BASF is probably the most popular brand of audio-cassette sold in the Caribbean. BASF stands for Badische Anilin und Soda Fabriken AG, the name of a German manufacturing company. The founder of the company was Fritz Haber, a brilliant Nobel prize-winning chemist, rector of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin.
BASF, the company he founded, made chemical weapons for the German government in both World Wars. More significantly, Haber developed and then his company manufactured vast quantities of Zyklon B poison gas used to kill millions of Jews in the extermination camps of Europe. When Haber demanded that his beautiful young wife Clara, also a brilliant chemist, assist him in producing a new chemical weapon that would enable Nazi Germany to wipe out all enemy armies and conquer the world, she refused and shot herself with his pistol.
Then the Gestapo secret police discovered that Fritz Haber himself was a Jew. Fritz died of shock, but all the surviving members of the Haber family and relatives were gassed to death at Birkenau with Zyklon B from their own factory.
Recently, the senior editor was required to arrange a visit from a firm of pest exterminators. One firm promised its technique would be 100 percent successful because Zyklon gas from BASF was used, which exterminated every living thing down to the level of bacteria. The firm did not get the contract.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One