IG Farben

IG Farben, formally Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG, was a German chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate formed in 1925 through the merger of several major German chemical firms, including BASF, Bayer and Hoechst, into what briefly became the largest chemical company and one of the largest corporations in the world. Under the Nazi regime the company became deeply integrated into Germany's war economy, producing synthetic fuel and rubber essential to the military, and it built a massive industrial plant at Auschwitz III, known as Monowitz, that relied on forced and slave labour drawn from the adjacent Auschwitz concentration camp. IG Farben subsidiary Degesch manufactured Zyklon B, the pesticide adapted for use in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other extermination camps, directly implicating the company in the machinery of the Holocaust. After the war, senior IG Farben executives were tried before a US military tribunal in the IG Farben Trial, part of the broader Nuremberg proceedings, resulting in convictions of several directors on charges including slavery and plunder, and the Allied occupation authorities ordered the company broken up, restoring BASF, Bayer and Hoechst as independent companies by the early 1950s while a much reduced IG Farben entity remained in formal liquidation for decades afterward.