Talk:BASF/Archives/2011

Factory or Manufacturing?
== BASF,IG Farben, HITLER and War World II

Prior Editing History

 * in Revision as of 21:44, 30 June 2005 User:Jerzy rv'd to F
 * in Revision as of 15:51, 29 June 2005 User:Atlant restored M
 * in Revision as of 07:03, 28 June 2005, 61.94.148.174 restored F
 * (10 intervening edits left M intact)
 * in Revision as of 08:28, 10 January 2005, 24.225.241.234 switched to M
 * (11 intervening edits left F intact)
 * in Revision as of 10:30, 30 November 2004 141.6.2.29 made F visible
 * (11 intervening edits left F piped)
 * in Revision as of 20:31, 16 November 2003 i (Jerzy) "translated" B & F by creating lks to the corresponding en: articles
 * (All 8 previous revisions had only the German name and the acronym)

Reference-Book Evidence

 * Harper Collins German Dictionary (College Edn of 1990), translates the following nouns:
 * Fabrik as :"factory" (only)
 * Fabrikat as :"manufacture, product"
 * Fabrikation as :"manufacturing, production"
 * Der Große Duden Stilwörterbuch der deutschen Sprache gives three examples of Fabrik in use, describing it as :
 * being entered by workers,
 * lying idle, or
 * being expanded in senses that the Harper Collins translates, respectively as
 * "extend" or "expand",
 * "widen" or "enlarge", and
 * "enlarge".
 * Schöffler-Weis Englisch-Deutsch Taschenwörterbuch (3rd Edn of 1967), (sorry, don't have the volume for other direction) translates
 * manufacture in its noun sense as :"Herstellung" or "Fabrikat"
 * manufacturer as :"Fabrikant"
 * manufacturing only as nouns for use as prefixs to other nouns, i.e. essentially attributive nouns:
 * "Fabrik-",
 * "Gewerbe-" :(which in isolation means "trade or occupation"), and
 * "Industrie-" (whose only translation in isolation will surprise no one).
 * factory as
 * "Faktorei": (not acknowledged by Harper Collins)
 * "Handelsniederlassung": (not acknowledged as unit by HC, but by decomposing & translating the first third and the rest:) "trade" + "settlement", and
 * "Fabrik(anlage)", which is to say, both
 * Fabrik: (already familiar), and
 * "Fabrikanlage": which again requires decomposition, with "Anlage" having (among even less pertinent senses)
 * as only general sense: "disposition",
 * in technology: "plant",
 * in "sports etc": "facilities",
 * colloquially: "system" or "equipment" (w/ "stereo system" as an example), and
 * in finance: "investment".

IMO,
 * this is good evidence that "factory" is the most natural translation in this context, and
 * the only evidence that "manufacturing" could be an acceptable translation reflects use in different grammatical roles than here, and is poor evidence of acceptability here, and stronger evidence of the potential for non-native speakers to misinterpret the general role of "Frabrik" from hearing it used those others roles, and to falsely generalize it to this role.

--Jerzy·t 1 July 2005 03:24 (UTC)

As a native-speaker I'd translate it as "factory", too.

Zaibatsu

Cartel Membership?
I found this page because BASF was mentioned as part of (Tamiflu producer) La Roche's price-fixing cartel. Shouldn't that be mentioned here on the BASF page? --tharsaile 19 October 2005

Please also find this interesting letter on what BASF, BAYER ans some other phamaceutical compannies have been also doing around the World based on this Letter.

RE: Open Letter by Matthias Rath, M.D. to the Health Food Community in the USA

Dr. Rath is the physician and scientist who led the medical breakthrough on vitamins and cardiovascular disease documented in his book “Why Animals Don't Get Heart Attacks - But People Do”. Two-time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling stated in his last will in June 1994, “There is no question in my mind that I thought about Dr. Rath as my successor”.

Dr. Rath was born in Germany and worked in the USA for many years. Now he lives in Holland and is organizing the battle against the head of the international Pharma-Cartel Germany's Hoechst, Bayer, and BASF and their efforts to ban vitamins and other natural therapies world-wide.

With this Open Letter Dr. Rath informs the health food community in the U.S. and the American people about important recent developments in the global battle to preserve vitamin freedom. Moreover, this letter is an appeal to every human being to seize the historic responsibility and opportunity helping to end the tyranny of the Pharma-Cartel and lay the foundation of a new health care in the interest of the people.

http://hills.ccsf.cc.ca.us/~jinouy01/drrath2.html

Logotype
Won't anyone upload Basf's logotype to illustrate the article?

History
Currently the history section says: "Under the leadership of Carl Bosch, BASF founded IG Farben, Hoechst, Bayer, and three other companies, thus losing its independence."

I am guessing this was maybe translated from a German original because it makes no sense :-)

If BASF "founded" these 6 companies, that would imply it set up a number of independent of subsidiary companies. Is this what is meant? And why would this mean it was no longer independent?

Were these companies somehow merged under another holding company? (The only evidence for this hypothesis is the statement that BASF lost its independence.)

And who were the "three other companies" ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Thirteenangrymen (talk • contribs) 20:10, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Size, BASF, IG Farben, HITLER and War World II
BASF says, it is the largest chemical company. Is this true (Dow says the same)? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 89.50.230.241 (talk • contribs).


 * It depends on the measure. Dow has a much higher market capitalization, BASF has about twice the number of employees. Rook wave 01:03, 28 February 2006 (UTC)


 * In sales BASF is the biggest chemical company in the world, nearly equal to big as Dow, DuPont or other companies. greetings from Germany --195.93.60.41 11:09, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Can anyone comment on the relationship btw BASF, HITLER and World War II

Reference: http://www.1976design.com/blog/archive/2004/10/19/hitler-who/ Please find attached some information I just got from the net that i think it is worthy to know for the general public:

IG Farben - The Main Benefactor The most powerful German economic corporate emporium in the first half of this century was the Interessengemeinschaft Farben or IG Farben, for short. Interessengemeinschaft stands for "Association of Common Interests" and was nothing other than a powerful cartel of BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, and other German chemical and pharmaceutical companies. IG Farben was the single largest donor to the election campaign of Adolph Hitler. One year before Hitler seized power, IG Farben donated 400,000 marks to Hitler and his Nazi party.

Accordingly, after Hitler's seizure of power, IG Farben was the single largest profiteer of the German conquest of the world, the Second World War.

One hundred percent of all explosives and one hundred percent of all synthetic gasoline came from the factories of IG Farben. Whenever the German Wehrmacht conquered another country, IG Farben followed, systematically taking over the industries of those countries. Through this close collaboration with Hitler's Wehrmacht, IG Farben participated in the plunder of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Holland, Belgium, France and all other countries conquered by the Nazis. Zyklon-B, an extermination gas produced by Hoechst, was used to kill millions of innocent people, before their corpses were burnt

The U.S. government investigation of the factors that led to the Second World War in 1946 came to the conclusion that without IG Farben the Second World War would simply not have been possible. We have to come to grips with the fact that it was not a psychopath, Adolph Hitler, or bad genes of the German people that brought about the Second World War. Economic greed by companies like Bayer, BASF and Hoechst was the key factor in bringing about the Holocaust. No one who saw Steven Spielberg's film "Schindler's List" will forget the scenes in the concentration camp Auschwitz.

Auschwitz was the largest mass extermination factory in human history, but the concentration camp was only the appendix. The main project was IG Auschwitz, a 100% subsidiary of IG Farben, the largest industrial complex of the world for manufacturing synthetic gasoline and rubber for the conquest of Europe.

On April 14, 1941, in Ludwigshafen, Otto Armbrust, the IG Farben board member responsible for the Auschwitz project, stated to his IG Farben board colleagues, "our new friendship with the SS is a blessing. We have determined all measures integrating the concentration camps to benefit our company."

On March 1, 1941, the Reichsführer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, inspected the construction site

The pharmaceutical departments of the IG Farben cartel used the victims of the concentration camps in their own way: thousands of them died during human experiments such as the testing of new and unknown vaccines.

There was no retirement plan for the prisoners of IG Auschwitz. Those who were too weak or too sick to work were selected at the main gate of the IG Auschwitz factory and sent to the gas chambers. Even the chemical gas Zyklon-B used for the annihilation of millions of people was derived from the drawing boards and factories of IG Farben.

The map of Auschwitz (above) speaks for itself. The size of the IG Auschwitz plant (red area) was larger than all Auschwitz concentration camps (blue area) taken together.

If you really want to know about BASF, WWII, Hitler, etc... then you really should read the The Crime and Punishmnt of I.G. Farben by Joseph Borkin. It corrects the slight exaggerations about Zyklon-B and the role of BASF in the WWII. Carl Bosch's meeting with Hitler in which he promised to supply the Nazi army with anything they needed and then tried to persuade him that his plan to eradicate the jews wasn't such a good idea provides a rare glimpse of reason in the WWII BASF story. A great fraction of the huge pile of BASF patents and nobel prizes were developed by Jewish scientists, many of which were Carl Bosch's friends. You will notice that the address for the modern Headquarters of BASF is on Carl Bosch Street.

Unfortunately the book will also show you how things were even worse the the sentiments above. Many of the WWII crimes were actually pioneered in World War I (slave labor, chlorine gas, phosgene gas). The fact that they tried to optimize slave labor usage (food vs output vs lifespan) shows the depths to which cold engineering can sink in the right environment:

"I.G. reduced slave labor to consumable raw material, a human ore from which the mineral of life was extracted. When no usable energy remained, the living dross was shipped to the gassing chambers and cremation furnaces where the SS recycled it into the German war economy - gold teeth for the Reichsbank, hair for mattresses and fat for soap." - direct quote from TCAPIGF by Borkin. The book is out of print, so the copyright status might be interesting. ISBN 0-671-82755-3

Fair use rationale for Image:BASF logo.svg
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World War II
There are currently two sentences in this section, which is pretty pathetic for a major player in the most important event of the 20th century.

I have added the "section needs expansion tag" which is well warranted.--Bodybagger (talk) 00:42, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

Maybe the murder of ten of thousands of defenceless people should be added to this section. Dtmckay (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 02:17, 4 February 2010 (UTC).

We would like to propose the following change to this section: Both the Ludwigshafen and Oppau plants were of strategic importance for the war because the German military needed many of their products, e.g. synthetic rubber and gasoline. As a result, they were major targets for air raids. Over the course of the war, fighter planes attacked the plants a total of 65 times.

Shelling took place from the autumn of 1943 on, and saturation bombing inflicted extensive damage. Production virtually stopped by the end of 1944.

Due to a shortage of male workers during the war, women were conscripted to work in the factories, and later prisoners of war and foreign civilians. Concentration camp inmates did not work at the Ludwigshafen and Oppau plants.

In July of 1945, the American military administration confiscated the entire assets of IG Farben. That same year, the Allied Commission decreed that IG Farben should be dissolved. The sites at Ludwigshafen and Oppau were controlled by French authorities.

Following extended negotiations, the Badische Anilin- und Soda-Fabrik AG was re-founded on 30 January 1952 as one of the five successor companies of IG Farben.

Kind regards Annette Hoellebrand BASF SE, Corporate Communications —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nah67056 (talk • contribs) 12:47, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

Picture in section "History"
Unfortunately, the Portsmouth site in Virginia, USA, shown on the picture in section “History” does no longer exist. The site was a producer of superabsorbent polymers. Afterwards, the production was shifted to Freeport, Texas, and the building was demolished. References can be found in the BASF annual report 2007, p. 73.

The list of BASF’s sites in the US can be found here:.

Pictures of current BASF sites in the USA that could serve as a replacement can be downloaded here:.

Kind regards

Benjamin Rusch

BASF SE, Corporate Communications 141.6.11.13 (talk) 16:23, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

Two minor bugs
The current entry contains some minor bugs that we would like to propose for change:


 * The description at the beginning, second paragraph, says that “The BASF Group comprises more than 160 subsidiaries and joint ventures and operates more than 150 production sites in Europe, Asia, Australia, Americas and Africa.” These facts are outdated and could be changed as following: “The BASF Group comprises subsidiaries and joint ventures in more than 80 countries and operates six integrated production (Verbund) sites and close to 380 production sites in Europe, Asia, Australia, Americas and Africa.” Source:
 * Chapter “History”, subcategory “Takeovers” contains a paragraph which states that the takeover of Ciba “is currently under review by the European Commissioner for Competition”. However, the takeover bid has already been accepted and Ciba is now part of BASF. A possible replacement could be “The company acquired Ciba (formerly part of Ciba-Geigy) on April 9, 2009. From the end of 2012 at the latest, synergies are expected to be more than €450 million annually.” Source:

Kind regards

Benjamin Rusch, Corporate Online Communications BASF (talk) 16:59, 26 March 2010 (UTC)


 * ✅ with some slight changes to wording. -- B figura  (talk) 18:45, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Business Segments - Plastics
We would like to propose the deletion of the comment "This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive and inappropriate external links or by converting links into footnote references." Currently there is only one external link included in the Plastics Section.

Kind regards,

Annette Hoellebrand, BASF SE, Corporate Communications BASF|Corporate Online Communications BASF]] (talk) 08:23, 9 July 2010 (UTC)--Nah67056 (talk) 08:28, 9 July 2010 (UTC)