West Germany: The Wages Of Death

The case stirred chilling memories: a German businessman helps a mad dictator build a poison-gas factory. But the time was the 1980s, the accused Jurgen Hippenstiel-Imhausen, head of a prominent chemical firm, and the dictator Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. “You knowingly delivered to Libya an installation suitable for the production of poison-gas weapons,” said an angry Judge Jurgen Henninger at the end of the eleven-day trial in Mannheim.

The executive admitted that he realized soon after accepting the $150 million contract in 1984, purportedly for pharmaceuticals and insecticides, that it was for making nerve gas. Still, he set up a dummy Hong Kong company and cleared $12 million in profits.

Because of glaring weaknesses in West German law, the only charges that could be brought were export-law violations and income tax evasion.