Rathenau, Walther

The German industrialist Emil Rathenau (1838-1915) recognized the industrial potential of electrochemistry. In 1887 he founded the firm Allgemeine Elektrizitatsgesellschaft (A. E. G.) and in 1893 he started a new company, named Elektrochemische Werke, which was headed by his son, Walther (1867-1922). The two men together led the expansion of these companies into the field of electrochemistry.89... 

Walther Rathenau, Von kommenden Dingen (1916), quoted in Maier, "Between Taylorism and Technocracy, p. 47. Maier notes that the apparent harmony of capital and labor in wartime Germany was achieved at the cost of an eventually ruinous policy of inflation (p. 46). 

For an American viewpoint, see D.J. Kevles, George Ellery Hale, the First World War and the advancement of science in America, Isis, 59 (1968), 427-437 H. Wright, Explorer of the Universe, A Biography of George E. Hale (New York Dutton, 1966) for a German perspective, see H. Kessler, Walther Rathenau His Life and Work (London, 1929). For a later history of the concept, see Carroll Pursell, The Military-Industrial Complex (New York Holt and Reinhart, 1972). 

In response to Allied pressure, industrial representatives consulted with the Germans Foreign Office. The Economics Ministry and the Ministry for Reconstruction [Wiederaufbau] - which was directed in 1920-21 by Walther Rathenau -decided to comply on a limited basis, conceding the Allies the purely military information they demanded in the first questionnaire, in the hope of limiting the loss of commercial data in future. However, the Ministry of National Defense [Reichswehr] took a much harder line, and tiled to keep back information it deemed... 

Brunner, Mond Co. announced in May 1921 (evidently without prior negotiations with BASF) that it had obtained from the British government a license under the Treaty to use confiscated BASF patents to make synthetic ammonia. Bosch complained to Walther Rathenau, Minister for Reconstruction, but he could offer no help. Even so, the British could only get the process to work, in 1923, with information purchased from Alsatian engineers who had worked in Germany during the war. ... 

Kessler, H. Walther Rathenau His Life and Work (London G. Howe, 1929). 

The development of the catalytic process for ammonia synthesis was already one realization of the desire to manufacture domestic substitutes for economically important imported goods. It is also a common belief among historians of the First World War that without the Haber-Bosch process the German military would have run out of munitions in 1915. Similar intentions led Haber to his wartime partnership with the Raw Materials Department of the War Ministry under Walther Rathenau, which eventually led him to research on chemical means for waging war. As Johnson pointedly summed up the progression the logic of Ersatz led to the problems of munitions, and eventually to poison gas. ... 

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