Agfa

The interest community was founded in 1904 by

1. Agfa (Aktiengesellschaft für Anilinfabrication Berlin)
2. BASF (Badische Anilin and SodaFabrik Ludwigshafen)
3. Bayer (color factories before Friedrich Bayer & Co. Elberfeld)

Therefore, it was also called a three -fed company. The i.G. initially limited themselves to exchange of experiences and waiver of competition through common products. The model for this was Trusts - company mergers in the USA, e.g. Standard Oil. Trusts were central stock companies, created by the unification of several stock corporations that formally kept their existence. The elimination of the competition permits profit maximization and easier enforcement of one\'s own interests.

The Actien-Gesellschaft für Aniline-Fabrikation (Agfa) was a founding member of I.G. in 1925. Farben and essentially formed Division III (Photochemistry) with the main plants in Wolfen and Leverkusen.

Agfa was deeply involved in the company\'s war crimes. In addition to war-important films and special chemicals for the Wehrmacht, Agfa built and operated its own forced labor camps at the Wolfen plant.

From 1944 onwards, the Agfa camera factory in Munich also maintained its own subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp (Agfa Command), in which hundreds of female concentration camp prisoners were forced to produce time fuses for the armaments industry under the most brutal conditions.

The chemist Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy (the elder) (a son of the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy) was, along with Martius, the key commercial and scientific mind in the founding and development of Agfa. He died early in 1880, but laid the foundation for the company's rise to become a major corporation.

In 1867, the chemist Carl Alexander von Martius, together with Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy (the elder), founded the companies at Rummelsburger Bucht in Berlin, from which the world-famous Agfa emerged in 1873. He led the company as technical director for decades.

Within the decentralized group organization of I.G. Agfa (with its main locations in Wolfen and Leverkusen) formed the absolute foundation of Division III (photochemistry and synthetic fibers).

The Agfa production network was fully integrated into the Nazi war economy. The company management used the infrastructure of Division III to produce special films for the Wehrmacht\'s aerial reconnaissance at the Agfa factory in Wolfen, with the brutal use of thousands of forced laborers. This division also managed the logistics for the Munich concentration camp subcamp (Agfa Kamerawerke), where prisoners from Dachau had to produce detonators for aerial bombs.

From September 1944, Agfa (as part of the I.G. Farben Group) used the specially established Munich concentration camp subcamp (Agfa Kamerawerke) in Munich-Giesing. Around 550 female concentration camp prisoners from the Netherlands and Eastern Europe were interned under deplorable conditions in an unfinished apartment block on Weißenseestrasse. In the neighboring Agfa factory they had to assemble time-delayed fuses for anti-aircraft defense and parts for the V1 and V2 long-range missiles. In January 1945 there was a historically rare, courageous strike by imprisoned women against malnutrition.

The Westerbork transit camp in the occupied Netherlands served the National Socialists as a central collection camp for the deportation of Jewish citizens to the extermination camps. In 1944, the SS specifically selected a group of around 200 Dutch women (including many political prisoners and resistance fighters) to work in the German armaments industry. They were deported directly to Munich to do forced labor at the Agfa camera factory there.

At the age of 28, Oppenheim took up an activity at the Actien-Gesellschaft für Anilinfabrication (AGFA) to represent his sick brother-in-law and founder of the Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy factory. With the death of Mendelssohn Bartholdys, Oppenheim had permanently entered the company and headed the Agfa company in Rummelsburg for several years before he was appointed in its management in 1886.

Starting from the Agfa dye in Berlin-Treptow, Eikonogen and in 1891 with Rodinal the foundation was laid for the later photo department of the AGFA. The department of the department was expanded to include X -ray photo sheets in 1896. In 1909 the Wolfen film factory was founded, which covered the entire activities of the AGFA in the photo sector.

Due to the work with cellulose for the subject of the film, Oppenheim forced the research on the artificial silk, the production of which became a significant branch of the AGFA. The foundation of the Wolfen color factory is attributed to his work. Oppenheim was involved in the first merger negotiations in the German chemical industry very early. In 1916 he belonged to the Community Council of the German Tea Farbic Fabries, from 1925 he was a member of the I.G. Farben AG.

Otto von Mendelssohn Bartholdy (son of Agfa co-founder Paul) inherited a sizeable block of shares in Agfa (Actien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrikation). He represented the family interests on the supervisory board of the traditional Berlin company until it was merged into I.G. Colors.

The largest European film manufacturer Agfa merged in 1928 in the United States with ANSCO to Agfa-Ansco.