Leuna Works

Before the day was over, Farben s Leuna works manufactured one hundred times more gasoline than they had produced in 1935, and even as the planes were zooming back and forth across the border, schemers in the Krauch office were confirming the quota for 1943 of over 100,000 metric tons. And this was the day of which Time magazine reported of Germany "The great lack is gasoline."... 

The first tank car filled with ammonia left the Leuna Works in the spring of 1917. In 1918, the combined factories of the BASF at Oppau and Leuna churned out 115,000 tons of ammonia, a tenfold increase over the company s prewar production. The ammonia manufactured in 1918 alone was worth 1,725,000 marks in royalty payments to Fritz Haber, the equivalent to about 4 million today. Fritz Haber had become, for his time, an extraordinarily wealthy man. 

Planck noted in passing Haber s resignation in 1933, and suggested that it resulted from trivial disputes over personnel policies, rather than political dissent. But that was all in the past, Planck continued. Think of what endured. Gonsider the Leuna Works ... 

Pocketing the enormous profits from the Leuna Works while refusing to give the customary recognition to its intellectual creator strikes me as disgraceful ingratitude, he told the Nazi leader. 

Fritz Haber left behind a technological inheritance as well, a bequest of machinery that shaped Germany and the world. Some of the oldest parts of the legacy, machines retrieved from the Leuna Works, stand in the lonely outskirts of Merseburg, a city a hundred miles southwest of Berlin, formerly part of East Germany. They are part of an open-air museum. 

In 1917, a pump exactly like this one drove the first clouds of hydrogen and nitrogen gas into reaction chambers of the Leuna Works and pushed ammonia gas out the other side. The ammonia was destined for Germany s hungry munitions factories. When the first railcar filled with ammonia left the Leuna Works, it carried the following message on its side, handwritten in chalk Death to the French. ... 

The war ended, but the flywheels kept spinning, pumping out ammonia for democrats and Nazis alike. The Leuna Works grew... 

Allied bombers took aim at these pillars of German military power. Between May 12, 1944, and April 4, 1945, some eighteen thousand bombs rained down on the Leuna Works, eventually bringing production at the factory to a complete standstill. Several hundred workers were killed, many of them forced laborers and prisoners of war who weren t allowed into bomb shelters. 

The Leuna Works and its neighboring factories in the towns of Schkopau and Bitterfeld acted as the foundation of an increasingly bizarre economy. Because they lacked dollars to pay for oil, Communist central planners maintained Hitler s policy of self-... 

I saw the Leuna Works for the first time in 1989. The complex extended as far as the eye could see across the horizon. The buildings were black with soot, smokestacks spewed white clouds, and no escape was possible from the smell of high-sulfur coal. Plant managers wearing pins of the Socialist Unity Party assured me that the Leuna Works had a bright future in capitalism. Others, after work hours in the privacy of their homes, described factories filled with equipment fit only for a museum. 

As East German socialism collapsed, the flywheels and pumps of the Leuna Works slowed and stopped forever. In the mid-1990s, the old factories were demolished and carted off as waste. The technological momentum of the Haber-Bosch era finally was exhausted. 

The Leuna Works were torn down in the early 1990s, after German unification, but a hundred factories around the world have sprouted in their place. These chemical behemoths throb with the energy of a chemical reaction first mastered by Fritz Haber, then replicated on an industrial scale by Carl Bosch. 

Braus lived in the town of Auschwitz. His office was near the buna plant. After he moved his desk, which had faced the vast Auschwitz plain, to face the wall, he slept a little more at night, though he never got a full night s sleep. Inside the Leuna plant, most of Braus s inmates did light work. They were assistants in laboratories they did bookkeeping and helped in the glass warehouses. Inside, where it was warm. Warm and quiet. 

High pressure technology transfer and diversification took many avenues, though most new innovations continued to appear from BASF. First, in 1923, was methanol production at the Leuna ammonia factory, and based on the work of Matthias Pier. BASF had patented a high pressure methanol process in 1914, but no further studies were carried out until after G. Patart in France applied for a similar patent (1921). In this case the same equipment could be used to manufacture ammonia or methanol, according to demand. Synthesis gas, the mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, was used directly, without separation, to prepare methanol. In a similar way, isopropanol was manufactured under high pressures. 

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