Interhandel

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The Inter Commerce ( Commerce and Industry Beteiligungen AG ) was a front company of IG Farben on Swiss soil. It was at the center of one of the largest and still controversial international economic affairs of the 20th century.

history

The financial holding was founded (along with other subsidiaries) by IG Farben from 1928 to 1929 in Basel, initially under the name IG Chemie with a capital of 290 million Swiss francs. It was linked to IG Farben through an option and dividend guarantee agreement and personal ties and was thus dominated by IG Farben until 1939. At the head of Interhandel was Hermann Schmitz , Chairman of the Board of Directors of IG Farben. The company structure served to organize foreign exchange for the project of producing synthetic gasoline from coal. It should handle the foreign business and those in the American General Aniline and Film Corp. (GAF) to protect the combined company holdings of the Nazis from confiscation by the Allies.

From 1942, however, the GAF's business and assets were frozen by the suspicious allies. After the end of the war, several controversial audits by the so-called Swiss clearing house alleged that GAF was a subsidiary of IG Chemie (later Interhandel), and therefore purely Swiss property and to be released by the Allies. These initially refused and referred to the courts. The US court demanded that Switzerland surrender all files, which it refused with reference to banking secrecy and feared industrial espionage. The dispute over this lasted several decades and was only ended by an out-of-court settlement between the former US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the Swiss Bank Corporation ( SBG , now UBS ), which had taken over Interhandel at the end of the 1950s. The GAF was therefore wound up, the SBG merged with Interhandel, received almost half of the proceeds in 1965 (around 515 million Swiss francs at the time; the other half went to the USA) and thus became the largest bank in Switzerland.

In the 1980s, IG Farben brought an action against the SBG in liquidation in Germany, but unsuccessfully until the BGH.

The evaluation of documents relating to this case in the Swiss Federal Archives was blocked by the Swiss federal government. Finally, the Independent Expert Commission Switzerland - Second World War was set up, which came to the conclusion that, from a purely legal point of view, Interhandel was a Swiss company. This result is still controversial today.

literature

  • Volker Koop: The dirty fortune. The Third Reich, IG Farben and Switzerland . Siedler Verlag, 2005. ISBN 978-3-88680-811-3
  • Mario König : Interhandel: The Swiss Holding of IG Farben and its Metamorphoses - an Affair about Property and Interests (1910–1999) . Series: Independent Expert Commission Switzerland - Second World War - Commission Indépendante d'Experts Suisse - Seconde Guerre Mondiale, Volume 2. Chronos-Verlag, Zurich 2001. ISBN 3-0340-0602-0 . Summary of the final report of the investigation commission as an online text: uek.ch

See also

literature

  • Switzerland: Under lock and key . In: Der Spiegel . No. 6 , 1997 ( online ).
  • Mario König: Interhandel ( memento of September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), review by Roger Monnerat. In: Die Wochenzeitung (WOZ), Zurich, number 36, 2001.
  • Shraga Elam: Switzerland and the assets of IG Farben: The Interhandel Affair . In: Journal for Social History of the 20th and 21st Century . tape 13 , no. 1 , 1998, p. 61-91 ( blogspot.de ).

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