Nazi continuities in East Germany. IV. Continuities in the identity construction of industrial chemists, 1940-1970

Prominent sections of the German chemical industry's elites were notoriously close to the Holocaust and mass murder of compulsory laborers. Yet the scientists maintained a broad continuity of their traditional bourgeois mental dispositions, even as they displayed deep loyalty to the Nazi regime. They managed to hold onto their leading positions in the late 1940s through the establishment of the East German state and preserved an elitist habit of bourgeois networking. This continuity led into an intergenerational continuity when a new intelligentsia took over in the 1960s. It adopted its predecessors' bourgeois mentality and developed an even stronger non-ideological type of managerial cooperation.