The Holocaust was operationally dependent on private German industry. Around half a million slave labourers worked in German factories at any moment by 1944, and most of the major German industrial firms of the period had at least one slave-labour operation. The exploitation of slave labour was the more visible side of the story. The wider corporate involvement extended further: into the construction of the camps and the gas chambers, into the chemical industry that supplied Zyklon B, into the financial services that processed the confiscated Jewish wealth, into the railways that operated the deportation trains, and into the insurance industry that handled the claims on stolen property. Almost every major German corporation of the period has, somewhere in its records, a Holocaust connection.
The pages in this section name the corporations and set out what each did. Some are well-known names that have made formal apologies and paid reparations; others have made similar acknowledgements only recently or in some cases never. The pages are not exhaustive. Almost every name in German industry of the 1930s and 1940s has some record of involvement; the pages here cover the largest and most-documented cases.
What is here
The chemical and pharmaceutical sector is dominated by IG Farben, the largest German chemical company of the period, which built the Buna-Werke synthetic rubber plant at Auschwitz Monowitz using slave labour from Auschwitz III, and whose subsidiary Degesch produced Zyklon B for use in the gas chambers. IG Farben was broken up after the war by the Allied authorities; its successor companies, including Bayer, BASF and Hoechst, are still in operation today and have made formal acknowledgements of the wartime record.
The automotive sector is covered through BMW, Daimler-Benz and Volkswagen. Each operated forced-labour factories during the war. Volkswagen in particular, set up by Hitler’s government in 1937 with state funding and slave-labour-built infrastructure at Wolfsburg, has perhaps the most direct organisational continuity from its wartime to its post-war existence.
The electrical and industrial-machinery sector is covered through Siemens and Thyssen. The financial sector is covered through Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank and through Allianz and the Insurance Companies. The German railway is covered through Deutsche Reichsbahn: The German Railways, which operated the deportation trains as a normal commercial freight service.
Several pages cover the underground production facilities built by slave labour in the closing years of the war. The Mountain Factories and Underground Production covers the wider programme. The Bergkristall Facility, an underground Messerschmitt jet fighter factory in Austria, was built by slave labour at the cost of around 16,000 prisoner deaths. The REIMAHG Factory, near Kahla in Thuringia, was a similar underground facility for jet fighter production.
Sabotage by Forced Labourers covers the systematic sabotage that slave-labour workers conducted on the production lines, particularly in the V-weapon programme at Mittelbau-Dora, where prisoners deliberately produced defective rocket components at a rate that significantly affected the operational reliability of the V-2 missile.
The wider pattern
The corporate participation in the Holocaust falls into several categories. Direct exploitation of slave labour: a German company contracted with the SS for prisoners from a particular camp and used them in its factories, paying the SS a daily fee per prisoner that was a fraction of the cost of free labour. Aryanisation: a German company purchased Jewish-owned competitors at confiscatory prices, often with the active cooperation of the German civil service. Strategic supply: a German company manufactured something specifically for the killing programme, of which Zyklon B is the central case but the supply of construction materials for the camps, of medical equipment for the experiments, and of bureaucratic services for the deportations are also part of the record.
The post-war fate of these companies has been mixed. Some, particularly IG Farben, were broken up by the Allies. Others, particularly Krupp, were placed under restrictions but resumed operation. Most of the named companies in this section continued to exist and to prosper. The reparations payments to surviving slave labourers came late, in most cases after the 1990s, often only after substantial litigation in American courts under the Alien Tort Statute. The German Foundation Initiative, the German Stiftung established in 2000, paid around 4.4 billion euros in compensation to surviving slave labourers across the world.
Why these pages matter
The Holocaust is sometimes presented as the work of a small group of fanatical Nazis. The corporate record makes that presentation untenable. The Holocaust was sustained by, and made profitable for, much of the senior management of German industry. The men who chaired the boards of the major German companies of the 1940s, who signed the contracts with the SS for slave labour, who approved the construction projects that depended on prisoner death, were not Nazi fanatics. They were respectable industrialists who saw a business opportunity and took it. Most of them returned to similar respectable positions after the war. Their successor companies are still doing business today.
Sources
- Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: I.G. Farben in the Nazi Era, Cambridge University Press, 1987 (revised 2001)
- Peter Hayes, From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, 2004
- Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation, Crown, 2001
- Benjamin B. Ferencz, Less Than Slaves: Jewish Forced Labor and the Quest for Compensation, Harvard University Press, 1979 (the foundational study by the Nuremberg prosecutor)
- Wolf Gruner, Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938-1944, Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Hans Mommsen and Manfred Grieger, Das Volkswagenwerk und seine Arbeiter im Dritten Reich, ECON, 1996
- Gerald D. Feldman, Allianz and the German Insurance Business 1933-1945, Cambridge University Press, 2001
- Harold James, The Deutsche Bank and the Nazi Economic War Against the Jews, Cambridge University Press, 2001
- Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, Free Press, 1978
- S. Jonathan Wiesen, West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past 1945-1955, University of North Carolina Press, 2001
- Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, vols VI to IX (industrialist evidence), Nuremberg, 1947-1949
- United States v. Carl Krauch et al. (the IG Farben Case), Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, vols VII and VIII, US Government Printing Office, 1952-1953
- Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” (Stiftung EVZ), final report on the slave-labour compensation programme, 2007, https://www.stiftung-evz.de
- USHMM, “Forced Labor: An Overview”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org
- Yad Vashem, “The Economic Exploitation of the Jews”, https://www.yadvashem.org