The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH (), often shortened to Degesch, was a German chemical corporation which manufactured pesticides. Degesch held the patent on the infamous pesticide Zyklon, a variant of which was used to execute people in the gas chambers of German extermination camps during

the Holocaust The Holocaust (), known in Hebrew language, Hebrew as the (), was the genocide of History of the Jews in Europe, European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy ...

. Through the firms Tesch & Stabenow GmbH (Testa) and Heerdt-Linger (Heli), Degesch sold the poisonous gas Zyklon B to the

German Army The German Army (, 'army') is the land component of the armed forces of Federal Republic of Germany, Germany. The present-day German Army was founded in 1955 as part of the newly formed West German together with the German Navy, ''Marine'' (G ...

and the

Schutzstaffel The ''Schutzstaffel'' (; ; SS; also stylised with SS runes as ''ᛋᛋ'') was a major paramilitary organisation under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany, and later throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II. It beg ...

(SS). Degesch was founded in 1919 as a subsidiary of Degussa. Its first director was

Nobel laureate The Nobel Prizes (, ) are awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Academy, the Karolinska Institutet, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee to individuals and organizations who make outstanding contributions in th ...

Fritz Haber Fritz Jakob Haber (; 9 December 1868 – 29 January 1934) was a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrog ...

. In 1936, Degussa and

IG Farben I. G. Farbenindustrie AG, commonly known as IG Farben, was a German Chemical industry, chemical and Pharmaceutical industry, pharmaceutical conglomerate (company), conglomerate. It was formed on December 2, 1925 from a merger of six chemical co ...

each held 42.5% of the shares, while Th. Goldschmidt AG held the remaining 15%. During the years 1938 through 1943, Degesch was extremely profitable. For most of these years, IG Farben received

dividend A dividend is a distribution of profits by a corporation to its shareholders, after which the stock exchange decreases the price of the stock by the dividend to remove volatility. The market has no control over the stock price on open on the ex ...

s amounting to twice the value of their shares. After the Second World War Degesch continued production. In 1986, the company was sold to Detia Freyberg GmbH; the current name is Detia-Degesch GmbH.

Prosecution

During the IG Farben trial the director of Degesch, Gerhard Friedrich Peters, implicated himself. He received information by Kurt Gerstein about the murder of people using Zyklon and was informed that the German army needed the gas without the usual additives that were added to warn people by smell of its poisonous nature (the Zyklon B variant). In 1949, Peters was charged with murder in the court of Frankfurt and convicted and sentenced to five years imprisonment. The conviction was in 1952, legally confirmed in an appeal and set to six years. Peters went to prison but was acquitted in a new appeal in 1953. The law had changed; he was no longer considered guilty in assisting in murder. The chairman of the board of directors from 1939 to 1945, Hermann Schlosser, was arrested in February 1948, and acquitted in April 1948; later he took another job as chairman of the board. The owner of Tesch & Stabenow, Bruno Tesch, and its director Karl Weinbacher were convicted and sentenced to death by a British tribunal and executed in Hamelin Prison on 16 May 1946. An employee Joachim Drosihn was acquitted. In 1979, Testa, which was newly founded after the war, merged with Heerdt-Lingler GmbH (HeLi) with the financial participation of Degesch.

References

{{reflist Chemical companies of Germany Defunct companies of Germany Chemical companies established in 1919 1919 establishments in Germany Companies involved in the Holocaust

Prosecution

See also

References