A Little More On This History Of Human Pesticide "Experimentation"
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A Little More On This History Of Human Pesticide "Experimentation"
Date:
Tue, 17 Sep 2002 10:44:03 -0400
From:
Stephen Tvedten <steve@getipm.com>
Organization: Get Set Inc. (www.getipm.com)
To: Paul Helliker <phelliker@cdpr.ca.gov>
Director, State of California, Department of Pesticide
Regulation
cc: Christine Whitman whitman.christine@epa.gov
A little more on this history of human pesticide "experimentation"
Wilhelm Mann had been the main IG Farben executive on the subsidiary company that made the lethal Zyclon B used to kill concentration camp prisoners in the gas chambers (CO was not sufficiently lethal and took too long). Mann was chairman of the supervisory board of directors of this subsidiary company, Degesh, whose full name was [German Corporation for Pest Control]. Degesh's most valuable asset was its monopoly of Zyclon B, prussic acid, an insecticide. The firm's patent for the insecticide had expired by the 1940s, but it held the patent for the warning odor (indicator), until then always used in the manufacture of Zyclon B. The SS's orders for vast amounts of Zyclon B for the gas chambers, without the warning agent, doubled IG Farben's dividends from its controlling interest in Degesh.
After the War, the notorious IG Farben was broken up into Bayer, BASF and Hoechst. Some of the executives covered their tracks well as the War had come to an end, destroying documentation. Wilhelm Mann was acquitted in the Nuremberg trials and became chief of Bayer pharmaceutical sales. Fritz ter Meer, a senior Farben executive convicted in Nuremberg of slavery and mass murder for his involvement with the construction and operation of the synthetic rubber plant near the concentration camp at Auschwitz, was let out of jail in a few years (rehabilitated?) and went on to be elected chairman of the supervisory board of directors of Bayer in 1956.
from THE CRIME AND PUNISHMENT OF I.G. FARBEN/The Startling Account of the Unholy Alliance of Adolph Hitler and Germany's Great Chemical Combine, by Joseph Borkin, 1978. And, THE DEVIL'S CHEMISTS by Josiah E. DuBois, Jr., 1952.
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