the family has its own charm:

The Schmitzes: Republican Family Values