- The Second World War started with the German attack to Poland 1st of September 1939. The causes of the war had been planted already some twenty years before, in the Treaty of Versailles. The most destructive war of the mankind ended to the explosion of the first atomic bomb in history and opened a door to a new age. The atomic age had started and along with that, the possibilities in pharmaceutical development and in medical studies were completely different than before. The Second World War also caused the fact that the ethics of researchers and doctors, had to be inspected more closely, while performing human and animal testing. The need to create a protocol, which everyone would be obligated to follow, was a real one. The chief prosecutor in Nuremberg 1946 accused that the German doctors and researchers had destroyed science and abandoned ethics. This was very true, when the horrors of concentration camps were uncovered. It’s however good to remember, that the German doctors were the first one in the 1930’s and in 1940’s to discover the relationship between smoking and cancer. Also the dangers of asbestos were recognized in Germany, already in the year 1943. All of these researches however were abandoned after the war, as they were stained by the horrors of Nazi’s.
- Also the directors of IG Farben Trust, to where the pharmaceutical company Bayer belonged too, had to pay the price for the crimes committed during the war. IG Farben was a leading chemical company in the Europe, which was occupied by Germany. As Germany invaded and occupied more areas, IG Farben moved in and took the chemical plants. As there was a constant lack of labour force, IG Farben Trust used slave labour in their factories and also managed it’s own concentration camps, which were sub-camps to the bigger and more well know concentration camps. The most biggest and most horrible crime committed by IG Farben during the war was without a doubt, to manufacture with an exclusive right the Zyclon B, which was used in the gas chambers. After the war IG Farben Trust was break into a smaller companies like Bayer, BASF and Hoechst, which later merged and formed the French pharmaceutical company of Aventis. Twelve of the former directors and workers of IG Farben were sentenced to imprisonment in the trial of Nuremberg, for the crimes committed against a mankind.
- Some of the directors of Bayer however were released due to the lack of evidence. For example Wilhelm Mann which later came the sales director of Bayer, was let free, but later in the 1990’s, it became clear, that Wilhelm Mann and Bayer had been part of the experiments of Josef Mengel, as new evidence were discovered, evidence that the trial of Nuremberg didn’t have.
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