The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

by Thomas Hager

Plant examiners determined that the blast had started in a storage silo, essentially a huge pile of fertilizer. One minor problem they had faced from the start of Oppau was that granular fertilizer tended to cake in storage, to absorb water from the air and solidify into a rocklike mass. Workers at Oppau had long used explosive charges, small ones, to break up the huge piles for shipping. It was thought to be absolutely safe:

Whatever the particulars, one of the little blasts used to break up the pile triggered a huge explosion, like setting off a blasting cap in a bundle of dynamite. The entire silo went up, some forty-five hundred metric tons of fertilizer. The force of the blast was hard to gauge; one estimate put it around that of a small atomic bomb.

They would present a united front to the world—while still marketing and selling products under their old individual names. It became official in the fall of 1925 under the name of the Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft (literally, the Interest Community of the Dye Industry, Inc.), an unwieldy name that the public quickly shortened to IG Farben, or, simply, Farben.

In March 1933 state agencies were supplied with new flags featuring the swastika. When Haber’s institute was asked to fly one, he forced himself to personally direct the building supervisor in raising it, an act “so much more dignified for [Haber] than if this requirement had been forced upon him,” one of his Jewish employees wrote. Perhaps if he flew the flag and kept his head down, the Hitler regime would pass.

The Nazi Party in Nuremberg published a cartoon strip called the Life and Deeds of Isidor G. Faerber, featuring crudely stereotyped Jewish professors selling substances harmful to the Aryan race.