L. G. Farben was the largest corporation in Germany and the largest chemical corporation in the world. This organization planned and schemed as a tool of the Nazi regime. The Allied Control Council has agreed that the economic power of cartels, syndicates, trusts and combines will be eliminated. We are committed and determined to seek out and destroy the sources of Germany's once powerful aggressive industrial might.
Thus in 1945 did a Senate Military Affairs subcommittee hear Major General John H. Hilldring, the War Department's chief of U.S. military government and decartelization in Germany, pledge to break up the $2.8 billion Farben chemical trust. Farben had held an interest—often a controlling interest—in 379 German companies and 400 others. The Allies enthusiastically enforced this policy of dismemberment. They imprisoned 13 of Farben's top 23 executives as war criminals, stripped Farben of $1 billion worth of its assets and of its 30,000 patents. The Russians and Poles swallowed the three-fifths of Farben that lay in eastern Germany, including its biggest single chemical works and its largest synthetic-rubber plant. Farben plants in the Western occupation zones were divided into 44 separate companies.
That was the end of Farben as such. But it was the beginning of an amazing recovery by the free-enterprising successors to the cartel, which has resulted in bigger sales than their prewar parent ever had. In the postwar German boom, Farben's vigorous successor companies have won back far more of their immense prewar business and prestige than the most optimistic German had hoped for. Sales of the three biggest companies last year topped $1.09 billion, just over Farben's prewar total; and they are rising at the rate of 12% a year (but are still well behind Du Font's $1.89 billion). Even so, the German chemical industry has grown so fast that the trio accounts for but one-third of all West German chemical sales. Yet it holds 7% of the capital invested in West German companies, employs 2% of the country's industrial work force.
From Ashes to Atoms. Fastest growing of the top three Farben heirs is Farbwerke Hoechst near Frankfurt, whose moving force is energetic Board Chairman Karl Winnacker, 53, a wartime Farben plant manager. Hoechst's sales—antibiotics, synthetic fibers, cellophane and oxygen—rocketed 17% last year to $355 million. Now the company is taking German industry's first steps toward harnessing the atom. It operates a nuclear research laboratory outside Frankfurt and is building a heavy-water plant (annual capacity: six tons) that will be among Europe's biggest when completed this year. Last week, with Atomic Energy Commission approval. North American Aviation Inc. sent to Hoechst the final parts of a 50-kw. U.S. nuclear research reactor that uses heavy water. Hoechst will donate the reactor to Frankfurt University, which will conduct nuclear experiments for Hoechst and other German companies.