IG Farben and Hugh Nibley

Hugh W. Nibley spoke about the controversial German conglomerate I.G. Farben with his son Alex Nibley in Sergeant Nibley PhD, a book about the elder’s experience in World War II. Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG earned much-needed foreign exchange to help finance the Nazi war machine, helped build and maintain Auschwitz for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi party of Germany, and held ties with key U.S. counterparts before and during the war including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Chase Manhattan, Standard Oil, Du Pont, Dow Chemical, and Ford Motor Company.

Apparently as the war neared an end, a few friends of Sergeant Nibley went looking for a place to hold an NCO club in Heidelberg. While searching for a suitable location among many fraternity houses they came upon Germania House, a frat house that had concealed records linking the U.S. corporation Standard Oil to Germany’s I.G. Farben. Here is what Alex Nibley wrote about his father’s experience:

I ended up in Heidelberg at the headquarters for General Dever and the 6th Army Group. That’s where all the fancy people were, and they kept giving each other medals every Thursday and this, that, and the other. General Devers liked comfort, and he wanted everybody to be comfortable. We enjoyed ourselves in Heidelberg. This was the center of German education, and when I had been a missionary in that region I had seriously considered returning to go to school in Heidelberg. Also, the city had not been touched by the war and stood all intact. The first thing after we got there, some old friends of mine from Ritchie went to look for a good respectable frat house for the non-coms, because we wanted our own club. Heidelberg is of course where the tradition of university fraternities reached its zenith and the city was full of wonderful mansions used by the fraternities, so our guys went to this very elegant one, the Germania House. I wasn’t there, but they told me about it. They said, “We went up and knocked on the door and a butler in full-dress livery – everything but a powdered wig – came to the door and looked at us in surprise and said, ‘Well, you people were here yesterday. We don’t have any of the records any more. They’re all gone.’

“What records? What happened? we said.

“Well, they had these big trucks, and we took all the records out and put them in the trucks and they took them away.’

“We said, ‘What records?’

“Your Standard Oil records. We had all your Standard Oil Company records here,’ the butler said.”

It seems there was an agreement that we wouldn’t bomb Heidelberg if they wouldn’t bomb Oxford, so they had all the Standard Oil records there in Heidelberg. Of course, Standard Oil had been hand-in-glove with the German Bayer concern that was famous for making aspirin but also made a lot of other things. Joseph Borkin wrote a book about that, The Crime and Punishment of I. G. Farben. They built Auschwitz, for example, and they were so bad that the SS – mind you, the SS! – pleaded with them to let up on the poor prisoners because they couldn’t produce unless they got something to eat, and there were just dying like flies. When I first went on my mission in the late twenties, I was sent to Ludwigshafen for the first few months, and everybody there was talking about the greatest explosion in German history that had taken place at the Oppau factory, the I. G. Farben factory at Ludwigshafen, this sordid industrial town.

At this time the Germans were very restricted in what military materials they could produce, and they were supposed to be producing fertilizer in this plant, but they’d been making high explosives. They took us through the factory and showed us the processes that the chemicals would go through, and at the end out comes ammonium nitrate for fertilizer, and they had these little bags of fertilizer they were filling. But of course ammonium nitrate can also be used for explosives, so a little trickle of fertilizer would flow from this huge factory, but everybody knew that what they were doing was making munitions. And I. G. Farben was hand-in-glove with Standard Oil. The companies were in partnership, and they protected each others’ patents and they exchanged their knowledge and formulas during the war. Bayer aspirin, Hoechst, BASF – they’re still among the biggest corporations in the world, and they were all parts of I. G. Farben. And all this was going on, and we’d bumbled onto it in Heidelberg. The place we were trying to get for an NCO club was full of Standard Oil records.¹

The importance of I.G. Farben to the Nazi war effort was underscored by a team of civilian and military experts who concluded after the war:

Without I.G.’s immense productive facilities, its far-reaching research, varied technical experience and overall concentration of economic power, Germany would not have been in a position to start its aggressive war in September 1939.²

Joseph Borkin wrote about the partnership between I.G. Farben and the Nazi party concerning Auschwitz:

The depth of the partnership was reached at Auschwitz, the extermination center, where four million human beings were destroyed in accordance with the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” Hitler’s plan to destroy an entire people. Drawn by the almost limitless reservoir of death camp labor, I.G. chose to build a great industrial complex at Auschwitz for the production of synthetic rubber and oil. So enormous was this installation that it used as much electricity as did the entire city of Berlin. More than 25,000 camp inmates paid with their lives to construct it.³

Anthony C. Sutton, noted author on the order of the Skull and Bones, wrote that American financiers assisted I.G. Farben and the Nazis in the build-up leading to WWII:

Directors of Farben firms (i.e., the “I. G. Farben officials” referred to in the investigation) included not only Germans but also prominent American financiers. This 1945 U.S. War Department report concluded that I.G.’s assignment from Hitler in the prewar period was to make Germany self-sufficient in rubber, gasoline, lubricating oils, magnesium, fibers, tanning agents, fats, and explosives. To fulfill this critical assignment, vast sums were spent by I.G. on processes to extract these war materials from indigenous German raw materials – in particular the plentiful German coal resources. Where these processes could not be developed in Germany, they were acquired from abroad under cartel arrangements. For example, the process for iso-octane, essential for aviation fuels, was obtained from the United States,

“… in fact entirely [from] the Americans and has become known to us in detail in its separate stages through our agreements with them [Standard Oil of New Jersey] and is being used very extensively by us.”

The process for manufacturing tetra-ethyl lead, essential for aviation gasoline, was obtained by I. G. Farben from the United States, and in 1939 I.G. was sold $20 million of high-grade aviation gasoline by Standard Oil of New Jersey. Even before Germany manufactured tetra-ethyl lead by the American process it was able to “borrow” 500 tons from the Ethyl Corporation. This loan of vital tetra-ethyl lead was not repaid and I.G. forfeited the $1 million security. Further, I.G. purchased large stocks of magnesium from Dow Chemical for incendiary bombs and stockpiled explosives, stabilizers, phosphorus, and cyanides from the outside world.

In 1939, out of 43 major products manufactured by I.G., 28 were of “primary concern” to the German armed forces. Farben’s ultimate control of the German war economy, acquired during the 1920s and 1930s with Wall Street assistance, can best be assessed by examining the percentage of German war material output produced by Farben plants in 1945. Farben at that time produced 100 percent of German synthetic rubber, 95 percent of German poison gas (including all the Zyklon B gas used in the concentration camps), 90 percent of German plastics, 88 percent of German magnesium, 84 percent of German explosives, 70 percent of German gunpowder, 46 percent of German high octane (aviation) gasoline, and 33 percent of German synthetic gasoline.⁴

American I.G. sought to improve its public image in America during the 1920s and 30s:

This miserable picture of pre-war military preparation was known abroad and had to be sold — or disguised — to the American public in order to facilitate Wall Street fund-raising and technical assistance on behalf of I. G. Farben in the United States. A prominent New York public relations firm was chosen for the job of selling the I.G. Farben combine to America. The most notable public relations firm in the late 1920s and 1930s was Ivy Lee & T.J. Ross of New York. Ivy Lee had previously undertaken a public relations campaign for the Rockefellers, to spruce up the Rockefeller name among the American public. The firm had also produced a sycophantic book entitled USSR, undertaking the same clean-up task for the Soviet Union — even while Soviet labor camps were in full blast in the late 20s and early 30s.

From 1929 onwards Ivy Lee became public relations counsel for I. G. Farben in the United States. In 1934 Ivy Lee presented testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee on this work for Farben. Lee testified that I.G. Farben was affiliated with the American Farben firm and “The American I.G. is a holding company with directors such people as Edsel Ford, Walter Teagle, one of the officers of the City Bank …. ” Lee explained that he was paid $25,000 per year under a contract made with Max Ilgner of I.G. Farben. His job was to counter criticism leveled at I.G. Farben within the United States. . . .

The remaining four members of the American I.G. board were prominent American citizens and members of the Wall Street financial elite: C.E. Mitchell, chairman of National City Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Edsel B. Ford, president of Ford Motor Company; W.C. Teagle, another director of Standard Oil of New Jersey; and, Paul Warburg, first member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and chairman of the Bank of Manhattan Company.

Directors of American I.G. were not only prominent in Wall Street and American industry but more significantly were drawn from a few highly influential institutions. (See chart above.)

Between 1929 and 1939 there were changes in the make-up of the board of American I.G. The number of directors varied from time to time, although a majority always had I.G. backgrounds or connections, and the board never had less than four American directors. In 1939 — presumably looking ahead to World War II — an effort was made to give the board a more American complexion, but despite the resignation of Hermann Schmitz, Carl Bosch, and Walter Duisberg, and the appointment of seven new directors, seven members still belonged to the I.G. group. This I.G. predominance increased during 1940 and 1941 as American directors, including Edsel Ford, realized the political unhealthiness of I.G. and resigned.

Several basic observations can be made from this evidence. First, the board of American I.G. had three directors from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the most influential of the various Federal Reserve Banks. American I.G. also had interlocks with Standard Oil of New Jersey, Ford Motor Company, Bank of Manhattan (later to become the Chase Manhattan), and A.E.G. (German General Electric). Second, three members of the board of this American I.G. were found guilty at Nuremburg War Crimes Trials. These were the German, not the American, members. Among these Germans was Max Ilgner, director of the I.G. Farben N.W. 7 office in Berlin, i.e., the Nazi pre-war intelligence office. If the directors of a corporation are collectively responsible for the activities of the corporation, then the American directors should also have been placed on trial at Nuremburg, along with the German directors — that is, if the purpose of the trials was to determine war guilt. Of course, if the purpose of the trials had been to divert attention away from the U.S. involvement in Hitler’s rise to power, they succeeded very well in such an objective.⁵

As a conglomerate, I.G. Farben lives on as Agfa, BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst (purchased by Sanofi-Synthélabo as Aventis). It seems however, that the Americans involved in financing and supplying the company were never brought to justice.

At the conclusion of Sergeant Nibley PhD, Alex poignantly drew the following comparison between two preachers in pre-WWII Bavaria:

In the late twenties, two preachers in southern Germany were giving speeches on street corners and handing out pamphlets. One became the essence of militarism, challenged the world, and energized his nation with a vision of world dominance. The other, among the least likely soldiers in the world, joined several million other oddballs and military misfits to challenge the dictator and bring his thousand-year Reich to a disgraceful end only twelve years after it had come to power. The war was over. Hitler’s Teutonic ideal of discipline, regimentation, and racism had challenged the spoiled, flabby, disorderly democracies – and lost. The strange and indirect association of the two ardent preachers of Bavaria was over. . . [Hitler] believed the war was determined not by a triumph of democracy over totalitarianism, but by the defeat of one dictatorship – his own – by another more fanatical, more rigid, and more dedicated to ruthless domination – Stalin and the Soviets.⁶

Sources:

1. Nibley, Hugh and Alex Nibley. Sergeant Nibley, PhD: Memories of an Unlikely Screaming Eagle. Salt Lake City: Shadow Mountain, 2006. 258-260.↩
2. Borkin, Joseph. “Introduction”. The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben. Biblioteca Pléyades. 11 January 2008.↩
3. Ibid.↩
4. Sutton, Antony C. “The Empire of I.G. Farben”. Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. 2000. Studies in Reformed Theology. 22 January 2008.↩
5. Ibid.↩
6. Nibley, Hugh and Alex Nibley. Sergeant Nibley, PhD: Memories of an Unlikely Screaming Eagle. Salt Lake City: Shadow Mountain, 2006. 288.↩

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