*Unable or unwilling to fade into decent obscurity, Schleicher had begun to dabble in politics again.
*Röhm was taken into custody for a few hours before being shot in a cell at Stadelheim prison, near Munich.
†Papen himself survived; indeed, after a brief period of house arrest, he accepted the post of German ambassador to Vienna from the people who had murdered his friends. Former chancellor Heinrich Brüning was equally fortunate. He had slipped out of the country in May after being tipped off that he was marked for murder.
§The SA continued after the Röhm purge under different leadership but it was never the same force again. The SS, of course, emerged from the SA’s shadow as an independent organization under the leadership of its Reichsführer, Heinrich Himmler. It would eventually become a much stronger rival to the army than the brownshirts had ever been.
*Duisberg’s legacy to the IG wasn’t restricted to drugs, dyes, and scientific discoveries. He also left three sons. Carl Jr. served on the IG’s supervisory board, Curt followed in his father’s footsteps in the pharmacy department at Leverkusen, and Walter, an American citizen from 1933, became vice president and treasurer of the American IG.
*Actually, Hitler had persuaded his compliant cabinet to prepare this decree the day before Hindenburg’s death, a treasonable and illegal act according to the German constitution as it then stood.
*The word buna was an amalgamation of the first two letters for the molecule butadiene and Na, the chemical symbol for the element sodium.
*Göring was not slow to exploit the many opportunities for personal enrichment that his new responsibilities opened up—in the form of bribes and inducements from manufacturers and financiers. He wasn’t the only one to benefit. Because so much of Göring’s time was to be devoted to the Four-Year Plan, Hitler decided to pass his ministerial responsibilities for the police to Heinrich Himmler. With a portfolio that now encompassed the SS, the Gestapo, and concentration camps for political opponents, Himmler was becoming a force to be reckoned with—and someone with whom the IG would eventually have to work.
*Unlike Krauch, Eckell resigned from the IG and became a full-time civil servant on the government payroll.
†In 1938, frustrated by the steel industry’s opposition, Göring set up a state-owned steel manufacturer, the Hermann Göring Werke.
*For the IG, the Spanish civil war was an opportunity to assess the performance of its synthetic aviation fuel, supplied to the Luftwaffe as part of the 1933 Benzinvertrag.
*Bosch questioned the Führer’s grasp of economics during a speech at the Deutsches Museum in Munich on May 7, 1939. As punishment he was removed from the institution’s board and prohibited from making speeches without permission.
*What effect the revelation had on Ollendorf’s opinion of his “old friend” isn’t recorded, but there is a strangely satisfying symmetry in the fact that, not long after Ollendorf managed to get out of Germany, Gajewski was himself interrogated by the Gestapo. According to the historian Peter Hayes, during a tour of local Nazi officials at the IG’s Wolfen plant in September 1939, Gajewski made some injudicious remarks about the viability of a plan that the Führer had endorsed to make paper and fabric from potato skins. The words were reported and Gajewski was hauled in for a few hours’ questioning. He was warned to watch his behavior in the future.
*All of this, of course, was in stark contrast to the steadily improving conditions being enjoyed by the IG’s “German workers” as a consequence of the cartel’s work for the Four-Year Plan. The rapid expansion in the IG’s manufacturing capacity led to great labor shortages and in concert with the regime, which was desperate to maintain industrial productivity, the company set up various incentive schemes to motivate and reward staff. Foreign holidays, weekend breaks at Strength through Joy (Kraft durch Freude) camps, cinema and theater tickets, mystery tours, and prizes of sports equipment were all on offer to “comrades” who showed especial dedication to the cause of meeting the firm’s targets. Organized by Labor Front representatives within each plant, these trinkets were nominally awarded on the recommendation of the factory boss and the personnel department, but they seem to have been less popular or significant than the increased pay the company was forced to offer to hang on to its most skilled staff. The IG wasn’t the only large manufacturer striving to meet onerous targets in the later 1930s, and though the Nazi bureaucracy was beginning to limit labor mobility, it was still possible for specialist workers to shop around for the best job. The situation became critical in some IG plants and managers were forced to ask for drafts of conscript labor—the Nazi Party’s remedy for the habitually unemployed—to fill in the gaps. The cartel even abandoned its long-standing reluctance to hire women. In 1938, for example, out of a combined workforce of seventeen thousand at Ludwigshafen and Oppau there were just over one hundred female employees. A year later this number had grown to over a thousand.
*As for the efficacy of these efforts, Nazi propaganda—from a variety of sources—certainly played a part in keeping Latin America neutral during much of the Second World War and the large and wealthy expatriate German community to which IG staff belonged was effective at influencing government policy, but the concern was not the only German business with interests in the region.
*The Luftwaffe was not yet totally dependent on the IG’s synthetic fuel and the Air Ministry continued to add to its stocks of traditional aviation gasoline by purchasing abroad through neutral agencies for as long as it was able. These stocks were quickly diminishing, however, because the Luftwaffe’s fleet of planes was constantly expanding, more aerial training was being undertaken, and combat missions were still being flown on General Franco’s behalf in Spain.
*Several days before the Anschluss, Paul Haefliger, the IG’s principal international negotiator, warned a colleague in Paris to get out of France, apparently because the imminent German takeover of Austria might trigger a more general war. At Nuremberg, prosecutors suggested that Haefliger’s prescience was clear evidence that the IG had advance knowledge of what was about to happen. They also alleged that on the day before German troops crossed the border, the IG executive had attended a company mobilization conference and recommended moving the concern’s headquarters from Frankfurt to Berlin because of the dangerous proximity of the French. Haefliger responded that he had been working on “assumptions” until the Anschluss and then “we realized suddenly that—like a stroke of lightening from a clear sky—a matter which one had taken more or less theoretically could become deadly serious.”
*Von Schnitzler wasn’t alone in establishing links to the SS leadership. Heinrich Bütefisch, the IG’s synthetic fuel genius and part-time SS colonel, became a member of Himmler’s Circle of Friends, a group of around thirty-six influential individuals from industry, party, and government who gathered regularly to discuss matters of interest to the Reichsführer.
*Nuremberg prosecutors found this folder among the few IG documents about the deal to survive the war. When ter Meer’s words were read out in court, Otto Ambros started giggling. Clearly, that summer in Paris still evoked fond memories.
*A few days after ICI’s connections to IG Farben first came up at the Nuremberg trial, an internal British Foreign Office memo noted gratefully, “The Times discreetly omits reference to ICI Ltd.”
*For all the discomfort these drafts of foreign workers endured in the early years of the war, most of them were from “civilized” western or southern Europe and were treated accordingly: their suffering was modest when compared with that of the Poles, Russians, and Jews who later fell into the IG’s hands.
*According to Weiss’s 1923 agreement with Bayer (taken over by IG Farben in 1925), Cafiaspirina was manufactured at Leverkusen and sold by Sterling in South America, with Weiss’s company receiving 25 percent of the profits.
†The extraordinary range of the cartel’s business interests in the region was later demonstrated at Nuremberg, when prosecutors listed 117 different Central and South
American subsidiaries, trading partners, sales agencies, and other businesses in which the IG had some kind of stake. Dozens more firms from the area were excluded from the list because investigators had been unable to establish the exact nature of their connection to the IG.
*The British government was curiously uninterested in the news that one of America’s top businessmen was proposing to attend a meeting with a representative of a country with which it was now officially at war.
*In British POW slang, “stripeys” could be political prisoners, criminals, or Jews, but not the POWs themselves. Kommando was camp parlance for a work gang, which could be up to fifty inmates.
*Heydebreck later became the site for an IG synthetic fuel plant.
*In July 1940, as a reward for the victories in Poland and France, Hitler had appointed Göring a Reich marshal, the highest possible rank in the German armed forces.
*Children, being less productive, would be furnished at a cost of RM 1.5 for each nine- to eleven-hour shift they worked.
*The Gestapo had destroyed the synagogue in 1939.
*The IG managers back in Germany were also given the chance to enjoy Höss’s company. He made frequent trips to Leuna and Ludwigshafen, so that he “would be in a better position to utilize the labor of concentration camp inmates.”
*Many of them, of course, had been specifically marked to die. For example, the SS had brought several hundred Russian army commissars to Auschwitz explicitly for the purpose of working them to death in the district’s gravel pits.
*Himmler had coveted this role for himself but his irritation was allayed by the fact that Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister who had made no secret of holding similar ambitions, was also disappointed.
*Set up before the war by Fritz Todt, a civil engineer, to carry out the Nazis’ autobahn construction program, the Organisation Todt used conscript labor to build and repair roads, railways, military fortifications such as the West Wall, and various other public works. Appointed armaments minister in March 1940, Todt was killed in a plane crash in February 1942 and was succeeded by Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer.
*Himmler had ambitions to boost the economic interests of the SS and saw armaments production at Auschwitz and other camps as one way to do this. But aside from some small-scale production of skis and ammunition crates for the Wehrmacht, the project never really got off the ground; the SS did not possess the requisite financing, raw materials, machinery, or specialist expertise. The Reichsführer was also opposed by the armaments minister, Albert Speer, who later recalled: “Himmler wanted to turn the concentration camps into vast modern factories, especially for the manufacture of weapons, directly subordinate to the SS.… Hitler, however, took my side. Our pre-war experience in dealing with SS plants that made bricks and processed granite had already been sufficiently off-putting.”
*Not that the survivors gained much from this reprieve. If they didn’t die at the hands of their SS guards or their kapos or succumb to disease, malnutrition, and overwork, the vast majority would fail one of the future selections that regularly took place within the camp population to make room for new arrivals. On average their lives were extended by around three months, a period of intense cruelty, hardship, and deprivation that in most cases could have only one end.
*The Reichsführer had good reason to be in a sunny mood. The day before, Hitler had told him the Russians would be defeated by Christmas and had confirmed that Himmler would be in overall control of Germanizing the Russian territories.
*Over a hundred thousand corpses were thrown into these pits in the course of a few weeks; eventually the bodies were exhumed and burned to prevent local water supplies from becoming contaminated.
*The IG initially assumed responsibility for food because it wanted to control links between Monowitz and the typhus-ridden other camps. Had it not done so the food would have been delivered several times a day from Birkenau and the disease would have surely come with it.
*Of the two thousand who arrived on the January 23 transport, only three survived the war.
†The Labor Office was part of the SS WVHA, or Main Economic-Administrative Office.
*As is now known, the Nazi authorities went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that the transport of Jews went smoothly, even attempting to persuade potential deportees that good, honest work and pleasant conditions awaited them in the East. In December 1942, for example, Dutch Jews received postcards purporting to come from people who had already been sent to the IG camp at Monowitz. They reported, “The food is good, with hot lunches, cheese, and jam sandwiches in the evenings.… We have central heating and sleep under two blankets. There are magnificent shower arrangements with hot and cold water.”
*The corpses were thrown onto a platform to the side of the parade ground, where they would lie, in full view of their fellow inmates, until collection by truck from Birkenau a couple of days later. Rudolf Vitek later said, “It was no rare occurrence that detachments of 400 to 500 men brought back with them in the evening five to twenty corpses.”
*Officially, prisoners were allowed almost no belongings other than their wooden shoes, underclothes, and striped costumes. These had all been worn by others many times before and, never having been washed, were invariably filthy, lousy, tattered, and torn. Nevertheless, on pain of a beating or worse from a camp guard, any obvious deficiency—such as a missing button—had to be replaced before it was spotted. How prisoners were supposed to do this without the necessary means is anyone’s guess, but somehow they found ways. Prisoners were also issued a battered metal bowl for meals, but no spoon, and new inmates usually had to give away some of their ration to acquire one that had been fashioned secretly out of scrap metal or wood. Inevitably, thefts of all these items were rife and there was a thriving black market in any detritus that might prove useful.
*When Germany began to collapse in early 1945 the IG systematically destroyed several thousand documents to prevent them from falling into Allied hands. Clearly, there is no way of knowing for certain what was in those documents but Nuremberg prosecutors believed that many of them referred to Auschwitz.
*Carl Krauch, on the other hand, visited only once. Nevertheless, he was so enamored of the operation that when the possibility of another synthetic fuel factory arose in July 1943 he wrote to Himmler in his capacity as chairman of the IG’s Aufsichtsrat: “Dear Reichsführer, I was particularly pleased to hear during this discussion you hint that you may possibly aid the expansion of another synthetic factory … in a similar way as was done at Auschwitz, by making available inmates of your camps, if necessary. I have also written to Minister Speer to this effect and would be grateful if you would continue sponsoring and aiding us in this matter.… Heil Hitler.” Nothing came of the plan.
*According to the accounts, the IG’s dividends on its Degesch holdings for 1942, 1943, and 1944 (the years of the Final Solution) were double those for 1940 and 1941.
*Mengele also experimented on adults. Although it is hard to be certain of the numbers, it is believed that several thousand people died as a result of his “research.”
*SS doctors Waldemar Hoven and Helmuth Vetter were sentenced to death for their crimes.
*As it happened the Allies hadn’t yet produced tabun and sarin, although the British had a stockpile of thirty-two thousand tons of mustard gas and phosgene by 1944—sufficient to poison almost one thousand square miles of German territory. It is not known whether the USSR had developed the deadlier nerve agents, although both sides went on to produce them during the cold war, using captured German scientific know-how.
*Ultimately, the repairs proved fruitless. By April 1945 sixty-five enemy air raids had hit the plants at Ludwigshafen and Oppau, causing an estimated RM 400 million worth of damage and leaving only 6 percent of 1,470 buildings unscathed.
*Despite the deprivation, it has to be said that conditions for IG Farben’s civilian foreign workers in Germany were at least on a par with those for workers at other giant Germ
an corporations, such as Krupp, the Hermann Göring Werke, and Siemens, and in some cases were marginally better. Drexel Sprecher, a member of the U.S. prosecution team at Nuremberg, concluded that Krupp’s exploitation of slave labor, with its “sadism, senseless barbarity, and shocking treatment of dehumanized material,” was even worse than that of the IG. But there were no saints in this game. By the end of 1944, over seven and a half million civilian foreigners—men, women, and children—were working in the Third Reich’s mines, factories, and fields, and countless numbers of them were degraded, beaten, starved, and murdered by their employers.
*The death camps, closed because the Russians were drawing closer and the Reich’s need for Jewish labor was increasing, had been run at a profit. Hans Globocknik, the SS officer in charge of Operation Reinhard, gave a final accounting to Heinrich Himmler in December 1943. The overall value of cash and goods taken from those murdered was in excess of RM 180 million.
*As a qualified chemist, Levi had managed after a few months to get menial work inside an IG laboratory at the plant. Although his living conditions and diet were no better than before, he was spared some of the worst of the backbreaking work that killed so many others.
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