It is so hard to read this excellent book about such disgusting behavior ... even when found guilty of slavery and murder, the IG Farben executives got at most 8 years in prison.

... here's one example ... the IG Farben executives were so "unsettled" they had to establish their own concentration camp

Sickness, malnutrition, the work tempo, and sadistic S.S. guards and Capos also took their toll. It was an unsettling sight for I.G. officials to witness work details carrying their dead back and forth so that all inmates could be accounted for at roll call when the work day began and when it ended. It was a strange way to run a business.... I.G. Auschwitz was approaching a financial and technical crisis. With the investment of almost a billion Reichsmarks in jeopardy, the I.G. managing board of directors decided on a drastic solution. It made a further and dramatic descent into the Nazi hell. In July 1942, just after Hitler had begun his second year of troubles in the Soviet Union, the I.G. managing board voted to solve its Auschwitz labor problems by establishing its own concentration camp

...Monowitz was completed in the summer of 1942. Although it belonged to I.G., Monowitz had all the equipment of the typical Nazi concentration camp--watchtowers with searchlights, warning sirens, poised machine guns, armed guards, and trained police dogs. The entire camp was encircled with electrically charged barbed wire. There was a "standing cell" in which the victim could neither stand upright, kneel, nor lie down. 36 There was also a gallows, often with a body or two hanging from it as a grim example to the rest of the inmates. Across the arched entrance was the Auschwitz motto, "Freedom through Work."

I never thought about the guilt of companies in WWII until I read this book. It dives into the world of those who created the gases used in WWII and how those companies were guilty of war crimes for creating those weapons. I found it very fascinating and added a new perspective on my understanding of WWII.

Great read. As a valve guy in Houston this meant alot to me.

I first read this in 2008 and reread it a few years later. It astounded me in my first reading, with its well-researched story of the industrial ethos of profit and applied sciences that drove the machinery of horrible hellish mass murder made all the more incredible because so many in industry and in government justified their actions. This book has stayed with me strongly for more than a decade now. I highly recommend it as a companion read to The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Both are about scientists solving interesting problems with more of a focus on their social and financial positions, with no absence of pressure from the nations who employed or deployed them, than on their sponsors' intended uses for their work deliverables.

A crisp, concise history of the IG Farben industrial collection, from its creation at the beginning of the century, through the atrocities of WW2, and into its political rehabilitation in the Cold War. It's packed with details and I found it fascinating to read.