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PARTIAL TRANSLATION OF
DOCUMENT NI-10455
PROSECUTION EXHIBIT
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| FILE NOTE OF DEFENDANT TER MEER, 21 MARCH 1938, CONCERNING A
DISCUSSION WITH MILITARY AND GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVES ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF
BUNA AND FURTHER DEALINGS WITH AMERICAN COMPANIES* |
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| Present: |
Brigadier General Loeb
Ministerialdirigent Dr. Mulert
Dr.
Eckell
Dr. ter Meer |
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Subject: Action taken in the U.S. concerning buna
Dr.
Eckell, who had been informed about the request of the Goodyear Co. for
granting an exclusive license for our buna patents in the U.S.A. as well as
about the Goodyear Co.’s report on investigations concerning buna and
about that firm's own polymerization experiments, had already reported on the
status of these matters to Brigadier General Loeb. I, in turn, described at
considerable length the factual situation in the U.S.A.
The problem of
making the American rubber goods industry independent of the regular supplies
as they were being received from English and Dutch colonial plantations, has
been in existence already since the first postwar years. Henry Ford's Hevea
plantation attempts in the State of Para (Brazil) are known; so are the
Firestone Co.'s plantations in Liberia, and the acquisition of important
caoutchouc plantations in the Dutch East-Indies by the U.S. Rubber Co.,
Goodyear, and the Manhattan Rubber Co. Germany's going in for large-scale
manufacture of buna-S, the realization abroad, especially in the U.S.A., that
buna-S is a suitable tire rubber and, finally, the possibility — as it
presented itself to the U.S.A. — to produce buna-S at prices approximately
equal to the average price of natural rubber, created an extraordinarily great
interest in America for the whole problem. Conferences which up to now had the
sole object of easing the minds of American interested parties and possibly to
prevent an initiative on their own part within the frame of butadiene rubber,
were held with Standard, Goodrich, and Goodyear. We are under the impression
that one cannot stem things in the U.S.A. for much longer without taking the
risk of being faced all of a sudden by an unpleasant situation and endangering
the full benefits from our work and our rights. |
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* This file note was
attached as enclosure 1 to a letter Defendant ter Meer sent to Defendant Krauch
on 15 January 1942, In the transmittal letter Defendant ter Meer stated that
"The report which I dictated on the basis of this discussion is attached as
enclosure No. 1."
1281 |
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