Bayer: Aspirin, Heroin Cough Syrup, IG Farben and the Monsanto Gamble

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Bayer began in 1863 in Barmen, Germany, when dye salesman Friedrich Bayer and master dyer Johann Friedrich Weskott started making synthetic dyes from coal tar chemistry. The same aniline compounds pointed the company toward medicine. In 1899 it launched aspirin, officially credited to chemist Felix Hoffmann, though Arthur Eichengrün, a Jewish Bayer chemist, later asserted while imprisoned at Theresienstadt that he directed the work and coined the name. From 1898 to 1910 Bayer also sold heroin, named from the German word for heroic, as a non-addictive morphine substitute for coughs, pneumonia and tuberculosis. Phenobarbital followed in 1912. In World War I Bayer made chemical weapons, and the U.S. and Canada confiscated its assets and trademarks, which is why aspirin is a generic word in America. In 1925 Bayer merged with BASF, Hoechst and others into IG Farben, where Gerhard Domagk discovered Prontosil, the first commercial antibacterial drug, and won a 1939 Nobel Prize the Nazi regime forced him to decline.

During World War II IG Farben built the Buna Works at Monowitz, Auschwitz III, and by 1943 nearly half its workforce was slave labor and conscripts, including about 30,000 Auschwitz prisoners. SS physician Helmuth Vetter, on Bayer's payroll, ran lethal experiments on inmates. After Nuremberg, Fritz ter Meer was sentenced to seven years, yet in 1956 he became chairman of Bayer's supervisory board. Later scandals included its Cutter Laboratories unit selling unheated Factor VIII clotting concentrate in Asia and Latin America after a heat-treated version existed, and the 2001 withdrawal of Baycol after 52 deaths. In 2018 Bayer bought Monsanto for $66 billion, the largest acquisition by a German company, and inherited Roundup litigation over non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

• A surviving memo shows a Bayer employee paid 170 Reichsmarks each for 150 female Auschwitz inmates, then asked for another group after they died in experiments.
• Ter Meer served as Bayer's supervisory board chairman from 1956 to 1964, during West Germany's postwar rebuilding.
• Thousands of hemophiliac patients in the regions that received the unheated Factor VIII contracted HIV and died of AIDS.
• Roundup claims passed 165,000, and Bayer committed more than $10 billion to settlements without admitting liability.
• By 2023 Bayer's market value had fallen about 60 percent, leaving the whole company worth less than it paid for Monsanto.