On the morning of 14 February 1948 a former Auschwitz prisoner named Norbert Wollheim, who had been transferred to Sweden in 1945 weighing under six stone and had subsequently moved to the United States, took the stand in Courtroom 600 of the Nuremberg Justizpalast and gave evidence in the trial of the senior management of the IG Farben chemical conglomerate. Wollheim had been arrested in Berlin in February 1943, transported with his wife and three-year-old son to Auschwitz, separated on the ramp from his family who were gassed the same day, and assigned as slave labour to the IG Farben Buna works at Monowitz, a synthetic rubber and fuel plant the company had built directly adjacent to the Auschwitz complex. He had worked at the plant for twenty months. He had survived. The figure of survivors of Monowitz from the wider population of approximately 35,000 prisoners who passed through the camp during its operation was approximately one in seven; the camp’s purpose, on the IG Farben corporate planning documents introduced at the trial, had been the extraction of the maximum amount of work from the prisoners before their deaths from exhaustion or selection for the gas chambers. Wollheim’s testimony, given in calm German that the simultaneous interpretation system rendered into English for the bench, has since been quoted in textbooks of business ethics around the world. He told the court:
The IG Farben directors visited the plant several times during my twenty months there. They walked through the construction sites and the production halls. They spoke with the engineers. They saw what had become of us. They saw the bodies of the prisoners who had been killed at the work that day. They had to step over them on the platforms. There was no question of not knowing.
The Industrialists Trials, considered together, were the prosecutorial attempt to bring the senior leadership of German industry to account for the role of German firms in the killing economy. They were three separate cases: United States v. Friedrich Flick et al. (the Flick case, April to December 1947); United States v. Carl Krauch et al. (the IG Farben case, August 1947 to July 1948); United States v. Alfried Krupp et al. (the Krupp case, December 1947 to July 1948). The three cases together put forty-two defendants in the dock, the senior management of three of the largest industrial concerns in Europe. Twenty-three were convicted. The longest individual sentence handed down was twelve years, to Alfried Krupp. The aggregate sentences handed down totalled approximately ninety-three years of prison time. The actual aggregate prison time served was less than thirty-five years. Most of the defendants were back in industry within a decade. Several became wealthier in the postwar period than they had been before the war. The corporate fortunes that had grown on the killing remained with the families that had grown them. The prosecution of the German industrialists, by any measure of substantive consequence, was a failure. By the measure of the documentary record, it was indispensable.
Flick
The first of the three cases tried Friedrich Flick himself, the seventy-four-year-old founder of one of the largest steel and coal conglomerates in Europe, and five of his executives. The Flick group had drawn extensively on slave labour from the eastern occupied territories and from concentration camps; on the prosecution’s calculation, the labour intake had peaked at approximately 48,000 prisoners and forced workers in 1944. The group had also acquired, on terms substantially below fair value, Jewish industrial properties seized in the Aryanisation programmes of 1937 onwards.
Flick’s defence was that he had been a businessman responding to wartime conditions; that the use of slave labour had been an SS programme to which the firm had been required to participate; and that the conditions in which the workers had been kept had been the responsibility of the SS rather than of the firm. The court rejected the defence in part. Flick was convicted on three counts: slave labour, plunder of property in occupied territory, and membership of the SS as a paying member of Himmler’s circle of friends, the Freundeskreis Reichsführer-SS, to which Flick had contributed approximately 100,000 Reichsmarks annually throughout the war. He was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment.
Flick served four years at Landsberg before being released on grounds of ill health in 1950. The Allied High Commissioner declined to confiscate his property. He returned to Düsseldorf and resumed running the firm. The Flick group expanded substantially in the postwar period; by the time of his death in July 1972 at the age of eighty-nine, Flick was reportedly the wealthiest man in West Germany. He left the firm to his sons. The Flick group, in subsequent decades, would be involved in the major political-funding scandal of the 1980s in West Germany, in which it emerged that the firm had been making large undeclared donations to all the major political parties for years. The corporate culture, on multiple measures, had carried over from the period of the trial.
Flick himself never expressed any regret for the wartime conduct. He never paid any compensation to the surviving slave labourers. The Flick family declined for fifty years to participate in any of the postwar German industrial-compensation schemes. They eventually contributed in the 2000s, after sustained public pressure, to the German Foundation Initiative on Forced Labour Compensation. The contribution was modest. The Flick family is now collectively one of the wealthiest in Europe.
IG Farben
The IG Farben case was the largest of the three industrial trials, the most extensively documented, and the most morally weighted. Twenty-four directors were charged. The defendants included Carl Krauch, the chairman of the supervisory board and the senior figure in the conglomerate’s planning; Hermann Schmitz, the chief executive; Otto Ambros, who had directed the Buna construction at Monowitz and the production of the nerve gas Sarin; Fritz ter Meer, who had been the senior figure on the company’s board responsible for chemicals; Heinrich Bütefisch, who had supervised the synthetic fuel production; Christian Schneider, the senior personnel officer; Walter Dürrfeld, the manager of the Monowitz plant.
The case rested on three elements. The first was the corporate planning record. IG Farben’s internal documents had recorded, in detail, the decision to build the Buna plant at Auschwitz specifically because of the availability of slave labour; the company had paid the SS approximately three to six Reichsmarks per prisoner per day depending on skill level, and had treated the prisoners as a fungible production input. The plant’s construction had been planned for a labour intake of approximately 30,000 prisoners; the plant’s operation had drawn through approximately 35,000 prisoners over its three years of operation, of whom approximately 25,000 had died.
The second was the Zyklon B supply chain. The company’s subsidiary Degesch had held the patent on Zyklon B and had supplied it to the Auschwitz commandant’s office for the killing operations. The shipping invoices were in evidence. The Degesch board had been aware of the use to which the gas was being put; an internal memorandum of June 1943 had discussed the appropriateness of removing the gas’s standard warning odour before delivery to Auschwitz. The court accepted that the Degesch directors had known what the gas was being used for. The company’s senior management was therefore knowingly responsible for the supply.
The third was the conduct at the Monowitz plant itself. The wider IG Farben board had received reports on the conditions at Monowitz and on the rates at which prisoners were dying. The company had calculated that the average productive lifespan of a Monowitz prisoner was approximately three to four months before death from exhaustion or selection for the gas chambers. The company had built a private SS hospital on the plant grounds and had directly funded the Birkenau gas chambers’ operation through its labour payments to the SS.
The defence had been that the company directors had been businessmen responding to wartime conditions; that they had not run the killing programme; and that they had had no operational responsibility for what the SS did with the labour the company had purchased. The court rejected the defence in significant part. Thirteen of the twenty-four defendants were convicted on slave labour or plunder counts. Krauch drew six years; Ambros eight; ter Meer seven; Bütefisch six; Schmitz four; Dürrfeld eight. Eleven were acquitted. The acquittals on the conspiracy and aggressive war counts were a substantial setback for the prosecution; the bench held that the prosecution had not made the case beyond reasonable doubt that the IG Farben directors had been party to the wider Nazi war planning.
By 1951, every man convicted in the IG Farben case had been released. Otto Ambros, who had drawn the longest sentence and who had directly run the Monowitz plant and the Sarin production, served less than three years. He resumed his postwar career as a senior consultant to the German chemical industry. He served on the boards of substantial firms including the German chemical company Hibernia and the American firm W.R. Grace. He was awarded the West German Federal Cross of Merit in the 1950s. He died in Mannheim in 1990 at the age of ninety. The IG Farben conglomerate itself had been broken up by the Allied authorities into its constituent firms after 1945; Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, Agfa, and the rest reformed as separate companies and resumed their dominant positions in the German chemical industry.
Krupp
The Krupp case tried Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, then forty years old, and eleven of his executives. The Krupp group had operated the largest single network of forced labour and slave labour in the German industrial economy; on the prosecution’s calculation, approximately 100,000 forced workers and prisoners had passed through the Krupp plants during the war, including a private concentration camp set up at the firm’s main works at Essen. The camp, named the Berthawerk after Alfried’s mother, had operated from 1942 to 1945. The conditions had been similar to those at Monowitz. The deaths had been substantial.
The trial ran from December 1947 to July 1948. The defence had run that the firm had been required to use slave labour by the wartime economic regime; that the conditions had been the responsibility of the SS; and that Krupp himself, who had taken over the firm’s operations in 1943, had not been the architect of the labour programmes. The court rejected the defence. Krupp was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment, the longest sentence handed down to any individual industrialist in the Subsequent Proceedings, and the court ordered the confiscation of his entire personal fortune, including the firm.
The confiscation order was the unusual and consequential element of the Krupp judgment. It was the only instance in any Nuremberg proceeding in which a court had ordered the seizure of corporate property as part of a criminal sentence. The High Commissioner John J. McCloy reversed the order in January 1951. The reversal was a political decision; McCloy was rebuilding West German industry as a Cold War ally and saw no purpose in confiscating one of the country’s largest industrial concerns at the moment when its productive capacity was needed for European reconstruction. Krupp’s sentence was commuted to time served. He was released from Landsberg in February 1951 with his fortune restored. He drove from Landsberg to the family mansion at Villa Hügel near Essen, met his executives the following day, and resumed running the firm. Within five years the Krupp group was producing more steel than it had at the height of the war. By the time of Alfried Krupp’s death of cancer in July 1967 at the age of fifty-nine, the firm was the largest industrial concern in Europe. The firm’s family ownership ended in 1968 under the terms of Krupp’s will; the company subsequently merged with Hoesch in 1991 and Thyssen in 1999 to become the present ThyssenKrupp.
The Wollheim litigation
Norbert Wollheim, the witness whose testimony had opened this page, did not let the matter end with the trial. After the IG Farben case judgment of 1948, he returned to the United States and to private litigation. He filed suit in West Germany in 1951 for compensation against IG Farben in liquidation, the corporate entity that survived the dissolution of the conglomerate. The Wollheim case ran for ten years. It was settled in 1957 with IG Farben’s payment of 30 million Deutschmarks into a trust fund to be distributed to surviving Auschwitz slave labourers. The settlement was the model on which subsequent industrial-compensation arrangements with German firms were built.
Wollheim himself received approximately 5,000 Deutschmarks. He continued his postwar life in New York, working in the textile industry and remarrying. He gave evidence at several subsequent war crimes proceedings including the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial of 1963 to 1965. He died in New York in November 1998 at the age of eighty-five. The IG Farben in liquidation entity continued to exist as a wind-down vehicle for property restitution claims until 2003, when it filed for bankruptcy after the German government accepted, finally, that the residual claims of survivors and their heirs would be paid by the wider German Foundation Initiative on Forced Labour Compensation rather than by the company.
What the Industrialists Trials achieved and did not achieve
The trials established, on the documentary record, that the killing of European Jewry had not been the work of the SS alone. The synthetic rubber works at Monowitz, the steel furnaces at Essen, the coal mines of the Flick group, had been operated by the senior management of three of the largest industrial concerns in Europe in full knowledge of what was happening to the workers they had taken from the SS. The corporate boards had received the reports. The directors had visited the plants. The accounts had been kept. The killing had been a project that had drawn German industry, in the technical and the moral sense, fully into its operations.
The trials did not, however, produce any meaningful corporate accountability beyond the documentary record. The clemency of 1951 returned the convicted executives to their positions. The corporate entities themselves continued to operate, in their reformed postwar shapes, with the same families and substantially the same management cultures. The compensation paid to surviving slave labourers, even after the eventual settlements, was far below any reasonable calculation of the value of the work extracted, and far below any meaningful measure of the suffering caused. The corporate fortunes that had grown on the killing largely stayed with the families that had grown them.
The wider lesson of the Industrialists Trials, the lesson that the Klarsfelds in France and Eli Rosenbaum at the Office of Special Investigations in the United States have spent the postwar period drawing out, is that the prosecution of the perpetrators alone is not sufficient. The institutions that profited from the killing must also be held to account. The accounting in the case of the German industrial conglomerates was not done. The fortunes accumulated. The families flourished. The historical record alone has been the substantive consequence. It is, by some measures, less than the prosecution had hoped for. It is, by every measure, more than nothing.
See also
Sources
- Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, vol VI (Flick Case), vols VII to VIII (IG Farben Case), vol IX (Krupp Case), U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952 to 1953
- Diarmuid Jeffreys, Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine, Bloomsbury, 2008
- Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era, Cambridge University Press, 1987
- William Manchester, The Arms of Krupp 1587 to 1968, Little, Brown, 1968
- Joachim Scholtyseck, Der Aufstieg der Quandts: Eine deutsche Unternehmerdynastie, C.H. Beck, 2011 (for comparative German industrial historiography)
- Norbert Wollheim, testimony in the IG Farben case, 14 February 1948, NMT vol VIII
- Benjamin B. Ferencz, Less Than Slaves: Jewish Forced Labor and the Quest for Compensation, Harvard University Press, 1979
- Kim Christian Priemel, The Betrayal: The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence, Oxford University Press, 2016