The Riddle of the Rhine: Chemical Strategy in Peace and War — Text and Context

The I.G. as a Military Arsenal

The excerpts show Lefebure's central argument: the German dye combine, the I.G., was a terribly effective arsenal for mass production of older war chemicals, explosives, and newer poison gases. He supports this with concrete evidence of rapid conversion. For example, a T.N.T. plant at Leverkusen, producing 250 tons per month, was converted from standard dye-producing plant in only six weeks. The I.G. factories supplied a considerable proportion of the high explosives used by Germany.

Lefebure emphasizes the intimate relationship between war and peace production in chemical warfare. Chemical warfare products are closely allied and in some cases almost identical with the finished organic chemicals and intermediates produced by the dye industry. This means that even when a new chemical suggestion comes from a research organisation apart from the dye laboratories, the products fall automatically into the class handled by the dye industry. The implication is that the I.G.'s peacetime infrastructure was inherently adaptable to military purposes.

Disarmament and the Treaty Stock Comparison

Lefebure uses a striking comparison to illustrate the scale of I.G. production relative to Treaty of Versailles limits. The Treaty allowed Germany to hold a stock of about half a million shell of different stated calibres. The explosive needed to fill these shell could be supplied by less than two days' explosives production of the I.G. at its average war rate. Between two and three million shell could be filled by a week's production.

For poison gas, the average rate within the I.G. was at least three thousand tons per month, sufficient to fill more than two million shell of Treaty calibres. Lefebure warns that unless drastic action has been taken, the bulk of this capacity will remain, and Germany will be able to produce enough poison gas in a week to fill the Treaty stock of shell. This is presented as a critical disarmament problem, especially in a country where the manufacture and use of such substances are specially prohibited.

The Geography and Structure of the Rhine Factories

The excerpts provide a detailed description of the I.G.'s composition. By the end of the nineteenth century, dye manufacture was concentrated almost exclusively in six great firms: Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik (Ludwigshafen), Bayer (Leverkusen), Aktien-Gesellschaft fur Anilin-Fabrikation (Berlin), Farbwerke Meister Lucius & Bruning (Hochst am Main), Leopold Cassella (Frankfort), and Kalle & Co. (Biebrich). Two other concerns, Chemische Fabrik Greisheim-Elektron and Chemische Fabriken vormals Weiler-ter Meer, also operated on a comparable scale.

Lefebure notes that all these establishments, with one single exception, were located along the Rhine. This geographic concentration is central to the book's title and argument. The Rhine factories are presented as a unified strategic asset, capable of coordinated production and conversion. The author's post-armistice experience surveying the great chemical munition factories of the Rhine gave him a central view of the whole matter, which he claims was the privilege and opportunity of very few.

Lefebure's account is grounded in his firsthand experience as a combatant gas unit member, liaison officer, and post-armistice advisor on chemical questions. The excerpts do not reveal the full scope of his policy recommendations, but they clearly establish his core thesis: the I.G. represented a continuing threat to disarmament due to its dual-use capacity. Readers should note that the book was published in 1923, before the full rearmament of Germany, and that Lefebure's arguments are based on wartime production data and Treaty compliance concerns.

I finished The Riddle of the Rhine feeling strangely hollow, how easily peace leans on chemistry’s quiet ledger. It made me think of Edith Wharton’s letters from the front, the human wreckage behind those same industrial calculations. Her Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort — Reading Notes sits beside my chair now, a softer, sadder echo of that same war’s machinery.