Any German company specializing in industrial gases - should immediately put up a flag.
In 1898, a student, Adolf Messer founded a company for acetylene lamps in Frankfurt Höchst.
https://forward.com/news/481412/nazi-collaborator-monuments-in-germany/
Bad Soden — The spa town on the outskirts of Frankfurt has a conference center named for Nazi Party member and war profiteer Adolf Messer (1878–1954). Messer’s welding, cutting and industrial gas company employed slave labor and manufactured weapons for the Third Reich. In 2019, student protests forced Frankfurt’s Goethe University to rename a campus lounge that honored Messer.
(Wikipedia):
The company merged in 1965, with Knapsack Griesheim AG to form the new Messer Griesheim GmbH. After this merger Farbwerke Hoechst held two-thirds of the company shares.
Knapsack Griesheim AG - with ties to IG Farben, a manufacturer of Zyklon B.
Knapsack…..(1906 the Knapsack-Griesheim AG, later part of the Hoechst AG (see Hoechst below)
IG Farben - was a German company that manufactured Zyklon B - the gas used to exterminate Jews and other concentration camp prisoners.
The United States of America vs. Carl Krauch, et al., also known as the IG Farben Trial, was the sixth of the twelve trials for war crimes the U.S. authorities held in their occupation zone in Germany (Nuremberg) after the end of World War II. IG Farben was the private German chemicals company allied with the Nazis that manufactured the Zyklon B gas used to commit genocide against millions of European Jews in the Holocaust.
IG Farben was founded in December 1925 as a merger of six companies: BASF (27.4 percent of equity capital); Bayer (27.4 percent); Hoechst including Cassella and Chemische Fabrik Kalle (27.4 percent)…
Liquidation of IG Farben:
Agfa, BASF and Bayer remained in business; Hoechst spun off its chemical business in 1999 as Celanese AG before merging with Rhône-Poulenc to form Aventis, which later merged with Sanofi-Synthélabo to form Sanofi. Two years earlier, another part of Hoechst was sold in 1997 to the chemical spin-off of Sandoz, the Muttenz (Switzerland) based Clariant. The successor companies remain some of the world's largest chemical and pharmaceutical companies.
Messer -> Knapsack-Griesheim AG -> Hoechst AG -> IG Farben -> Zyklon B
So it looks like the Messer Group has ties to Nazi Germany and to Zyklon B. The reason that this "deal" has not been publicized is to keep people from looking past the headlines.
When looking into the history of these German companies, it seems to be an intentional tangled muddled mass of information.
I can't find the link right now; but a source, states that I.G. Farben plants weren't bombed by either side during WWII.
How the once-huge chemical/pharmaceutical company IG Farben actually profited off the Holocaust
CATEGORIES: 1940S, AMERICAN WAR HISTORY, TRUE CRIME & VINTAGE CRIMINALS, VINTAGE NEWSPAPERS