Business & Finance: Europe's Biggest

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The air into which Merseburg's church thrusts its spire is much like the air over any other Central German village. Somewhere in it, no doubt, could be found the traces of that pious carbon dioxide exhaled by Martin Luther when he preached in Merseburg some 400 years ago. More evident is the carbon monoxide belched daily by Opel cars speeding through wheat and coal lands on the high road to Berlin. But for the most part, Merseburg's air is undistinguished−healthy, fragrant, and with its conventional share of oxygen and nitrogen.

This is fortunate, for Merseburg's air is important. Upon it, last year, was levied a tax of 770,000,000 cubic metres, from which 18,000 men drew the nitrogen. Thus the Leunawerk* branch of Europe's mightiest chemical company produced 700,000 tons of the gas, and confirmed its right to be called the largest nitrogen-fixation plant in the world. Thus German chemists, trained in the art of making explosives, proved they could make fertilizers as well.

Statistics at Leunawerk are indigestible. Eleven chimneys climb a tenth of a mile toward the sky, and at their base a mile-long row of boiler-houses make up the world's greatest steam-generating unit. Leunawerk's silo, piled with white fertilizer, could enclose and hide a Roman amphitheatre. Like Manhattan disembowled, the plant's ganglia of pipes and conduits (some of them ten feet in diameter) make hideous lacework overhead.

To a few men only is Leunawerk's full significance clear. One of them, of course, is kindly Dr. Karl Düysberg, "Father of Students," Chairman of the Board of I.G. Farbenindustrie A.G., of which Leunawerk is only a part. Another is I.G. Farben's President, Chemist Carl Bosch. It was he who adapted the Haber synthetic nitrogen process to commercial use, and made it the Haber-Bosch process. In a sense, Leunawerk would have been impossible without him.

Last week, Herr Chairman Düysberg and Herr President-Chemist Bosch came to Manhattan. With the great Bosch, came a lesser Bosch, a young man with a keen and wise interest in his father's vast designs. Like the most valuable of I.G. Farben's processes, their movements, plans, purposes, were shrouded in impenetrable secrecy. But it was permissible to conjecture that they had come to accomplish what I.G. Farben has long tried to do−gain access to U.S. capital by listing its stock or the stock of its Swiss subsidiary (I.G. Chemie) on the New York Stock Exchange. And, should they succeed, they might use their new capital to buy and operate U.S. chemical companies.

Long and bitter has been the opposition to the entrance of I.G. Farben into the New York money market. And not without reason. For the I.G. Farbenindustrie A. G. (Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft) is first of all the largest corporation in Europe (capital, 1,100,000,000 marks) and hence a natural competitor of U.S. industry. And, more important, it is the perfect example of a system which many a U.S. industrialist privately applauds, but which almost all U.S. businessmen feel compelled publicly to condemn. Reckless would be the executive of a great U.S. corporation who ventured to proclaim himself in favor of RATIONALIZATION.