Monsanto / Bayer: A Century of Harm

In 1925, Bayer merged with five other German chemical companies to form IG Farben — the largest chemical and pharmaceutical corporation in the world. During World War II, IG Farben became an instrument of genocide.

Beginning in 1941, IG Farben built a synthetic rubber factory at Auschwitz using 30,000 concentration camp prisoners as slave labor. Workers who could no longer produce were sent to the gas chambers. IG Farben built its own concentration camp — Buna-Monowitz, also called Auschwitz III — in direct collaboration with the Nazi regime. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum documents the full record.

IG Farben's subsidiary Degesch — 42.5% owned by IG Farben — held the trademark on Zyklon B, the poison gas deployed in the Nazi extermination camps. Zyklon B killed over one million people. The company also paid SS physicians to test its drugs on unwilling prisoners at Dachau, Auschwitz, and Gusen.

At the IG Farben Trial (1947–1948), one of the subsequent Nuremberg proceedings, 23 IG Farben directors were tried for war crimes. 13 were convicted. All were released early by 1951.

Fritz ter Meer helped plan the Buna-Werke factory at Auschwitz III, where 25,000 forced laborers were deployed. He was convicted at Nuremberg. Sentenced to 7 years. Released in 1950. In 1956 — six years after his release — Bayer AG elected Fritz ter Meer chairman of its supervisory board. He held that position until 1964.

This is not buried history. It is the institutional lineage of the company that acquired Monsanto for $63 billion in 2018.

From 1935 to 1977, Monsanto was the sole US manufacturer of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) — industrial chemicals later classified as probable human carcinogens and persistent environmental toxins. For decades, Monsanto operated a PCB plant in Anniston, Alabama, dumping tens of thousands of pounds of PCBs into Snow Creek and burying them in and around the community without warning residents.

In 1966, Monsanto managers discovered that fish submerged in Snow Creek turned belly-up within 10 seconds, spurting blood and shedding skin as if dunked into boiling water. They told no one.

By 1969, the Anniston plant was discharging approximately 250 pounds of PCBs into Snow Creek per day, according to an internal memo marked "CONFIDENTIAL-F.Y.I. AND DESTROY." Thousands of pages of Monsanto internal documents — many marked "CONFIDENTIAL: Read and Destroy" — documented what the company knew and concealed. These documents were made public by the Environmental Working Group in 2002.

An internal report framed the company's response choices as: "say and do nothing; create a smokescreen; immediately discontinue the manufacture of Aroclors; respond responsibly, admitting growing evidence of environmental contamination." For decades, Monsanto chose the first option.

In 2002, a jury found Monsanto liable on all counts — including negligence, wantonness, nuisance, suppression of the truth, trespass, and outrage. In 2003, Monsanto and Solutia agreed to pay $700 million to settle lawsuits covering approximately 21,000 Anniston residents. The Anniston PCB site remains an EPA Superfund site.

Monsanto introduced glyphosate — marketed as Roundup — in 1974. It became the world's most widely used herbicide, applied primarily to crops genetically engineered by Monsanto to tolerate it. By the time the science caught up, Monsanto had been suppressing it for years.

In March 2015, the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic to humans" (Group 2A) — based on evidence linking glyphosate to non-Hodgkin lymphoma in occupationally exposed workers and "sufficient" evidence of cancer in animal studies.

Documents released during litigation — known as the "Monsanto Papers" — showed that company scientists ghostwrote research attributed to independent academics and systematically worked to undermine independent scientific findings on glyphosate toxicity.

Dewayne "Lee" Johnson, a school groundskeeper who applied Roundup for years, developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma. In August 2018, a jury awarded him $289 million. The amount was subsequently reduced to $78 million, then $21 million on appeal. Johnson was the first case to go to trial. Thousands more followed.

Bayer — which had just completed its $63 billion acquisition of Monsanto in June 2018 — eventually paid approximately $11 billion to settle around 100,000 claims. In 2026, a proposed U.S. nationwide class settlement of $7.25 billion received preliminary court approval in Missouri to cover current and future Non-Hodgkin lymphoma claims.

Roundup remains on sale. Bayer has not admitted the product causes cancer.

Monsanto's business model evolved from manufacturing industrial chemicals to controlling the inputs of global agriculture. The company's herbicide-resistant genetic traits have been planted in approximately 90% of all US soybean crops. Monsanto controlled an estimated 60% of the US seed market for corn and soybeans and provides approximately 90% of GM seed sown globally.

Every farmer who purchases Monsanto seed signs a technology agreement prohibiting them from saving seeds from their harvest to replant. Seed-saving is a practice as old as agriculture. Monsanto criminalized it for anyone using its varieties. The company employed teams of investigators to monitor compliance and sued 145 individual US farmers for patent infringement or breach of contract.

The most famous case involved Percy Schmeiser, a Saskatchewan canola farmer who found Roundup Ready canola growing in his field — carried there by wind and pollen drift from neighboring farms. Monsanto sued. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled 5–4 that growing the plants constituted "use" of Monsanto's patent. However, the Court unanimously held that Schmeiser owed $0 in fees or damages because he had gained no financial benefit from the trait. He had to pay his own legal costs.

The effect of Monsanto's legal strategy was structural: it made the cost of defending against the company — regardless of guilt — prohibitive enough to ensure compliance. Most farmers settled rather than litigate. The seed supply became a subscription.

In June 2018, Bayer completed its acquisition of Monsanto for $63 billion — the largest all-cash acquisition in corporate history at that time. The deal unified a century of corporate harm under a single corporate structure.

Under one roof, after the merger, you have:

• Bayer's institutional lineage: reconstituted from IG Farben, the corporation that operated Auschwitz III, held the Zyklon B trademark, and used 30,000 concentration camp prisoners as slave labor — and then elected its convicted Nuremberg director to chair the supervisory board in 1956.
• Monsanto's 40-year PCB cover-up: "Read and Destroy" memos, fish dying in 10 seconds, $700 million paid to 21,000 Anniston residents, an EPA Superfund site that remains contaminated.
• The Roundup cancer suppression campaign: ghostwritten science, $11 billion in settlements, 100,000+ cancer plaintiffs, the product still on sale.
• The global seed monopoly: 90% of US soybean acreage, 145 farmers sued, the practice of seed-saving made a contract violation.

Bayer's share price fell roughly 40% after the acquisition as the scale of glyphosate liability became clear. The company has paid out more in settlements than any agricultural corporation in history. Its executives have faced no criminal charges.

None of this happened by accident. Each act was a decision — to conceal, to suppress, to control, to deny. The legal system absorbed each one as a cost of doing business. The corporation continued. The merger made it larger.