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75 years of polyurethane: Beginning of the machine age (Part 3)
von Dr. Gupta Verlag
7th March 1945: allied forces capture the bridge at Remagen on the Rhine, just 66 km south of Leverkusen, and encircle the Ruhr with other locations of IG Farben; they take over Frankfurt am Main two weeks later, so that the Hoechst plant also falls into the hands of US soldiers. On 30 April the Red Army finally hoists its flag over the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin. Hitler is dead, the Second World War over. Germany has been liberated from Nazi barbarism.
But the country has been flattened. Towns and cities and many industrial plants have been destroyed. Is it the end of history, or the chance to start over and to do it better next time? Whatever went on in the minds of the defeated Germans at that time can hardly be imagined today. But even if it is no longer possible to look into their minds, German engineers, chemists and technicians succeeded amazingly quickly to pick themselves up again, to pitch themselves into work and to somehow continue.
Whether out of the thoughts, amid all the debris, to restore something like normality, or just to have something to do again: normal life gradually returned to people in the Leverkusen plant of IG Farben, even though it was already facing break-up. This is only the “zero hour”, they might have whispered to themselves, “we will continue”. At some time, Otto Bayer’s polyurethane team took the laboratory coats off the hooks again. And prepared to add the next chapter in the history of their new family of plastics.