Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Abbreviations
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction and Overview
- 2 The Company, the Party, and the Regime
- 3 Aryanization
- 4 Autarky and Armament
- 5 Precious Metals for the Reich
- 6 War Production and Spoliation
- 7 Forced Labor
- 8 Degesch and Zyklon B
- 9 War's End and Aftermath
- Appendices
- Index
2 - The Company, the Party, and the Regime
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Abbreviations
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction and Overview
- 2 The Company, the Party, and the Regime
- 3 Aryanization
- 4 Autarky and Armament
- 5 Precious Metals for the Reich
- 6 War Production and Spoliation
- 7 Forced Labor
- 8 Degesch and Zyklon B
- 9 War's End and Aftermath
- Appendices
- Index
Summary
When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany at the end of January 1933, the nine members of Degussa's managing board included no Nazis. However, two department heads who were later elevated to the board, Helmut Achterath and Hermann Federlin, already had joined the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) during the previous summer, at the apogee of its electoral success. Their examples highlight the degree to which Nazism – within the firm, as in the nation as a whole – was a movement of the relatively young and restless. Achterath, who had come to Degussa via the merger with HIAG, was a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor when he signed up, already known for an all-or-nothing intellectual disposition that his colleagues still teased him about in his old age; Federlin was thirty-five and a refugee from Alsace, where he had grown up and from which he had fled when the province reverted to France in 1919. Fritz Roessler, from the vantage point of his sixty-two years and his lofty position as head of the supervisory board, knew nothing prior to Hitler's accession of their political affiliation. He was equally oblivious to that of his own secretary, Adolf Hilpert, who had enlisted in the Party in October 1930 at the age of thirty-seven, and of several prominent subordinates in the same generation, such as Friedrich Pressel, an executive at Rheinfelden who later headed the factory; Hans Siebert, the business manager at the Hanau plant; and two of his ranking assistants, Adolf Diebold and Hans Kohlenbusch, all of whom had enrolled in the Party prior to the so-called seizure of power.
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- From Cooperation to ComplicityDegussa in the Third Reich, pp. 20 - 73Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004