As regarding Aryanization, the best that can be said of Degussa's roles in war production and the spoliation of occupied Europe is that they could have been worse, and the same applies to the firm's implication in the exploitation of foreign and forced labor. Moreover, as with the corporation's readiness to reap benefits from the Nazi state's extortion of companies and precious metals from Jews, complicity in its compulsory labor policies began, not in defeated enemy countries and under pressure of war, but within Germany and before the fighting commenced – in fact, in the summer of 1939 and on the outskirts of the nation's capital. The occasion was a series of labor problems at Degussa's run-down carbon black factory at Blankenburg, where the managers had proved unable to keep workers from decamping for jobs elsewhere and become embroiled in disputes with the local chapter of the German Labor Front (DAF). Frankfurt therefore sent its Nazi Plant Foreman, Adolf Hilpert, in late June to rectify the situation, and he and his Party comrades quickly agreed on several minor concessions concerning working conditions and decided to capitalize on new regulations by which the regime, after stripping most German Jews of their livelihoods, had begun assigning them to labor battalions. After pledging that “the Jews requested by the plant will be kept separate from the rest of the workforce … applied to the most unpleasant work, and supervised by a reliable Aryan work comrade,” Hilpert proudly reported that “the labor supply is guaranteed and the previous constant objections of the DAF will stop.”