Photo: CONCENTRATION CAMP - The factory system at Monowitz-Buna, a part of the Auschwitz system, used slave workers to produce synthetic rubber and oil. Credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-2007-005

Photo: CONCENTRATION CAMP - The factory system at Monowitz-Buna, a part of the Auschwitz system, used slave workers to produce synthetic rubber and oil. Credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-2007-005
Chemistry was central to Nazi endeavors. As the country became increasingly isolated from raw materials, chemists played a major role developing and improving techniques for producing synthetic alternatives to rubber, petrol, and even coffee. Chemical expertise was required to set up and run factories for these products. At Monowitz-Buna, part of the Auschwitz concentration camp system, the conglomerate company IG Farben, which included BASF, Bayer, Agfa, and Hoechst, used slave workers to produce synthetic rubber and oil. Average life expectancy for these workers was just a few months. The IG Farben conglomerate also produced the pesticide Zyklon B, which was used in gas chambers.
These and other details emerged in 1946 and 1947 during the trials in Nuremberg for Germany’s most nefarious war criminals. But the role of many German chemists was subsequently buried, revised, whitewashed, or denied as the country focused on rebuilding after the war, says Helmut Maier, a historian of technology at Ruhr University, in Bochum, Germany.
Upon request of the German Chemical Society (GDCh), Maier has just completed a six-year analysis of the society’s history in Nazi Germany, resulting in a 700-page tome that was delivered to GDCh this month and will be sent to potential publishers this fall. His work confirms and extends earlier research by Ute Deichmann, a historian of science at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Israel, on the expulsion of Jews from science institutes and the activities of academic chemists during the Third Reich.
In combination, their research reveals that the two chemical societies that joined after World War II to become GDCh were both eagerly compliant with Aryanization—advancing the superiority of the Aryan “race”—and dismissed Jewish members, society leaders, and staff, even before Nazi laws required them to do so. Before and during the war, the two chemical societies actively sought out collaborations with the Nazi military complex and supported the Third Reich by coordinating military research, publishing top-secret journals on poison gas and how to develop synthetic products without access to many raw materials. Finally, when the war ended, high-profile chemists wrote letters defending the character of IG Farben chemist and executive Carl Krauch, even after he had been found guilty of crimes against humanity.
When Hitler came into power in 1933, Germany’s chemical industry was resp