This is a detailed history of Hoechst, one of the three main components of I. G. Farben, Germany's largest private concern before it was dissolved by the Allies after World War II. I. G. Farben was founded in the mid-1920s as an amalgam of three large chemical enterprises, BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst, together with five smaller firms. We already possess a number of important previous studies on I. G. Farben, in particular Peter Hayes's by now classic account, Industry and Ideology (1987 and 2001), and Gottfried Plumpe's Die I. G. Farbenindustrie A.G. (1990). A vast array of hitherto unavailable sources has now enabled Stephan Lindner, a professor of Interdependence of Technological and Social Change in Munich, to write a genuine micro-history of Hoechst to the extent that he really succeeds in getting “inside” the workings of one of the three main component parts of I. G. Farben. Lindner's good fortune was due partly to Hoechst's 1998 executive-board decision to permit an unsparing scholarly investigation into the company's Nazi past. The author thus received every conceivable support in his undertaking. The rich firm archive was placed at his disposal, and he was given access to all available sources from files on Fremdarbeiter, on the fate of the company's Jewish employees, personnel files of the management, and unpublished personal memoirs of company directors to the point that he could search for names in parallel files and cross reference records from Hoechst with those from BASF and Bayer. His exhaustive archival research includes denazification files of the management, the holdings of the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz on I. G. Farben, as well as those of a good many regional archives. One may well speculate whether the board's liberality regarding the company's Vergangenheitsbewältigung was facilitated by Hoechst's imminent merger with Rhone-Poulenc in 1999, which changed the company name to Aventis so that the brand name of Hoechst would disappear for good.

Lindner has made the most of the favorable Quellenlage. The author provides an interesting analysis of the nazification of Hoechst and fascinating characteristics of the leading Nazi representatives at the company. He also shows how, especially during the war years, leading scientists and members of the management found themselves under pressure to join the party. The percentage of Nazi party members was highest among the Akademiker and lowest among Hoechst's unskilled workers. Lindner skillfully lays bare the intrigues of leading Nazis against each other and against the top management, whose position was severely weakened vis-à-vis party officials during the war. Among the Fremdarbeiter—the often forcibly conscripted laborers from all over Nazi-occupied Europe—west Europeans, as one might expect, were treated and fed better than those from Russia and Poland. In the darkest chapter of Hoechst's history, Lindner reveals that concentration camp inmates, artificially infected with viruses, served as guinea pigs for Hoechst medications. In masterful depictions of the firm's power structure and human microcosm, with its climate suffused with cabal, fear, denunciation, and all-pervasive suspicion, the author renders a significant contribution to our knowledge of everyday life in Nazi Germany.

At Hoechst, deviance from the tightly prescribed political norm was relentlessly punished. For a critical remark made about Hitler in the privacy of a family circle at the time of the Munich agreement (and subsequently made public through careless talk on the part of family members), the chemist Hugo Gärtner was summarily dismissed. Even when he was released from custody due to lack of evidence, Hoechst was adamant in its refusal to reemploy him. The publicity of his case undoubtedly convinced many that silence was the better part of valor. On the part of Hoechst there seems to have been an almost proactive anxiety to do the right thing politically and, as Lindner notes, denunciations, vague suspicions, or a careless phrase uttered privately sufficed to put an end to promising careers.

In what is perhaps the most moving section of the book, Lindner describes the fate of Hoechst's Jewish employees in detailed narratives of individual cases, dealing with them not as a statistic but a series of individual tragedies. Hoechst boasted a number of highly deserving Jewish scientists who had helped to develop pharmaceutical products, from which the company had earned millions. Most Jewish employees were kept on until 1938, though a few of the older ones were forced to take early retirement in 1935. Given that many of them had served the company loyally for decades and often added to its profits by securing lucrative patents, the reader is struck by the callous indifference with which they were treated. In one case, Hoechst thwarted a potentially successful attempt at emigration for fear that the dismissed chemist would take his know-how to a Japanese firm; in another, Hoechst refused to concede that non-Aryan descent had been the reason for forced retirement, insisting that the employee's poor health had been the cause so as to avoid postwar compensation payments. In still others the company withheld references or the permission to use the scientist's name on invented patents, thus making it more difficult to find work abroad. Most of Hoechst's non-Aryan employees were thus forced to remain in Germany, and many ended by taking their own lives.

Here a striking difference in the treatment of another group of “outsiders” becomes apparent. In the 1950s, Hoechst went out of its way to help those of its former managers who had been dismissed on account of their involvement with the Nazi regime. The solidarity of the “I. G. family” was indeed astonishing; everything conceivable was undertaken to mitigate the effects of denazification measures. In fact, by the late 1950s, most of those affected by them had been reintegrated into the firm. Thus, solidarity was extended, first and foremost, to the victims of denazification and not to the victims of the Nazi regime.

Lindner's book constitutes an extraordinary achievement. It is the fruit of a favorable combination of revealing primary sources and a gifted, meticulous historian who leaves no stone unturned and who, by dint of his expertise in chemical engineering and technological developments, writes intelligently and fluently about both the historical and technical aspects of his topic. Lindner has written an honest and complex book motivated by an unsparing desire to tell the whole truth. He eschews blanket condemnations, and his judgment remains differentiated throughout. A good part of the strength of Lindner's book lies in his multifaceted examination of countless individual cases in all their ramifications. Taken together they tell us the whole story.