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[ The above is a copyrighted picture reproduced here by permission: © 2006 Jochen Wilke. ]
Argent, a bear Sable armed and langued Gules over a a terrace Vert*.
Crest : A mullet of six points Or, between two wings Sable*.
(*) The above rendition of the canting arms of Friedrich Bayer (German: Bär = bear) is based on the information given in Neues Bergisches Wappenbuch Bürgerlicher Familien by Eike Pies, who mentions that the base Vert might not be correct and that the wings in the crest could be Argent.
Friedrich Bayer (1825-1880) was born on June 6, 1825 in Barmen-Wichlinghausen (now a part of Wuppertal, North Rhine-Westphalia). In 1891, the company Friedrich Bayer had founded in 1863 (Friedrich Bayer & Co.) bought the pharmaceutical company of the late Dr. Carl Leverkus from his sons. This consortium eventually grew to be the giant known today as Bayer AG in Germany and simply Bayer elsewhere...
The Bayer company during the Holocaust :
Bayer was part of the pro-Nazi conglomerate IG-Farben (which managed a slave-labor force of 25000 at their Buna Werke facility next to the Auschwitz camps). Bayer was also directly implicated in crimes against humanity, including inoculation of deadly diseases in unwilling prisoners for the purpose of pharmaceutical testing. They did little to come to terms with that dark Nazi past after WWII. From 1956 to 1964, Bayer's board of directors was either chaired or supervised by the convicted war criminal Fritz ter Meer (1884-1967) who had helped plan the Monowitz camp (Auschwitz III) for forced ;abor at the infamous Buna Werke factory.
