Hell's Cartel

by Diarmuid Jeffreys

  Although the Reichsführer was initially taken aback at the number of inmates the IG required, he was delighted to comply. For many years he had been trying to exploit the labor of concentration camp prisoners in Germany, especially in the field of munitions production, in order to build up the revenue and economic influence of the SS. But lack of commercial experience among his staff had seen most of these attempts fail. Now, with the IG’s expertise to call on, there was a chance he could get things right. He took a number of steps immediately, ordering Richard Glücks, the SS inspector of concentration camps, to “aid the construction project by means of the concentration camp prisoners in every possible way” and appointing SS Major General Karl Wolff of his personal staff to act as liaison officer with the cartel. Then he set off for Upper Silesia to meet IG Farben officials and to brief Commandant Rudolf Höss personally on his new responsibilities. To meet the IG’s needs, Himmler told him, the inmate population would have to be increased from its current maximum of ten thousand to at least thirty thousand. Auschwitz was destined to become the biggest concentration camp in the Reich.

  As Höss absorbed this remarkable news, the IG was taking its own leaps forward. The buna factory would entail the construction of a massive hydrogenation plant. To defray the expense, managers suggested that the facility also be used to produce hundreds of thousands of tons of synthetic fuel. The technological challenge of uniting two production strands in one factory was enormous, and combining the manufacturing process of different Sparten in one place ran counter to the concern’s normal organizational thinking, but if it could be made to work the potential gains could be huge. As a result, while Otto Ambros was appointed to control the buna operation, Heinrich Bütefisch was given responsibility for fuel. On the plant’s completion the two men would be in joint charge of one of the largest factories in the world.

  With heads spinning at the potential postwar financial gains to be reaped from such a vast project, the Vorstand then came to another fateful decision. Unlike the dozens of other new plants the cartel had constructed under the aegis of the Four-Year Plan, which had been built with the aid of government loans and subsidies, this one would be wholly financed by IG Farben. At a cost of almost RM 900 million, the project would be the single most sizable investment in the company’s history. But though the risk was extraordinary, the rewards promised to be greater still. In the long term the IG would have sole control of the buna factory’s output and profits.

  With the full backing of the Nazi hierarchy, the Wehrmacht high command, the Reich’s economic apparatus, and all his fellow directors on the Vorstand, Ambros now spurred his team into action. In March 1941, in a rapid series of conferences—attended at various times by Major General Karl Wolff, Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, Heinrich Bütefisch, Fritz ter Meer, Ambros himself, and the two IG men chosen to run the construction project, Walter Dürrfeld and Max Faust—the participants thrashed out the details of the IG’s collaboration with the SS. In the process, a clearly symbiotic relationship between the two organizations began to emerge. For example, at one meeting it was decided that “a payment of RM 3 per day for unskilled workers and RM 4 per day for skilled workers is to be made for each inmate. This includes everything, such as transportation, food, etc., and we (the IG) will have no other expenses for the inmates, except if a small bonus (cigarettes, etc.) is given as an incentive.” But none of this money would go to the inmates; the concern would pay it directly into the SS’s coffers.*

  At another meeting Walter Dürrfeld raised the problem of finding suitable overseers for the building phase of the project. Höss hastened to reassure him. The SS would provide the IG with kapos especially chosen for their ruthlessness, one for every twenty inmates. These men, Dürrfeld told Ambros later, would be “selected from among the professional criminals and are to be transferred from other concentration camps to Auschwitz.”

  In the meanwhile, IG Farben acquired the area around Monowitz, in some cases by invoking the authority of the regional government to expropriate the land from Polish farmers, in others buying plots that the SS had previously confiscated. It also arranged to purchase sand, gravel, and bricks from SS-owned facilities and bought a majority stake in the nearby Fürstengrube coal mine, which was to be worked by inmates from a specially established subcamp run by the SS. Speed was of the essence, IG executives constantly reminded their new partners. To make a real contribution to the war effort the buna plant would have to come into production within two and a half years—ideally by mid-1943. The sooner facilities were provided for IG managers coming from Germany, the sooner construction work could begin.

  The SS and the Reich authorities rushed to do their bidding. On April 3, 1941, the first deportation of Jews from the area began—a series of eerily silent processions that wound their way from the Old Town and its ruined synagogue to the railway station, where five Reichsbahn trains waited to carry them away.* As the deportees were marched past the town hall, IG managers came out from their temporary offices to watch them go by. More than three thousand Jews were taken to a holding facility at Sosnowitz; the rest were concentrated at Bendzin. For most of them their next sight of Auschwitz would be their last.

  On Monday, April 7, Otto Ambros got to his feet on a stage in nearby Katowice to address a gathering to mark the foundation of the great endeavor. All the relevant authorities were present: the Reich Authority for Spatial Planning, the Office of the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of the German Nation, the Reich Office for Economic Development, the Upper Silesian provincial governor’s office, the local water and power authorities, the municipal government of Auschwitz, and a contingent of senior SS officers from the concentration camp. In a wide-ranging speech Ambros took them through the exciting prospects for science and technology offered by this bold new venture, the economic benefits that would accrue to the region, and the important role concentration camp labor would play in getting it going. Then he turned to the racial and ideological significance of the whole undertaking.

  With the Auschwitz project, IG Farben has designed a plan for a new enterprise of giant proportions. It is determined to do everything in its power to build up a virile enterprise that will be able to shape its environment in the same way as many plants in west and central Germany do. In this manner IG Farben fulfills a high moral duty to ensure, with a mobilization of all its resources, that this industrial foundation becomes a firm cornerstone for a powerful and healthy Germanism in the East.

  Five days later, delighted by the warm reception these remarks had received and satisfied that everything was proceeding smoothly, Ambros wrote to Fritz ter Meer to report progress: “Our new friendship with the SS is proving very beneficial,” he said.

  IG Farben’s eight-year-long entanglement with the Nazis had brought it to an extraordinary point where one of its leading executives was describing the merits of a new factory in unmistakably racial terms and openly extolling the virtues of its profitable collaboration with a murderous regime. The availability of slave labor had been a crucial factor in the concern’s decision to build a plant next to a concentration camp; now the IG’s presence would contribute decisively to the camp’s expansion and its eventual evolution into an industrialized killing machine. Auschwitz’s inmates were already dying of hunger and exhaustion and disease and bullet wounds and beatings. Within a few months, as a consequence of the IG’s actions, the first selections to the gas chambers would begin.

  * * *

  STILL, AMBROS AND his team had presumed too much, too soon. Although the construction of the factory, the Buna-Werke, started well, problems soon began to appear, in part due to the project’s sheer size and complexity. Any plant set to occupy over one square mile of terrain—land that had to be cleared and prepared before other work could proceed—was bound to tax the technical and organizational ingenuity of the engineers and designers in charge. At the outset the blueprints were straightforward enough. The factory was to be laid out on a grid pattern, with raw
materials (coal, water, and lime) being brought in at the north side and buna emerging at the south. But the plans were complicated by the decision to add extra manufacturing capacity for synthetic fuel and for other chemicals, such as methanol, that the works might produce in the future. Revising these drawings and specifications consumed much valuable time.

  The more obvious problems of building a factory in wartime also became apparent. Basic construction materials such as cement, iron, and lumber were harder to obtain than had been envisaged, and adequate water and supplies were also unexpectedly difficult to arrange (the finished Buna-Werke was projected to need more electricity than Berlin). Nor did it help that Auschwitz lay a long way from the IG’s parent plants on the Rhine. Vital equipment sent from Ludwigshafen, Oppau, and Leuna was liable to be held up by bottlenecks on the overburdened railway system or delayed by Allied bombing. Occasionally the shipments were merely misdirected; at other times they failed to arrive altogether and had to be reordered from scratch.

  An even more serious predicament was the shortage of labor. Heinrich Himmler had promised the IG that the concentration camp would meet most of its needs but this manpower was proving slow to materialize. Building a security fence around such a massive work area took longer than anticipated and until it was completed in late 1941 the SS refused to allow more than a thousand inmates on the Buna-Werke site at any one moment—and then restricted them to working in daylight and under the strictest supervision. At the same time the SS was also preparing suitable housing for the advance parties of technical specialists now arriving from the IG’s factories in Germany and had just started construction of a major new satellite camp for prisoners of war at nearby Birkenau, an abandoned village set amid birch trees on the SS agricultural estate. These various projects all required inmates whose energies would otherwise have been dedicated to the plant and also reduced the availability of the “free” Polish workers the SS had brought in from the surrounding countryside.

  As the delays steadily worsened, the IG’s Walter Dürrfeld and Max Faust, the men in daily charge of the Buna-Werke construction, began to list their anxieties in weekly reports to Otto Ambros and the Vorstand. Their somewhat forlorn hope was to show headquarters that building a plant on the wild outer fringes of the new Reich was a more complicated undertaking than had first been imagined and thus to win some relaxation of the schedule. In the meantime they pressed their on-site subordinates and the SS to work the concentration camp laborers harder and faster to cut down some of the construction backlog. One of those prisoners, Rudolf Vrba, later described how the Auschwitz security apparatus translated this pressure into action.

  Men ran and fell, were kicked and shot. Wild-eyed kapos drove their bloodstained path through rucks of prisoners, while SS men shot from the hip, like television cowboys who had strayed somehow into a grotesque, endless horror film; and adding a ghastly note of incongruity to the bedlam were groups of quiet men in impeccable civilian clothes, picking their way through corpses they did not want to see, measuring timbers with bright yellow folding rules, making neat little notes in black leather books, oblivious to the blood bath. They never spoke to the workers, these men in the quiet grey suits. They never spoke to the kapos, the gangsters. Only occasionally they murmured a few words to a senior SS N.C.O., words that sparked off another explosion. The SS man would kick viciously at the kapo and roar, “Get these swine moving, you lazy oaf. Don’t you know that wall’s to be finished by eleven o’clock?” The kapo would scramble to his feet, pound into the prisoners, lashing them on, faster, faster, faster.

  In the face of this sort of savagery, the IG’s senior managers at Auschwitz could hardly pretend it was not happening. Yet they seemed remarkably oblivious to the possibility that their own demands were inciting the violence. Instead, they worried that the brutality might undermine productivity. One weekly progress report dispatched to Frankfurt in August 1941 complained that “in the last few weeks the inmates are being severely flogged on the construction site by the kapos in increasing measure, and this always applies to the weakest inmates, who really cannot work harder. The exceedingly unpleasant scenes that occur on the construction site are beginning to have a demoralizing effect on the free workers, as well as on the Germans.” The author went on to clarify that his unhappiness had less to do with the morality of the beatings than with the fact they were taking place on company property. “We have therefore asked that they should refrain from carrying out this flogging on the construction site and transfer it … to the concentration camp.”

  The IG men were clearly far more bothered by the long delays than by the treatment meted out to the prisoners. When the question of attacks on inmates next came up in the weekly reports, it was obvious that frustration had made officials much more tolerant of the SS’s methods: “The work, particularly of the Poles and inmates, continues to leave much room for improvement.… Only brute force has any effect on these people.… The commandant always argues that as far as the treatment of inmates is concerned it is impossible to get any work done without corporal punishment.”

  This tolerance may have been a product of the growing friendship between Commandant Höss and Dürrfeld. The men had begun socializing together with their wives and arranging joint hunting excursions into the surrounding countryside.* Indeed, on a personal level, relations between the IG and the SS at Auschwitz were blossoming, as one of the last weekly reports of the year made clear: “On December 20 representatives of the IG attended a Christmas party of the Waffen SS that was very festive and that ended up alcoholically gay.” The conviviality did little to resolve the IG’s labor problems, though, which were worsening by the week, in spite of the arrival at Auschwitz of a completely new influx of inmates.

  On Sunday, June 22, 1941, Hitler had launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, ostensibly to combat the supposed Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy to rule the world but also to satisfy his quest for lebensraum. The largest military assault in history to date, it was at first a stunning success. Victory followed victory as the Wehrmacht pushed Stalin’s forces back to the Urals and took millions of prisoners. Unsure what to do with these men but apparently determined not to accord them the protection of the Geneva Convention or abide by even the most basic rules of international warfare, the German army embraced the barbarism that had previously been the preserve of the SS and its Einsatzgruppen. The high command made sure that its troops followed the infamous Commissar Order—issued by Hitler to his generals in March 1941, through which the Communist Party’s representatives in the Red Army were singled out and summarily shot—and then invited the SS in to scour the ranks of captured men for any additional party functionaries, as well as “agitators” and Jews, that the Wehrmacht might have missed. The rest, many hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russian soldiers, were crammed into primitive barbed wire pens—often little more than large compounds in bare fields—and left to die of starvation, exposure, and disease.

  To Himmler this mass of Soviet prisoners promised a terrific boon. He had known of the approaching invasion back in March 1941, when, through his representatives at the meetings with the IG, he had promised the cartel a workforce of tens of thousands of forced laborers. Now, after an embarrassing hiatus, he wanted to deliver on that promise and augment the thinning ranks of Polish and German political prisoners the SS was providing from the concentration camp and the Fremdarbeiter (foreign laborers from the General Government, Holland, Belgium, France, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere) that the IG had managed to scrape together from other Reich agencies. He also needed workers to carry out his plans for transforming Auschwitz into a model German town. So he approached the army and offered to take a hundred thousand Russians off its hands. The high command was only too happy to agree.

  The first ten thousand Soviet POWs arrived at Auschwitz in October and were taken immediately to the new site at Birkenau. There, under conditions of the most appalling cruelty and deprivation, the Russians were forced to start building
their own barracks. Each of the proposed 174 housing blocks was to be divided into sixty-two bays, which were then to be subdivided to form three sleeping platforms. Four prisoners were meant to pack onto one platform, giving each person, at best, a coffin-sized sleeping space. One latrine block—essentially a shed containing a deep ditch with planks thrown over it at intervals—was to be provided per seven thousand prisoners; one wash barrack was allowed per seventy-eight hundred prisoners.

  But by Christmas 1941, after working with only a few tools and building materials either salvaged by bare hand from the demolished hamlet of Birkenau or scrounged from the IG plant at Monowitz, the POWs had managed to finish only two of these housing blocks, with another twenty-eight in various stages of construction. In the interim, the weather had deteriorated. From November on they had been exposed to the snow, ice, and subzero temperatures of a Polish winter, and now—exhausted, beaten, half starved, and diseased and with no immediate prospect of shelter—most of them began to succumb. By the end of January 1942 almost eight thousand of the original ten thousand Russians had died. By the end of the following month none were left.*

  This was a considerable setback to Himmler, especially since he couldn’t expect any replacements from the same source. With the struggle against the Soviet Union dragging on, Hitler and the high command had become concerned about labor shortages in industries more immediately involved in the war effort. On January 8, 1942, Hermann Göring, who had gained control over all prisoners of war, issued a decree announcing that henceforth most Soviet POWs would be used in the armaments industry, mining, railroad maintenance, and agriculture. As a result, Himmler was forced to look elsewhere for workers to fulfill his promises to the IG. With tragic inevitability his attention fell on the one group over whose destinies he now had absolute power—the Jews.