Pre-history

For more than 50 years, large corporations and governments have been trying to exert global control over essential commodities such as oil, food and health products.

Today’s oil, pharmaceutical, chemical and agro-chemical giants were spawned from an axis developed in the first third of the 20th Century between IG Farben and US oil interests, notably the Standard Oil Company, founded by John D. Rockefeller. 

IG Farben grew out of German Rothschild family interests and by 1930 was the largest chemical manufacturer in the world. It collaborated closely with the Nazis and the SS following Hitler’s rise to power, and was the company that drove the German war effort during WWII through the supply of synthetic fuel, rubber and other chemicals. It also developed and sold Zyklon-B, the nerve gas used at Auschwitz, also the site of the IG Farben chemical factory, which benefited from slave labour derived from the concentration camp. Zyklon-B, based on the pest-control fumigant hydrogen cyanide, was responsible for the murder of up to 6 million people between 1942 and 1945, with between 4 and 4.5 million people allegedly being gassed at the purpose-built Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.  In addition to this, IG Farben scientists used slave labourers to test chemicals, pharmaceuticals and vaccines without their consent.

Post WWII, some of leading officials and scientists within IG Farben were sentenced for war crimes during the IG Farben Case, in the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings (Case No 6). Amongst these, was Dr Fritz ter Meer, one of the most senior officials and scientists responsible for IG Farben and IG Auschwitz during the Nazi era. Dr ter Meer was sentenced in 1948 to 7 years for his part in the IG Farben-related war crimes against humanity, but, after having his sentence commuted and being released in 1952, he was subsequently appointed to the Board of Bayer (one of several post-WWII IG Farben spin-offs). In 1955, he was then appointed as Bayer’s chairman, a position he held to 1964.  

Dr ter Meer has been implicated in the establishment of the Codex Alimentarius Commission following meetings in 1962. Even during his trial at Nuremberg in 1947, it was clear that ter Meer was a strong proponent of harmonisation to the benefit of the German nation, an agenda that is strongly apparent in the work of the German government in relation to food, food supplement, medical, agricultural and other issues to this day.

Dr ter Meer’s counsel, speaking on behalf of his client at the IG Farben Trial in 1947, said:

“…Today I want to point out only one idea, namely the concept of a total European economic area, which formerly gained weight in many leading economic circles of Europe. An idea which, even today, though in a somewhat different form, is proposed by many political and economic experts, including some in America. These viewpoints shaped my client's aims to maintain, operate, and improve, as far as possible, these foreign enterprises in the general interest of the national economy as well as for the welfare of the employees and laborers.”