The boathouse of the company's own rowing club: next to the Rheinbadeanstalt in front of smoking Bayer chimneys (around 1910)
Photo: BAYER ARCHIVES LEVERKUSENIt was freezing cold, minus 21 degrees. But war production had to continue on January 27, 1917, the 58th birthday of Kaiser Wilhelm II. A line for trinitrotoluene - the explosive TNT - was frozen over in a filling plant for grenades. The arms factory belonged to the chemical company "Farbenfabriken vorm. Friedr. Bayer & Co", the forerunner of Bayer AG. It was not far from Bayer headquarters on the company premises in Leverkusen.
Supervisor Karl Werner tried to solve the problem at 11:30 a.m. He stuck a brass pen into the frozen pipe and hit it with a hammer. The explosion he set off tore his head off. Four minutes later there was an even bigger explosion. Windows and doors shattered within a radius of 30 kilometers and roofs were covered when 60,000 kilograms of TNT were blown up.
Carl Duisberg, who had been general director and thus head of Bayer for five years, was staying at the Berlin luxury hotel Adlon when hotel founder Lorenz Adlon excitedly asked him into an adjoining room. There Adlon informed him that he had just found out from Cologne that "all of Leverkusen had disappeared from the ground," wrote Duisberg in his memoirs: "The next few hours meant hell for me."
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