But there was always more to it than just aggressive capitalism. For a time, the company’s executives were some of the cleverest, most influential and innovative businessmen in the world. Its scientists had won a host of Nobel Prizes and were globally famous for their contributions to the advancement of medical science and for the many benefits their prowess had brought to society. When economic circumstances allowed, its hundreds of thousands of workers were among the best trained, best paid, and most highly skilled in Europe, with access to well-built company housing, sponsored orchestras and libraries, subsidized schools and medical facilities. The firm’s factories and laboratories were the envy of chemists in every other developed nation, its philanthropic gestures as dazzling as any in the world. IG Farben, in short, was both powerful and farsighted, a proud symbol of German efficiency and success and a shining example of the country’s enterprise, scientific acumen, and technological achievement.
So how did the IG fall so low? What exactly had its leading executives done to merit the accusation of direct complicity in the crimes of the most inhumane dictatorship in history, of a collaboration so close that without it, as Taylor put it, “Hitler and his Party followers would never have been able to seize and consolidate their power in Germany, and the Third Reich would never have dared to plunge into war”? A relationship that, if the Nuremberg indictment was to be believed, made IG Farben and its managers as culpable as the Führer and his coterie for the catastrophe that enveloped Europe in the middle part of the twentieth century. And were the defendants really the war criminals that the prosecution alleged; ruthless men with a self-serving mind-set shaped by years of struggle in a tough industry, driven by greed and ambition into a corrupt alliance with the Nazis? Or were they merely incautiously patriotic businessmen caught up in events beyond their control, guilty only of naiveté in believing that the risks inherent in an association with Hitler’s regime would be outweighed by the eventual benefits to their enterprise and their country?
The best way to answer these questions, to fully understand the intentions and influences of those who created and ran IG Farben, and to grasp just how and why its business rose so high and then plummeted so far, is to track the combine’s evolution over history—from its origins in the nineteenth century, when intense domestic and international competition forged the nascent German chemical industry’s determination to achieve global dominance, through to its golden era, when its genius for synthetic chemistry made anything and everything seem possible, and then on to its fatal alliance with the Nazis, to World War II and to the trial that followed. It is an extraordinary story with many unexpected twists and turns and much to tell us about the fallibility and failings of humankind and the way a nation gave up its soul. More directly, though, it contains a clear warning about the risks inherent in any close relationship between business and state and what can go wrong when political objectives and the pursuit of profit become dangerously entwined.
1
FROM PERKIN’S PURPLE TO DUISBERG’S DRUGS
It is curious that a story destined to end amid the drab, achromatic grays and blacks of rubble-strewn Germany should have begun with a vivid splash of color found on a scrap of silk. Nevertheless, the origins of IG Farben can be traced back to a serendipitous discovery by a young English chemistry student during Easter week of 1856. In that one moment, in a small attic room overlooking London’s docks, seventy years of disparate scientific, social, and technological development coalesced in the haphazard holiday experiments of a teenager—and gave birth to a new industry.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, organic chemistry had evolved into a vibrant intellectual discipline. Once popularly derided as the eccentric pastime of crank alchemists and gentlemen amateurs, it had become an important gear in the great engines of change—war, political upheaval, and new ideas in economics, philosophy, science, and technology—that had transformed society since the onset of the industrial revolution. Over those years a new generation of professional scientists had begun using innovative techniques of systematic research to investigate the basic matter of the world around them. The genesis of modern industrial chemistry lay in that inquisitiveness, because what started as an academic interest, a straightforward desire to know what everyday substances were made of, soon blossomed into a marathon, if hit and miss, effort to reproduce those same substances artificially. Well before things came to a head in a London attic, laboratories in Europe’s old universities and newer technical institutes were bubbling with experiments designed to reveal the chemical composition of materials that had hitherto seemed part of the given world. And where inquiring minds led, more entrepreneurial ones followed. To many of these pioneers the science held out the promise of dazzling rewards—a host of new discoveries with practical applications and great commercial potential.
William Henry Perkin was one of the more unlikely beneficiaries of this enthusiasm. In 1856 he was an eighteen-year-old student at the Royal College for Chemistry, which had recently opened in London in response to public unease that Britain might be falling behind its European competitors in an important new scientific field. After sailing through the institution’s basic syllabus with apparent ease, Perkin came to the attention of its young German director, August Wilhelm von Hofmann. An inspirational teacher who had won his scientific spurs at the renowned chemistry faculty of the University of Giessen, Hofmann was always on the lookout for students with special aptitude for pure laboratory research. Noticing Perkin’s interest, he asked him to help out on a number of his own pet projects.
One of these was an attempt to find a procedure for making quinine, the active substance in the bark of the Peruvian cinchona tree, which for over 250 years had been the most effective treatment for malarial fever—or ague, as it was then commonly called. Because cinchona bark was expensive and hard to obtain—the tree flourished only in its native South America—a synthetic version had been the target of ambitious chemists for decades. Hofmann was convinced the answer lay in coal tar, a noxious black gunk that was a by-product of gaslight, formed when coal was burned in a vacuum. Scientists had been investigating coal tar’s murky properties for over a quarter of a century and had found it chock-full of interesting chemicals but were still far from completely understanding it. Nevertheless, Hofmann knew that one of its derivatives, naphtha, when crystallized, had a chemical formula curiously close to that of quinine. Although he had been unable to turn this insight into a successful synthesis himself, he was sure that some patient tinkering with similar coal tar chemicals might yield the right result. And so, as Hofmann prepared to return to his native Germany for the Easter holidays, he gave the problem to his young assistant as an interesting vacation assignment.
Perkin took the task home to the laboratory he had built on the top floor of his family’s house in London’s East End. It was a simple room furnished with a small table and a few shelves for his rudimentary equipment, and although there was a view of sorts from the window (in idle moments he could gaze out on the engines shunting along an adjacent railway line), there was little else in the way of distraction. He assembled his beakers, test tubes, and small collection of chemicals and set to work.
His first attempt to create quinine involved a coal tar derivative called allyl-toluidine, which, like naphtha, had a chemical makeup very similar to that of the famous medicine. Using two standard laboratory procedures, oxidization and distillation, Perkin attempted to change the formula of the allyl-toluidine to make it identical to that of quinine by adding oxygen and removing hydrogen (in the form of water). His experiment failed. Instead of reproducing the colorless medicine, he came up with a red powder instead. A little frustrated, he tried replacing the allyl-toluidine with aniline, yet another coal tar derivate (identified by a German scientist, Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, some twenty years earlier), which he thought might oxidize or distill more easily. This attempt failed, too, but the resultant reaction left a black sludge that turned his test tubes a striking p
urple color when he tried to wash them in water. Intrigued, he went off and found a scrap of silk and stained it with the product of his experiments. He had no real reason to do such a thing; chemists stumbled across all sorts of strange colors when playing with coal tar chemicals and mostly just ignored them. But something about the brilliance and luster of this particular shade piqued his interest. A question popped unbidden into his mind: Could this chemical combination possibly form the basis of a new artificial dye? As the days went by and his new purple-stained cloth didn’t fade and survived all his attempts to launder it clean, Perkin decided to make a larger quantity of the dyestuff and seek the opinion of a commercial dye producer. From a friend of his brother Thomas, he got the name and address of a reputable company in Perth and sent it a sample. On June 12, 1856, its owner, Robert Pullar, wrote back.
If your discovery does not make the goods too expensive, it is decidedly one of the most valuable that has come out for a very long time. This colour is one which has been very much wanted in all classes of goods, and could not be obtained fast on silks and only at great expense on cotton yarns. I enclose you [sic] pattern of the best lilac we have on cotton—it is dyed only by one house in the United Kingdom, but even this is not quite fast and does not stand the test that yours does, and fades by exposure to air. On silk the colour has always been fugitive.
Pullar’s excitement was understandable. Unwittingly, Perkin had chanced upon a way to make one of the dye trade’s most sought-after products—a color synonymous with emperors, cardinals, and kings.* But perhaps more importantly he seemed to have found a new manufacturing process, a method of producing dyes in any quantity required, of a standardized quality and without many of the costs and risks associated with the industry. Traditionally, dyes could be produced only from animal or vegetable bases, yet even the most popular and commonly used colors, such as the Turkish red of the madder root, native to the Levant, or the saffron yellow of Cretan lilies, or the deep blue of India’s indigo plant, involved extraordinarily challenging extraction procedures. Madder, for example, had to be put through twenty distinct stages of separation before it would release its precious red cargo, whereas indigo would give up its color only after several weeks of complex and tedious fermentation. Any innovation that promised to bypass such laborious work was therefore certain to be eagerly embraced.
Of course, it was one thing to stumble upon an interesting discovery; it was another thing entirely to turn it into a successful commercial enterprise. The news from Perth was thrilling and came with a clear suggestion that Perkin should consider manufacturing his new dye himself, but he was only eighteen and had no experience of any sort of business, let alone one as complicated as the dye industry. Nonetheless, he took the plunge. He patented his idea in August 1856, visited Pullar for advice and moral support, and then traveled the country giving demonstrations to fascinated scientists and potential backers. Finally, after several frustrating months trying to raise capital from skeptical bankers, he persuaded his father and brother to sink all their savings into the project. In June 1857 they found a spot for a factory at Greenford Green in Harrow and less than six months later the first aniline purple went on sale.
Even then it could have gone horribly wrong. Perkin had decided to call his discovery mauveine after the French word mauve, partly in the hope that its Gallic connotations would make people think of glamorous Parisian haute couture, but what if the new color was considered gaudy or unfashionable?
As luck would have it, in the summer of 1857 Empress Eugénie, the style-conscious young wife of France’s Napoleon III, took a great liking to light purple because she thought it set off her eyes. Although the silk gowns she wore were actually colored with natural dyes produced in Lyons (extracted from rare lichens at great expense), she sparked a fad for the color that soon crossed the Channel. It helped that she was a close friend of Queen Victoria and gave her fashion tips from time to time. When Victoria was considering what to wear to the wedding of her daughter in January 1858, Eugénie’s favorite shade naturally came to mind. A few days after the ceremony, the Illustrated London News celebrated her choice in suitably gushing terms: “The train and body of Her Majesty’s dress was composed of rich mauve (lilac) velvet, trimmed with three rows of lace; the corsage ornamented with diamonds and the celebrated Koh-i-noor brooch; the petticoat, mauve and silver moiré antique, trimmed with a deep flounce of Honiton lace.” The British public patriotically took note and gave itself over to mauve mania. Within a few weeks every grand function and ballroom in London was awash in swathes of purple silk, and every fashion-conscious young woman in the provinces was seeking to emulate the party clothes of the high society debutantes she read about in the newspapers. Dressmakers, glove makers, and umbrella manufacturers were inundated with requests for mauve goods. They passed this demand on to the dyers and as there was no one else they could turn to (rare lichens being all very well for French empresses but far too expensive for lesser folk), Perkin’s company reaped the rewards.
News of the extraordinary success of this new dye product soon traveled back across the Channel to Europe, where the mauve fad picked up again with even greater intensity than before. Unfortunately, although Perkin held the patent to the color in England and was making much money from it, he had neglected to secure one overseas. During his trips around Britain to raise interest in the project, he had naively revealed too much information about the chemical process. When details began to appear in the scientific journals, continental dye producers pounced. In 1858, within a year of mauve’s first appearance on the streets of London, several of them were conducting their own aniline experiments. Even as Perkin began receiving widespread recognition from the European scientific community for his discovery and accepted the medals and honors that were his due, it was becoming clear that the genie was out of the bottle.
* * *
IF AUGUST VON HOFMANN’S appointment to the Royal College for Chemistry in 1845 had been an implicit acknowledgment of German supremacy in the science, then his return home in 1865 was a clear indication—Perkin’s achievements notwithstanding—that his country intended to retain its lead. Hofmann told his friends that he had been wooed back to a new professorial chair in Berlin by promises of vast sums of money to spend on a new laboratory but it was equally true that, disheartened by battles with some of the more conservatively minded backers of the Royal College in London (who had never ceased to irritate him with requests that his students apply their skills to stolid British concerns like mining and agriculture), he had also been yearning for a more sympathetic environment in which to work. In Germany he found it. The country was alive with political and economic energy. Most of its thirty-nine independent states had joined together in a single customs union, or Zollverein, in 1834, and ever since then the country had been driving toward its common destiny. It would not formally achieve that goal until 1871, but in many ways Germany was already one nation. And like other new countries it was hungry to make its mark, politically and economically. The hundred or so arcane treaties and laws that had once governed commerce between its separate states—and thereby hampered its industrial development in comparison with Britain and France—were gradually being streamlined. A new entrepreneurial spirit was taking hold and Germany was preparing to make full use of its many commercial advantages.
One of the most significant of these was its scientific acumen. German scientists were undoubtedly the best trained in Europe. For more than a generation, universities and technical colleges at Marburg, Göttingen, Heidelberg, Giessen, Berlin, Munich, Dorpat, Keil, and elsewhere had been putting science—and in particular chemistry—at the heart of their curriculum. The hundreds of graduates these institutions produced had been welcomed with great enthusiasm into a society that valued their skills and hoped that they might one day help propel Germany to its rightful place at the top table of industrialized nations. In the interim, this huge talent pool was of immense benefit to German manufacturers when it came to
exploiting innovative technologies and gave rise to whole new industries and commercial opportunities.* Inevitably, the synthetic dye business was one of them.
When news of William Perkin’s invention spread across Europe, it was actually the French who reacted first (a scientist called Verguin formulated a shade of fuchsine called magenta in 1859) and for most of the next decade the initiative was batted back and forth across the Channel as tinctorial science became the field to be in. New color had followed new color—Manchester brown, Magdala red, Perkin’s green, Nicholson’s blue—even August von Hofmann had gotten into the game during his last years in London, devising Hofmann’s violet and, perhaps more importantly, analyzing the complicated molecular composition common to all aniline dyes. But it was his countrymen who would derive much of the long-term benefit of this work. Enthralled by the emerging science, young German chemists had flocked to London, Manchester, and Paris to learn its secrets. When they returned home, they fell straight into the arms of waiting entrepreneurs.
German textile manufacturers had long resented Anglo-French dominance of the production of natural dyes and the high prices they had been forced to pay. Now, with abundant cheap coal being produced in the Ruhr, the scientific wherewithal to exploit the new aniline chemistry, and the economic impetus that came from political unification, German businessmen saw how this position could be reversed. Coal tar dyestuff companies began to spring up everywhere. By 1876 there were six major synthetic dye works in Britain, five in France, and seventeen in Germany. Europe’s newest nation had seized the initiative.
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