Rockefeller, I.G. Farben, And the Global Cartel

To Enforce Drug – Based Medicine.

In a strange way, the fact that chemotherapy is at the top of the list of accepted – enforced – treatments for cancer in the U.S. can be traced to the business interests and manipulations of a giant Germany – based multinational corporation called I.G. Farben and its affiliations with the Rockefeller oil interests, based in New York City but worldwide in its reach. The I.G. Farben conglomerate, first formally organized in 1926 with headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany, controlled nearly the entire German drug and chemical industries during the 1930s. They gained ownership of the technology for producing synthetic fuels from coal, a process called hydrogenation, first achieved by a German chemist in 1913.

I.G. Farben was not so much a discrete, single company as an interlocking web of dozens of companies around the world; in fact by 1940, not only did I.G. Farbens’s operations straddle 93 countries, but it was Europe’s largest industrial corporation and the world’s largest chemical manufacturer. In Germany alone, I.G. Farben controlled 380 companies. In the U.S., I.G. Farben had commercial interests or outright ownership in dozens of major companies, many of them in pharmaceuticals, such as Bayer, Proctor And Gamble, Monsanto Chemical, Dow Chemical, Lederle Laboratories, Hoffman-LaRoche Laboratories and Squibb and Sons Pharmaceuticals.

The name itself – I.G. – indicates the “cartel” nature of its business operations: Interessen Gemeinschaft, means  “community of interests”. Putting this in perspective, in the oil industry today, OPEC (Organization Of Petroleum Exporting Countries) is a cartel whose interests focus around maximizing profits from crude oil. A cartel is a voluntary, often international, combination of independent, private businesses that have similar products or affiliated services for the purpose of limiting their competition, which they do by price-fixing, allocating customers and markets, and exchanging technology. The goal is simple and purely capitalistic; severely curtail the competition to drive up the prices and control the market.

Long before OPEC, there was I.G. Farben. In the late 1920s, it stood poised to control the entire European petroleum market by offering a less expensive synthetic substitute. This plan might have been desirable to Germany, preparing for war, and for Europe in general, but it was a threat to the hegemony of the multinational oil interests of the Rockefellers, known then as Standard Oil Of New Jersey. John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (1839-1937), was the quintessential 19^th.-century capitalist “robber baron,” building up immense wealth by controlling an entire industry—oil. By the late 1860s, he already owned the world’s largest refinery; in 1870, he founded Standard Oil Company with the intention of “consolidating nearly all oil refining into one giant corporation,” explains historian Daniel Yergin in The Prize.  Already by 1879, Rockefeller’s reach was prodigious; he owned 90% of America’s oil refining capacity and, in 1899, his new company, Standard Oil Of New Jersey held stock in 41 other corporations.

In 1929, Rockefeller and I.G. Farben cut a deal. Rockefeller would sell oil but not drugs and have the hydrogenation patent for use outside of Germany; I/G. Farben  would stay  out of oil outside of Germany and sell only chemicals. I.G. Farben also received 2% of Standard’s stock, worth $35 million. In 1930, the 2 giants established a joint company to develop the oil-chemical field. Over the decades, the Rockefeller/I.G. Farben cartel would reap massive profits from both areas. What better arrangement than to control both drugs and oil?. Nearly all manufactured chemicals, including drugs, require coal tar or crude oil as a component (often in the form of petroleum jelly).

It was strategically desirable for Rockefeller’s oil interests to become linked with I.G. Farben’s chemical industry. They understood why and how a global cartel could work to discourage—quash---all small-scale enterprising non-drug oriented (non-petrochemical-based) approaches to medicine. They wouldn’t be able to control the money flow otherwise, and success in an alternative medicinal product-laetrile, Hoxsey herbs, antineoplastons, among many – could eventually undercut their monopoly.

Medical historian and researcher G. Edward Griffin concludes, after poring through reports of U.S. government hearings conducted between 1928 and 1946 to investigate these topics: “The reality, therefore , is that government becomes the tool of the very forces that, supposedly, it is regulating.” For “government” substitute  National Cancer Institute (NCI) , Food And Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Institutes Of health (NIH), and you can see why it is axiomatic for those organizations supposedly working for the American public to take all possible steps to suppress any innovations that might threaten the global drug (and oil) edifice they represent.

It is also highly revealing to note that, according to Griffin’s research, during the 1930s when Nazi Germany was preparing for war, I.G. Farben used its cartel interests in the U.S. to suppress or censure (through canceling advertisements) the publication of any information critical of or unfavorable to Nazi Germany. There is no reason to suppose that such media manipulation stopped with the end of that war. The fact that most mainstream American media consistently and routinely deride, make fun of, or seriously criticize alternative medicine, despite the reality of its successes and clinical efficacy, could be interpreted as meaning that the next generation of I.G. Farben interests may be pulling the strings in editorial offices across the country. The use of alternative medicine runs against the financial interests of the cartel.

There is still another factor that illustrates how a global cartel can strangle alternative medicine. According to Griffin’s research, as of 1974 the Rockefeller interests included “vast” stock holdings in the first and third largest insurance companies in the U.S., namely, Metropolitan and Equitable; they also maintained a strong presence (through board of directors’ membership) in Traveler’s and several other insurers. Rockefeller/I.G. Farben’s control in the insurance sector, if it still exists, either actually or camouflaged, could enable the cartel to complete the squeeze on alternative medicine by preventing its practices from being reimbursed by insurance policies across the country.

Open competition among different brands of vitamins, for example, was to be discouraged, as was over-the-counter sale of medicines. Making drugs available only  by doctor’s prescriptions, Griffin explains suited the cartel as a long range strategy because, by this setup, they could continually raise the prices and tightly control the market. Griffin states:  “In the specialized field of drugs and pharmaceuticals, the Rockefeller influence is substantial, if not dominant.”

The FDA push in the 1990s to reclassify all nutritional and herbal supplements as prescription drugs would require massively expensive clinical research, and is a perfect example of a regulatory change  that would materially benefit the cancer cartel and help put alternative medicine out of business. Cartels do exist today, as they did during the time of Nazi Germany, Griffin states; the names and ownership lists may have changed, but the interests remain the same. “The pharmaceutical industry, far from being exempt from this influence, has been at the center of it from the very beginning.”

These facts practically guaranteed that the American approach to cancer treatment would be dominated, even dictated, by what the Germans were doing prior to And during World War II. I.G. Farben, for example built the world’s largest poison gas industry. Farben was the prime manufacturer of poison mustard gas used to kill soldiers, and of Zyklon B, the nerve poison used to kill 6 million Jews in the concentration camps of German-occupied Europe. Griffin presents evidence suggesting that I.G. Farben actually controlled the Nazi State and operated many of the concentration camps, including Monowitz, which they built themselves (near Auschwitz, in Poland). At Monowitz, I.G. Farben used both “free” and slave labor, drawing on an estimated 300,000 inmates from the concentration camps as unreimbursed laborers. “By the time the Nazis began to tool up for war in Europe,” Griffin explains, “Farben had gained control over a major portion of America’s pharmaceutical industry.” Decades earlier, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., had learned from his I.G. Farben colleagues that pharmaceutical drugs  could become a source of fantastic profits especially if the competition factor was eliminated from the picture.

The Germans appeared to be pursuing research in 2 related fields: cancer treatment and more effective ways to kill people with chemicals. In a bizarre development, poison mustard gas was simultaneously researched for its ability to kill cancer tumors and soldiers. Some of this research took place at memorial Hospital (the predecessor to memorial Sloan-Kettering) and Yale University, mostly under the veil of wartime secrecy.

In 1942, secret research offices in the U.S., Britain, and Nazi Germany were simultaneously studying poison mustard gas as a chemical warfare agent and possible anticancer therapy. Based on the clinical success of treating a single laboratory mouse (which had Lymphoma) with a modified mustard gas, human trials began that year. The first human subject died; although his tumor initially regressed, his white blood cell count plummeted from 5,0000 to 200 per cubic millimeter of blood. By 1946 at least 160 American patients had been secretly subjected to poison gas treatment for cancer, according to Griffin.