Hell's Cartel

by Diarmuid Jeffreys

  The IG’s partners in this disaster, the officers of the SS, withdrew over the next few days. Before they went, they, too, tried to destroy the evidence of their crimes. Files, lists, and other papers from the administration offices at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Monowitz were burned in huge bonfires around the camps. The dismantled crematoria were blown up and the largest warehouses, where the looted personal effects of the gassed Jews had been stored before being shipped back to the Reich, were set on fire along with several barrack blocks. Not everything could be burned, however: the Russians later found stores containing 370,000 men’s suits, 837,000 women’s coats and dresses, 44,000 pairs of shoes, and 7.7 tons of human hair. On January 20 and 21 SS sentries were removed from all the watchtowers, leaving only small patrols to guard the camps and subcamps. Over the next few days, after randomly killing another seven hundred prisoners of various races and nationalities, the remaining SS began to slip away too. One of the last to leave was SS doctor Josef Mengele on January 17. He had continued his experiments almost to the end, closing down his experimental laboratories only when his source of human material finally began to give out. He took the written reports of his murders with him.

  For the eight hundred seriously ill prisoners left in the Monowitz infirmary, abandoned by both the SS and their former IG employers without food, medicine, heat, electricity, or water, a dreadful struggle to stay alive until the camp was liberated now ensued. Lying in their freezing and filthy bunks, racked by dysentery, typhus, diphtheria, and a host of other diseases, they watched out of the cracked windows as the German army retreated down the road past the camp for three days. Then they cringed in helpless terror as Allied planes returned to bomb the nearby Buna-Werke for one last time. After that they were on their own. The vast majority were completely incapable of fending for themselves, unable to venture outside to scavenge for scraps of food in the frozen snow or to pick up firewood or even to make it to the latrine bucket. The few who had a little strength did their best to help—among them Primo Levi, suffering badly from scarlet fever—but it was a hopeless task. Five hundred more inmates died of sickness, cold, and hunger before the Red Army arrived.

  Around midday on January 27, 1945, Levi and another prisoner were carrying a body to an open grave pit outside their hut when they saw four young Russians approach on horseback. The soldiers came slowly up to the wire and gazed at the huts, the bodies on the ground, and the few filthy skeletal figures gathering nervously in front of them.

  They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame that we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man’s crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defence.

  The Russians, from the Sixtieth Army of the First Ukrainian Front, found at least six hundred unburied corpses lying around the camps and some seven thousand prisoners still alive, mostly at Birkenau. Of the three hundred alive at IG Monowitz, two hundred more would die in the coming days, despite all the medical help the Red Army could provide. Primo Levi was one of the very few who was loaded onto a cart and taken out through the main gates.

  * * *

  IN GERMANY, THE IG’s senior executives were at last waking up to the possibility that they might be called to account for their association with the Nazis. In July 1944 the BBC had begun broadcasting details of what was happening to Jews at Auschwitz and elsewhere, based on reports smuggled out of the camps by the Sonderkommando and the Polish resistance. The broadcasts had been accompanied by Allied warnings, repeated several times in the following months, to the effect that anyone who had participated in such crimes would be hunted down and brought to justice as a war criminal.

  Hermann Schmitz took these threats very seriously and began to agonize over his personal safety. His anxiety intensified when, in the aftermath of a failed attempt on Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944, the Nazi regime threatened dire reprisals against “all traitors and saboteurs.” Schmitz hadn’t been involved in the conspiracy but the atmosphere of fear and mistrust swirling around the highest ranks of Nazi society fed into his growing paranoia. His behavior became increasingly erratic and contradictory. One minute his obsessive secretiveness led him to shut himself up in his office, where he would place a tea cozy over the telephone in an apparent attempt to frustrate any Gestapo listening devices; the next he was openly courting allegations of defeatism by joining other industrialists in a half-baked attempt to contact Allen Dulles, the wartime head of the American OSS, with peace proposals. Nothing came of these approaches, although Schmitz actually had quite close links with the Americans. Before the war Dulles’s law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, had handled IG Farben’s U.S. business interests, when the cartel began to transfer ownership from German to American representatives.

  Some members of the Vorstand responded to the mounting crisis in predictable fashion. August von Knieriem, the IG’s chief counsel, spent the autumn of 1944 drawing up a lengthy paper considering, in his lawyerly way, the prospects for the concern’s survival after the war and concluding that its breakup by the Allies was inevitable but survivable. Wilhelm Mann, staunch Nazi loyalist, urged continued fealty to the cause, arguing that the IG had to abide by the Führer’s wishes that production be moved away from the advancing Allies and into the German interior. But most of the executives began to think in terms of personal survival and how to keep themselves and their families beyond the reach of the Russians. For some, it was just a question of sticking close to their homes and offices in the IG towns and cities along the Rhine and maintaining a low profile until the Americans or British arrived. Others, whose duties usually took them to Berlin, found they had more pressing reasons to be elsewhere. In January, for example, Max Ilgner declared that working in the bomb-damaged IG offices on the Unter den Linden was becoming far too difficult and he moved his whole operation back to Frankfurt. (Reportedly he took two trainloads of sensitive documents with him, although these were never recovered.) In early March, Georg von Schnitzler slipped off to his estate at Oberursel, changing into his Scottish tweeds and highly polished English shoes to help reinforce the image of a peaceful country gentleman. Carl Wurster and Heinrich Bütefisch went back to Ludwigshafen. Otto Ambros set off for the Gendorf chemical plant in his native Bavaria. Von Knieriem returned to his house in the picturesque city of Heidelberg, where several other directors also lived. Even Wilhelm Mann eventually decided on discretion and joined Heinrich Hörlein back at Leverkusen. Fritz ter Meer, meanwhile, was planning for the systematic destruction of incriminating documents at the IG’s vast Frankfurt office complex, lest they fall into Allied hands; some fifteen tons of paper were eventually incinerated. None of the men—not even Carl Krauch, who had arguably benefited most from his association with the Nazis—elected to stay in the German capital with their Führer.

  A few days before the U.S. Third Army moved into Frankfurt, Hermann Schmitz paid a final visit to the IG’s headquarters. After attending a brief meeting with some of his colleagues—presumably to discuss what to do when the Allies arrived—he and a few others set off by train to their homes in Heidelberg. According to Ernst Struss, who went with them, they emerged very shaken at the other end, having spent several hours being shunted back and forth between Allied and German lines while attempting to dodge the fighting. Their train had been shot at a number of times and on occasion the IG bosses were forced to swallow their dignity and clamber under the seats to avoid being hit. It was the closest many of them had been to participating personally in Hitler’s war and they didn’t particularly enjoy the experience.

  By April 1945 the figh
ting had moved eastward as the Americans swept toward the Elbe and a meeting with the Russians. Well before the war was brought to a close in May, with the downfall of Berlin, the suicide of Adolf Hitler, and the unconditional surrender of all German forces, the members of the IG’s top team had ensconced themselves safely behind the lines of the Western powers. Surely now, they told themselves, all they had to do was stay out of the limelight and soon everything would get back to normal. After all, the world would always need chemicals.

  * * *

  THE ALLIES HAD certainly gone to some effort to capture the IG’s major chemical factories. By March 1945 U.S. troops were massed directly across the Rhine from Leverkusen but the bridges had been blown up and there was constant small-arms and mortar fire from the other bank. While the Americans pondered a way to get across, their artillery bombarded any sign of activity in the plant itself in case war materials were still being produced. As it happened, manufacturing had been abandoned but the factory’s solid fuel generators were still going because they were now providing the town’s only source of electrical power. To keep them turning without the fumes inviting a barrage of shells called for some typically innovative IG thinking: the plant’s engineers eventually dug a network of exhaust tunnels to disperse the smoke imperceptibly through the broken windows and cracked roofs of damaged buildings. Employees also armed themselves, not to defend the factory against the Allies necessarily but to stop any attempt by the retreating Wehrmacht to reduce it to rubble. Whatever workers had felt about the Nazis, it was plain the war was now lost, and no one wanted to see their livelihoods put in further jeopardy. Consequently, when American troops finally occupied Leverkusen on April 14, no resistance was offered and surviving Bayer employees willingly agreed to clear rubble, repair machinery, and get production going as quickly as possible; their cooperation continued when the British took over the zone two months later. Both the workers and the management reasoned that demand for aspirin and other drugs was going to be substantial and Leverkusen should be first in line to provide them.*

  It was much the same story at the other IG plants in western Germany, from Essen and Hüls in the north to Durlach and Rottweil in the south: a few days’ fierce fighting while the Wehrmacht was still around and then grateful surrender to the Allies. The various works of the old Hoechst group around Frankfurt passed relatively unscathed into U.S. hands on March 28. Even the huge Ludwigshafen and Oppau plants had managed to avoid complete destruction, although damage there was worse than elsewhere because the factories’ synthetic fuel and buna output had made them particularly important targets of Allied bombing. Captured on March 24, the plants were eventually passed into the control of the French, who immediately began a program to get them back on line.

  In the East, the situation was somewhat different. The Red Army seized the IG’s plants at Auschwitz, Heydebreck, and Dyhernfurth, in Silesia, and took over the concern’s massive fuel facility at Leuna but seemed much more interested in dismantling equipment than in getting it going. Within days of their arrival at the Buna-Werke Russian troops began taking apart the high-pressure apparatus so that it might be reassembled in the Soviet Union.

  But the Allies’ interest in the IG extended far beyond the mere acquisition of its buildings. Hard on the heels of their combat troops came specialist units tasked with securing the concern’s technology and scientists. For the British and Americans, this was part of a wider operation known as Project Paperclip, which had two key objectives. The first was to lay their hands on as much of Germany’s wartime scientific expertise as possible in order to exploit it for their own benefit; the second was to deny it to the Russians, who had a similar program, Operation Osavakim. Paperclip had begun in 1944 when some three thousand specialists were selected, trained, and formed into units, and it took wing in the aftermath of the invasion of Germany, when they were shipped en masse to Europe. With full logistical, intelligence, and military support, the authority to commandeer whatever transport they needed, and orders to move as quickly as possible, the units were remarkably successful, scooping up a huge haul of data and matériel covering everything from rocketry and ballistics to torpedoes, antitank weaponry, and submarine construction. They proved even more adept at identifying and capturing thousands of key German scientists and technicians, taking many of them back to England and the United States for interrogation.*

  Inevitably, the IG was a major target. On March 25, the day after the U.S. Army had cleared the area around Ludwigshafen, a joint British and American specialist team was flown in from London. On arriving at the plant and finding it badly damaged, investigators began rounding up and interrogating the few senior managers they were able to lay their hands on. Two days later, some of the Germans were loaded onto trucks and taken to a nearby forest, where they were set to digging up boxes of technical and scientific documents that had been buried among the trees. A quick perusal of these papers “indicated them to be of such value as to warrant transportation as an intact unit to London as soon as possible for examination and duplication.” An entire laboratory at Oppau was then dismantled and shipped back to the UK.* Fuel scientists were also tracked down. At Leuna, a few weeks later, an American unit moved forty-nine synthetic fuel chemists and their families at gunpoint from their homes in the Russian zone to new accommodations in the West. Others were identified and rounded up after Heinrich Bütefisch was arrested, taken to London, and interrogated by the British Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee.†

  But no IG technology was more urgently sought than that of its secret chemical weapons program. In late 1943, Britain’s Enigma code breakers at Bletchley Park had intercepted and decrypted German high command signals about tabun and sarin, the two deadly nerve agents developed for the Wehrmacht. Deeply uneasy lest this expertise fall into the hands of the Russians and yet equally keen to acquire it for themselves, the British and Americans made it a top priority to find the two specialists most involved in development and production: Gerhard Schrader, the scientist who had formulated the weapons, and Otto Ambros, the man responsible for their manufacture. Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tarr of the British Chemical Warfare Service was put at the head of a fifty-strong team to track them down.

  Schrader was found easily enough at the Elberfeld plant laboratory, and without much ado he handed over his research notes and the contents of his safe. But he professed not to know where Ambros was. In fact, U.S. troops had already located Ambros at Gendorf, in Bavaria, although as they hadn’t known what to make of him they had been on the verge of letting him go. On entering the small town in the last weeks of the war, the GIs had been surprised to find a chemical factory with many of its production facilities placed underground. Its manager, a cheerful man with a neat, prematurely gray moustache and a well-cut suit, had hastened out to meet them and volunteered to show them around. As they peered into vats and wandered around the empty offices, he told them it was a detergent plant that made soaps and household cleaning products for the domestic market. There was nothing untoward about the underground chambers; the factory had merely been complying with government instructions to all German businesses to provide air raid protection for their employees. He then told them his name, Ambros, and that he was just a simple chemist, originally from Ludwigshafen on the Franco-German border but transplanted to Gendorf by the fortunes of war. At the end of the tour he even offered them some cleaning products for their vehicles.

  The unit’s commanding officer was still a little suspicious, however, and so put the chemist under arrest until he was cleared with headquarters. When, after several days, the officer had heard nothing back from his superiors, he began to think that the man might indeed be as innocuous as he claimed. But fortunately someone had passed the circular announcing his arrest to Lieutenant Colonel Tarr, who dropped everything and rushed down to Bavaria as quickly as he could. During his debrief of Gerhard Schrader, Tarr had found out that the bulk of the IG’s chemical weapons production had taken place at Dyhernfurth, in Silesi
a, which was now under the control of the Red Army. It was vital therefore to know just what had been manufactured there and in what quantities. Otto Ambros would be just the person to tell him. His interrogation of the IG man had barely begun when a warrant for Ambros’s arrest as a suspected war criminal arrived from SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force). Ambros was to be transferred immediately to the “Ashcan” detention center at Mondorf-les-Bains in Luxembourg.

  Ambros never arrived. En route he and his escort were diverted into the French zone, where the authorities, presumably just as keen as the Americans and British to make use of his chemical weapons expertise, refused to let him go. And so there, for the moment, he stayed, working under French supervision at Ludwigshafen.*

  Other IG officials were picked up here and there in the following weeks and months, although their detention was necessarily an ad hoc and uncoordinated affair. In the summer of 1945 Germany was in a state of almost total chaos. Towns and cities were devastated. Roads, railways, bridges, and housing had been destroyed. Power, water, and telephone systems had collapsed and food was in desperately short supply. Two huge Allied armies sat amid the ruins of the once mighty Third Reich while millions of displaced persons, concentration camp inmates, freed slave laborers, and Allied POWs picked their way through them, trying to find a way home or at least to reach some kind of shelter. At the same time, fifty million German civilians waited in trepidation among the rubble to learn what their fate might be and millions more grim-faced German POWs were marching into huge mass holding camps for processing and screening. It seemed that most of Europe was on the move, a dusty, disheveled horde of the hungry and lame, homeless and exhausted, in search of something or someone—a meal, a loved one, or merely a place to lay their heads. In March 1945, just before the end, one prescient cynic had painted some graffiti on a Berlin wall, “Enjoy the war—the peace is going to be terrible.” But the reality was turning out to be worse than anyone had expected.