IG Farben

IG Farben (Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG) was the largest chemical and pharmaceutical company in Europe and, in 1939, the fourth-largest corporation in the world. The company built and ran the Buna-Werke synthetic rubber plant at Auschwitz Monowitz from 1941, paid the SS for the use of around 35,000 Jewish slave labourers from the Auschwitz camp at the plant, and over the four years of operation worked around 25,000 of them to death. The company’s subsidiary Degesch (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung) was the principal supplier of Zyklon B, the cyanide-based pesticide used in the Auschwitz gas chambers, to the SS. IG Farben is the case where the moral weight of corporate participation in the Holocaust is at its heaviest. Twenty-three of its senior managers were tried at Nuremberg in 1947 to 1948. Thirteen were convicted; the heaviest sentence was eight years.

The Buna-Werke decision

The decision to build a synthetic rubber and synthetic petrol plant at Auschwitz was taken by the IG Farben board in late 1940 and early 1941. Several sites had been considered. The Auschwitz site was chosen on three grounds: the local Silesian coal supply, the rail and water connections, and, explicitly in the surviving board minutes, the availability of slave labour from the Auschwitz concentration camp. The board minutes record the slave labour calculation. The site was selected for it.

Construction began in April 1941. The plant was operated jointly by IG Farben’s management and the SS. IG Farben paid the SS a per-prisoner per-day labour fee of three to four Reichsmarks, which the SS retained; the prisoners themselves received nothing. The conditions at the IG Farben Monowitz sub-camp (Auschwitz III) were lethal: starvation rations, no medical care for prisoners unable to continue work, twelve-hour shifts in heavy industrial conditions. The average life expectancy of an IG Farben slave labourer at Monowitz was around three months. Prisoners who became too weak to work were returned to the SS for selection at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which meant the gas chambers.

The Levi testimony

One of the IG Farben Monowitz slave labourers was the Italian Jewish chemist Primo Levi, prisoner number 174517, who survived nine months at the camp and went on to write the most widely-read survivor literature of the Holocaust. Levi’s books, including Se questo è un uomo (1947) and I sommersi e i salvati (1986), describe in detail the daily operation of the Monowitz camp and the IG Farben management’s direct involvement in working the prisoners to death. The Levi testimony is the case where the operational conditions of an industrial slave-labour camp have been preserved in literature of high quality and continuing readership. Levi met IG Farben civilian managers regularly during his work at the plant’s laboratory; he names some of them in his memoirs.

Degesch and Zyklon B

IG Farben held a 42.5 per cent stake in Degesch, the dedicated pesticide subsidiary that distributed Zyklon B. Degussa AG and the Goldschmidt firm held the rest. Degesch had originally produced Zyklon B as a fumigation pesticide for grain stores and ship holds. The product was sold to the SS in industrial quantities from 1942 onwards. The standard commercial Zyklon B included a strong-smelling chemical warning agent designed to alert humans to the presence of the cyanide gas. The SS requested, and Degesch provided, a special variant of Zyklon B with the warning agent removed. The warning-free variant was used at the Auschwitz, Majdanek and Birkenau gas chambers. The IG Farben board was informed of the contract.

The accountancy records survived the war. The IG Farben share of Degesch’s profits from the SS Zyklon B contracts was modest in the context of the company’s overall turnover, but the financial significance is not the point. The company knew the use to which the product was being put. The company continued to supply it.

The Nuremberg trial

The IG Farben trial (United States v Carl Krauch et al), the sixth of the twelve subsequent Nuremberg trials, was conducted by an American military tribunal between August 1947 and July 1948. Twenty-three IG Farben managers were charged with crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy. Thirteen were convicted. The convictions were principally for slavery and looting; the prosecution’s broader case on crimes against peace and crimes against humanity was largely rejected by the tribunal. The heaviest sentence, on Otto Ambros, head of the Buna chemical division, was eight years. Most of the convicted men served part of their sentences, were released early, and resumed senior corporate positions in West German industry. Ambros became a board member of multiple post-war German chemical and engineering firms. Fritz ter Meer, convicted of slavery and looting, became chairman of Bayer AG, one of IG Farben’s post-war successor companies, in 1956.

The post-war successors

The Allied occupation authorities broke up IG Farben in 1951 into four successor companies: Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, and Agfa. The four companies became and remain among the largest German corporations. The successor companies, after several decades of resistance, contributed to the German industry compensation fund for slave labour set up in 2000 (the Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft). Around DM 10 billion in industry contributions were paid into the fund, with around 1.6 million surviving slave labourers receiving payments. The compensation came around 55 years after the work had been done. Most of the slave labourers had died in the interval. The IG Farben successor companies have published, with variable degrees of fullness, official histories of their wartime operations.

What it was

IG Farben is the central case of corporate complicity in the Holocaust. The company’s board chose the Auschwitz site for the synthetic rubber plant on the basis of slave labour availability, supplied Zyklon B to the gas chambers through its Degesch subsidiary, worked tens of thousands of prisoners to death at Monowitz, and emerged from the post-war reckoning with limited convictions, light sentences, and successor companies that became and remain global commercial concerns. The IG Farben senior managers who served prison terms returned to senior corporate positions on their release. The case is the documentary evidence of how easily a great industrial corporation could be folded into a state killing programme and recovered from afterwards.

See also

Sources

  • Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era, Cambridge University Press, 1987
  • Diarmuid Jeffreys, Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine, Metropolitan Books, 2008
  • Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben, Free Press, 1978
  • Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo, Einaudi, 1947
  • IG Farben trial transcripts, Nuremberg Military Tribunal, 1947 to 1948
  • USHMM: IG Farben