Dossier mode

Judge the firms that own the world's seed by their records — and Bayer's does not begin with Roundup.

Bayer was a founding constituent of IG Farben, the cartel that built the Buna works at Auschwitz. Four decades later, its Cutter division kept selling an HIV-risk clotting product overseas after a safer one existed at home.

Bayer helped form IG Farben — the cartel behind the Buna works and the camp built to supply it.

Bayer was one of six firms merged in December 1925 to create IG Farben; the Allies dissolved the cartel after the war and Bayer re-emerged as a successor. IG Farben built the Buna synthetic-rubber/fuel plant beside Auschwitz, and in late October 1942 the SS established Auschwitz-Monowitz ('Buna,' later Auschwitz III) to house prisoners forced to labor there. Documented by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Cutter, a Bayer division, kept selling HIV-risk clotting medicine overseas after a safer version existed.

Cutter Biological introduced a safer, heat-treated Factor VIII in late February 1984, then for more than a year kept selling the older, unheated product in Asia and Latin America — in part to honor fixed-price contracts and avoid unmarketable inventory. In Hong Kong and Taiwan alone, 100+ hemophiliacs contracted HIV after using the old product; it was also sold in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan and Argentina. Documented by The New York Times in 2003 from Cutter's own records.

After Cutter introduced a safer, heat-treated Factor VIII in early 1984, more than 100 hemophiliacs in Hong Kong and Taiwan alone contracted HIV from the older, unheated product the division kept selling abroad — one market among several (Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, Argentina). The full overseas toll is real but, as the NYT noted, hard to pin to a single number.

The New York Times (Bogdanich & Koli), May 22, 2003

How this page is graded.

• FACT: Bayer's IG Farben lineage, the Auschwitz-Monowitz forced-labor camp built to serve the Buna works, and Cutter's overseas sale of HIV-risk Factor VIII after a safer version existed.
• NOT asserted: that 'IG Farben was the single largest donor to Hitler' — a contested, oft-overstated superlative; German heavy industry broadly financed the regime, which is the accurate frame.
• NOT asserted: a precise count of overseas hemophiliacs infected by Cutter's product — the toll is real but, as the NYT noted, hard to pin down decades later.

Help us fill these lines.

• OpenThe full accounting of IG Farben's wartime forced labor and the postwar allocation of liability among its successor firms.
• OpenThe complete overseas toll of Cutter's HIV-risk Factor VIII, market by market.
• OpenWhat Bayer knew, and when, about the older product's risk as it continued foreign sales after February 1984.