Business & Finance: Strange Doings at Aniline

Five key executives of General Aniline & Film Corp. were fired without warning last week—not by the company, but by the U.S. Treasury. Despite the company’s recent attempts to Americanize* itself (TIME, Nov. 10), the Treasury has had 50 agents inside the place for a month, fingering their figurative triggers. Last week they could wait no longer.

The five executives were all German-born, U.S.-naturalized. Not only were they fired, but their funds were frozen, they were barred from company premises and forbidden to communicate with their ex-employes. The five: Rudolph Hutz, $80,000-a-year vice president & director;Vice Presidents Hans Aickelin and William vom Rath; F. W. von Meister, manager of the Ozalid division; Leopold Eckler, acting manager of Agfa Ansco. Four worked at one time for I. G. Farben (German Dye Trust); all personified, said Treasury men, Aniline’s German origins and ambiguous control.

They also made Aniline’s wheels go round. Already harried by Government prying, Aniline protested that now its actual operations would be hampered. Those operations include much vital war work: 90% of the khaki dye for U.S. uniforms, Agfa Ansco films for Army & Navy, Ozalid blueprint paper & apparatus for many a defense plant.

The Treasury did not care. It asserts that Aniline’s war output is pretty standardized and can be kept going by second-string men. Anyway, the Treasury would rather wreck the company than take further chances. Some things made Treasury’s hair curl: movies of secret tests of new, experimental U.S. tanks at Aberdeen, Md. were developed by three German aliens employed in the Agfa Ansco plant; Ozalid division employes, many of them German-born, thoroughly inspected defense plants before installing blueprint processes, frequently went back to service the equipment. If no accidents or sabotage had occurred, it was not from lack of opportunity. Nor were last week’s firings likely to be the last.

Besides the Treasury, Aniline has the Department of Justice on its flanks. Aniline’s five ex-officers are already under indictment for conspiracy under the Sherman Act; Justice is meanwhile continuing a study of who owns it. Part of Aniline’s troubles (and the Treasury’s nervous trigger finger) are due to a jurisdictional fight between the two departments for control of alien properties. That fight will go on until Franklin Roosevelt names an Alien Property Custodian and defines his thankless duties.

* Franklin Roosevelt’s good friend & neighbor, Judge John Mack, became president (at $90,000 a year); globe-trotting ex-Ambassador William C. Bullitt, Ralph Budd, Robert L. Stevens became board members.