Bayer

Bayer is presented as a pharmaceutical subsidiary of IG Farben whose correspondence with Paul Doll makes the lethal use of concentration-camp prisoners legible as a routine commercial transaction. A letter reports that all 150 women sent to the company for experiments died, then requests another group of the same size at the same price. The exchange’s stark arithmetic links experimental failure, administrative repetition, and the valuation of human beings.

Institutional Identity and Connection to the Camp

The evidence identifies Bayer as a pharmaceutical firm and a subsidiary of IG Farben. Its connection to the camp is conveyed not through a description of its facilities or general operations, but through a personnel officer’s letter to Paul Doll, read by Angelus Thomsen in Frithuric Burckl’s office at Buna-Werke. The letter places Bayer within a chain of institutional dealings that moves women from the camp into experiments and then turns their deaths into a request for further subjects.

The account gives no broader history of Bayer or explanation of the company’s internal structure. Instead, its institutional character emerges from this precise exchange: a company representative communicates with Doll about the transport, the outcome of the experiments, and the terms for sending another group. The restrained business form does not soften the violence it records; it makes the machinery of procurement visible.

The Experiment and the Request for Replacements

The personnel officer states that a transport of 150 women arrived in good condition, but that Bayer could not obtain conclusive results because all of them died during the experiments. The letter then asks Doll to send another group of the same number and at the same price. It supplies no further account of the women, the experiment’s course, or the circumstances of their deaths. Their collective fate is compressed into a failed result followed immediately by a request to repeat the process.

When Angelus Thomsen asks how much the women cost, Burckl answers that each was priced at 170 Reichsmarks. Doll had wanted 200, but Bayer negotiated the figure down to 170. That detail sharpens the transaction’s commercial logic: the women are treated as a priced supply, and even the stated terms include bargaining between the camp commandant and the company. The evidence does not say whether Bayer’s request for another 150 women was fulfilled.

Burckl’s Critique and the Pattern of Repetition

Burckl identifies the letter as evidence of a faulty attitude. He does not treat the deaths merely as an unfortunate experimental outcome: he asks whether all the women died at once after receiving the same dose, or whether they died in batches, one by one. The questions focus on the possibility that Bayer repeated its mistakes, making the demand for another group especially damning. The experiment involved a new anaesthetic, which Burckl says had been overdosed.

The scene sets two kinds of accounting against one another. Bayer’s letter records the number transported, the deaths, and the requested replacement group; Burckl’s questions insist on the sequence and conditions of those deaths as evidence that the failure could have been examined rather than repeated. The novel gives no account of any corrective action by Bayer. Its significance lies instead in the contrast between the company’s request to continue and Burckl’s recognition that repetition itself reveals the fault.