I.G. Farben’s Adaptation to the Nazi Regime from 1933 on
The I.G. Farben board always upheld good relationships with officials at key government agencies during the Weimar period, but none of the company’s leading actors had comparable connections to the NSDAP. The change in power of January 30, 1933, posed a challenge for the top I.G. Farben managers, and the members of the combine’s Central Committee felt compelled to take considerable efforts to show their loyalty to the new regime and gain influence over the key economics policymaking interfaces.
I.G. Farben was well-versed in the practice of political influence by the means of donations to parties; this was now pursued even more vigorously in the effort to win friends at the NSDAP. The effort had already begun in 1932 with donations to the party through the “Kalle circle.”
In his later testimony to the Nuremberg follow-up trial of I.G. Farben executives, Georg von Schnitzler told how Chancellor Hitler, Reichstag President Hermann Göring and Hjalmar Schacht, the incoming president of the Reichsbank, met with leading industrialists on February 20, 1933, and came away with pledges of 3 million RM to fund the National Socialist campaign for the March 5 Reichstag elections. The representatives of the chemicals and nitrates industries promised a total of 500,000 RM. I.G. Farben paid the entire sum, wiring 400,000 RM to the NSDAP leadership and 100,000 to Franz von Papen. This was only the beginning of a checkbook offensive worth a total of 4.5 million RM already in 1933 and systematically beefed up in the following years. According to card-index files kept by the I.G. Central Committee through 1945, the largest amounts were paid under the cover of industrial coordination measures to two funds: 12.7 million RM to the “Adolf Hitler-Fund for the German Economy” and 16 million RM to the “Winter Charity Campaign” (Winterhilfswerk). At the same time, substantial payments went to the leadership groups of the NSDAP, SS, and SA, and to most of the Nazi movement’s mass and professional organizations. Just the centrally tabulated tributes and bribes totaled 39.6 million RM by the end of the war.[1]
Next to the financial lobbying, I.G. Farben hastened to declare its loyalty to National Socialist policies, and not only in public statements. Management and personnel moved to effect a rapid Nazification on all levels of the concern. Top executives and plant managers demonstrated their support for the Nazi government in the company’s bodies and committees. With these internal assurances, Carl Bosch and Carl Duisberg were freed to go to the public and use nearly identical phrases in telling how highly they valued the new regime, because it was finally taking strong measures and letting actions follow on its words.[2] By late 1936 eight members of the board and/or the Central Committee had joined the NSDAP. One-third of the members in each of these executive bodies was now a registered National Socialist.[3]
A race began on the upper and middle management levels to acquire the career enhancement of a party membership book. The personnel were subjected to forced organization through the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF), as was the case across the German Reich. The result was a complete self-Nazification of I.G. Farben workplaces, where managers and personnel strove to embody the “Leader and Following Principle” anchored in the 1934 “Law for the Organization of National Labor.” These transformations received glowing treatments in the company newspaper, Von Werk zu Werk. The new symbiosis was displayed in elaborate rituals, especially at the combine’s major administrative centers like the Frankfurt I.G. headquarters. By 1937 and 1938, nearly all members of the board and Central Committee, all leading managers at the Berlin offices, and all leading I.G. managers playing a role within the Four-Year Plan authorities were NSDAP members.
(GK; transl. NL; based on: Karl Heinz Roth: Die I.G. Farbenindustrie AG von 1933 bis 1939)