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Armed Forces, or else are only guarded and kept in good repair in
peacetime as so-called "shadow factories" without current production, so that
production can be started immediately in case of emergency. Such production
plants have been erected by IG upon the order of the High Command of the Armed
Forces or its dummy enterprises, such as the Economic Research Corporation
(WIFO), as well as by order of the Reich Air Ministry and the Army Ordnance
Office. Since sometimes these plants represent investments of many million
marks, a formal agreement has nearly always been made between the office of the
Armed Forces which gave the order, and IG, both for construction as well as for
maintenance or operation.
In case processes are employed in Wehrmacht
plants which were discovered through IG's experimental and manufacturing work,
in part at the expense of considerable means, in several cases the Armed Forces
granted a sort of additional royalty fee to IG apart from the normal
reimbursement of expenses, including a limited profit. If the plants have a
purely stand-by character, that is, will start production only in case of
emergency, and for the time being it is not possible to apply the royalty to
the manufactured products, the government authorities have granted such a
royalty only if what the IG had learned affected not only the production costs
but also the expenses for the establishment of the plant, so that the
government authorities thereby had saved a considerable amount of money through
the reduction in the cost of constructing the production plant. By way of
example, 2 nitric acid plants of the WIFO which have been put into operation
pay a regular royalty (corresponding to their present production figure of
about 100,000 RM per year), while in the case of 2 other similar shadow plants,
only a part of the savings effected in the costs of construction, RM 135,000
and RM 75,000, was separately repaid.
In case new discoveries and
practical knowledge are obtained through the operation of state-owned plants by
IG, which possibly may also lead to patent rights, it has been considered as
self-evident up to now, although never laid down in writing, that these patent
rights as well are exclusively vested in IG as plant manager of the state
plant. The government authorities have declared on repeated occasions that the
state-owned plants also ought to get the benefit of such new discoveries and
practical factory knowledge; that is, it is expected that IG will keep those
state-owned plants up to date and in good repair, which are operated by them or
under their sponsorship as stand-by plants, according to the latest state of
technical progress (in return for a suitable reimbursement of expenses).
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