Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
The arrangements that had been made at the Hague soon proved to be inadequate,
so it was decided in the spring of 1940 that another meeting was necessary.
Howard saw another motivation for an additional meeting:
“[…] we intended also to ask them to supply some of their detailed designs
of manufacturing equipment and technique for Buna. We hoped that I. G.
might obtain permission of its government to sell to us the plans for the Buna
polymerization plants they had erected in Germany under the government program.”
These hopes were dashed at the conference between Standard and Farben
which finally took place in Basle, Switzerland, in mid-April 1940 during the
German occupation of Norway, which signaled the end of the Sitzkrieg. The new
political conditions arising from the German realization that the situation was a
serious one brought about at the conference the effective termination of the relations
between Farben and Standard. Naturally, Standard got nowhere with its proposals
to buy plant designs. However, as Howard explains:
“One other point was very much on our minds. We wanted to make sure, if
possible, that the Germans had not, since the outbreak of the war in Europe,
made any radical change in their Buna manufacturing processes or formulas.
Direct questions were out of order, since the I. G. men could not discuss any
phase of Germany’s industrial war effort. But during the settlements of patent
transfers and discussions of license definitions needed to implement the Hague
agreement, we obtained sufficient data to feel sure that all of the fundamentals
of the Buna operation had remained unchanged. This conclusion was later
fully confirmed.”
This was the “last direct contact Standard had with the Germans on Buna rubber.”
116
All American knowledge of the Buna processes, which made the American
war effort possible, came from these relationships with I. G. Farben, and this is
accepted fact in the rubber industry. 117 Nevertheless, Standard later came under
some rather stupid criticism and even later legal action on account of them. 118
The sudden unavailability in 1942 of a source of rubber set off a major political
crisis in the United States. There had been a Buna program in existence since
mid-1940, when the Rubber Reserve Corporation had been created within the Reconstruction
Finance Corporation. This agency, headed by Jesse H. Jones, supervised
the stockpiling of reserve crude rubber and also sponsored the construction
of Buna plants, which started in 1941. However, nobody in authority had foreseen
the complete loss of the Far East rubber, so the synthetic rubber program had been
modest in scope. Consequently, in 1942 there was almost no practical experience
with large scale use of the Farben processes.
The emergency had been realized immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor,
because three days later, the U.S. government banned the sale of new automobile
tires for civilian purposes. General rationing of rubber followed quickly.
116
117
118
74
Howard, 104-108.
Naunton, 104.
DuBois, 284.