Category: Industrial Cartels

• The Standard Oil I.G. Farben Pact

  This theory claimed that Standard Oil and I.G. Farben, despite belonging to countries that later became wartime enemies, entered into a deeper arrangement than ordinary industrial partnership. In its strongest form, the allegation held that Rockefeller-linked oil interests and the Nazi chemical-industrial complex secretly agreed to protect each other’s strategic assets, including through an understanding that their most important plants would not be targeted. The theory drew power from real prewar patent and cartel relationships, extensive commercial cooperation in chemicals and fuels, and the documented importance of I.G. Farben to Germany’s synthetic-fuel war economy. It became more conspiratorial when those real business ties were expanded into a wartime non-bombing covenant.

• The Standard Oil Water-into-Fuel

  This theory claimed that Germany had developed a near-limitless fuel technology—described in rumor as making gasoline from water, from air and water, or from ordinary feedstock so abundant that oil power would be threatened—and that Standard Oil or Rockefeller-linked interests acquired, buried, or destroyed the breakthrough. The story drew strength from a real and complicated history: Germany did build a major synthetic-fuel industry based on coal hydrogenation and Fischer-Tropsch chemistry, Standard Oil and I.G. Farben did have cartel and patent relationships before the war, and the United States did capture German fuel science and recruit German specialists after 1945. The specifically miraculous “water-into-fuel” form of the theory was the conspiratorial exaggeration applied to that real synthetic-fuels history.