PRESS RELEASE, November 14, 2006
Coalition against Bayer Dangers
BAYER continues to refuse to openly distance itself from the convicted war criminal Fritz ter Meer. On All Saints Day the company again had a wreath laid on ter Meer’s grave in Krefeld-Uerdingen (Germany).
Ter Meer, born in 1884, was a board member of IG Farben from 1925. During the Second World War he was responsible for the construction of the IG Farben factory in Auschwitz, in which around 30 000 slave labourers went to their deaths. In July 1948 at the Nuremberg IG Farben trial ter Meer was sentenced to seven years in prison for enslavement and looting. During questioning he maintained that no specific suffering was inflicted on the slave labourers “because without this they would have been killed anyway”.
After his release from prison, ter Meer became Chairman of the Board of BAYER. After his death in 1967 Bayer named a student support foundation the “Fritz ter Meer Foundation”.
Axel Köhler-Schnura from the Coalition Against BAYER Dangers: „It is unacceptable that BAYER honours a war criminal like Fritz ter Meer and at the same time refuses to adequately and justly compensate the victims and their descendants. BAYER must face up to its share of the responsibility for the Nazi reign of terror, the war and slave labour.” Köhler-Schnura points out that for decades BAYER refused to pay compensation to surviving slave labourers. Only when international protests threatened the company’s reputation did it hesitantly agree to pay damages - more than 50 years after the end of the war.
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CBG - KEYCODE BAYER #273
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