Operation Paperclip: Revisiting War Propaganda Part 1: Auschwitz Was Built for I.G

[00:00:00]This is Walter Teagle and he was the president of Standard Oil New Jersey in 1929. This is Herman Schmid and he was the CEO of IG Farbin in 1929. Standard Oil was a US petroleum monopoly that had been set up by John D. Rockefeller in 1870. IG Farbin was the world's biggest chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate. In 1929, these two companies made a deal. To understand why these two companies made a deal, you first need to understand hydrocarbons.

[00:00:31]Standard oil were in the oil refinement business. It owned oil wells, pipelines, tankers, etc. Crude oil is made up of hydrocarbons.

[00:00:43]Hydrocarbons are the building blocks of modern life. They get processed into chemicals and then turned into plastics, into pharmaceuticals, into fertilizers, into explosives. The same barrel of crude oil can become petrol for your car, jet fuel for a fighter jet, the plastic in your phone case, the chemicals in your drugs. Different hydrocarbon molecules have different lengths and structures. You can crack them apart, you can rearrange them, you can join them, you can turn one thing into another. That is what Igarbon does.

[00:01:16]It turns those raw procarbons into products, synthetic products. And it's the prochemical industry that does that.

[00:01:26]It takes crude oil and natural gas and turns it into plastic and synthetics. In 1929, Standard Oil had a complete monopoly on the world's oil supply. And IG Farbin had a monopoly on the world's chemical patents. They had the oil and they had the science to do something useful with it. They came together in 1929 and created a joint company called Jasco, the joint American study corporation. This deal divided the global market between oil and chemicals.

[00:02:02]Standard oil controlled oil and IG farbin controlled chemicals, but they agreed to share patents in both directions. The patents they shared were not ordinary patents. They included hydrogenation technology turning coal into synthetic fuel. Buna synthetic rubbers, the trademarked family of synthetic rubbers, tetraethylene lead, the additive that makes aviation fuel high octane enough for fighter jets, and multiple nitrogen fixation processes for making explosives. Standard oil gave Igarbin the technology to make fuel for fighter jets. and IG Farbin gave Standard Oil the technology to make synthetic rubbers and plastic. In 1929, Standard Oil and IG Farbin created a cartel that controlled the global supply of all of those things. That means if you wanted any of those things, you had to go through them. There is no alternative. If you wanted jet fuel, synthetic rubber, plastics, explosives, or fertilizers, you had to deal with this cartel. They cross-licicensed their patents. They agreed not to compete.

[00:03:13]They agreed to block competitors. They shared profits. They shared technology.

[00:03:19]They shared market intelligence. And they shared human capital. Also in 1929, IG Farbin incorporated its American holdings as American IG chemical corporation. This corporation was registered in Delaware and its board of directors was a list of the most powerful men in American business. It consisted of Walter Teagle, the president of Standard Oil, Edel Ford, the president of Ford Motor Company, Charles E. Mitchell, the chairman of National City Bank, and Paul Warberg, the infamous investment banker. His brother Max also sat at the same time on the IG Farbin advisory board in Hamburg.

[00:04:02]When the war got close, Standard and Farbin moved all of their shared patents into Standard's name so they'd look purely American and dodge any wartime seizures. On the 20th of February 1933, a secret meeting took place at the Reichag President's Palace in Berlin.

[00:04:20]This meeting was between Adolf Hitler who had just been made chancellor, Hermangoring, president of the Richag, Yalmar Shock, president of the right bank, and 25 of Germany's richest industrialists. They were there to decide whether or not they would back Hitler. They decided yes, and they set up a fund and a target, and they started fundraising for the Nazis. The target was 3 million Reichkes marks. This was the money that would finance the Nazi party's election campaign. The biggest single contributor was IG Farbin. They put in 400,000 reichs marks. This was 13% of the total fund. IG Farbin had sent four of its board members including George von Schnitzler. He was a central committee member at IG Farbin and he was the one who signed that check. In his speech, Hitler outlined to these industrialists some of the benefits to them of supporting him. They included eliminating the communist threat, achieving political stability, and initiating a lucrative rearmment policy.

[00:05:32]Communism scared the industrialists. And bring political stability is also good for business. When an industrialist says they want to bring political stability, they don't mean peace and democracy.

[00:05:46]They mean no more communist uprisings, no more trade unions that get in the way of profit. The industrialists wanted a system where they didn't have to worry about elections anymore. The Nazis promised to effectively end democracy.

[00:06:01]Political stability, the stability to let us extract without your annoying unions or regulation is a dog whistle for the destruction of democracy. The industrialists didn't want peace. They wanted a government that would use its force and violence to protect their profits. And they wanted to rearm Germany because it meant massive government contracts to them. In exchange for their money, the industrialists got the Nazi state as their customer. IG Farbin got contracts for synthetic rubber, synthetic fuel, explosives, and all of their other products. The Nazis said, "If you finance our political campaign, we will guarantee demand for your shitty plastic products." This was an investment. For the 400,000 Reich marks that IG Farbin invested in the Nazi party, they got billions back in government contracts.

[00:06:58]IG Farbin did not just supply the Nazi party with chemicals. They funded the Nazi party, they got them into power.

[00:07:08]They helped Hitler become chancellor.

[00:07:11]They financed the election campaign that gave the Nazis control of the rich stag.

[00:07:16]And then they profited from the regime they had helped create. What happened inside the company itself is also worth noting. The Nazi takeover of the company's own management culture. By 1936, eight members of IG Farbin's board had joined the Nazis. By 1938, every board member and every central committee member and every senior manager in Berlin was a card carrying Nazi member.

[00:07:46]IG Farbin ran its own slave labor camp, Monowitz, right next to Awitz. At Nuremberg, 13 of their managers were convicted, some of them for slavery and mass murder. IG Farbin set up Awitz.

[00:08:02]Awitz Museum's own historical archive confirms this directly. It says the camp's founding is connected with the initiative by the German chemical concern IG Farbin AG to build its third largest plant for synthetic rubber and liquid fuels. It was built first and foremost to produce Buna, a synthetic rubber. It was IG Farbin who decided to build this enormous chemical factory at Awitz. This is actually a Polish town.

[00:08:32]It's actually called They chose it because they needed a location that was near a coal mine, near a river, and near plenty of cheap labor.

[00:08:47]So, they chose this small Polish town near the border of German occupied territory. The only problem was this operation needed thousands of workers and the local population wasn't enough.

[00:09:00]So, IG Farbin asked the Nazis to supply prisoners. So the SS built the concentration camp next door to the plant. The gas chambers at Awitz used gas supplied from the chemical plant next door. Awitz was a laboratory and the prisoners were experiments. And based on some of the research questions that they were asking, they were building the future of work. They wanted to know how much work could a slave laborer do on a starvation diet. How many hours could they work before they died? Which prisoners were most efficient? What conditions maximized outputs while minimizing cost? IG Farbin was not just a supplier to the Holocaust. This was an active participant, arguably the one who benefited most. It funded the Nazis. It designed the camps.

[00:09:53]It requested the prisoners. It used them as slave labor. And it made the gas that killed