Return To Nuremberg: Big Pharma Must Answer For Crimes Against Humanity

Gabriel Donohoe

Fools Crow

After World War Two, scores of suspected Nazi war criminals were prosecuted by the Allies in the Palace of Justice in the city of Nuremberg, the birth-place of the Nazi Party. The defendants were drawn not just from the military, but also from medical, judicial, administrative, industrial, and other sectors of the German war machine.

Among the industrial prisoners charged with crimes against humanity were 24 managers of IG Farben, an organization without whom, according to U.S. Chief Prosecutor General Telford Taylor, the Second World War would not have been possible.

In 1925, IG Farben, Interessengemeinschaft Farben, (Association of Common Interests), became a powerful cartel of German chemical and pharmaceutical companies such as Bayer (the aspirin manufacturer), BASF, AGFA, and Hoechst (now known as Aventis.)

By 1933, the IG Farben group had become the largest chemical and pharmaceutical corporation in the world. And even today, although it doesn’t use the name IG Farben, its companies remain the most powerful transnationals on the planet in pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and agro-chemicals.

The IG Farben cartel was crucial to the Nazi war effort by supplying synthetic fuel, rubber, and other chemicals. They also manufactured Zyklon-B, the nerve gas used to kill millions in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Birkenau, and elsewhere.

The cartel, later known as the Devil’s Chemists, used unwilling inmates of the concentration camps as slave laborers and guinea pigs to test chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and vaccines. Tens of thousands died, and those who became too ill to be of any use were murdered in the gas chambers.

IG Farben worked closely with the Nazi regime and with the SS and was perhaps the most important dynamic in driving the Nazi war machine, donating some 80 million Reichsmarks in return for chemical, pharmaceutical, and petrochemical industries seized from occupied countries.

Yet they could not have gotten to a position of such power without huge investment from John D. Rockefeller and his Standard Oil Company.