All three books reviewed here are written within national perspectives, and yet they make a considerable contribution to global history, reflecting the inherently universal nature of so widely traded a commodity as rubber. Mark Finlay’s book is devoted to the American quest for temperate rubber, and also explores the exploitation of agrarian raw materials to make synthetic rubber. Susanne Heim’s book, well translated from a German publication dating from 2003, has the parallel German search for temperate rubber as its main case study. As for Diarmuid Jeffreys’ retelling of the story of IG Farben, synthetic rubber lies at its heart. The three authors thus say relatively little about the tree that is usually taken to be the first link in the rubber commodity chain, Hevea brasiliensis. Instead, they investigate the search for alternatives to tropical rubber, in a context of war and preparation for war. Authoritarian regimes turned to synthetic and temperate rubber from the early 1930s, whereas, for liberal democracies, the major stimulus came when Japan seized Southeast Asia’s Hevea trees, between December 1941 and March 1942.

Research in the fields of synthetic and temperate rubber has often been portrayed as the domain of unworldly chemists and botanists, but all three authors reveal a deeply politicized process. In the case of the USA, Mark Finlay shows how immensely wealthy individuals, with a bee in their bonnet about rubber, were able to exert considerable influence over public servants. He is also sensitive to the complex interplay between federal and local authorities, and between rural and urban America. Heim and Jeffreys show how German scientists and managers gradually became implicated in Nazi crimes against humanity, and argue that they got off lightly after the end of the war, in part by playing the role of the naïve boffin.

Finlay primarily investigates attempts to discover rubber plants that would thrive in the United States. These plans appealed to a number of constituencies: isolationists seeking security in an increasingly violent world; economic nationalists denouncing the ‘blackmail’ of British and Dutch traders and planters; and representatives of depressed rural constituencies. Finlay richly illuminates the complex and cross-cutting ideological, military, political, and economic strands of this ultimately unsuccessful crusade. He draws attention to the now forgotten ‘chemurgist’ movement, fostering reliance on homegrown agricultural raw materials for purposes of national security. The most notable supporters of the cause, in terms of money, time, and publicity, were the inventor Thomas Edison, the tyre entrepreneur Harvey Firestone, and the automobile mogul Henry Ford.

Guayule (Parthenium argentatum) emerged as the most promising cultivar for the United States, after truly indigenous plants (notably goldenrod and rabbitbrush) had failed to live up to initial hopes. The guayule shrub grew wild in the dry lands of north-central Mexico, with some small stands in western Texas. The American Intercontinental Rubber Company (IRC) began as a profitable collector of wild guayule in Mexico, but was hit hard by the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and the subsequent collapse of world rubber prices. However, the IRC’s Mexican operations remained profitable in many years during the interwar period, and exports to the USA boomed in 1942–45, responding to a generous fixed price. Finlay, who has consulted the company’s papers, could have said more about its Mexican operations, and he fails to explain why nearly two-thirds of the stock was held by a Dutch holding company by the early 1940s.

Finlay concentrates instead on the IRC’s dogged project to use Mexican seeds to cultivate guayule in the American south-west, and eventually beyond America’s borders as well. The company jealously guarded its virtual monopoly of genetic material and know-how, and sought to develop a guayule nucleus around Salinas, in southern California. However, scientists faced the twin problems that guayule took five years to mature and that it could not be tapped like Hevea, but had to be uprooted and completely crushed to extract the latex. Moreover, the first processing mill opened in the Salinas valley in early 1931, just as world rubber prices were collapsing. Washington repeatedly refused to provide tariff protection or subsidies, and withdrew subsidies from research. The IRC, facing mounting losses, thus turned to more questionable ventures. From 1930, the company touted its services to authoritarian regimes, including Nazi Germany and the USSR. Contracts were signed with Fascist Italy, which planted guayule in southern Italy, Libya, and Eritrea. Indeed, the IRC complained bitterly when the British naval blockade prevented it from exporting seeds to Italy after June 1940.

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the American government set up the Emergency Rubber Project (ERP) in March 1942, employing over a thousand scientists and agronomists for a massive research programme. Finlay strikingly describes this as a kind of ‘Manhattan Project of the plant sciences’ (p. 141). The ERP bought up the IRC’s remaining loss-making guayule operations in California, including the seeds that had been destined for Fascist Italy. Californian farmers contracted themselves to supply guayule to ERP processing plants, but major tensions arose when guayule began to encroach on valuable irrigated land, traditionally planted with salad and other vegetables.

Encouraged by Quakers and scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), interned Japanese-Americans also turned to guayule. Finlay recounts the poignant story of how these detainees worked with a tiny budget and skimpy facilities on marginal lands at the Manzanar internment camp, in the Owens Valley of eastern California, meeting with much official and unofficial hostility. Despite all the obstacles, and to the immense embarrassment of the American authorities, Japanese-American scientists and agronomists proved more successful in growing and processing guayule than the lavishly funded and equipped employees of the ERP. Scant recognition or rewards were forthcoming, although Japanese-American success with guayule probably contributed to an easing of conditions in the camp.

Finlay further shows that, from 1942, the Americans became serious about another plant, kok-saghyz (Russian dandelion, Taraxacum kok-saghyz). This Central Asian weed, cultivated by the Soviets since the early 1930s, had to be uprooted, but it had the great advantage over guayule of maturing within a year. After receiving seeds from the USSR in 1942, the ERP and others hoped to grow the dandelion in the northern United States, and in neighbouring parts of Canada. However, disillusion quickly set in because germination rates were poor, yields were far below Soviet claims, and colossal amounts of labour were required to tend kok-saghyz plants and harvest their roots.

As both indigenous and foreign cultivars failed to prosper within the borders of the United States, chemurgists were obliged to seek out foreign territories, as far as possible ones in which Americans exercised influence or control. Finlay has illuminating sections on the disastrous saga of the Madagascar rubber vine (Cryptostegia grandiflora) in Haïti, put forward as a form of ‘aid’ to this American semi-colony. This poorly planned and executed programme ended up by supplying tiny amounts of rubber at US$564 per pound, at a time when Sri Lankan Hevea rubber fetched a mere 28.5 cents per pound. Finlay also refers to American cultivation of Hevea in Latin America, the Philippines, and Liberia, and even Hawai’i and southern Florida. Indeed, he might usefully have given somewhat more detail about these experiments.

Susanne Heim approaches the problem of temperate rubber plants from the standpoint of the network of research institutions making up the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and Institutes in Germany, focus sing on the extent to which employees compromised themselves with the Nazi regime. She rejects the simplistic division between ‘good scientists’, who found protected niches in which to continue pure research, and ‘contaminated individuals’, who succumbed to the temptations of Nazism. She also rejects the notion that the Nazis were generally hostile to science, and caused its rapid decline through the expulsion or killing of Jews, the imposition of ‘Aryan physics’ and party placemen, and enforced international isolation. Instead, she shows that many scientists voluntarily entered into different degrees of cooperation with the regime, and made genuine scientific advances in the process. In particular, they seized the opportunity of the eastern conquests to acquire scientific materials as loot, and to bring trained personnel back to the Reich. Many of these German scientists built sparkling scientific careers, which, in most cases, were only briefly interrupted by defeat: after the war, some of them went?on to work on problems of ‘Third World’ development. Heim argues her case closely and convincingly, although the details of internecine institutional and personal squabbles become somewhat overwhelming at times. Her position on the exploitation of the eastern lands fits well with Mark Mazower’s recent fine analysis of Germany’s Nazi empire.Footnote ¹

The most innovative and disturbing case study in Heim’s book is the central section on temperate rubber. Some research on the Russian dandelion began in 1938, when the Four-Year Plan sketched out a programme of increasing autarky. However, kok-saghyz only became a Nazi obsession as a result of Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. This reckless gamble both cut the trans-Siberian railway lifeline that brought Hevea rubber from Southeast Asia via Japan and hugely increased military consumption of rubber. Moreover, synthetic rubber could not substitute for natu?ral rubber on large tyres, notably those fitted on planes and lorries. Heinrich Himmler thus elaborated fantasies of producing up to 12,000 tons of temperate rubber a year, and fought hard and successfully for his SS to gain hegemony over the sector. In the process, he co-opted scientists from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for plant breeding to carry out research. They in turn gained access to Soviet and Polish research materials on kok-saghyz, inspected the main Soviet processing mill in Uman (Ukraine), and employed trained perso?nnel from the conquered east.

Most problematic of all, Himmler’s dreams were based on the ruthless exploitation of forced labour in the eastern conquests. While peasants on occupied collective farms had already been obliged to continue cultivating kok-saghyz, as they had done before under the Soviets, Himmler now ordered women and children from ‘partisan-infested areas’ to be rounded up for this work. Grim ‘children’s camps’ were to be established on the fringes of kok-saghyz areas, and Polish schoolchildren were to be enrolled for rubber work. In 1944, in the Baltic States, with the Nazi empire visibly crumbling, prisoners, juvenile delinquents, orphans, the deaf and dumb, and Russian refugees fleeing Stalinism were all pressed into service to cultivate and harvest the Russian dandelion. While Kaiser Wilhelm Institute scientists were not directly involved, they did advise the Nazis on how to optimize the output of agricultural workers. Heim does not hazard an overall guess as to how much rubber was actually produced, but it seems clear that it was only a few hundred tons.

Paradoxically, it was in Auschwitz, that by?word for the worst excesses of Nazism, that temperate rubber saved the lives of a few Jews, who would otherwise have been earmarked for extermination through work. The main agricultural research station working on kok-saghyz was transferred to Auschwitz in early 1942, and skilled Jews, mainly women, were recruited to do most of the research work. Claudette Bloch, a gifted French Jewish biologist, headed the team. She was able to obtain relatively decent conditions for inmates, who were allowed to reside on the premises. However, Heim argues that German scientists and managers were not motivated by any altruistic desire to save Jews, but simply wanted to promote their careers, avoid being sent to fight on the eastern front, and remain sheltered from epidemics sweeping through the main camps. Conversely, the inmates did their best to slow down and sabotage research on rubber, despite the considerable risks that they were taking.

It is hard to escape the overall conclusion that these programmes failed, at least in economic terms. At the end of the war, Finlay notes that the American authorities set German prisoners of war to the task of ripping out healthy guayule plants. Similarly, Heim indicates that the Germans dropped kok-saghyz like a hot potato once the conflict was over. Nevertheless, Finlay reminds us that the cultivation of the Russian dandelion lingered on in the USSR, probably into the 1960s, something about which very little is known. Moreover, he notes the unexpected revival of guayule since 1997, after it was discovered that latex gloves made from guayule did not cause the allergies that Hevea inflicted on some people. He even suggests that terrorists might spread fungal spores in Southeast Asia’s Hevea stands, forcing industrialized nations to turn once again to renewable temperate rubber plants, especially suitable because of dwindling supplies of oil, gas, and coal. If this scenario were ever to come about, scientists could certainly fall back on numerous research findings in dusty tomes.

Turning to synthetic rubber, Finlay has a fine chapter on the neglected agrarian roots of the extraordinary surge in North America’s output from 1942. In both the United States and Canada, agricultural and forestry products were first turned into industrial alcohol and then into butadiene, the chief component needed to manufacture synthetic rubber. Molasses from the Caribbean, especially Cuba, had been the main feedstock for large distilleries on the east coast before the war, but shipping problems rendered molasses scarce. Farmers thus turned to grain reserves that had built up in the depressed 1930s, as well as current output, and organized themselves politically to demand a network of small new distilleries in the mid-west. While the government mainly resisted this demand, distilleries produced amounts of alcohol considerably above their rated capacity, and proved to be the backbone of synthetic rubber production until the last year of the war. Indeed, farmers and distillers did much better than the petrochemical industry, which needed to husband resources to meet the armed forces’ immense consumption of petrol, and which encountered a set of initial technical hurdles in producing butadiene. That said, Finlay fails to point out that general-purpose American synthetic rubber (GR-S) was a copolymer of butadiene and styrene, and that, even though much less styrene was required than butadiene, the styrene had to be extracted from coal or oil, making it impossible to produce GR-S entirely from agrarian resources.Footnote ² He also passes rather too quickly over the role of rubber reclaimed from scrap in solving the American rubber crisis.Footnote ³

Heim does not discuss the use of foodstuffs as raw materials for the manufacture of synthetic rubber, even though the first section of her book concerns the Nazi drive to attain agricultural self-sufficiency: the research of various Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes concentrated on animal breeding, fodder, vegetable fats, fibres, and agricultural labour. She does stress that Germany’s eastern conquests, especially the Ukraine, failed to yield the vast food surpluses that Hitler had envisaged. However, she does not relate persistent fears of food shortages, in a nation scarred by memories of blockade in the First World War, to Germany’s marked aversion to producing synthetic rubber from foodstuffs. The Nazis knew that the Soviets made inferior rubber from butadiene alone, drawing mainly on potatoes but also on some other foodstuffs, wood waste, and oil.Footnote ⁴ ermany’s Italian allies, who produced a copolymer of butadiene and styrene, turned beet sugar into butadiene, even though their German advisors counselled the use of coal.Footnote ⁵ In Nazi Germany itself, coal remained the crucial raw material for manufacturing Buna rubber, together with a little natural gas, as demonstrated in Peter Morris’ authoritative thesis.Footnote ⁶

Diarmuid Jeffreys’ focus lies on the production of synthetic rubber and oil in Nazi Germany, but he skates rapidly over the technical aspects and is only moderately concerned with the economic aspects, which Adam Tooze has recently integrated into his masterly survey of the Nazi economy.Footnote ⁷ Instead, Jeffreys writes lucidly about the tragic moral decline of IG Farben, the scientifically innovative chemical combine that monopolized synthetic rubber production in Germany. After an unnecessarily lengthy introduction on the origins of the combine, he chronicles the series of compromises that accompanied and followed the Nazis’ rise to power. Arguably, this began with IG Farben’s sacking of its Jewish personnel in ?Germany, followed by the dismissal of its Jewish employees abroad. To save its pioneering oil-from-coal plant at Leuna, the company moved ever closer to the Nazis. Through a set of contracts with the state, IG Farben’s fortunes thus became firmly tied to rearmament and war. By 1937, the?majority of the company’s cadres were in the Nazi party, and many belonged to the SS. The death of Carl Bosch in 1940 marked the passing of the last major figure who dared publicly to criticize the Nazis, including Hitler himself.

The core of Jeffreys’ book concerns the lead-up to the trial of IG Farben’s leaders for war crimes in?1947–48. In early 1941, the company decided to?build a massive synthetic rubber factory in ?Auschwitz, with the plans later adapted for the production of synthetic oil as well. Auschwitz lay beyond the range of Allied bombers, benefited from good rail and water communications, and was close to plentiful supplies of coal, limestone, water, and electricity, all of which were necessary to produce Buna rubber. Moreover, the company could draw on labour from the concentration camp, which initially contained Poles but which over time vastly expanded and took mainly Jews. As serious problems arose with the quality of work performed by inmates, IG Farben took the momentous step of setting up its own satellite concentration camp, to hasten the construction of its huge factory. An estimated 35,000 people died in the process, and yet the plant never produced any synthetic rubber or oil for the Nazis, in part because inmates deployed ‘weapons of the weak’ to slow down and sabotage construction. Jeffreys is particularly concerned to establish what the leaders of IG Farben knew about manifest abuses in the camp, which was run on a day-to-day basis by the SS, and what they also knew about the killing of those deemed unfit for work. In the light of the evidence that he has accumulated, he criticizes the light prison sentences handed down by American judges to the personnel from IG Farben in 1947–48, suggesting that growing anti-Communism was partly to blame.

These three fine books, which go a long way to showing how the global rubber commodity chain responded to war and the threat of war, are all based in large part on primary materials. Moreover, the archival documents studied often emanate from private sources, rather than from the state. Thus, Finlay has used the papers of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford; Heim has benefited from the archives of the Max Planck Society, which took over from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society after the war; and Jeffreys has tackled the records of the successor companies to IG Farben, which was broken up after the war. In addition, the authors have sought out oral informants. Jeffreys has made striking and novel use of the reminiscences of British prisoners of war in Auschwitz, and cites searing passages from Primo Levi’s account of camp life. Finlay has obtained valuable information from a Japanese-American detainee, Frank Akira Kageyama, and other participants in the American saga. Heim, in addition to her own interviews, refers to the moving published testimony of Claudette Bloch and other women who worked in the Auschwitz research centre.

All three books provide helpful illustrations but are irritatingly deficient in other aspects of presentation, albeit in different ways. The books by Finlay and Heim are devoid of maps, while that by Jeffreys only has one of the Auschwitz site. Finlay has no consolidated bibliography or list of archival sources, which makes it hard to track down abbreviated references. Moreover, his overflowing endnotes often make it difficult to determine exactly when something happened. As for the endnotes in Jeffreys’ work, they refer to whole pages, without numbers to indicate the relevant block of text. Heim’s index includes only personal names, and all three authors have too much substantive text tucked away in footnotes or endnotes.

In conclusion, it is worth noting that the USSR?remains the great gap in our knowledge of synthetic and temperate rubber in this dramatic period, even though it was the Soviets who pioneered the production of both types of rubber. Scattered information does exist in various sour?ces,?and Heim provides helpful intelligence on kok-saghyz, derived from reports before and after the German invasion of the USSR. Finlay also sheds some light on this topic, as American scientists collected publications and went to the USSR to observe how their new allies dealt with the ?Russian dandelion. Nevertheless, good monographs on the history of temperate and synthetic rubber in this era of the Soviet Union’s history would enable global historians to gain a more rounded picture of a commodity chain in crisis.