When it was founded at the end of 1951, Farbwerke Hoechst A.G. was the smallest of the “Big Three” I.G. Farben successor corporations. Like BASF and Bayer, Hoechst had originally been founded in the 1860s; it had begun as a small dye producer and then had expanded its product line into pharmaceuticals and other organic chemicals in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like BASF and Bayer, Hoechst has had a long and distinguished tradition of research, product development, and marketing. Finally, like the two other members of the Big Three, Hoechst initially intended to continue its reliance on coal-based feedstocks; only slowly and deliberately did the firm's management choose to move into petrochemical production. However, the Hoechst group, unlike the other two large I.G. successors, had fallen on hard times, especially during the interwar period. Major Hoechst managers had been underrepresented among the top members of the managing board of I.G. Farben, and the investment plans of the chemical giant during the period from 1925 through 1945 neglected Hoechst plants, as compared with their treatment of the BASF and Bayer groups.

Partly as a consequence of the relative neglect of investment in the plants of the Hoechst group, they ended the war in a contradictory situation: The Allies had not bombed them as heavily as they had other plants, especially those of BASF, because the Hoechst plants simply had not been as important to the German war effort.