Degesch

Prosecution

During the IG Farben trial the director of Degesch, Gerhard Friedrich Peters, implicated himself. He received information by Kurt Gerstein about the murder of people using Zyklon and was informed that the German army needed the gas without the usual additives that were added to warn people by smell of its poisonous nature (the Zyklon B variant).

In 1949, Peters was charged with murder in the court of Frankfurt and convicted and sentenced to five years imprisonment. The conviction was in 1952, legally confirmed in an appeal and set to six years. Peters went to prison but was acquitted in a new appeal in 1953. The law had changed; he was no longer considered guilty in assisting in murder. The chairman of the board of directors from 1939 to 1945, Hermann Schlosser, was arrested in February 1948, and acquitted in April 1948; later he took another job as chairman of the board.

The owner of Tesch & Stabenow, Bruno Tesch, and its director Karl Weinbacher were convicted and sentenced to death by a British tribunal and executed in Hamelin Prison on 16 May 1946. An employee Joachim Drosihn was acquitted.

In 1979, Testa, which was newly founded after the war, merged with Heerdt-Lingler GmbH (HeLi) with the financial participation of Degesch.