I have always heard that Bayer aspirin helped make the gas cannisters for the concentration camps. They also supplied medicine for the Nazis as well as injected prisoners with germs to test drugs.

Do you believe this is true?
How can people still buy their product?
How have we forgotten the role they played in the Holocaust?

Here's an article about it.Mainly Hitler and his crazy SS, were to blame for the holocaust.

Article link here


post edited to correct page distortion from excessive link length.

[This message was edited by Koz on 01-08-04 at 08:37 AM.]

Mozart, I think you may have missed the gist of the article.

What is does say is that
" that most people found it difficult to believe that ordinary German businessmen had any serious role in the Holocaust.

"The belief was that the crimes were committed by Hitler and a few crazy SS officers,"

In reality many civilian Germans were involved.


(Maybe this was your point and it was edited out by Koz due to overlength.)

The Shoah was one of the most dispicable acts in human history. But we are confronted with a potential slippery slope when we seek retribution from people for what their ancestors did or companies for what previous executives did.

It's more complicated than the promoters of this idea make out. Before WW2 Bayer was one of the companies; Hoechst, Bayer and BASF were the other big ones; that formed a cartel called IG Farben. IG Farben was a big donor to Hitler's party. When WW2 started they soon were producing 100% of the explosives and most of other important chemicals, for example gasoline substitutes as well as pharmaceuticals for the German Reich. It was a subsidiary of IG that made Zyklon B, the gas used in the gas chambers.

IG Farben was split up into four companies in 1952. Bayer AG , the present company, was one of the four resulting. Until 1974 one of the directors of BASF, another of the four, Carol Wurter, was someone who had worked in the direction of the subsidiary that had made the Zyklon B. ( So perhaps,by some supposed logic, we should not now buy BASF blank recording tapes for our cassette players or VCRs ! )

Farben also funded several of the concentration camps.