IG Farben’s Long Fall: How Europe’s Biggest Company Outlived Its Own Verdict

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

On 25 June 2026 the US Supreme Court ruled 7–2 for Monsanto in Monsanto v. Durnell. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion. The Court held that federal pesticide law preempts state failure-to-warn claims about Roundup. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, and Justice Neil Gorsuch joined her. Monstanto’s parent company being one of the companies included in IG Farben.

Bayer acquired Monsanto in 2018 and inherited more than 100,000 claims. Chief executive Bill Anderson welcomed the decision. He called it “an important step in our multi-pronged strategy to significantly contain this litigation.”

On 1 July Bayer consolidated its US glyphosate operations into a new entity, Ruveon LLC. Bayer stresses that Ruveon stays inside the group. It describes the unit as “a more nimble and well-positioned player.”

Bayer carries a second inheritance. In December 1925 it merged into IG Farbenindustrie AG. That company built a factory at Auschwitz. A Farben subsidiary supplied the gas used at Birkenau. The corporate form absorbed the crime, then outlived it by sixty-seven years.

Six firms, one balance sheet, December 1925

Six German chemical companies signed the merger contract on 21 November 1925. IG Farben came into existence eleven days later.

BASF, Bayer and Hoechst each took 27.4 percent of the equity. Hoechst brought Cassella and Kalle with it. Agfa held 9 percent, Griesheim-Elektron 6.9 percent, and Weiler-ter Meer the remaining 1.9 percent.

Carl Duisberg of Bayer had argued for exactly this since 1904. He toured Standard Oil, US Steel and Alcoa in 1903. He came home wanting a German trust of comparable weight, and he waited twenty-one years to get it.

By 1926 the combine carried a market capitalisation of 1.4 billion Reichsmarks. It employed roughly 100,000 people. Its supervisory board acquired a nickname its members enjoyed: the Council of Gods.

Nothing in that founding predicted Auschwitz. No board member backed the Nazi Party before 1933. Four supervisory board members were Jewish, and the far-right press attacked the firm on exactly that ground.

Carl Bosch bets the company on high pressure

Carl Bosch chaired the new board. He staked its future on high-pressure chemistry. Ammonia came first, and synthetic fuel followed from 1927 at Leuna.

The science worked brilliantly. Bosch and Friedrich Bergius shared the 1931 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for high-pressure methods. Gerhard Domagk won the 1939 medicine prize for the antibacterial action of prontosil. Otto Bayer synthesised polyurethane in 1937.

The economics collapsed. World oil prices fell after 1929, and coal hydrogenation cost far more than imported crude. Farben had sunk enormous capital into a process the market did not want.

By 1932 the company faced writing down its single largest investment. Its net profit had shrunk to a fraction of the 1929 figure. Bosch’s masterpiece looked like Bosch’s mistake.

Hold that thought. The commercial desperation of 1932 explains almost everything that followed.

The gasoline contract of December 1933

Hitler rescued the write-down. Farben and the Reich government signed the Benzinvertrag on 14 December 1933. The state guaranteed offtake of 350,000 tonnes of synthetic petrol at a fixed minimum price.

Autarky policy converted a stranded asset into a profit centre. No private buyer would pay Farben’s hydrogenation costs. A rearming state would.

Farben had contributed to the 1933 election campaign. Joseph Borkin later documented that payment as German industry’s largest single contribution. Borkin investigated the cartel as a US Justice Department antitrust lawyer.

Read the sequence carefully. Farben did not fund Hitler because it shared his ideology. It funded him, and then it discovered that his ideology paid. Peter Hayes has spent four decades pressing that distinction, and it matters.

From taxpayer of the Republic to instrument of the Reich

The Four Year Plan of 1936 completed the capture. Carl Krauch moved into Hermann Göring’s economic office. He chaired Farben’s supervisory board from 1940 while still serving the Nazi state.

Krauch personified the interlock. BASF’s own corporate historians now say so in plain language. His short line to the economic bureaucracy delivered the collaboration with the SS at Auschwitz.

Aryanisation ran in parallel. Jewish board members resigned. The company dismissed its remaining Jewish employees by 1938, after Göring tied foreign-exchange access to their removal.

Expansion followed the Wehrmacht. Farben received permission to seize Czechoslovak chemical plants in May 1938, months before Munich. It played a far more active role there than during the Anschluss.

Hayes argues that Farben lost the policy arguments and grew rich anyway. It could not steer the state. It could only price the state’s demands and invoice them.

What the combine actually produced

Raymond Stokes reconstructed Farben’s share of German output at the end of the war. The figures explain the Allied obsession with breaking it up.

Farben made all of Germany’s synthetic rubber and all of its methanol. It made 90 percent of plastics and organic intermediates and 84 percent of explosives.

It supplied 75 percent of nitrogen and solvents, roughly half of pharmaceuticals, and about a third of synthetic fuel.

By 1943 it ran 334 facilities across occupied Europe. It shipped three billion marks of product. Hayes puts annual net profit near 500 million Reichsmarks.

Borkin quoted an American wartime assessment that has aged well. Without Farben’s plants, research and concentrated economic power, Germany could not have started the war in September 1939.

Half the workforce did not choose to be there

Farben employed roughly 330,000 men and women in 1943. Slave labourers and conscripts made up close to half of them. Some 30,000 came from Auschwitz.

The company did not stumble into that arrangement. It leased prisoners from the SS at a low daily rate per head. It budgeted for them like any other input.

The record goes further than labour. Bayer division staff ran drug trials on camp inmates at Auschwitz and Mauthausen.

In one documented case Bayer had 150 women transferred from Auschwitz for an anaesthetic trial. It paid 150 Reichsmarks per woman, having judged the camp’s asking price of 200 too high. Every woman died. The unit then wrote to commandant Rudolf Höss requesting another 150 at the same price.

Auschwitz III: the factory that never worked

Heinrich Himmler signed an order in February 1941 supporting a Farben Buna plant near Monowitz. The SS built a subcamp to house the labour force. Prisoners called it Buna.

Farben chose the site for cold reasons. Upper Silesia offered coal, lime, water and rail. It also offered captive workers, and it sat beyond the range of British bombers.

BASF’s own corporate history states the toll plainly. About 25,000 people died in connection with the Farben plant at Auschwitz-Monowitz. Most were Jewish concentration camp prisoners.

Now set the commercial fact beside it. American bombers struck the site four times between August and December 1944. The plant never entered full synthetic rubber production.

Roughly 25,000 people died in connection with a factory that never delivered its product.

Zyklon B and the accounting of distance

Degesch manufactured and distributed Zyklon B. Farben owned 42.5 percent of it. Three Farben board members sat on the Degesch administrative committee.

Hayes reconstructed the production ledger. Output rose from 160 short tons in 1938 to 411 tons in 1943. Auschwitz ordered 8.2 tons in 1942 and 13.4 tons in 1943.

Those orders never exceeded 3.3 percent of Degesch’s output. One tonne of Zyklon B killed roughly 312,500 people.

The tribunal treated that statistical smallness as reasonable doubt. It acquitted Wilhelm Mann, Heinrich Hörlein and Carl Wurster on the gas charge. It found no proof that they steered Degesch or knew the product’s use.

What the managers knew

Farben’s directors told the tribunal they knew nothing of the gassings. Their plant stood a few kilometres from the crematoria of Birkenau.

Peter Hayes rejects the claim in nine words. “The killings were an open secret within Farben,” he writes. People worked at not reflecting on what they already knew.

Ernst Struss, secretary of the managing board, testified after the war. Farben’s chief engineer at Auschwitz had told him about the gassings.

Rudolf Höss recalled a conversation with Walter Dürrfeld, who managed the Farben plant. Dürrfeld asked whether the camp cremated Jews. Höss declined to answer, and thereafter assumed Dürrfeld knew.

Charles Coward, a British prisoner of war held at Monowitz, put it to the court more simply. Nobody could work at that plant without knowing.

Case VI opens, 27 August 1947

American prosecutors filed the indictment on 3 May 1947. Brigadier General Telford Taylor led the prosecution. Josiah DuBois served as his deputy and later wrote the case up as The Devil’s Chemists.

Twenty-three Farben directors faced five counts. The counts covered aggressive war, plunder, enslavement, SS membership, and conspiracy.

Judge Curtis Shake presided. James Morris and Paul Hebert sat with him, and Clarence Merrell served as alternate. Every judge came from the American bench, and critics have questioned that choice ever since.

The court sat for 152 days across sixteen months. The transcript ran to roughly 16,000 pages. Case VI became the third-longest proceeding at Nuremberg.

Thirteen convictions, ten acquittals

The tribunal delivered judgment on 29 and 30 July 1948. It acquitted every defendant of waging aggressive war. It acquitted every defendant of conspiracy.

Thirteen men drew sentences between eighteen months and eight years. Ten walked out entirely.

Otto Ambros and Walter Dürrfeld received the maximum eight years. Both had run IG Auschwitz. Fritz ter Meer drew seven years. Carl Krauch and Heinrich Bütefisch drew six.

Georg von Schnitzler drew five. Chief executive Hermann Schmitz drew four. The remaining sentences ran between eighteen months and three years.

Compare that against the charge sheet. The tribunal had heard evidence of enslavement, plunder and mass death. It handed down an average of roughly four years.

Judge Hebert writes the dissent that outlived the verdict

Paul Hebert, dean of the law school at Louisiana State University, refused the majority’s reasoning on slave labour. He rejected the defence of necessity outright.

He found that Farben cooperated willingly. The firm seized each new source of manpower as it appeared. “Disregard of basic human rights did not deter these defendants,” he wrote.

Hebert would have convicted fifteen further members of the managing board. He treated the use of slave labour as corporate policy, not as coercion by the state.

His dissent now reads like the majority opinion of history. Historians cite it more often than the judgment it dissented from.

The pardon machine

John McCloy, the US High Commissioner for Germany, commuted sentences under heavy political pressure. Every convicted Farben director left prison by 1951.

Some had already served most of their terms in pre-trial detention. Others simply received clemency. Dürrfeld’s eight-year sentence became time served.

Several men later collected the Federal Cross of Merit. The Cold War had arrived. West German chemistry now mattered more to Washington than West German guilt.

The convicted return to the boardroom

Fritz ter Meer chaired Bayer’s supervisory board from 1956 to 1964. He had helped plan Monowitz. Bayer laid a wreath on his grave every year, and stopped only decades later.

Otto Ambros joined a dozen chemical boards after his release. One of them was Chemie Grünenthal, the firm that sold thalidomide.

Carl Krauch joined the supervisory board of Bunawerke Hüls. Hermann Schmitz joined Deutsche Bank’s board in Berlin.

Carl Wurster, acquitted on the Zyklon B count, chaired the IG Farben board and rebuilt BASF. Heidelberg made him an honorary professor.

The men returned. The company did not. That asymmetry defines the whole post-war settlement.

Wollheim v. IG Farben: one man, 10,000 marks

Norbert Wollheim survived Monowitz as a welder. The SS gassed his wife Rosa and his three-year-old son Uriel on the ramp at Auschwitz.

Before the war he had helped organise the Kindertransport. After it he read a newspaper notice inviting claims against Farben’s liquidators.

His lawyer Henry Ormond filed suit in Frankfurt on 3 November 1951. Wollheim asked for 10,000 Deutschmarks in unpaid wages and damages. The sum reflected procedure, not justice.

On 10 June 1953 the Frankfurt regional court found for Wollheim on every count. German industry read the ruling as an existential threat. Farben appealed, and then it negotiated.

The settlement that closed the door

Farben and the Claims Conference signed an agreement on 6 February 1957. Farben paid 27 million Deutschmarks for Jewish forced labourers. It paid a further 3 million for non-Jews.

Roughly 5,900 survivors received 5,000 Deutschmarks each. Claimants had to file by 31 December 1957. Each one waived every further claim in the process.

Farben’s negotiators had one overriding aim. They wanted to prevent a judicial precedent that other firms would inherit. They achieved it.

One legal detail did enormous work. Wollheim sued IG Farben in Liquidation, not the newly refounded Bayer AG. The successors kept the assets and shed the defendant.

Liquidation as a sixty-year business model

Allied law broke Farben apart in 1951. The shell entered liquidation on 1 January 1952 as IG Farbenindustrie AG i.L. The Allied High Commission passed a Liquidation Conclusion Law in 1955.

The shell then refused to die. It administered claims, held property, and kept a stock market listing for six decades.

Its stated purpose was orderly wind-down. Its practical function was delay. After reunification it moved to reclaim land in the former East Germany, and survivors’ groups reacted with fury.

Speculators traded its Reichsmark-denominated shares. Financial engineers circled the remaining assets. Protesters picketed the annual meeting in Frankfurt every single year.

The final delisting, 2003–2012

The liquidators announced a wind-up in 2001 and filed for insolvency on 10 November 2003. Remaining property worth 21 million Deutschmarks went to a buyer.

The company declined to join the national compensation fund established in 2001. It contributed 500,000 Deutschmarks to a foundation for former forced labourers instead.

German exchanges delisted the shares on 9 March 2012. The Frankfurt commercial register struck the company off on 31 October 2012.

IG Farben’s legal existence ended eighty-seven years after the merger. It ended sixty-seven years after the Red Army reached Monowitz. Almost every claimant had died first.

The money arrived late, and it arrived small

The Bundestag created the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future foundation in August 2000. German industry and the federal government each contributed roughly five billion Deutschmarks.

Between 2001 and 2007 the foundation paid €4.4 billion to 1.66 million people across almost 100 countries. Camp survivors received up to €7,670 each.

Bayer joined as a founding member. BASF contributed about €70 million. Farben’s net profit in a single wartime year had run near 500 million Reichsmarks.

Pressure produced those payments. American class actions and an intergovernmental agreement did the work. Conscience arrived fifty-five years late, and it arrived with a legal-peace clause attached.

An uncomfortable footnote: the breakup worked

Economist Felix Poege studied the 1952 breakup as a natural experiment. He compared patenting in technologies exposed to the split against unexposed ones.

Patenting tracked closely before the war. It diverged sharply afterwards. Poege attributes the gain to competition and technology spillovers rather than product-market rivalry.

Farben’s own successors innovated more apart than together. Antitrust economists now cite the case constantly.

The moral argument and the efficiency argument pointed the same way. That almost never happens, and policymakers should notice when it does.

What Durnell decided, and what it did not

The Supreme Court answered a narrow question. Federal law preempts a state failure-to-warn claim when the EPA has not required the warning.

The ruling does not declare glyphosate safe. It moves authority from state juries to a federal regulator. Bayer expects most pending warnings claims to fall away.

Justice Jackson dissented and Justice Gorsuch joined her. Chief Justice Roberts pressed Bayer hard at oral argument. Protesters gathered outside the Court in April, and they crossed the usual party lines.

Bayer had already proposed a nationwide class settlement in February 2026. It also petitioned Washington for antidumping duties on Chinese glyphosate. Several farm groups that backed Bayer at the Court objected to that filing.

The counter-argument deserves a hearing

Ruveon is not a liability shield, and nobody has shown otherwise. Bayer states clearly that Ruveon remains a Bayer Group business. It attributes the move to a five-year framework announced before the ruling.

Bayer assumed Monsanto’s liabilities in 2018 and has paid billions to claimants. It founded the Hans and Berthold Finkelstein Foundation in 2023. Since 2022 it has published openly on its own Nazi past.

The historical analogy carries hard limits. Farben’s crimes belonged to a dictatorship’s war economy. A preemption doctrine in product liability belongs to a functioning constitutional order.

Readers should hold both thoughts at once. A parallel is not an equation, and this publication will not pretend otherwise.

What the Farben century actually teaches

Three lessons survive the noise.

First, corporate form is a container for liability. Lawyers reshape containers faster than claimants can fill them. Wollheim sued a shell because the shell held the guilt while the successors held the assets.

Second, individual accountability decayed fastest of all. Thirteen convictions produced no sentence longer than eight years. Not one man served his full term.

Third, restitution followed litigation and never conscience. Farben paid in 1957 because Wollheim won in 1953. German industry paid in 2000 because American courts loomed.

Bayer’s lawyers won on 25 June. Its historians publish on Monowitz. Both facts hold. The century between them tells us where to look.

Watch the corporate form. Not the corporate statement.

How we reported this

Veritas Europaea built this piece from primary and peer-reviewed sources. We used the published tribunal record for Case VI, the Wollheim Memorial archive of the Fritz Bauer Institute and the corporate history pages of BASF and Bayer.

Also we took production and profit figures from Peter Hayes and Raymond Stokes rather than from secondary journalism, read the Supreme Court’s slip opinion in Monsanto v. Durnell. We read Bayer’s own press releases for the 2026 events.

Every quotation here comes from a named, published source. We invented nothing.

Sources disagree on the Monowitz death toll. Estimates range from roughly 10,000 to more than 25,000, depending on definition. We cite BASF’s own figure and name it as such.

Also we approached Bayer for comment on the Ruveon restructuring. We will update this article if the company responds.

Sources and further reading

• Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
• Peter Hayes, “Auschwitz, Capital of the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17:2 (2003).
• Raymond G. Stokes, Opting for Oil (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 70.
• Diarmuid Jeffreys, Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine (Metropolitan Books, 2008).
• Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben (Free Press, 1978).
• Josiah E. DuBois Jr., The Devil’s Chemists (Beacon Press, 1952).
• Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, Vol. VIII (US GPO, 1952) — judgment, sentences and the Hebert dissent.
• US Holocaust Memorial Museum — Case #6: The IG Farben Case.
• Wollheim Memorial, Fritz Bauer Institute — Wollheim v. IG Farben.
• BASF corporate history — IG Farben.
• Bayer — Culture of Remembrance.
• Foundation EVZ — founding history.
• Supreme Court of the United States, Monsanto Co. v. Durnell, No. 24-1068 (25 June 2026).
• Bayer press release — Ruveon LLC (1 July 2026).
• Felix Poege, “Competition and Innovation: The Breakup of IG Farben,” IZA Discussion Paper 15517 (2022).