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
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- Nibley, Hugh and Alex Nibley. Sergeant Nibley, PhD: Memories of an Unlikely Screaming Eagle. Salt Lake City: Shadow Mountain, 2006. 258-260.↩
- Borkin, Joseph. “Introduction”. The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben. Biblioteca Pléyades. 11 January 2008.↩
- Ibid.↩
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