Reviews for Standard Letters For Building

The average rating for Standard Letters For Building based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-07-08 00:00:00 Nelya Niyazova This book outlines the growth of the I.G. Farben cartel, which until the end of World War I, consisted of several different pharmaceutical chemical companies in the Rhine-Ruhr district of Germany. In the 1920's they merged with the intent of simplifying and streamlining their sales, manufacturing, and marketing processes to become more effective. It should also be noted that one of the I.G. Farben companies was responsible for the utilization of poison gas in World War I, a harbinger of worse to come. Page 74 (my book) But the overall significance of both the synthetic nitrate program and the development of poison gas weapons lay in the fact that they brought the German chemical industry right into a mutually dependent relationship with the state...increasingly supported by government loans and contracts...habits acquired under such stressful and demanding circumstances wouldn't easily be broken in the difficult times ahead. The German chemical industry was beginning to swim in very dangerous waters. I.G. Farben became very prosperous during the 1920's and 1930's with lucrative markets in Europe, and North and South America. They needed money and grants to test, and then manufacture synthetic fuel and rubber. Until the Nazis came to power this was always on-hold. The Hitler regime saw two advantages; having synthetic fuel and rubber would make Germany much less dependent on outside sources for these key military resources. Also synthetic fuel would make it much easier for Germany to camouflage the extent of her military build-up during the 1930's. So this, tragically, became a win-win situation; I.G. Farben got extensive monetary grants - and the German-Nazi regime accelerated its' preparations for waging aggressive war. I.G. Farben hardly thought about its deepening connections to a dictatorship that was racist, anti-democratic, and increasingly aggressive. Page 165-166 (Hermann Goring speaking at a meeting of German industrialists, including those of I.G. Farben on February 20, 1933) "The sacrifices asked for will be easier for industry to bear if it is realized that the election of March 4, will surely be the last one for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years." Page 211 Adolf Hitler/1936 "The minister of economics has only to set the tasks of the national economy; private industry has to fulfill them. But if private industry considers itself unable to do this, then the National Socialist state will know by itself how to resolve the problem." One can only ask what were the managers and leaders of the large industrial corporations thinking of when they heard these words. They were certainly not thinking along the lines of a future German liberal and humanitarian democracy. When war began in 1939, I.G. Farben moved aggressively into Poland ruthlessly acquiring land and former companies. They also started to build a massive synthetic rubber plant near Auschwitz. For this they used slave labour - and I would think the word "slave" in this case to be generous - at least with some forms of slavery there is an attempt to keep the captives alive or reasonably healthy. In this case, I.G. Farben "selected" non-productive labourers who were too weak from beatings and malnutrition for the gas chambers. In addition I.G. Farben contributed actively to the Holocaust by supplying Zyklon B for these gas chambers. Anybody working there knew what was going on - and they all commuted back-and forth to their main plants in Western Germany. For all this the owners of I.G. Farben were let off far too easily. The author outlines the trial where, perhaps, under different circumstances, the sentencing would have been far more severe. For one thing the political leaders had already been convicted the previous year - with many receiving the death sentence. The trial of these industrialists was seen by some (certainly not the prosecution) as being unnecessary. And the Cold War was ramping up, and Germany was now becoming a useful ally against the Soviet Union. This is a grievous account of how large companies and its personnel slides, from being inconsiderate, to actively participating in human carnage and extreme racist genocide. There was little acknowledgement by them of their many, many crimes against humanity.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-05-15 00:00:00 Xiong Lee Who was really responsible for Hitler and World War II? In 1965, just twenty years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, I visited Auschwitz. Even though that was nearly half a century ago, my memory of that shattering experience remains vivid: the mountains of human hair, eyeglasses, and gold dental fillings; the photographs of skeletal prisoners staring glassy-eyed from bunk beds crowded together in darkness; the route from the trains to the barracks to the ovens followed by more than one million European Jews from 1941 to 1944. Those disturbing images kept coming back to me as I made my way through the pages of Hell's Cartel, Diarmuid Jeffreys' compelling story of the role of Germany's largest industrial concern in the rise of the Nazis and the conduct of World War II. Few readers under the age of 60 are familiar with the name IG Farben, but for most of the 1920s and 1930s, the company ranked fourth in the world, just behind General Motors, U. S. Steel, and Standard Oil of New Jersey. However, IG Farben was more than another enormous business ' it was, in fact, a cartel, or association of separate huge firms for much of its existence ' and, more than any other company, it personified German science and Germany's rise while it dominated much of the German economy between the two World Wars. (The name IG Farben is an abbreviation for a string of German terms meaning "community of interest of dye-making corporations.") Hell's Cartel opens in Nuremberg in 1947, where 23 of the highest-ranking Nazi political and military leaders of the Third Reich had been tried, and most found guilty, in a lengthy war crimes trial that ended the preceding year. Now, in one of a series of subsequent military tribunals, 24 of the directors of IG Farben were going on trial, too. With the scene set against the devastation of urban Germany, Jeffreys then launches into the history of IG Farben, beginning in the 1880s with the first attempts in Germany to challenge English control of the chemical dye industry; the emergence of several large companies famous in their own right (Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, Agfa) as the German industry overtook its competitors and leapt to the lead in dyestuffs, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals; and the two-decade quest of Carl Duisberg ("the world's greatest industrialist") to convince the leaders of competing firms to combine with his own company, Bayer, in an all-German chemical cartel. When Duisberg finally won the day in 1925 and the IG Farben was born, the foundation was laid for one of the darkest chapters in the history of business. In Jeffreys' view, the fatal moment came in 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power, when the IG's chief executive, Carl Bosch, entered into a huge government contract to produce high-octane synthetic fuel for Hermann Goering's illegal air force. "The agreement Bosch had signed," Jeffreys writes, "was far more than the fulfillment of his long-held ambitions [to commercialize synthetic fuel]. It was also a pivotal moment in a sequence of events that would lead inexorably to the blitzkrieg, to Stalingrad, and to the gas chambers of Auschwitz." Although the IG manufactured thousands of products through its extensive web of companies and subsidiaries ' ultimately, throughout the lands Hitler annexed from 1936 to 1943 ' its military significance lay chiefly in its production of synthetic fuel, synthetic rubber, and explosives. However, for many observers, the cartel's most notable product was the Zyklon-B gas used to exterminate millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others judged undesirable and unfit in the deranged mind of Adolf Hitler and those who followed his lead. Jeffreys' judgment about the preeminent role of IG Farben is unequivocal. "Had the IG's managers found the courage to oppose doing business with the Nazis in the late 1930s, or had they been even marginally less compliant, Hitler would have struggled to get his war machine moving." Going even further, the author quotes one of the company's top executives, Georg von Schnitzler, who concluded after the war had ended that the firm gave "'decisive aid for Hitler's foreign policy which led to war and the ruination of Germany . . . I must conclude that IG is largely responsible for the policies of Hitler.'" It is difficult to imagine a more dramatic example than IG Farben of business unmoored from any moral purpose ' not just supplying the products that literally fueled the Nazi war machine and sponsoring the gruesome research of Dr. Josef Mengele (the notorious "Angel of Death"), but going so far as to build its own concentration camp for Jewish slave laborers at Auschwitz. [Note: "Auschwitz" connoted a network of more than forty camp facilities, including the Birkenau extermination camp and the IG's installation near the synthetic rubber plant it was building near the Polish border town of Auschwitz.] In the final pages of Hell's Cartel, Jeffreys returns to the 1947 IG Farben trial in Nuremberg, detailing the testimony and attitudes of the two dozen defendants, introducing the American lawyers and judges, and relating the court's verdict on each of the defendants. I won't summarize here the outcome of the trial. Suffice it to say that the final chapters of this book make the whole story well worth reading. Diarmuid Jeffreys is a British journalist and television documentary producer. In an earlier book, Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug, he researched some of the early history of Bayer and other German pharmaceutical companies that figure in central roles in Hell's Cartel.