For Degussa, the beginning of the end of the Nazi era occurred on March 22 to 24, 1944, when successive waves of Allied bombers devastated Frankfurt and loosed “catastrophe … upon the main administration building as well as Works I and II.” Within 36 hours, some 18 million Reichsmarks worth of the firm's structures, equipment, and supplies collapsed into ash and rubble. Only the new laboratory building on the Wolf family's former property emerged relatively intact. Also completely or partially destroyed were the homes of Hermann Schlosser, Ernst Bernau, Adalbert Fischer, and Koloman Róka.

Though hardly the first aerial attack on either a Degussa installation or the city of Frankfurt, the onslaught of late March 1944 vastly exceeded anything the firm had experienced or anticipated. Knapsack's military importance and proximity to Britain attracted strikes as early as the summer of 1940, prompting Degussa to sink 130,000 RM into blast- and shrapnel-proofing that muted the effects of renewed assaults in October 1942 and March 1943. The Berlin offices and laboratories of the Auergesellschaft at Fr. Krause Ufer 24 were wrecked the following September, and their staffs then transferred to outlying sites, as were some of Degussa's own operations in the nation's capital. And the metropolis on the Main River suffered through no fewer than thirty-six raids in 1940–42, then was hit repeatedly in 1943–44, including by hundreds of aircraft at a time on October 4, November 26, December 20, January 29, February 4 and 8, and March 2 and 18.