Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
Germany had made the internal political situation unpredictable and unstable.
Germany capitulated, a victim of, among other things, the twentieth century’s first
“energy crisis.”
The extreme vulnerability of Germany in respect of raw materials had, of
course, been realized by the German chemical industry during the war, and after
the war the popularity of the concept of “autarky,” non-reliance on imports or foreign
aid, was partially based on this consideration. The only raw materials that
concern us here are oil and rubber, of which there was essentially none in Germany.
In Europe, only Romania had significant oil resources, and there was no
natural rubber anywhere in Europe. There were, however, huge sources of coal in
Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
The great German chemicals company, I. G. Farben, was in 1918 a collection
of six smaller companies, which later combined in 1925 to form Farben. The principal
predecessor company, Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik (BASF) of Ludwigshafen-am-Rhein
had, starting early in World War I, been working on processes
for producing synthetic oil and synthetic rubber from coal. These investigations
continued after the formation of Farben and also after the rise of Hitler in 1933.
The Nazi government soon adopted a policy of subsidizing these autarky-oriented
developments. 90 Thus, on account of government encouragement, the real need for
the synthetics, and the general German scientific-technological pre-eminence of
the time, especially in chemistry and chemical engineering, Germany was substantially
ahead of the rest of the world in these areas.
Synthetic oil was by far the easier of the two problems. Coal is mainly carbon;
the general principle is that coal treated with hydrogen gas at high pressure and
temperature (“hydrogenation”) resulted in oil. The usual range of chemical products
could be made from this oil: dyes, explosives, drugs, etc. Another state of
hydrogenation yielded gasoline. The idea was basically simple, although the process
was inherently expensive, and most research consisted in a search for the most
effective catalysts. During World War II, there were many synthetic oil plants in
and around Germany; they produced about 75 percent of the oil available to the
Germans; the rest came mainly from Romania. 91
Synthetic rubber was a different matter; the technical problems in developing a
sufficiently economic synthetic rubber suitable for tires were most severe and
were not really resolved until approximately the beginning of the war.
The basic steps in making rubber are first making long chains of molecules of
some sort, polymerization, and then causing these chains to “cross-stitch” – to
join each other at various points – vulcanization. One needed a molecule congenial
to polymerization and vulcanization, and it was found that butadiene was particularly
suitable. In the late twenties, it had been found that sodium was an excellent
catalyst for polymerization of the butadiene, and consequently the synthetic
rubber that was being made from butadiene with sodium (Na) as catalyst was
called “Buna” rubber. The sodium had been dropped by 1935, but the term
“Buna” was retained. By replacing 25 per cent of the butadiene with styrene,
90
91
Howard, 3, 11-22, 44, 60-62; NMT, vol. 7, 79-80.
Craven, 172.
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