From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich, Peter Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), xx + 373 pp., $40.00.

Abstract

In 2003, the German chemical company Degussa found itself in the midst of a controversy over its production of an anti-graffiti coating for the Holocaust memorial under construction in Berlin. For a month, work on the monument’s concrete pillars stopped as architects, politicians, and the press debated whether a company linked to the Holocaust should be involved in its memorialization. Building eventually resumed, with Degussa’s continued participation, but not before the international public learned about the company’s controversial history. That history is the subject of Peter Hayes’s excellent new study. Before Degussa’s role in the Third Reich became the subject of headlines, few Anglo-American readers knew anything about the company. While students and scholars of the Holocaust were familiar with the names of German automobile firms, as well as Krupp and IG Farben (the latter with its immediate links to compulsory labor and death in Auschwitz), they were less aware of Degussa’s relationship to Nazi crimes. Indeed, before Hitler came to power, it seemed unlikely that this company would become a major player in the German economy. In 1927, it ranked sixty-fourth among the one hundred largest firms in Germany and near the bottom among the largest chemical companies. Yet as Hayes details, this situation changed dramatically over the next decade and a half. Through the end of World War II, Degussa had grown at a remarkable rate. But it also bore a burden of complicity as heavy as any other German firm’s: it had produced materials for an expansionist war, “Aryanized” thirteen Jewish firms, exploited thousands of forced laborers, processed gold dental fillings ripped from the mouths of death-camp inmates, and supplied (through its subsidiary) the Zyklon B gas used to murder Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Majdanek. How did a company that began as a precious metals smeltery in the second half of the nineteenth century grow into a diversified firm that could offer so many products and services to a murderous regime? How did pragmatic businessmen become involved in such ghastly crimes?