1995-The Bayer aspirin company has finally apologized for the inhumane acts of its parent firm including using Jewish slave laborers during the Holocaust. "I have sorrow and regret and apologize for the inhumanity in my country for what I.G. Farben did to your people," Helge Wehmeier, the head of Bayer Corp., told Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel at a lecture last week. Bayer's parent company, Bayer AG, was part of the German chemical conglomerate I.G. Farben, which used Jewish slaves at its factories during the Holocaust including one at which Wiesel worked as a teenager. I.G. Farben also had a significant investment in a company that made Zyklon B gas, which was used to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews at Auschwitz the concentration camp in Poland where Wiesel's mother and sister died. Last Wednesday's lecture, at which Wehmeier introduced Nobel Prize-winning Wiesel, almost didn't happen. Wiesel found out months ago that Bayer was a sponsor of the Three Rivers Lecture Series in Pittsburgh, and he canceled his appearance. When the director of the series, Dennis Ciccone, told Wehmeier that Wiesel declined to attend because Bayer was a sponsor, Wehmeier visited Wiesel at his New York apartment. "I was very moved by the man," Wiesel told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "I explained to him the situation. And I said to him, 'Look, Bayer never apologized.

' I said it straight out. "And he said, 'What if I apologize?

' "Right then, I knew he would do it, and do it well," Wiesel said. During his lecture, Wiesel noted that Wehmeier who was born in 1943 was hardly responsible for the actions of his forefathers. "It's not your fault that I.G. Farben was guilty," he said in his lecture. And Wehmeier spoke of his "shock and shame" at learning of the actions of the Nazi regime. "I'd like a future relationship between Germans and Jews that will not solely be defined by Hitler," he said.