The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

by Adam Tooze

a plant at Leuna capable of turning out 200,000 tons of air fuel per annum. The highly toxic tetraethyl lead additive required to boost the fuel’s octane rating was supplied courtesy of IG’s patent-sharing agreement with Standard Oil of New Jersey.97 Standard transferred the technology to Leuna, regardless of protests from the State Department in Washington. In return, and with the full agreement of the German authorities, Standard received the secrets of IG’s new synthetic rubber technology. Needless to say, air fuel expansion was entirely at the expense of the Air Ministry. The Reich also provided a second critical precondition for the Luftwaffe’s precipitate expansion, by underwriting a huge increase in the production of aluminium, the aircraft industry’s most indispensable raw material. Like steel, aluminium production in Germany depended on imports of bauxite ore. But unlike iron ore, bauxite could be obtained in sufficient quantity from Hungary and Yugoslavia, countries with which the RWM had negotiated efficient bilateral trading agreements. To process the ore, the state-owned Vereinigte Aluminiumwerke, part of the VIAG group, poured 180 million Reichsmarks into a tenfold expansion of smelting capacity.98