Customer Reviews

Inside IG Farben: Hoechst During the Third Reich

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A detailed look into this subsidiary of the infamous I. G. Farben. With a management dedicated to both profits and innovation, the leadership of Hoechst chemical incrementally sunk into the depths of anti-Semitism, slave labor, and human medical experimentation in the concentration camps. There was some resistance to all of this and even some acts of relative kindness with a reluctance to abandon old comrades who were now accused of being Communists, critics of Hitler, or simply having Jewish blood. But fear, profits, and a desire to continue research that would enhance the world--chemotherapy, modern fabrics, dyes and plastics--in a hoped-for peacetime of international trade and patent protection became a twisted compliance with a totalitarian regime. What may have started as compulsion soon became compliance. As the author says in reviewing the company records: "...it is often very difficult for historians to distinguish between compulsion and consent in a totalitarian system...." Regrettably, the management of Hoechst is in the end guilty and got off quite lightly at the Nuremberg trials.