Page Outsourcing says it helped hire more than 300 finance, IT and procurement professionals for Evonik’s Malaysian shared services centre. Lovely. Clean desks, clean dashboards, clean little back-office success story for a German specialty chemicals giant. Then TCAP checks the family tree and finds Degussa, Degesch, Zyklon B, forced labour, Holocaust-victim gold, price-fixing penalties, environmental fines and dead workers in the smoke. Page saw a chemical giant. TCAP saw the paperwork wing of a corporate bloodline with graves in the fucking roots.
The Page Connection
Page Outsourcing has a case study about Evonik. Not vague. Not inferred. Page says Evonik, a German specialty chemicals giant, engaged it to help staff and manage a shared services centre in Malaysia.
Page says the relationship began in 2017. It says the work grew into an ongoing partnership. It says more than 300 professionals were hired across finance, IT and procurement. It says 152 finance professionals were hired, 110 IT positions were filled, and 37 lives were changed in procurement. It says time-to-hire fell, Evonik saved money, and the two companies signed a new three-year contract.
There it is again. Lives changed. Page bloody loves that phrase. It rings it like a little church bell whenever the invoice needs a soul.
But this is not a cupcake shop needing an accounts assistant. This is Evonik. Specialty chemicals. Industrial history. Corporate ancestry with enough buried material to make the family tree look like it was planted in a crime scene.
Page saw shared services.
TCAP saw a shovel.
Clean Desks, Dirty Roots
The Evonik case study is a lovely bit of office varnish. Finance. IT. Procurement. Shared services. Malaysia. Hiring costs reduced. Roles filled quickly. Specialists sourced. Workflows improved. Local expertise. Recruitment Process Outsourcing with a little corporate bow on top.
That is the clean end of industry. No smoke stacks in the photo. No dead workers in the headline. No forced labour in the margin. No gas pellets. No gold teeth. Just the polite office bloodstream that lets a chemical giant keep moving money, systems, invoices, vendors and internal machinery around the world.
That is why it matters. Industrial giants are not only factories. They are accounts payable, procurement approvals, IT systems, compliance files, supplier records and hiring campaigns. They are shared service centres humming away under fluorescent lights while the old corporate bones stay politely under the floorboards.
Page helped staff that end. The clean desk end. The “please do not look at the roots” end.
The Degussa Problem
Evonik did not fall from the sky wearing a sustainability badge. Its corporate history runs through Degussa, and Degussa is not some harmless old name on a dusty filing cabinet. Degussa’s history includes Degesch, Zyklon B, forced labour and Holocaust-victim gold.
Evonik’s own history material deals with the National Socialist era. It says Degesch, linked to Degussa’s corporate history, was involved with Zyklon B. It says predecessor companies used forced labourers. It says Degussa was Germany’s largest precious metal smelter at the time and that gold dental fixtures gathered in ghettos and concentration camps were delivered directly to Degussa smelteries between 1940 and 1945.
Read that slowly. Gold dental fixtures. Ghettos. Concentration camps. Smelteries. Corporate history written in the language of plunder and ash.
So no, TCAP is not saying modern Evonik is currently bottling Zyklon B behind reception while Page fills procurement roles. That would be lazy, stupid and beneath the scalpel. The point is uglier.
Page helped staff the modern, polished office wing of a chemical giant whose corporate ancestry contains some of the darkest industrial filth on Earth.
Zyklon In The Bark
Zyklon B sits in the family tree like a black knot in the wood. Evonik’s history pages say Zyklon B, the poison gas used in death chambers from September 1941, had earlier been developed for delousing soldiers’ quarters. They also describe the industrial process that allowed the gas to be retained in cotton-wool-like pellets.
That is the kind of sentence corporate history writes when it has to describe hell without screaming. Cotton-wool-like pellets. The phrase is almost unbearable.
Soft language around industrialised murder. Chemistry turned into administration. Death made portable, packed, processed and routed through companies, contracts and men who later discovered all sorts of convenient gaps in their knowledge.
That is the chemical family tree Page wandered into with its little recruitment basket. Finance. IT. Procurement. The modern parts. The tidy parts. The parts that make the old horror look safely archived until someone opens the drawer.
The Holocaust Memorial Stain
Degussa’s history did not stay buried. In 2003, construction of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial was paused after it emerged that Degussa was involved through materials connected to the project, including anti-graffiti coating, because of the company’s historical link to Zyklon B production through Degesch.
That was not some online pile-on from people who had not read the footnotes. That was the past kicking the door open in the middle of a memorial to murdered Jews. A company linked through its history to the machinery of genocide appearing in the physical treatment of a Holocaust memorial.
You could not design a nastier metaphor if you were drunk, cruel and writing with a bone.
Eventually, trustees allowed the work to continue. Fine. Filed. Nuanced. Historically argued. All the cautious words can sit in the room. But the stain was real enough to stop the build, and now Page wants us to admire 300+ shared-services hires for Evonik like the family tree is just some decorative houseplant.
Forced Labour, Looted Gold And The Corporate Autopsy
The family tree gets worse the deeper you cut. Evonik’s own timeline says Hüls used up to 6,000 forced labourers, Degussa 10,000, Röhm 1,000 and Goldschmidt at least 500. These are not ghosts invented by TCAP. These are predecessor-company numbers sitting in Evonik’s own historical material.
Then there is Degussa and gold. Evonik’s history says gold dental fixtures gathered in ghettos and concentration camps were delivered directly to Degussa smelteries between 1940 and 1945, meaning Degussa participated in plundering Jews across Europe.
That is not “legacy”. That is not “complex history”. That is not a regrettable footnote for a values page.
That is teeth torn from murdered people entering the industrial bloodstream.
And Page’s case study sits at the other end of that bloodstream, talking about finance roles and procurement lives changed like history is something you can wipe off with a branded mouse mat.
The Modern Compliance Perfume
Evonik has acknowledged this history. It has commissioned research. It has published historical material. It has participated in compensation structures. Good. That matters.
But acknowledgement is not bleach. A company does not get to turn the lights down, hire a historian, file the ghosts under “corporate responsibility” and then expect everyone to clap because the modern brochure smells like lavender.
TCAP is not saying Evonik ignored the past. TCAP is saying the past is still part of the corporate body. It is in the family tree. In the names. In the predecessor lines. In the industrial memory. In the uncomfortable little silence between “specialty chemicals” and “Degesch”.
Page’s role is not to answer for Degussa’s crimes. Page’s role is to explain why its trophy cabinet keeps filling with clients and partners whose histories, industries and public records look like they were dredged from a moral septic tank.
Imperial. BAT. HSBC. Evonik.
Different pipes. Same smell.
The Price-Fixing Department
And Evonik’s modern record is not exactly a baptism robe either. Violation Tracker lists penalties connected to companies currently owned by Evonik since 2000, including competition-related offences, environmental violations and safety-related penalties. The competition-related total alone sits in the tens of millions.
That does not mean every old chemical-industry offence is the same as Zyklon B. Obviously. But it does mean the modern corporate picture is not just “acknowledged history and moved on”.
It is price-fixing stink, regulatory files, environmental penalties and the usual industrial habit of acting surprised when the paper trail starts coughing.
Page helped hire finance, IT and procurement professionals. Lovely. Those are exactly the departments that make modern industrial giants work: the spreadsheets, the systems, the suppliers, the contracts, the controls and the nice clean office intestines that keep the beast fed.
Environmental Fines And Factory Smoke
Violation Tracker also lists environmental penalties linked to Evonik-owned companies, including air pollution, water pollution and other environmental violations. Again, TCAP is not pretending every fine is a corporate apocalypse. Industrial companies get fined. Regulators regulate. Lawyers argue. Settlements happen. That is the wallpaper of the sector.
But wallpaper matters when there is mould behind it.
A chemical giant with predecessor blood on the family tree, modern regulatory penalties in the file and a recruitment case study dressed up as shared-services triumph does not get the soft-focus treatment from TCAP.
Page can say hiring. TCAP says infrastructure. Page can say 300+ professionals. TCAP says office bloodstream. Page can say procurement. TCAP says somebody has to keep buying the parts.
Dead Workers In The Smoke
Then there are the workers. In 2012, an explosion and fire at an Evonik plant in Marl, Germany killed two workers. Chemical & Engineering News reported that the fire lasted 16 hours.
Two workers. Sixteen hours. That is not a line item. That is families getting a phone call and a plant getting a crisis file.
Evonik has also had other safety incidents reported over the years. Industrial chemistry is dangerous. Nobody with a functioning brain pretends otherwise. But when Page presents the Evonik relationship as a neat recruitment success story, TCAP is allowed to put the human cost back into the frame.
Because companies love shared services when the office lights are on. They are less keen on the bit where someone gets killed in the smoke.
Page’s Favourite Trick
This is Page’s favourite trick. Take the customer, scrub the edges, count the hires and call them lives changed.
Evonik becomes 300+ professionals. Finance. IT. Procurement. Malaysia. Savings. Reduced time-to-hire. New contract. Success.
Nothing about Degussa in the headline. Nothing about Degesch in the standfirst. Nothing about Zyklon B in the case-study glow. Nothing about forced labour or Holocaust-victim gold or dead workers or price-fixing penalties or environmental files.
Of course not. That would ruin the little recruitment picnic.
But TCAP does not work for Page’s marketing team.
TCAP checks the family tree for rot before sitting under it.
Shared Services, Shared Amnesia
Shared services is such a bloodless phrase. It sounds like a printer room made a baby with a spreadsheet.
But shared services are where the modern corporation hides its nervous system: finance, IT, procurement, accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger, fixed assets, cost accounting, internal systems and supplier relationships. Not the glamorous end. The necessary end.
The end that keeps the lights on while the old ghosts stay locked downstairs.
So when Page boasts about hiring more than 300 people for Evonik’s shared services centre, it is not a small thing. It is Page helping staff the office machinery of a global chemical group with a historical file that could curdle milk.
Page saw roles.
TCAP saw the paper wing of a chemical dynasty with bones under the archive floor.
The Question For Page
Why Evonik? Why this chemical giant? Why this family tree?
Did anyone at Page read Evonik’s own history pages before turning the Malaysian shared services centre into a recruitment trophy? Did anyone ask about Degussa, Degesch, Zyklon B, forced labour, gold dental fixtures from ghettos and concentration camps, the Berlin Holocaust Memorial controversy, the antitrust penalties, the environmental files or the dead workers?
Or did Page just see a clean SSC brief, a hiring target, a new contract and another chance to write “lives changed” while the past sat in the corner holding its teeth?
Because this is becoming a pattern. Page stands near the money. TCAP stands near the stain.
The Chemical Family Tree From Hell
This is the Page Partners map now. Imperial was the cancer factory. BAT was the second black lung. HSBC was the cartel-laundry bank. Evonik is the chemical family tree from hell.
Not because modern Evonik is the same legal creature as every historical predecessor crime in some cartoonish way. Spare me the lawyerly fainting. TCAP knows the distinction.
That distinction is exactly the point.
Modern corporations love the benefits of lineage when it gives them scale, heritage, expertise, market position, technical credibility and a century-deep industrial mythology. Then, when the roots hit bone, suddenly everyone wants footnotes, nuance, separation and a quiet room where the brand team can breathe into a paper bag.
No.
You do not get heritage without inheritance.
You do not get the chemical crown and then pretend the family graveyard belongs to somebody else.
The Closing Formula
Page Outsourcing can keep the Evonik case study. More than 300 hires. Finance. IT. Procurement. Shared services. Malaysia. Savings. Reduced time-to-hire. New three-year contract.
Lovely.
But TCAP is not reading it like a procurement manager. TCAP is reading it like someone who knows what happens when companies polish the office wing and hope nobody asks what the factory used to make, who the predecessors used, what they smelted, who died, who paid fines, and whose history is still sitting under the floorboards.
Page saw a chemical giant. TCAP saw Degussa in the roots, Degesch in the bark, Zyklon B in the archive, forced labour in the soil, victim gold in the furnace, penalties in the file and two dead workers in the smoke.
That is not just a client story.
That is a corporate autopsy with a recruitment invoice stapled to it.
Unredacted.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Page Outsourcing – Over 300 professionals hired for chemical giant Evonik’s Malaysian SSC
- Page Resourcing – Recruitment Process Outsourcing
- Evonik History – Degussa in the National Socialist Era
- Evonik History – Corporate development, Third Reich and outbreak of war
- Evonik History – War, destruction, the start of rebuilding
- The Art Newspaper – Work resumes on Berlin Holocaust Memorial after halt in construction
- Violation Tracker – Evonik Industries
- ChemSec – Controversies: Evonik Industries
- Chemical & Engineering News – Deadly Blast Rocks Evonik Plant