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

by Adam Tooze

Bosch’s central objective in promoting the merger seems to have been to attain sufficient scale to be able to finance the progress of his immensely expensive synthetic technologies.64 By September 1923 Bosch’s research group had synthesized methane, and in 1926, at its Leuna facility near Merseburg, in the central German industrial belt, IG Farben embarked on the construction of the world’s first facility for coal hydrogenation, the alchemical process through which coal was transformed into petrol. This programme followed a clear scientific logic. But it was also motivated by that most modern of fixations, the idea that one day the oil would run out. The 330 million Reichsmark investment in Leuna’s coal-based technology would pay off when the oil wells ran dry and fuel prices rocketed. It was this commitment to synthetic chemistry that made IG Farben into by far the closest and most important industrial collaborator of Hitler’s regime. IG’s technology offered Germany the chance of independence from imported oil. Indeed, in the near future, Bosch’s research teams promised to go beyond hydrogenation to the efficient mass production of synthetic rubber, thus adding the second key ingredient of motorized warfare. Conversely, it was IG Farben’s expensive investment in these technologies that gave the otherwise internationally minded corporation a powerful incentive to collaborate with Hitler and his nationalist programme. Bosch’s gamble on the imminent exhaustion of oil backfir...