Bayer AG is a chemical and pharmaceutical giant founded in Barmen, Germany in 1863 by Friedrich Bayer and his partner, Johann Friedrich Weskott.
Today it has its headquarters in Leverkusen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It trademarked acetylsalicylic acid as aspirin in 1899.
It also trademarked heroin a year earlier, then marketed it world-wide for decades as a cough medicine for children “without side-effects”, despite the well known dangers of addiction.
During the First World War, Bayer turned its attention to the manufacture of chemical weapons including chlorine gas, which was used to horrendous effect in the trenches. It also built up a “School for Chemical Warfare”.
During this time Bayer formed a close relationship with other German chemical firms, including BASF and Hoechst.
This relationship was formalised in 1925 when Bayer was one of the
chemical companies that merged to form the massive German conglomerate
Interessengemeinschaft Farben or IG Farben, for short.
It was the largest single company in Germany and it became the single largest donor to Hitler’s election campaign.
After Hitler came to power, IG Farben worked in close collaboration with the Nazis, becoming the largest profiteer from the Second World War.
Amongst much else, IG Farben produced all the explosives for the German
military and systematically looted the chemical industries of occupied
Europe. It’s been described as the Nazis’ “industrial jackal” following
in the wake of Hitler’s armies.
During the Second World War, IG Farben used slave labour in many of its
factories and mines and by 1944 more than 83,000 forced labourers and
death camp inmates had been put to work in the IG Farben camp at
Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Auschwitz was a vast labour and death camp where more human beings were
put to death than were killed in the whole of World War I.
It was comprised by 3 main camps: Auschwitz I, a concentration camp;
Auschwitz II (Birkenau), an extermination camp in which by 1944 some
6,000 people a day were being killed; and Auschwitz III, which supplied
slave labour for the nearby IG Farben plant (Buna-Werke, also known as
IG Auschwitz).
IG Farben’s Auschwitz plant was a massive industrial complex. The
largest outside of Germany, it consumed as much electricity as the
entire city of Berlin.
Built and run by slave labour, it is thought — at a conservative estimate – to have cost at least 35,000 lives.
In 1941, Otto Armbrust, the IG Farben board member responsible for IG
Farben’s Auschwitz project, told his colleagues, “our new friendship
with the SS is a blessing.
We have determined all measures integrating the concentration camps to benefit our company.”
But not only did thousands of slave labourers die from the conditions in
which they worked for IG Farben, those camp inmates who were viewed as
too sick or weak to continue to labour in the IG Auschwitz plant were
selected for the gas chambers.
IG Farben paid 100,000 reichsmarks each year to the SS and in return was
assured a continuous supply of fresh slave labour, while being
“relieved” of unfit inmates.
Elie Wiesel, the writer, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor, came to
Auschwitz in 1944 and was sent with his father to IG Farben’s Buna work
camp.
That same year, the Holocaust survivor and author Primo Levi was among
125 men selected at the railhead for labour at IG’s Buna-Werke.
One of only 3 survivors from this group, Levi later wrote about his experiences in searing detail:
“A fortnight after my arrival there I already had the prescribed hunger,
that chronic hunger unknown to free men… On the back of my feet I
already have those numb sores that will not heal. I push wagons, I work
with a shovel, I turn rotten in the rain, I shiver in the wind, already
my own body is no longer mine: my belly is swollen, my limbs emaciated.”
In Night,
Elie Wiesel’s acclaimed memoir of his personal experiences of the
Holocaust, he describes how veterans of IG’s Buna-Werke told those who
had arrived there late in the war that the brutal treatment they were
experiencing was as nothing to what had previously been endured by the
IG work force:
“No water, no blankets, less soup and bread. At night we slept almost naked and the temperature was 30 below.
“We were collecting corpses by the hundreds every day… Work was very
hard… [The gangmasters] had orders to kill a certain number of
prisoners every day; and every week selection [for the gas chambers] – a
merciless selection.”
When it came to “selection”, it was an IG Farben subsidiary, with IG
Farben managers on its Management Committee, that manufactured and
supplied Zyklon B to the SS.
This poisonous cyanide-based pesticide, on which IG Farben held the
patent, was used during the Holocaust to annihilate more than a million
people at both the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek extermination camps.
The form of Zyklon B used in the gas chambers was deliberately made
without the normal warning odorant. IG Farben also supplied the SS with
the Methanol used to burn the corpses.
In 1946 the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal concluded that without IG
Farben the Second World War would simply not have been possible.
The Chief Prosecutor, Telford Taylor, warned:
“These companies, not the lunatic Nazi fanatics, are the main war
criminals. If the guilt of these criminals is not brought to daylight
and if they are not punished, they will pose a much greater threat to
the future peace of the world than Hitler if he were still alive.”
Their indictment stated that due to the activities of IG Farben “the
life and happiness of all peoples in the world were adversely affected.
“Charges as grave as fomenting war and killing slave labourers were also
added. In his opening statement the Nuremberg Chief Prosecutor pointed
out that, “The indictment accuses these men of major responsibility for
visiting upon mankind the most searing and catastrophic war inhuman
history. It accuses them of wholesale enslavement, plunder and murder.”
According to the Nuremberg prosecutors:
“We have seen Farben integrating itself with the Nazi tyranny, turning
its technical genius to the furnishing of… commodities vital to the
reconstruction of the German war machine, and emerging in Hermann
Goering’s entourage at the highest level of economic planning and
mobilization for war.
“We have seen Farben poised for the kill, and subsequently swollen by economic conquest in the helpless occupied countries.
“Faced with a shortage of workers, we have seen Farben turn to Goering
and Himmler, and persuading these worthies to marshal the legions of
concentration-camp inmates as tools of the Farben war machine.
“We have seen these wretched workers dying by the thousands, some on the
Farben construction site, many more in the Auschwitz gas chambers after
Farben had drained the vitality from their miserable bodies…
“Literally millions of people were put to death in the very backyard of
one of Farben’s pet projects – a project in which Farben invested 600
million reichsmarks of its own money.”
Although the Nuremberg Tribunal indicted 24 IG Farben board members and
executives on the basis of crimes against humanity, only 13 received
prison sentences.
And the sentences they received were described by the Nuremberg Chief Prosecutoras “light enough to pleasea chicken thief”.
Bythe early 1950sa number of those convicted of slavery, looting and
mass murder were back at the helm of the very companies – Bayer,
Hoechstand BASF, formed out of the assets of IG Farben in 1952.
The owners of these “new” companies were alsothe shareholders of IG Farben.
Thus, although the gravity of the crimes committed by IG Farben meant
the company was considered too corrupt to be allowed to continue to
exist, it was supplanted by its key constituents – companies like Bayer
which were owned, and directed at the highest level, by the very same
people as IG Farben.
Those who had helped Hitler to power and provided the technical know-how
for his wars of aggression and the Holocaust, were back in control of
the industry.
The Bayer executive Fritz ter Meer typifies the bounce back.
An executive of IG for many years, the most senior scientist on its
supervisory board and the chairman of its technical committee, he had
become a Nazi Party member in 1937 and was the executive responsible for
the construction of the IG Farben factory in Auschwitz, in which tens
of thousands of slave labourers met their deaths.
Ter Meer’s own visits to Auschwitz and the detailed reports he received
made it inconceivable that he did not have a clear picture of what was
occurring.
The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal found him guilty of plunder, slavery
and mass murder. As a result, Ter Meer received the longest sentence of
any of the IG Farben board members.
But despite being found the most culpable of the men who, in the words
of Chief Prosecutor, “made war possible… the magicians who made the
fantasies of Mein Kampf come true”, ter Meer was already outof prisonby
1952.
By 1956 he had become the chairman of the supervisory board of Bayer, a
post he held until 1964. Even today Bayer continues to honour this
convicted mass murderer.
On All Saints Day 2006, for instance, the corporation is known to have
laid a wreath on ter Meer’s grave in Krefeld-Uerdingen, Germany.
Yet for decades Bayer refused to pay compensation to its surviving slave
labourers. Only after international protests did it eventually agree to
pay damages – more than 50 years after the end of the war.
Bayer continued to grow in the post-war period, eventually becoming
bigger than the whole of IG Farben evenat its zenith. Even as part of IG
Farben, Bayer had maintained its strength in pharmaceuticals.
In fact, scientific experiments had been done specifically on behalf of Bayer in Auschwitz and other concentration camps.
IG had footed the bill for the research of Josef Mengele,
Auschwitz-Birkenau’s infamous “Angel of Death”, and some of his
experiments utilised germs and pharmaceuticals provided by Bayer.
Wilhelm Mann, whose father had headed Bayer’s pharmaceutical department,
wrote as head of IG’s powerful pharmaceutical committee to an SS
contact at Auschwitz:
“I have enclosed the first cheque. Dr Mengele’s experiments should, as we both agreed, be pursued. Heil Hitler.”
IG employee SS major Dr Helmuth Vetter, stationed at Auschwitz, participated in human medical experiments by order of Bayer.
“Prisoners died as a result of many of these experiments. Vetter was
convicted of war crimes in 1947 and was executed in 1949 but Bayer’s
role only emerged later. In the Auschwitz files correspondence was
discovered between the camp commander and Bayer.
“It dealt with the sale of 150 female prisoners for experimental purposes and involved haggling over the price.
One exchange notes:
“The experiments were performed. All test persons died. We will contact you shortly about a new shipment at the same price.”
According to testimony by SS physician Dr Hoven during the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal:
“It should be generally known, and especially in German scientific
circles, that the SS did not have notable scientists at its disposal.
“It is clear that the experiments in the concentration camps with IG
preparations only took place in the interests of the IG, which strived
by all means to determine the effectiveness of these preparations.
“They let the SS deal with the – shall I say – dirty work in the concentration camps.
“It was not the IG’s intention to bring any of this out in the open, but
rather to put up a smoke screen around the experiments so that… they
could keep any profits to themselves.
“Not the SS but the IG took the initiative for the concentration camp experiments.”
In the post-war years Bayer grew to become the third largest
pharmaceutical company in the world. In the mid-1980s Bayer was one of
the companies which sold a product called Factor VIII concentrate to
treat haemophilia.
Factor VIII turned out to be infected with HIV and in the U.S. alone, it
infected thousands of haemophiliacs, many of whom died in one of the
worst drug-related medical disasters ever.
But it was only in 2003 that the New York Times revealed that Bayer had
continued producing and selling this infected product to Asia and Latin
America after February 1984 when a safe product had become available, in
order to save money.
Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe, who investigated the scandal, commented:
“These are the most incriminating internal pharmaceutical industry documents I have ever seen.”
In the early 1990’s Bayer is said to have placed patients at risk of
potentially fatal infections by failing to disclose crucial safety
information during a trial of the antibiotic Ciproxin.
Up to 650 people underwent surgery using Ciproxin without doctors being
informed that studies (as early as 1989) showed Ciproxin reacted badly
with other drugs, seriously impairing its ability to kill bacteria.
In 2001 Bayer had to recall its anti-cholesterol drug Baycol/Lipobay,
which was subsequently linked to over 100 deaths and 1,600 injuries.
Germany’s health minister accused Bayer of sitting on research
documenting Baycol’s lethal side-effects for nearly two months before
the government in Berlin was informed.
It is thought to have been partly in response to the impact of the
Baycol scandal that Bayer bought the rival crop sciences unit of French
company Aventis, which had absorbed part of Hoechst, in October 2001.
Bayer CropScience was formed in 2002 when Bayer AG acquired Aventis
CropScience and fused it with their own agrochemicals division (Bayer
Pflanzenschutz or “Crop Protection”).
The Belgian biotech company Plant Genetic Systems, also became part of Bayervia the acquisition of Aventis CropScience.
Today Bayer CropScience is one of Bayer’s core business divisions, which include:
- Bayer HealthCare: drugs, medical devices and diagnotic equipment;
- Bayer MaterialScience AG: polymers and plastics;
- Bayer CropScience: GM crops and agro-chemicals.
Bayer is the world’s leading pesticide manufacturer and the world’s
seventh largest seed company. Bayer CropScience is responsible for the
majority of GM field trials in European countries. Bayer’s GM crops are
mostly “Liberty Link” – designed to be resistant to its “Liberty”
herbicide.
Liberty is a trade name for Bayer’s glufosinate weedkiller. Together
with Monsanto’s Roundup Ready crops, Bayer’s Liberty Link crops are one
of the two main types of GM herbicide resistant crops, but glufosinate
is a controversial herbicide.
In January 2009, the European Parliament voted to ban pesticides classified as carcinogenic, mutagenic or toxic to reproduction.
As a result the permit for glufosinate will not be renewed. A European
Food Safety Authority (EFSA) evaluation states that glufosinate poses a
high risk to mammals.
It is classified as reprotoxic, because of research evidence that it can
cause premature birth, intra-uterine death and abortions in rats.
Japanese studies show that the substance can also hamper the development
and activity of the human brain.
Bayer’s systemic insecticide Imidacloprid, sold in some countries under
the name Gaucho, and Clothianidin, has also proven highly controversial
as it is widely believed to have contributed significantly to bee
deaths.
There have been calls for neonicotinoids to be withdrawn as seed
dressings for crops that might affect bees, or even for a complete ban
on their use.
In May 2008 German authorities blamed Clothianidin for the deaths of
millions of honeybees, and the German Federal Office of Consumer
Protection and Food Safety (BVL) suspended the registration for eight
pesticide seed treatment products, including Clothianidin and
Imidacloprid, on maize and rape.
In 2008, Bayer CropScience was at the centre of a hugecontroversy in the
aftermath ofan explosion at one ofits U.S. pesticide production
facilities.
A U.S. Congressional investigation found faulty safety systems,
significant shortcomings with the emergency procedures and a lack of
employee training hadled to the explosion which killed two employees.
The region apparently narrowly escaped a catastrophe that could have surpassed the 1984 Bhopal disaster.
According to the Congressional investigation:
“Evidence obtained by the committee demonstrates that Bayer engaged in a
campaign of secrecy by withholding critical information from local,
county and state emergency responders; by restricting the use of
information provided to federal investigators; by undermining news
outlets and citizen groups concerned about the dangers posed by Bayer’s
activities; and by providing inaccurate and misleading information to
the public.”
Bayer CropScience were found to have deliberately removed and destroyed evidence after the chemical explosion
Bayer CropScience has been involved in a large number of controversies
related to GM crops, perhaps most notably the contamination in 2006 of
much of the US long-grain rice supply by Bayer’s unapproved Liberty Link
GM rice.
Read:Bayer and US Govt. Knowingly Gave HIV to Thousands of Children
This caused the U.S. rice industry’s worst ever crisis with:
- over 40% of US rice exports negatively affected
- multiple federal lawsuits filed
- trade with the 25-nation EU at a standstill
- other countries banning US long-grain rice imports
- many other countries requiring testing of all imports of U.S. rice
- some markets for medium- and short-grain rice being affected
- another unapproved Bayer GM rice (LL62) also being detected in U.S. rice supplies
US rice farmers being warned they would never again be able to validly describe their crop as “GM-free”.
Tellingly, a key factor in the sale of Aventis CropScience to Bayer was a similar crisis involving GMmaize.
The Starlink fiasco started when in October 2000 traces of an Aventis
GMmaize (corn) called StarLink showed up inthe food supplyin the U.S.
even though it only had approval foranimal feeds or industrial use.
Starlink was not approved for human consumptionbecause the Environmental
Protection Agency couldn’t rule out the possibility that humans would
beallergic to it.
The agency’s approvalhad beenconditional on Aventis’s agreement to keep Starlink from being eaten by humans.
The Starlink fiasco eventually led to a massive recall of over 300 U.S.
food brands due to the enormous scale of the contamination.
ABC News reported in late November 2000:
“In Iowa, StarLink corn represented 1 percent of the total [maize] crop,
only 1 percent. It has tainted 50 percent of the harvest.”
The ‘StarLink’ gene also showed up unexpectedly in a second company’smaize and in USmaize exports.
United Press International reported, “Aventis CropScience Wednesday was
at a loss to explain why another variety of corn besides its StarLink
brand is producing the [StarLink] Cry9C protein.”
U.S. maize exports to big buyers were badly hurt. Federal officials
blamed the unauthorized appearance of geneticially engineered maize in
the food supply solely on its manufacturer.
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