A secret meeting was held on 20 February 1933 between Hitler and over two dozen powerful industrialists at Hermann Goering’s home. The purpose behind the meeting was to persuade the big business moguls to invest in the Nazi Party election campaigns for the coming March. The donations came in from several companies, raising over two million Reichsmark, four hundred thousand of those Reichsmark coming from IG Farben alone. IG Farben was reportedly represented at the meeting by board member Georg von Schnitzler. Schnitzler later became a captain in the Nazi Sturmabteilung (aka the Brownshirts). In order to place that donation into context with inflation, that four hundred thousand Reichsmark would be the equivalent to around thirty million dollars (nearly twenty-four million pounds) today. The efforts were for nought, because the Nazis failed to obtain the majority they were seeking in that election. Instead, they rendered any Communist members of the Reichstag unable to vote and threatened any non-Nazi members with violence, winning the vote for the Enabling Act through intimidation.
It was only through the assistance of IG Farben that many of the medical and scientific horrors of the concentration camps were able to proceed. In 1940, IG Farben were looking to build a new factory and they set their sights on Himmler’s largest concentration camp, built in Oswiecim, or Auschwitz, Poland. The site was scouted by Otto Ambros, who found it to be ideal. The plan was to utilise slave labour from the camp to construct their new plant. The result was the Farben Suschwitz plant. It was the financial involvement of IG Farben that took Auschwitz from an obscure backwater of the Nazi extermination plan and pushed it to the forefront, making it the site of one of the largest mass murders in history.
When touring the grim and sorrowful remains of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the museum guides will plainly tell you that IG Farben were behind the Nazis building the Birkenau camp. The camp began, not as an extermination camp like so many others, but as a slave labour camp for IG Farben Industries. Slave labour was an integral part of the Nazi regime, with many companies taking part in the dark practice. The Buna Industrial plant, known as IG Auschwitz, was located approximately 6km from the Auschwitz camp. Buna housed one hundred thousand Soviet prisoners of war and utilised them for slave labour.
The Polish farmers who had been living on the land where the Auchwitz complexes would be constructed were all kicked-off of the land, all of their property destroyed to make way for the death and labour camps in 1940 and 1941. The Nazis utilised some of the raw leftover materials after the farmers’ buildings were destroyed as part of the construction of the camps. It wasn’t until after the Wannsee Conference in 1942 that thousands of innocent Western European Jews were shipped to Birkenau to be slaughtered or enslaved. IG Farben built an industrial complex on the land near Auchwitz to produce their chemicals; thirty thousand slave labourers would die there. When the Adolf Hitler was gearing-up to invade Poland and Czechoslovakia, IG Farben was working closely with the Nazis to secure and seize desired chemical plants in those regions. The conditions within Auschwitz were deplorable. The clothing and living spaces would often become infected with lice or other vermin and when that happened, a deadly chemical fumigant known as Zyklon B was used to treat them and kill the infecting creatures. In fact, the Zyklon B chemical fumigant gas would end up being the method used to kill the Russians, Jews, Gypsies and other prisoners in the Nazi gas chambers. The Nazis were in search of a more economically efficient way to mass-murder their prisoners and it was Auschwitz deputy Karl Fritzsch who first thought up the idea of using the gas to kill humans in the camp. This gas was produced by Fritz Haber’s company, Degesch (Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Schadlingsbekampfung). Degesch utilised the evil product under licence from IG Farben who, in turn, owned 42.2 per cent of the shares in Degesch. Experiements that IG Farben were involved in included the forced testing of drugs on prisoners – including what would become the first round of chemotherapy treatments. Nazi SS Major Dr med. Helmuth Vetter was an employee of IG Farben. Vetter was the notorious chief doctor at Auschwitz and was himself often responsible, along with the other doctors there, for selecting which Jews would face the gas chambers. The Nazi SS Dr Hoven would testify the following at the Nuremberg trials:
It should be generally known, and especially in German scientific circles, that the SS did not have notable scientists at its disposal. It is clear that the experiments in the concentration camps with IG preparations only took place in the interests of the IG, which strived by all means to determine the effectiveness of these preparations. They let the SS deal with the – shall I say – dirty work in the concentration camps. It was not the IG’s intention to bring any of this out in the open, but rather to put up a smoke screen around the experiments so that (…) they could keep any profits to themselves. Not the SS but the IG took the initiative for the concentration camp experiments.
The Allies broke up the IG Farben conglomerate in 1945. Unlike so many of the companies that were involved with the Nazi regime during the Second World War, IG Farben didn’t come away unaffected. Their direct involvement with the atrocities of war earned twenty-four members of the company a spot in the famed Nuremberg trials.
Although there were twenty-four intended defendants, one was excused from the trials due to a serious illness. The twenty-three members of IG Farben who actually stood trial for their war crimes inluded Carl Krauch (Chairman of the Supervisory Board), Hermann Schmitz (Chairman of the Managing Board), Georg von Schnitzler (Military Economy Leader), Fritz Gajewski (Director of AGFA), Heinrich Horein (Head of chemical research), August von Knieriem (Chief Counsel and Head of the legal department), Fritz ter Meer (Head of Department II), Christian Schneider (Head of Department I), Otto Ambros (Buna plant production chief), Paul Hafliger (Head of the metals dept.), Ernst Burgin (Plant leader), Carl Lautenschlager (Plant leader), Max Ilgner (Head of intelligence and propaganda), Heinrich Butefisch (Production chief at Auschwitz), Friedrich Jahne (Chief engineer), Hans Kugler (Head of sales for dyestuffs), Heinrich Gattinau (Intelligence and plant police), Carl Wurster (Plant leader), Hans Kuhne (Plant leader), Wilhelm Rudolf Mann (Pharmaceuticals), Heinrich Oster (Manager of the Nitrogen Syndicate), Walter Durrfeld (Head of construction at Auschwitz and Monowitz) and Erich von der Heyde (Deputy of intelligence and plant police). A good number of the men on trial were also members of the Nazi SS and SA at various levels.
The trial began on 27 August 1947 and ran for nearly a year, until 11 June 1948. The IG Farben Trial was the third longest trial held at Nuremberg, behind the IMT trial and the Ministries Case. The judges who served as part of the Military Tribunal VI and oversaw the trial included Clarence F. Merril, Paul M. Herbert, James Morris and Curtis Grover Shake.
On the first day of the trial the prosecuting attorney’s opening statement addressed the kind of charges that were being levied against the twenty-four men. The following is quoted directly from the transcript of that opening statement: