Inorgana

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Founded in Nuremberg in 1933 as Anorgana Chemische Handelsgesellschaft mbH and registered in Berlin since May 10, 1935, later in Frankfurt / Main and Ludwigshafen, Anorgana GmbH was one of the two subsidiaries of IG Farbenindustrie alongside Chemische Werken Hüls GmbH . The chairman of the supervisory board was Fritz ter Meer , managing directors Otto Ambros and Paul Dencker. With the outsourcing of operations to the Anorgana subsidiary, the IG Farben Group wanted to conceal from 1939 that it was directly involved in the manufacture of chemical warfare agents (poison gases). Anorgana GmbH's production facilities were Gendorf (Upper Bavaria) and Dyhernfurth (Silesia), today Brzeg Dolny [ˈbʒɛk ˈdɔlnɨ] in Poland. Another facility in Falkenhagen near Berlin was not completed by the end of the war.

history

As early as 1937, the Army High Command planned the construction of several standby systems for military needs , i.e. armaments factories, in the event of war . One of the locations should be the remote Gendorf an der Alz, which at that time belonged to the municipality of Emmerting (Upper Bavaria). Warfare agents were to be produced there in complete seclusion and with the greatest of secrecy. Construction work on the first test facility began in August 1938, controlled by Orgacid GmbH, a cover company of the Wehrmacht. From April 1939, the collecting society for the coal and steel industry ("Montan GmbH"), also controlled by the Reich War Ministry, commissioned the Bavarian nitrogen works with the construction of the actual standby system .

On September 7, 1939, a few days after the outbreak of the Second World War , Colonel Oskar Schmidt, the head of the gas protection department (WaPrüf 9) in the Heereswaffenamt (HWA) and Ministerialrat Dr. Johannes Zahn from the Army High Command brought IG board members Fritz ter Meer and Heinrich Hoerlein to him and demanded a production facility for the nerve gas tabun from IG Farben, although the company had already refused twice because of the negative experiences in World War I. moral concerns, but rather in order not to jeopardize his international business interests: "As a global company, the IG does not want to have associated its name with the production of war gas". With their distant and evasive attitude, however, the managers were unable to assert themselves against the demands of the Nazi regime.

In order to set up the chemical plants required by the military, IG Farbenindustrie together with the Buna works in Ludwigshafen founded the Luranil construction company. They were responsible for the planning and construction of the production facilities in Dyhernfurth and Gendorf, initially with the use of voluntary workers, since absolute reliability and discretion were required due to the delicate product range. Due to the shortage of labor, Gendorf increasingly recruited foreign workers from 1941/42, initially around 500 Italian and around 120 French workers, later increasingly “Eastern workers”, prisoners of war and around 250 concentration camp prisoners from Dachau . From 1942 onwards, around 30 to 40% of the total workforce is said to have come from abroad. In Dyhernfurth, too, around 800 Italians were deployed from spring 1941, as well as prisoners of war marked "RU" ("return undesirable"). 1,500 to 2,500 concentration camp prisoners from Groß-Rosen had to work at the bottling plant for Tabun . The SS cynically named the prisoners' quarters "Elfenheim" because the residents came and disappeared like elves, that is, they were victims of the criminal working conditions.

For propaganda purposes, there was talk of factories for detergent and soap production (“Trilon”). Anorgana GmbH was only a tenant, the properties were managed by the collecting society for the coal and steel industry . The actual construction work in Dyhernfurth began in March 1940. The responsible senior engineer and BASF authorized representative Max Faust moved to Auschwitz in June 1941 to oversee the construction of the IG Farben plant there.

For the future operation of the Falkenhagen plant, the state-controlled Montan GmbH, together with IG Farben, founded Monturon GmbH , in which both had a half share . Although 90 million Reichsmarks are said to have been invested, production obviously did not start until the end of the war. Nevertheless, in 1942/43 Falkenhagen was at times the largest branch of the Montan with 61 employees and 87 security guards and fire guards.

Production until 1945

In Gendorf, where Max Wittwer, an employee from Ludwigshafen as plant manager, began in September 1941, the production of glycol and diglycol for use as an anti-freeze agent began; in addition, chlorine, caustic soda and acetaldehyde were used as the starting material for Buna synthetic rubber manufactured. Due to technical problems, the synthesis of mustard gas ( mustard ) was delayed until February 1943. A total of 2000 tons of mustard gas are said to have been produced in Gendorf by the end of the war.

Dyhernfurth started delivering tabun in September 1942 , the daily amount increasing from one to 20 tons. Despite an instruction from the Armaments Ministry to end production in December 1944, work is said to have continued until shortly before the arrival of Soviet troops in February 1945 (the evacuation began on January 23, 1945). Overall, of the 58,000 tons of tabun ordered, only 11,980 tons are said to have been produced in Dyhernfurth, with production peaking in August and September 1944.

Because tabun decomposed in the bombs and experiments in 1943 showed that the gas was almost unusable in cold weather, the more stable and more effective sarin ("SANN") was to be produced in the Falkenhagen plant, which was no longer necessary due to the war.

Dismantling and reconstruction after 1945

The facility in Dyhernfurth remained almost undestroyed until the end of the war, despite heavy fighting in the immediate vicinity. Russian technicians dismantled the production facilities for Tabun and shipped them to the Soviet Union. In 1946 the plant resumed production, initially only with the synthesis of the disinfectant and bleaching agent sodium hypochlorite . From 1947, the area developed under the name Rokita-Werk into one of the largest Polish chemical manufacturers. The current production range includes polyols, chlorine, chlorine compounds, alkalis, surfactants and phosphorus derivatives. The sole shareholder is the German PCC SE based in Duisburg.

The Gendorfer plant had an extremely changeable post-war history. Immediately before the arrival of American troops in April 1945, Anorgana managing director Otto Ambros tried to convert Gendorf to harmless products such as soap and detergents. Nevertheless, after questioning witnesses, he was arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison as a war criminal in the Nuremberg IG Farben trial , primarily because of his responsibility for the Farben plant in Auschwitz . Fritz ter Meer received seven years.

Advertising poster for the post-war Inorgana product Genantin

From December 1945 to August 1946, operations in Gendorf were idle, apart from dismantling work. After that, the dismantling of the facilities continued with around 1,800 employees. On July 26, 1948, the US occupation authorities declared Gendorf to be an "Independent Unit", i.e. an operation outside the IG Farben group. This made it possible to continue operating and rebuilding the largely dismantled factory, which was even subsidized with funds from the Marshall Plan ( European Recovery Program ).

After IG Farben was broken up, the Allies ordered that the headquarters of Inorgana be relocated from Ludwigshafen to Gendorf. The company was entered on August 1, 1952 as Anorgana Gendorf GmbH in the commercial register of the Traunstein Local Court. After a visit by the former Farben board members Carl Krauch, Friedrich Jähne and Hans Wagenheimer in Gendorf, negotiations began on integrating the plant into Hoechst AG . Because of the complex and politically burdened history of the plant, the Free State of Bavaria initially acquired the shares in Anorgana GmbH from the assets of IG Farbenindustrie AG in liquidation on March 31, 1953 . At the shareholders' meeting on April 22, 1953, the State Secretary of the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs, Willi Guthsmuths, was elected as the chairman of the supervisory board. Since the Allies absolutely wanted to prevent a re-acquisition of Gendorf by an IG Farben successor company such as Hoechst and had imposed a three-year blocking period, the factory temporarily became the property of Münchener Verwaltungsgesellschaft für Grundstücke mbH , a subsidiary of Hoechst AG and Bayerische Club bank . It was not until September 1955 that Hoechst took over the plant completely and relocated the headquarters of Anorgana GmbH to the group headquarters in Frankfurt am Main. The former liaison of IG Farben in Frankfurt-Hoechst to the local Gestapo and the NS-Gau leadership , Hans Wagenheimer, worked for Anorgana from 1953, from 1955 until it was integrated into the Hoechst Group, even as managing director, after which he received power of attorney . The technically unqualified Nazi careerist (NSDAP membership number 215 305) and SS man was referred to as an " SD " man in the arbitration chamber proceedings ; his exact role in the group remained controversial.

Environmental impact

Both in Dyhernfurth and in Gendorf there were considerable environmental problems in production during the Second World War, with some very long-term consequences for the groundwater. The Oder is said to have "colored, smelly sewage" and smelled of chlorine. A sewer pipe into the Inn, which had actually been planned for Gendorf in 1940, was never built, which is why the sewage seeped into the Alz, which had little water. Around Gendorf as far as Haiming and Stammham, some 12 kilometers away, traces of war production that are harmful to the environment can still be detected in the groundwater (such as chlorides and sulfates). In March 2012 a massive fish death in the Alz caused a national sensation. It turned out that a detergent raw material , the fatty amine Genamin LA 302 D , had been mistakenly pumped into an exhaust air purification system. From there it is said to have got onto the roof of a production plant and ignited. The extinguishing water got into the river. The large-scale, long-term contamination of the groundwater with perfluorooctanoic acid triggered heated discussions . The raw material was manufactured in Gendorf from 1968 to 2003 and is considered carcinogenic. According to the chemical park operator, the maximum concentrations in the groundwater will probably not be reached until 2030. Special filters have been designed to prevent PFOA from getting into drinking water since 2009. Nevertheless, PFOA concentrations were found in the blood of residents that were 20 times higher than the "harmless value". There is no official limit. From 2020 PFOA is to be banned in the European Union.

literature

  • VC Bidlack: Anorgana GmbH Werk Gendorf: Chemical Warfare Office of the Publication Board, Department of Commerce, Washington 1945.
  • Dietrich Eichholtz : History of the German War Economy 1939–1945 , Munich 2003.
  • Stefan Hörner: Profit or Morality - Structures between IG Farbenindustrie and National Socialism , Bremen 2012.
  • Barbara Hopmann: From Montan to Industrial Management Company (IVG), 1916–1951 , Stuttgart 1996.
  • Wilhelm Prandtl: Anorgana , Gendorf 1952, wishes you a good time in 1953 .
  • Florian Schmaltz: Research on warfare agents under National Socialism: on the cooperation between Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, the military and industry , Göttingen 2005.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Chemische Apparatur , Volume 28/1941, p. 176
  2. ^ Barbara Hopmann: Von der Montan zur Industrieverwaltungsgesellschaft (IVG), 1916-1951 , Stuttgart 1996, p. 82 f.
  3. ↑ THE PLAGUE IS THINKINGLY UNRELIABLE , in: DER SPIEGEL, December 22, 1969
  4. ↑ Isabell Sprenger: Gross-Rosen: a concentration camp in Silesia , Cologne / Weimar 1996, p. 239 ff.
  5. ↑ Dyhernfurth - fabryka śmierci
  6. ↑ Stefan Hörner: Profit or Moral - Structures between IG Farbenindustrie and National Socialism , Bremen 2012 p. 335
  7. ↑ wollheim-memorial.de: Max Faust (1891–1980)
  8. ^ Barbara Hopmann: Von der Montan zur Industrieverwaltungsgesellschaft (IVG), 1916–1951 , Stuttgart 1996 p. 58
  9. ↑ Stefan Hörner: Profit or Moral - Structures between IG Farbenindustrie and National Socialism , Bremen 2012 p. 331
  10. ↑ Industriepark Werk GENDORF: Living RESPONSIBILITY - From Gendorfer Werk to Industriepark , 2014.
  11. ^ Barbara Hopmann: Von der Montan zur Industrieverwaltungsgesellschaft (IVG), 1916-1951 , Stuttgart 1996, p. 82 f.
  12. ↑ "Clouds of Death over Europe" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 8 , 1982 ( online ).
  13. ↑ cf. Stephan H. Lindner: Shadow of the past or a new beginning? The Hoechst color works after the Second World War , in: Jörg Osterloh, Harald Wixforth (ed.): Entrepreneurs and Nazi Crimes: Economic Elites in the 'Third Reich' and in the Federal Republic of Germany , Frankfurt 2014, p. 179
  14. ^ Stephan H. Lindner: Hoechst: an IG Farben work in the Third Reich , Munich 2005, p. 128
  15. ↑ Working group of contemporary witnesses at the Senior Citizens' Academy : As Air Force Helpers 1944/1945 - A report by Dr. Hubert Marusch, Leipzig , August 2015.
  16. ↑ altoetting.bund-naturschutz.de: Alzkatastrophe , October 31, 2012.
  17. ↑ infraserv.gendorf.de: PFOA: Securing drinking water quality from the Öttinger Forest in the long term , Press information, September 22, 2016.
  18. ↑ innsalzach24.de: Update: First facts about chemical accident at Alz , March 13, 2012.
  19. ↑ bund-naturschutz.de: Alzkatastrophe , October 31, 2012. Accessed on January 26, 2020.
  20. ↑ [1]
  21. ↑ [2]