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The German Chemical Industry in the Twentieth Century pp 147–216Cite as

Germany’s synthetic fuel industry, 1927–1945

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Part of the book series: Chemists and Chemistry ((CACH,volume 18))

Abstract

Germany has virtually no petroleum deposits. Prior to the twentieth century this was not a serious problem because Germany possessed abundant coal reserves. Coal provided for commercial and home heating; it also fulfilled the needs of industry and the military, particularly the navy. In the opening decade of the twentieth century, Germany’s fuel requirements began to change. Two reasons were especially important. First, Germany became increasingly dependent on gasoline and diesel oil engines. The appearance of automobiles, trucks, and then airplanes made a plentiful supply of gasoline essential. Moreover, ocean-going ships increasingly used diesel oil rather than coal as their energy source. Second, Germany’s continuing industrialization and urbanization led to the replacement of coal with smokeless liquid fuels that not only had a higher energy content but were cleaner burning and more convenient to handle.

He is the author of Electron and valence: Development of the theory 1900–1925 (1982) and of several articles on the history of synthetic fuels, the most recent “The U.S. Bureau of Mines Synthetic Fuel Programme 1920s–1950s: German connections and recent American Advances,” Annals of science, 54 (1997), 29–68. Stranges is completing a book on the international development of the synthetic fuel industry.

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References

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  142. Ibid.

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  144. Ibid., xvi-xvii.

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  149. The most important of these are the Ministry of Fuel and Power, Report on the petroleum and synthetic oil industry of Germany (London, 1947) and the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, High-pressure Hydrogenation at Ludwigshafen-Heidelberg, FIAT, Final Report 1317 (9 vols., Dayton, Ohio: Central Air Document Office, March 1951). The Ministry’s Report deals with the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis and the coal Hydrogenation process whereas the Joint Intelligence’s High-pressure discusses only coal Hydrogenation.

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  150. A third comprehensive source is Henry H. Storch, Norma Golumbic, and Robert B. Anderson, The Fischer-Tropsch and related syntheses (New York, 1951). It also relies heavily on the captured German World War II synthetic fuel documents. These are the best and most comprehensive sources, and I have relied on them extensively.

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  151. Other important sources that I have used in this study are Peter Hayes, Industry and ideology, LG. Farben in the Nazi era (Cambridge, 1987)

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  152. Raymond G. Stokes, Divide and prosper: the heirs of I.G. Farben under allied authority, 1945–1951 (Berkeley, 1988)

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  153. John Gimbel, Science, technology, and reparations: exploitation and plunder in postwar Germany (Stanford, 1992)

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  154. 102f. Jeffrey A. Johnson, The Kaiser’s chemists, science and modernization in imperial Germany (Chapel Hill, 1990). During the early 1970s after the Arab oil embargo and crisis of 1973–74 Richard Wainerdi and Kurt Irgolic established the German Document Retrieval Project at Texas A&M University. They set as its objective the collecting, translating, and organizing of the thousands of German World War II documents and reports that the Allied intelligence teams had brought to the United States and now were scattered around the country in various government repositories, archives, and even with members of the TOM. The German Document Retrieval Project, of which I was a member, accomplished its objective, and as a result Texas A&M’s archives contain what is very likely the most comprehensive collection of information on Germany’s World War II synthetic fuel industry. I have used this collection in this and other papers I have written on the history of synthetic fuel. This paper’s citations on the plant descriptions are from the Ministry’s and the Joint Intelligence’s summaries, with other sources included when required for greater detail or clarification.

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  1. Department of History, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, 77843-4235, USA

    Anthony Stranges

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    John E. Lesch

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Stranges, A. (2000). Germany’s synthetic fuel industry, 1927–1945. In: Lesch, J.E. (eds) The German Chemical Industry in the Twentieth Century. Chemists and Chemistry, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9377-9_7

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