Hell's Cartel

by Diarmuid Jeffreys

  *Famously, the Jewish Sonderkommando who had been ordered to destroy the crematoria rose in revolt on October 7, 1944, knowing that, once the SS had obliterated traces of the killing apparatus, they would be murdered as surviving witnesses. All but a handful were shot, hanged, or tortured to death.

  †Denis Avey managed to slip away from the POW column after days of marching through the snow in Czechoslovakia and Austria and then spent several weeks on the run, somehow crossing Germany behind enemy lines in the depths of winter. At one point he even crept through the outskirts of Nuremberg, where the Waffen SS were preparing barricades and artillery positions for a last-ditch defense and the Gestapo was executing deserters. When he finally met up with the Americans he was desperately weak and on the verge of starvation. The RAF flew him back to England but he refused to stay more than a few hours in the army reception center and slipped out to hitch a ride to his family home. Mentally and physically shattered, he moved to Manchester after a few days and checked himself into a hospital. He would spend most of the next two years there; apart from having lost an eye, he was now suffering from tuberculosis and the long-term effects of malnutrition and exhaustion. Eventually, he went back to his old job as an engineer and even managed to become a very successful amateur three-day eventer on show horses. But for years he found it impossible to discuss Auschwitz: “We would sometimes see people being marched from the trains past our camp on the way to Birkenau. And when you see little kids, little children, and their mothers and you know they are going to go straight in and up the chimney … its something you never forget. I have been haunted by it all my life, but you just bury it.” His interview for this book in 2004 was one of the first times he had talked about his experiences since 1945.

  *It quickly became clear that the damage to Leverkusen was surprisingly slight. Despite fourteen air raids on the plant between May 1944 and March 1945, seven of which could be categorized as heavy, the bombs had torn down brick buildings rather than damaged machinery and only 15 percent of the factory was considered beyond repair. Indeed this was generally the story for much of German industry, with the exception of fuel and transportation. After the war, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reported that at most only about 20 percent of Germany’s extended wartime industrial capital had been destroyed. While large sections of residential and city center accommodations had been hit, bombers had often missed industrial sites in the suburbs. In 1945, for example, the Krupp works at Essen was producing more tanks than it ever had but it couldn’t get them to the troops at the front because the railway network had been destroyed.

  *The most famous achievement of Paperclip was probably the capture of Wernher von Braun and four hundred scientists from the V2 rocket center at Peenemünde, many of whom later became involved in the U.S. ballistic missile and space programs. In this case and in several others, the wartime record of those detained was of far less concern to the Allies than their expertise—despite the fact that many were ardent Nazis and there was often clear prima facie evidence of their involvement in war crimes. The detainees brought back to the UK were kept under heavy guard at Beltane School in Wimbledon, South London, otherwise known as “Inkpot.” The United States spread its German detainees around undisclosed locations in Washington, D.C., and Texas.

  *Many of the documents had no military value as such but were simply economic loot—patents and technical blueprints that were passed on to the chemical industries in Allied countries. It is not surprising that among the British investigators were several specialists from ICI, the IG’s erstwhile partner and rival.

  †Bütefisch, who seems to have been courteously treated, gave the BIOS investigators a detailed account of the IG’s synthetic fuel program, but he avoided saying anything about IG Auschwitz, except to dismiss it as an enterprise “financed with government money,” which was untrue. He also failed to mention that he had been in charge of its synthetic fuel program and had visited the site seven times.

  *The exact circumstances of Ambros’s handover to the French are shrouded in mystery because the Allies’ interest in anything to do with German chemical weaponry was kept very quiet. For this reason it cannot be said definitively that even small stocks of tabun and sarin were found at Gendorf or what may have happened to them if they were. However, it is known that quantities of the nerve agents were recovered from somewhere in Germany in July 1945 and brought back to Porton Down in England for analysis, and the most likely source of information leading to their recovery would have been Ambros. The gases weren’t hugely difficult to make, of course, as Ambros had earlier pointed out to Hitler, and it is highly likely that the Western powers would soon have begun producing them in any case. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, may also have acquired quantities of the gases from the IG-Anorgana Dyhernfurth plant in Silesia, although the SS made strenuous efforts to destroy stocks before the Red Army arrived.

  *Indeed, some lesser IG figures were initially sought more vigorously than Vorstand members because of their perceived economic value to the Allies. Walter Reppe was a case in point. One of Germany’s leading acetylene scientists before the war, he had developed a branch of chemistry that had enormous potential in the development of plastic. He had gone on to become plant leader at Ludwigshafen but was not directly implicated in war crimes as such. Nevertheless he was arrested and taken into custody in the summer of 1945. Colonel Ernest Gruhn, director of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency in Washington, in charge of the recruitment and exploitation of German scientists, then tried, unsuccessfully, to bring him to the United States. Reppe was eventually released and later joined the managing board of BASF.

  *One unsubstantiated story has it that the building had been spared Allied bombing because General Eisenhower wanted to use it as the headquarters of the U.S. occupation authority in Germany after the war.

  †To their consternation, Nuremberg investigators discovered that Struss had been unsupervised and that he had used wood-burning trucks to move the papers. How many hundreds of key IG files might have been sacrificed along the way is unclear.

  §Intelligence reports later suggested that this painting may have been looted from the Louvre.

  *The Royal Air Force had bombed Nuremberg heavily in January and March 1945. Then the city had been caught up in the fighting between the Germans and General Wade Haislip’s Fifteenth Corps. Both sides had shelled each other’s positions, causing immense damage.

  *The Americans also contemplated prosecuting the directors of Siemens, Bosch (the electrical manufacturers), the Deutsche Bank, Mannesmann, and dozens of other German companies, but lack of judicial resources and political support made it impossible to assemble cases.

  *The directive, which provoked widespread resentment among the German population, eventually proved too broad to be enforceable, although it did result in around 370,000 former Nazis being removed from their jobs before January 1947. By then, however, the Americans had begun turning over denazification proceedings in their zone to German tribunals and the rules were being more liberally interpreted. In 1950, a year after the Western zones of Germany had evolved into the Federal German Republic, U.S. High Commissioner John McCloy announced that 13 million people in the U.S. zone had been involved in denazification, with up to 930,000 subjected to some kind of penalty for their Nazi activities. Nevertheless, by that same year, many former Nazis had managed to find their way back into their old jobs—for example, around 85 percent of Nazi-era officials in Bavaria had been reinstated, and 60 percent of the civil servants of Baden-Württemberg were ex-Nazis.

  *Many civil servants in the UK, especially at the Foreign Office, felt much the same and their influence gradually diminished any appetite the Labour administration may have had for an industrialists’ trial in the British zone. This was despite the fact that Sir Hartley Shawcross and Elwyn Jones, the UK’s two leading lawyers at the IMT, thought that German industry had a case to answer. As a result, the only Nazi company director ever convicted by the British was Br
uno Tesch, of the Degesch sales agency Tesch and Stabenow, who had supplied Zyklon B to Auschwitz.

  *Some of these names may still be unfamiliar: Heinrich Oster was manager of the European nitrogen syndicate and had been an early proponent of cooperation with the Nazis; Max Brüggemann had been secretary to the Vorstand but was later severed from the trial for ill health.

  *This may have been true, of course, but not even in their own evidence had the IG directors ever tried to claim that the SS or the government had forced them to build their factory at Auschwitz.

  *Alfred Krupp was also among those released. His property and wealth were all restored to him.