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Pastimes : Book Nook -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (329)	6/11/2001 11:19:45 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 443

Maybe "conspiracy" isn't the right word. How about "military-industrial complex"? Spent the afternoon reading The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, by Joseph Borkin, who, according to the dust jacket, "was chief of the patent and cartel section of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, and was responsible for the wartime investigation and prosecution of the I.G.-dominated cartels." Not really all that well-written, unfortunately, but he does go into some detail about Germany's deficiencies in natural resources, and the ingeniousness in German chemists in synthesizing substitutes. The facts which actually impressed me the most had to do with WWI. The German High Command thought the war would be very short, and they didn't ever think about the fact that they 1) only had enough gunpowder for 6 months, and 2) were unable to make gunpowder without Chilean nitrate, which they couldn't get at due to the British blockade. Chemists at I.G. Farben had been trying to make the synthesis of nitrates feasible on an industrial scale (for fertilizer), so at some point were able to persuade the High Command to essentially give them a blank check - actually print money, but that's a story we went over before. Similar thing with synthetic oil and Buna rubber during WWII - except that, according to the book, despite the investment of 900 milion Reichsmarks and the loss of thousands of lives of slave laborers, the plant, which used more electricity than the entire city of Berlin - it was set up in a sleepy little village in Polish Silesia called Auschwitz - never produced one pound of Buna rubber, and very little oil. And yes, by the way, many tons of documents were destroyed before the end of the war. What survives is so horrifying that one wonders what was contained in that which was destroyed?