Tag Archives: Hell’s Cartel by Diarmuid Jeffreys

IG Farben: Manufacturing Death

Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering

View of the Reichstag assembly after Hitlers speech in Berlin on Jan. 30, 1937. Left first row, right: Adolf Hitler. Standing on the steps: the Prussian Premier Hermann Goering. (AP Photo)

IG Farben didn’t start out as a Nazi death factory, which is what it’s known for to this day. In fact, up to the mid 1930’s, its chief executives were not particularly anti-Semitic. Formed in 1925, IG Farben started out as a chemical company that manufactured dye. It was so successful, that by the 1930’s it became the largest chemical company in the world and the fourth largest company in general. One of its leaders, Carl Bosch, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1931 for the development of chemical high-pressure methods. In Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine (New York, Henry Holt and Company, 2008), Diarmuid Jeffreys describes the progression—or, more fittingly, regression–of IG Farben from Germany’s leading chemical company to a death factory during the Holocaust.

Jeffreys records one of the most telling moments of this transition: the episode when the company’s leader, Carl Bosch, who valued the scientific work of many of his Jewish colleagues and employees, paid a visit to Hitler himself in the attempt to change his anti-Semitic outlook by considering its impact on science. Needless to say, Hitler not only didn’t budge, but also refused to communicate with Bosch henceforth:

“Then Bosch, as delicately as he could, raised the “Jewish question.” Perhaps the Fuhrer didn’t realize the potentially damaging consequences of his policies, he suggested. If more and more Jewish scientists were forced abroad, German physics and chemistry could be set back a hundred years. To his alarm, Hitler erupted in fury. Obviously the businessman knew nothing of politics, he snarled. If necessary, Germany would ‘work one hundred years without physics and chemistry’. Bosch tried to continue but Hitler rang for an aide and told him icily, ‘The Geheimrat wishes to leave.’” (178)

When the company’s senior executives, who didn’t see much scientific or economic value in anti-Semitism–Carl Bosch and Carl Duisberg—retired, they were replaced by a new crop of leaders who toed the party line. The company started to follow a more “pragmatic” approach, catering to the gruesome needs of the Nazi regime.

By 1941, IG Farben became directly involved in the death machine at Auschwitz. It built a rubber factory called Monowitz, or Auschwitz III, monitored by IG Farben managers and run through the exploitation of slave labor. There prisoners were worked to death, in identical conditions to the rest of the concentration camp: fed the same insufficient and unnutricious food; guarded by the same brutal SS prisoners; lacking in health care, and subject to the same reprisals and torture as the rest of the prisoners of the Auschwitz complex. Most prisoners could only survive two to three months working in such harsh conditions. When they were no longer fit for work, they were sent to the gas chamber.

After the war, following the precedent set by the Nuremberg Trial, some of the leaders of IG Farben were indicted before a U.S. Tribunal led by General Telford Taylor. In 1947 and 1948, twenty-four defendants faced similar charges to those leveled a few years earlier against the Nazi war criminals:

  1. Planning and waging a war of aggression against other countries
  2. War crimes and crimes against humanity through destroying occupied territories
  3. War crimes against humanity through the enslavement, deportation, rape, torture and murder of civilians.
  4. Membership in the SS, a criminal organization
  5. Conspiring to commit the crimes outlined above

In the end, as General Taylor would remark with great disappointment after the trial, justice was not served. Only thirteen of the company’s senior executives received prison terms (one to eight years). (See Hell’s Cartel, 400) The rest of those indicted were released, and many became successful executives in other companies. After the war, IG Farben was fractured, but not annihilated. The Soviet Union took over part of it, while the Western part of the company continued to thrive, eventually becoming affiliated with Standard Oil. Because of its close affiliation with the Holocaust, the remnants of the company faced continual protests. Although IG Farben executives announced in 2001 that the company would dissolve by 2003, it continues to exist today, still in the process of liquidation. IG Farben thus remains a living testimony to the fact that business and science, if placed in the wrong hands, can be easily used for the most corrupt and amoral purposes.

Claudia Moscovici, Literature Salon


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Filed under Auschwitz III, Carl Bosch, Carl Duisberg, Claudia Moscovici, Hell's Cartel by Diarmuid Jeffreys, Holocaust Memory, IG Farben, the Holocaust