SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. 
Dyes and the Safety of the Newion” 
By Dr. HERBERT LEVINSTEIN. 
Dancer or Britis Drray. 
It is not generally known that after the battle of the Marne there 
Was a munitions crisis in Germany. The stock of shells, the huge 
accumulation of high explosives with which the German General Staff 
had calculated to overwhelm the French, had petered out before the 
gates of Paris. Certainly the Allies were in no better case, for they also 
were without stocks of shells or high explosives. As a consequence, 
both sides settled down into more or less permanent entrenchments. 
Some day the essayist of the period will speculate on what would 
have been the history of Europe during the coming 100 years had 
either of the belligerents in the great war possessed an adequate reserve 
of high explosive shells after the Marne. For this had been planned by 
the German General Staff to be a high explosive war, wherein the 
Germans would overwhelm their enemy by using more heavy guns, 
firing a greater weight of shells filled with vaster quantities of high 
explosives -than they (not knowing the British infantryman) calculated 
that modern civilized troops could stand. 
To the German General Staff the vital question, therefore, after 
the Marne, was how to re-organize the German production of shells 
and high explosives so as to re-establish their supremacy in these agents 
of destruction. 3 ; 
Tue LG, 
To this end, as we know from General Ludendorff’s Memoirs, the 
Chief of the German General Staff summoned two men to his assist- 
ance, Krupp von Bohlen and Dr. Duisberg. Everybody has heard of 
Krupps; Dr. Duisberg, one of the makers of modern Germany, is 
perhaps not so well known. He is the head of the I.G.—the great 
Interessen Gemeinschaft—the great combine of the German aniline 
dye manufacturers, " 
With this meeting commenced that close connexion between the 
German General Staff and the German J.G. which was, indeed, the 
_ agency by which Germany was, in spite of our blockade, able to keep 
the field from the battle of the Marne until November, 1918. That: 
_ may appear a difficult point to believe, for, on the face of it, no occupa- 
tion could be more harmless than the furnishing of dyes. It is casy 
to demonstrate its accuracy. 
Most of the German dyestuffs plants were not mobilized at the 
outbreak of war. Why not? Because the German General Staff did 
not go to war until the stock of explosives secretly accumulated over a 
long period appeared to be adequate to bring about the swift defeat of 
the Allies. Tt was, at first, considered preferable for the dye factories 
of the I.G. to continue producing stocks of dyes with a view to re-estab- 
lishing, at the conclusion of the campaign, that dominance over the 
textile trades of the world which the German Government considered 
to be the main function of the I.G. 
* From The Times, London. 
610 
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