Hell's Cartel

by Diarmuid Jeffreys

  This view, which was held with equal conviction by some conservative American critics of the U.S. military government, served only to encourage the legal team, working with the Subsequent Proceedings Division at Nuremberg, in their determination to bring IG executives and other business leaders to trial. They believed that unless it was shown that German industrialists had played a substantial role in bringing Hitler to power and taking the country to war, those industrialists might be tempted to try something similarly belligerent in the future. But the Republican Party had won a congressional majority in the election of late 1946, and now, led by the staunchly probusiness Senator Taft, right-wing members were beginning to express reservations about the need for additional tribunals in Germany when the real menace was Soviet Communism. The lawyers saw their window of opportunity closing and knew they had to move quickly to get the trials under way. Fortunately, their new chief was just the man to start things going.

  * * *

  IN MID - 1945 TELFORD TAYLOR was still a reserve colonel in U.S. Army Intelligence. He had spent much of the war based at Bletchley Park, in southern England, the site of Britain’s top-secret signal interception and code-breaking facility, which had played a significant role in defeating the Nazis by capturing and deciphering most of Germany’s Enigma traffic—the encrypted military message system used by the Wehrmacht, SS, Luftwaffe, and German navy. Taylor’s specific duty had been to guard the security of Ultra—as the Allies called the product of this code breaking—and oversee its distribution to the principal American army and air headquarters in Western Europe. It was a job of immense importance and responsibility that put Taylor in daily contact with the most important Allied secret of the war, and he won the Distinguished Service Medal for his performance.

  But in civilian life Taylor was an attorney. For ten years after his graduation from Harvard Law School in 1932, he had held a succession of federal legal positions, including a spell in 1939 as special assistant to the attorney general. It was in that capacity that he met Justice Robert Jackson, a former attorney general who had been appointed to the Supreme Court; Taylor even argued a case in front of him on one occasion. Consequently, Taylor was not completely surprised when, on returning to England in late April 1945 from a trip to General Patton’s headquarters, he found a message from his superiors at the War Department: Justice Jackson had been appointed by President Harry S. Truman to represent the United States at an international trial of war criminals that would be held when the war was over. He wanted Taylor to come work for him in Europe.

  Taylor was at first unsure about accepting. Though Germany was on the verge of defeat, the war with Japan continued and he was hoping to be reassigned to the Pacific theater. He also wanted to spend some time in the United States—he had become involved with a married British woman and needed to sort out his own marital situation at home. During a brief trip back to America to think things through, he was told categorically by his superiors that the war in Japan would not last long (he later surmised he was being given a clear hint about the atomic bomb) and that he was free, either to take up Jackson’s offer or to return to civilian life and the peace and quiet of private practice. He finally elected to go to Nuremberg.

  “Certainly I was not moved by vengeful or anti-German feelings,” he wrote later. “To be sure, I detested Nazism and had been in Germany a few weeks earlier when the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps were captured and the inmates liberated by American troops. But like so many others, I remained ignorant of the mass extermination camps in Poland and the full scope of the Holocaust did not dawn on me until several months later.” His decision was based simply on his feeling that he was not ready to return to civilian life. Indeed he would probably have joined any interesting American undertaking in Europe had it been offered.

  * * *

  AFTER A YEAR helping Jackson prosecute Göring, Hess, Speer, Ribbentrop, and the other top Nazi leaders, Telford Taylor understood a great deal more about the crimes of the Nazi regime and realized as well there was still much unfinished business. When his boss returned to the Supreme Court, Taylor accepted promotion to brigadier general and appointment as chief prosecutor for war crimes in Jackson’s place. One of his principal ambitions was to go after the men he believed had played a fundamental role in taking Germany to war—the men who had run IG Farben. He was set on bringing them to justice.

  He quickly discovered it would be no easy task. Prosecution lawyers had to be assembled, documentary evidence had to be gathered and collated, potential witnesses had to be tracked down and interviewed, decisions had to be taken as to exactly who should be indicted, what charges they would face, and what strategy should be followed to convince the court of their guilt. It was particularly important to get the last point right. Not long after he was appointed Taylor found out to his dismay that the judges being sent from the United States were not going to be of the first rank. He had hoped for federal judges at least, but Chief Justice Fred Vinson had decided their absence would be too disruptive to the judicial system back home. Instead the thirty men presiding over the trials that made up the Subsequent Proceedings at Nuremberg would be largely recruited from the faculties of law schools and from state courts, several of them from the conservative South and Midwest, with little or no experience or knowledge of international law, the recent history of Europe, or the complex issues involved. Although he was confident enough of their integrity, Taylor realized that developing arguments in front of such men was going to take patience and time and would make heavy demands on their powers of concentration.

  As far as the mechanics were concerned, Taylor would be in overall charge of the prosecution and would do what he could to keep it on course, but as there would be several trials under his command (the Krupp trial was to run almost simultaneously with the Farben trial, and others were in the pipeline), the day-to-day handling of each one would be delegated to a dedicated lead attorney. In the IG’s case, that role fell to Josiah E. DuBois. Recruited away from his newly established private practice in Camden, New Jersey, DuBois had worked for the U.S. Treasury for much of the war, including a long period as chief counsel in charge of tracking down the enemy’s financial assets. In that capacity he had gained an encyclopedic knowledge of IG Farben’s overseas dealings and had traveled widely in his attempts to freeze its funds, sequester its property, and limit its influence on the U.S. economy. He had also acted as counsel to the War Refugee Board, a cabinet committee set up by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1943 to see what could be done to rescue Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. Stubborn, committed, and used to handling the complex detail of business cases, he seemed eminently qualified to take on the IG—although whether his comparative lack of recent criminal trial experience would be a handicap remained to be seen. To support him, DuBois had a young, idealistic team of lawyers, some not long out of Harvard Law School and others who had spent the previous year assisting at the first Nuremberg trial. There were too few of them—twelve in all—and they would have to work in cramped and ill-equipped offices spread throughout the Palace of Justice, but Taylor was convinced that their mix of experience and youthful energy would be enough to get them through.

  * * *

  THE TEAM ENCOUNTERED obstacles right from the start. Putting together the broad outlines of a case against the IG may have seemed straightforward enough but getting the evidence to back it up was more difficult, as DuBois discovered on the evening he arrived at Nuremberg. He was met at the plane by two of his new colleagues, Drexel Sprecher and Belle Mayer. Sprecher had been at Nuremberg for several months and had worked as one of Justice Jackson’s administrative assistants during the Göring trial. Mayer was a more recent appointment but knew DuBois from a stint at the Treasury; indeed she had recommended that Telford Taylor approach him when an earlier nominee for lead prosecutor had been called home. On the drive back through the unlit streets of the bomb-shattered city the two lawyers explained that while thousands of IG documents had been
recovered, mainly from among the cache Ernst Struss had taken from Frankfurt to Griesheim a year earlier, most of them were of only general relevance.

  Then Mayer told DuBois of a visit to Berlin she’d made a few days earlier. She was looking for the IG’s NW7 offices but when she arrived she found the building in ruins and no documents anywhere to be seen. She then picked up a rumor that the Russians had taken them away for storage in an abandoned castle at Gross Behnitz, near Berlin. The two GIs she sent to investigate had found a sealed room—sealed, according to the on-site guard, on the orders of Swedish diplomats—but they broke in anyway and found it empty. Just why the Swedes had locked the room was a complete mystery and when their legation was contacted they denied all knowledge of the affair, as did the Russians. Mayer could only surmise that either the rumor had been false or perhaps Hermann Schmitz, who reportedly had a large personal fortune in Sweden, had somehow used his influence to spirit them away to some other location. To be on the safe side, Mayer had arranged for yet more GIs to take a steam shovel to the NW7 site to sift through the rubble, but she wasn’t hopeful of finding anything.

  The empty room was only one of many such dead ends. Investigators had also followed up reports that Max Ilgner had arranged for two railcars full of documents to be taken from Berlin to the Hoechst plant at Frankfurt. They had unearthed a rail docket for the journey but no documents. Nor was there yet any trace of paperwork from Auschwitz. They suspected that Walter Dürrfeld and Max Faust had destroyed some of it in the days before IG staff had been evacuated, but surely other documents would have been brought back to Germany. Where they may have gotten to was anyone’s guess. Even the photograph album of Auschwitz that Major Tilley had reported seeing in Hermann Schmitz’s personal safe had now disappeared.

  For several months, frustrated prosecutors chased here and there across Germany in search of files that they knew from impounded indices had once existed but had now vanished into thin air. Indeed it wasn’t until the trial was well under way that Duke Minskoff, one of the prosecution team, stumbled on clear evidence of what might have happened to them. Like DuBois a former Treasury Department lawyer, Minskoff had spent a few months in Germany in 1945 on the trail of the personal assets of the Nazi leadership. On that trip he had famously managed to get Göring’s wife, Emma, to reveal the whereabouts of $500,000 worth of jewels and precious stones and a large amount of cash that the Reich marshal had hidden away as a nest egg. But the IG case was refusing to reveal its secrets. Minskoff and his colleagues had been obsessed by the missing papers, but all his attempts to track them down had ended in failure. Then one day during a routine visit to the IG storage facility at Griesheim he got a break: a junior IG staff member let slip that truckloads of documents had been sent to Ludwigshafen in late 1946. The U.S. officer in charge then admitted, somewhat shamefacedly, that he had sanctioned the shipments on the understanding that they were exclusively technical papers and patents needed for manufacturing purposes.

  The lawyer hurried down to Ludwigshafen and asked the French plant overseers to order IG clerks to check the files. After a long wait, he learned that some documents had indeed been delivered but they had been sent to the purchasing department for destruction. Minskoff talked next to the purchasing manager, who admitted that he had been given eighteen crates of documents but that they had all since been pulped and recycled because there was a paper shortage. Besides, the documents were nothing but orders and invoices for equipment at Ludwigshafen, he insisted, and thus were of no possible value. A search of his department, however, revealed that he had kept some of the empty file folders. When Minskoff looked at them he found ten that were marked with the word Auschwitz.

  His tail now up, the lawyer finally persuaded one of Otto Ambros’s secretaries to talk. Eventually she admitted that from early 1946, when Ambros was first brought to Ludwigshafen by the French, until May 1947, when they reluctantly handed him over to the Americans, the IG director had used his office as a gathering point for all sorts of records sent from IG divisions elsewhere. These had subsequently been destroyed. Ambros had also conducted a lengthy secret correspondence with other IG executives, using code names to get the letters past the French and American censors. She couldn’t remember all the names, but she knew that Walter Dürrfeld had been Heribert, Max Faust had been Posth, Christian Schneider was Muth, while Carl Wurster was Stutt. Ambros himself had been Bargemann. She then described how on one specific occasion in early 1947 she and other panicking IG staff had deliberately frustrated prosecution document hunters.

  When, on 20 February, I saw a car that obviously belonged to the Nuremberg trials standing in front of the Ludwigshafen plant, I ordered my assistant, Miss Reither, to hide all the documents, which seemed to me to be of importance. Miss Reither took the documents one floor higher and wanted to put them into the wardrobe of an employee, a Mr. Kern. Mr. Kern did not want to have the documents in his wardrobe and thus they were hidden in a wall cupboard. I then called the apartment of Dr. Alt [Ambros’s personal assistant] and gave orders to hide one box there.

  The papers, she insisted, had since been destroyed

  Not every trail led down a cul-de-sac. Just before the case went to trial, the indefatigable Belle Mayer, who had never completely given up on the IG’s Berlin office papers, unearthed a U.S. Army shipping docket at the old Farben headquarters in Frankfurt. It turned out that in late May 1945, shortly after joining up with the Russians in Berlin, an American combat unit had impounded a mass of documents from the NW7 address, part of a general sweep of every official-looking building they could find. The papers had been sent back to the War Department in Washington with thousands of other captured files and were dumped, unsorted and unchecked, into an army warehouse in Alexandria. Then they were promptly forgotten.

  Cheered on by Telford Taylor and Josiah DuBois, Mayer took the next available flight to the States. She called DuBois a few days later. A preliminary search had uncovered hundreds of potentially incriminating documents, including a mass of procurement orders from the Wehrmacht to the IG. The find was by no means everything they were looking for but it was certainly a massive boost to their case. The documents were shipped back to Germany and along with thousands of others—memos, reports, letters, telegrams, and accounts—were translated and painstakingly reviewed by the lawyers and their assistants.

  Paper evidence wasn’t everything, of course. The prosecution team also traveled many thousands of miles across war-shattered Europe looking for witnesses whose testimony might be useful. They even flew to Britain to find POWs who had managed to live through the SS march out of Auschwitz. Some, like Denis Avey, were just too devastated by their experiences to talk to them, but they interviewed several others. They also managed to track down a handful of Jewish survivors who had somehow emerged from the camps, against all the odds, and all the owners and managers of the factories in occupied Europe taken over by the IG. Then they went in search of Germans—former IG workers, whom they thought might be willing to testify, civil servants, Wehrmacht officers, chemical industry experts, and hundreds of others whose recollections might be important. And every day the prosecutors asked themselves, “Do we have enough to secure convictions?”

  It was a good question. After four months, DuBois still was not completely sure he had a winnable case. It wasn’t that the evidence didn’t exist; his lawyers had actually pieced together a remarkably full and damaging record of IG Farben’s relationship with the regime. But he also knew this trial would be like no other at Nuremberg. The IG executives were about as far removed from the stereotypical view of jackbooted Nazis as it was possible to get. To any neutral observer they would come over as well-educated, respectable, conservative businessmen and scientists—one of them had even won a Nobel Prize. To put such men into the dock in front of judges who had led a comparatively sheltered life in provincial America, one had to be absolutely sure that their sophisticated veneer could be broken down. The proof had to be compelling.

&nbs
p; * * *

  MUCH WOULD CENTER on the validity of the very first statements the IG executives had made to officials in the days after their arrest. Some of these could be construed as highly incriminating but it was hard to know whether they would be accepted in court. U.S. Army teams had arrested most of the men well before the prosecution was appointed, and the initial interviews had been carried out in less than ideal conditions. None of the men’s statements had been made under oath and there was always a chance that some of them might be contested on the grounds that they were made under duress—an issue of particular significance because the case was going to be fought under American law and the Fifth Amendment would apply. By the time the prosecutors got around to interviewing the men again, they had been able to consult their lawyers. Now, when they deigned to answer questions at all, their answers were either noncommittal or strongly worded rebuttals of prosecution attempts to get them to admit any wrongdoing: They had been acting under orders, they said. Hitler’s grip on power had been such that no one dared oppose him or his Nazi henchmen. They had joined the party only because not to do so would have made them liable to investigation by the Gestapo. If foreign workers had been subjected to abuse, they had nothing to do with it. No, they hadn’t known that people were being murdered at Auschwitz. No, they were not in the least bit anti-Semitic and had always worked to help their Jewish employees. No, they had not stolen foreign companies’ assets. Any foreign takeovers they were involved in were legitimate business transactions. No, they hadn’t supplied medicines for medical experiments. A chemical weapons program? Nonsense, that was something that the army had pursued on its own.… The uniform responses showed that a carefully coordinated defense strategy was being prepared: Say nothing. Admit nothing. If the Americans think they have a case, let them prove it. But do not incriminate yourself.