Hell's Cartel

by Diarmuid Jeffreys

  Bosch’s recalcitrance aside, however, IG Farben was adjusting with remarkable ease to the demands of a government that was already showing the hallmarks of an absolute dictatorship. The events of May 1, 1933, were a case in point. Hitler had declared that this traditional workers’ day should be celebrated as an explicitly Nazi holiday of industrial achievement. At the concern’s Leverkusen plant, the manager, Hans Kühne, rushed out an enthusiastic statement calling on all his colleagues to join in the proceedings “and thus prove our will to cooperate.” Sullenly or otherwise, most of the workforce obliged. The scene was the same at Ludwigshafen, where the entire staff, including all the plant’s senior executives, assembled at 8:00 a.m. alongside uniformed detachments of the local SA and the National Socialist Factory Cell Organization. Only a year earlier, May 1 would have been a decidedly left-wing celebration; now the workers were all lined up docilely in front of Nazi banners to listen to speeches extolling the merits of the “people’s chancellor.” They were even urged to give three rousing “Sieg Heils” at the end of the rally.

  Needless to say, the former Communist and SPD trade unionists among them kept their heads down. One young Ludwigshafen employee, twenty-one-year-old Horst Wolff, later wrote his mother that the events of that day had sickened him deeply and that he had wanted to complain formally to management. Older workers in his section told him to keep his counsel and bide his time because “the Nazis wouldn’t be around for long.” Their advice turned out to be wise: on May 2, brownshirts and SS men smashed into every trade union office in the country, taking over newspapers and periodicals and confiscating funds. Hundreds of leading officials were attacked and humiliated and the management and assets of the whole labor movement were placed under Nazi control. A few weeks later, the regime began the final stage of its “revolution” by banning the Social Democrat Party outright and arresting its officials all over Germany. More than three thousand SPD functionaries were thrown into prison or hastily formed concentration camps, where many were beaten, tortured, and even murdered. Not long afterward all the remaining bourgeois political parties—including the Nationalists, Hitler’s erstwhile coalition partners—were bullied or manipulated into dissolution. By July 1933 Germany was indisputably a one-party state.

  Given the breakneck speed of these events, which demonstrated the regime’s increasingly sophisticated understanding of how to use fear and intimidation to get people to conform, it is perhaps not surprising that the IG and its directors slipped so readily into collaboration—not, of course, that any of them apart from Carl Bosch and one or two others of the concern’s founding generation had so far shown any real appetite for dissent. Carl Duisberg provided an interesting example. Despite his undoubtedly strong belief in the importance of strong government and the need for Germany to regain its place in the world, the IG’s godfather never had much time for the Nazis. Now in semiretirement he returned to his lavish house in Leverkusen to write a memoir in which he pointedly failed to mention either Hitler or the new regime. In any case, many of the old guard were on their way out. Between 1930 and 1933 dozens of IG veterans had died, retired, or otherwise left the business, including twenty-nine members of the Aufsichtsrat and thirty-one members of the Vorstand. Of the latter, around a dozen had been regular attendees at meetings of the Arbeitsausschuss, or Working Committee, the principal management body at the IG.

  The newer generation of IG leaders took a much more cynical and pragmatic view; whatever its drawbacks the new government clearly had a firm grip on power and it was important, both for their shareholders and for the future of the company, to maintain good relations. Inevitably, some viewed this cooperation in a more idealistic light. Georg von Schnitzler, for example, was later to claim that he had made an accord with the Nazis only because they were better than the alternative: “The collapse of the liberal bourgeois parties in Germany to which I adhered convinced me that Germany had to choose between national socialism and bolshevism. Under these circumstances I considered it right to make the attempt to come to terms with national socialism in order to save the German people from chaos.” Of course, idealistic or not, the practical consequences of such a justification were the same.

  The most obvious manifestation of the company’s growing compliance was the number of senior IG executives who followed Wilhelm Mann into the NSDAP at this time, eager to sign up before an announced freeze on new recruits (which was to last until 1937) came into effect. Hans Kühne, the manager at Leverkusen, joined after being sponsored by Robert Ley (a former Bayer chemist and Nazi gauleiter who was now head of the German Labor Front), although he was kicked out the following year for being a Freemason. Years later, he said that he had been attracted only by the regime’s promises to create jobs and political unity. Fritz Gajewski, the head of Sparte III, signed up along with Wilhelm Otto, his division’s head of sales. Friedrich Mullen, a deputy member of the Vorstand, joined on April 1, the day of the Nazi-inspired nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses, while Erwin Selck, the director in charge of the IG’s influential Berlin NW7 offices, got in by virtue of his personal financial contributions to a mounted Sturmabteilung detachment; he later joined a cavalry unit in Heinrich Himmler’s SS. Others had to wait until loopholes in the party rules allowed them in. Heinrich Hörlein, the Nobel Prize–winning head of the IG’s pharmaceutical department, joined in June 1934 but was able to get his party card backdated to May of the previous year. Heinrich Gattineau applied for membership immediately after the Nazis came to power but had to wait two years for acceptance, as did Ludwig Hermann of the Hoechst plant in Frankfurt.

  Actual party membership was not the only way to gain friends and influence people in Nazi circles. There were plenty of proxy organizations to belong to as well. For example, both Christian Schneider, one of the most eminent scientists at Leuna (and later in charge of Sparte I), and Heinrich Bütefisch, the hydrogenation expert who had met Hitler, eventually followed Erwin Selck into the SS as honorary colonels, while Heinrich Gattineau took up a part-time commission in the SA as he waited for his party card. Others were a little more circumspect—for now. Hermann Schmitz, the IG’s financial chief, declined to seek party membership in 1933, though he did accept a nomination in November as a Nazi-sponsored delegate to the Reichstag, which gives some indication of where his sympathies lay. Georg von Schnitzler was another who wasn’t quite ready to put his cards on the table; for the moment he restricted himself to maintaining a “salon” in Berlin at which high-ranking Nazis could mix with other political and industrial dignities.

  These men were still in the minority among IG executives. For some years to come, many remained skeptical about the Nazis or at least unconvinced that an overt expression of support was yet advantageous or necessary. It is also true that such levels of support as the IG’s managers did evince were not especially unusual when compared with those in other leading German firms, such as Krupp, Siemens, AEG, and the steel giant Vereinigte Stahlwerke. In time, though, more and more came to feel that some sort of affiliation was necessary. In 1937,when the party opened its doors to new members, a further fifteen members of the IG’s Vorstand rushed to sign up.

  The small handful that remained aloof beyond that date had a very different rationale. Carl Bosch never joined. For all the concessions the IG’s chief executive made to the regime’s demands, he always maintained that they were the unfortunate by-product of commercial expediency rather than the consequence of ideological commitment. In any event, Hitler’s fury over his attempts to intervene on behalf of Jewish scientists would hardly have helped Bosch’s application. Fritz ter Meer, the haughty chief of Sparte II, also stayed out, although his reasons were more about class than politics. He later claimed that he had decided not to apply because he had no intention of “attending meetings of local party members and listening to lectures by people far below me socially.”

  One of the most curious cases of agnosticism—curious in the sense that it was potentially prejudicial to his career and th
erefore completely out of character—was that of Max Ilgner. Young, deeply ambitious, and often exasperatingly self-promoting, Ilgner came from an unusual background for an IG Farben executive. His father and grandfather had both been middle-ranking army officers and he grew up expecting to follow in their footsteps. In 1918, after a spell in a Prussian cadet school, he saw a few weeks’ active service as a subaltern on the Western Front and then, during the chaos at the end of the war, joined the Freikorps. He had hoped to return to the army, but the Versailles Treaty imposed restrictions on the size of the Reichswehr and so, like many other young officers, Ilgner was forced to look for another way to earn his living. As it happened, his uncle was Hermann Schmitz, then Bosch’s financial lieutenant at BASF, so in 1924, after obtaining a doctorate (in political science rather than chemistry), Ilgner used the connection to get a job as a salesman in Ludwigshafen. Only twenty-five years old, he energetically began climbing the ladder to greater things.

  In 1926 he was sent to work for his uncle at the IG’s new central finance and public affairs section, based in the Deutsche Länderbank building on Unter den Linden in Berlin’s NW7 district. His task initially was to act as a liaison between Schmitz and the rest of the concern, a role that was not as grand as it sounded; he was actually a glorified messenger boy. But Ilgner was determined and competent and, perhaps more importantly, was able to rely on his uncle’s patronage. By late 1934 he had significantly expanded his area of responsibility—and that of the NW7 operation—and risen to become a deputy member of the Vorstand with a large degree of authority over press and public relations, market research, financial administration, and, crucially, the IG’s contacts with the government. Much of this influence was exercised through his control of two important NW7 subsections. The first, established in 1929, was called the Department of Economic Research, or Vowi (a short form of Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung), and was responsible for producing reports on developments overseas that might affect the IG’s commercial interests. The second, the Department of Economic Policy, or Wipo (Wirtschaft-spolitische Abteilung), was set up in 1932 (initially under Heinrich Gattineau) and had a more specific brief: to review matters that bore directly on IG Farben’s relationship with government, such as the law, taxation, and foreign economic policy. Of the two bodies it was the Vowi that was at first most influential. Drawing heavily on the IG’s global network of sales offices and foreign contacts as well as its own research staff in Berlin, the department gathered commercial and economic intelligence and produced reports that were often passed on to government ministries, in much the same way that modern think tanks pass on advice today. Conveniently, of course, they also provided Ilgner with a means of access to the corridors of power.

  While Ilgner’s activities propelled him into the higher reaches of the IG, they also earned him the enmity of several of his peers. Contemporaries on the Vorstand were deeply distrustful of his hunger for influence and his apparent determination to use his position to increase his profile in the outside world. As one of his subordinates, Kurt Krüger, was to say of him later: “Ilgner had great ambitions, but greater still was his conviction that he was destined to do great things, as well as his unusual desire for acclaim and acknowledgment, which drove him to try to play a role in public life.” However, with Hermann Schmitz always on hand to lend his support, Ilgner’s critics had to put up with him.

  Given the opportunity for self-aggrandizement that official association with the regime would have presented, it is therefore a little odd that Ilgner chose not to join the Nazi Party. Offered an exemption from the recruitment freeze in 1933, he declined on the mundane grounds that he didn’t want to have to resign from the Rotary International, a necessary requirement because Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, had taken a bizarre dislike to the Rotary and banned its members from joining Nazi ranks. Possibly Ilgner believed Nazi membership would make little or no difference to his career in the long run. In any case, his decision did not signify a refusal to deal with the regime. On the contrary, he showed no reluctance to trying to cement personal alliances with leading Nazis or doing all he could to advance the IG’s cause in government circles. According to Krüger, Ilgner, like others on the concern’s management team, believed that a pragmatic approach was the best way to secure influence.

  After Hitler took over the government, Ilgner followed the new trend with “banners and coattails flying” and tried to make connections in order to be “in on things” and to be able to take part. However, it cannot really be disputed that he hoped to influence developments in a way favorable to the German economy. Accordingly, he made haste to conform to the official party line and observe the institutions and outward forms of the Nazi regime.… However, this was not only Ilgner’s endeavor, but that of the whole leadership of IG, who, in this way, tried to secure the interests of the company, which they thought threatened under the new regime and with which they felt they had a bad name. The tendency to ingratiate oneself with the new powers showed itself everywhere.

  From the Nazis’ point of view, individual expressions of loyalty by IG Farben managers were far less important that the company’s wholesale cooperation. The IG, in common with other businesses, was expected to play a central role in the process of national renewal and, if necessary, to place its own interests second to those of the state. As a consequence, at home and abroad, the cartel was about to be pulled in several conflicting directions.

  Overseas, the IG’s immediate objective was to repair the harm done to sales by the political fallout from the Nazi takeover and the boycott of Jewish businesses. Wilhelm Mann’s letter was an early and overzealous attempt at damage limitation, but as the months went by such efforts became commonplace. In July 1933, for example, when the DuPont Corporation sent two executives to Frankfurt to arrange to sell back its small stake in IG Farben, a move prompted in part by the U.S. firm’s unease over recent events, several of the IG’s leading figures went out of their way to try to convince the Americans that things in Germany were returning to normal and that some of the stories they had heard were not true. Among them, remarkably, was Carl von Weinberg, the Jewish deputy chairman of the Aufsichtsrat, who told the DuPont executives that the Nazi movement had his full approval and that he was keeping his money in the country. Even Bosch unbent sufficiently to explain that Hitler had recently been curbing the more extreme elements of his party. The Americans were unconvinced, and the sale went ahead as planned.

  Max Ilgner rose to the task of damage control with particular enthusiasm. He appreciated better than most just how much harm the Nazis’ harsh rhetoric had done to Germany’s reputation abroad—and therefore to the IG’s exports—and took it on himself to form a Circle of Economic Advisers to Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry in the hope that its output could be made less strident. At first, he had some modest successes. He persuaded Goebbels to attend a few meetings of the circle and managed to explain frankly to him how the outside world now saw the country. “I didn’t paint a rosy picture as was customary in the Third Reich. Trade was dropping off and we were worried about German exports,” he later said. “We were tried and proven economists and we knew well the reaction of the world to propaganda.” Eventually, though, Goebbels took exception to Ilgner’s claims that his officials were harming German interests and left in a huff, never to return.

  Undeterred, Ilgner decided—again on his own initiative—to enlist the services of Ivy Lee, one of America’s most famous public relations and advertising experts, to improve Hitler’s unsavory reputation overseas.* When the American arrived in Berlin in early 1934 (after spending a few days in Rome on a similar mission with Mussolini), Ilgner arranged for him to meet the Führer.

  Although the notion of hiring one of Madison Avenue’s most gung-ho practitioners to give Adolf Hitler public relations advice might now seem quite bizarre, it was an amiable enough occasion, by all accounts. The meeting even appears to have survived the moment when Lee blithely suggested that, since the Jewi
sh boycott wasn’t going down very well with the American media, Hitler should consider dropping it. Regrettably, there is no record of the exact words with which the Führer declined to take this counsel, but presumably they can’t have been too bruising, because afterward Lee was happy to give Ilgner several tips on how IG Farben could help spin the dramatic changes taking place in Germany: foreign journalists could be entertained at press receptions featuring moderate speakers from German public life; influential Americans could be invited to take guided motor tours through the country to see how conditions were improving; Germany’s culture, beautiful landscape, and fascinating people should always be emphasized over the unpleasant rhetoric of the Nazis. Probably Lee’s most important proposal, however, was that he and Ilgner should discreetly arrange for positive articles about the new Germany to be placed in U.S. newspapers and magazine, copies of which could then be sent on to leading American opinion makers.†

  Ilgner’s enthusiastic adoption of such tactics, in addition to his frequent trips overseas to promote the notion that Nazi Germany was a misunderstood land of peaceful intent and impressive accomplishments, sat uneasily with some of his Vorstand colleagues. Georg von Schnitzler complained at one point that “we now appear as the champion of the German cause in general and as auxiliary government agents without even knowing whether the government considers this desirable.… The less one mixes business matters with questions of sympathy or antipathy to various forms of government or with the national psychological attitude the better it will be for our business.” But such criticism made little difference. Ilgner was indefatigable, and in any case the party’s Foreign Organization was also now beginning to insist that the IG’s overseas sales apparatus be used to disseminate propaganda. Although that idea was not implemented overnight (in the summer of 1933, for example, the Bayer field office in Montevideo was still independent enough to fend off a request by the German embassy that it include Nazi literature in its mailings to the local medical community), resistance soon began to crumble. By February 1934 the concern’s foreign staff had been told by managers to cancel any advertising in publications overtly hostile to the Third Reich and to swear an oath guaranteeing their personal political allegiance.