Before the First World War, German chemical companies controlled 85% of the global textile dye market, followed by the enterprises in Basel, Switzerland, which had a market share of 10%. The outbreak of war in 1914 shifted this relative strength within a very short space of time. The conversion of German industrial production to war-related goods, the export embargoes, and the British naval blockade struck at the heart of the German dye industry at the Main and Rhine rivers. Their deliveries to the foreign textile industry stopped. Companies in England, Italy, France, and the USA now turned to the Basel dye producers, primarily ordering three colors: field gray, field green, and bluish gray for their soldiers’ uniforms. Sandoz AG profited the most from these market shifts. While sales of textile dyes reached six million Swiss francs in 1914, they rose to 37 million within four years. Melchior Böniger (Info box 1), one of the two company directors, expected that the German chemical companies would resume supplying the market at the end of the war and that the sales of Sandoz AG’s dyestuffs division would collapse accordingly [1].