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Soviets ever took title to and exploited the confiscated facilities for their own benefit as IG Farben had done more than once.
Finally, misgivings also arise concerning the structure and presentation of the book. The choppy organization deprives readers of a sense of the particular situation at any given time and forces too much repetition. There are more misprints than is customary in a German scholarly work. The absence of any sort of index and of a list of the archives and document files consulted detracts from the book's usefulness to future researchers. Often the footnote references fail to alert readers to the origins of essential sources--for example, the Loehr-Akten from which he draws so much statistical information.
Gottfried Plumpe has added to our knowledge of IC Farben in some valuable respects, but they are fewer than he implies and diluted by his oversights and overstatements.
Peter Hayes is associate professor of history and German at Northwestern University, the author of numerous articles on modern German economic and business history and of Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (1987), and the editor of Lessons and Legacies; The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World (1991). He is currently writing a...