Hell's Cartel_IG Farben and the Making of Hitler's War Machine

by Diarmuid Jeffreys

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1. From Perkin’s Purple to Duisberg’s Drugs

  2. The Golden Years

  3. The Chemists’ War

  4. The Birth of a Colossus

  5. Bosch’s Plan

  6. Striking the Bargain

  7. Accommodation and Collaboration

  8. From Long Knives to the Four-Year Plan

  9. Preparing for War

  10. War and Profit

  11. Buna at Auschwitz

  12. IG Auschwitz and the Final Solution

  13. Götterdämmerung

  14. Preparing the Case

  15. Trial

  Epilogue

  Postscript

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Also by Diarmuid Jeffreys

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Laura and Joe

  PROLOGUE

  The courtroom was eerily familiar. Most of those in attendance had already seen the chamber in the newsreels or heard it described on the radio or read about it in the newspapers and photographic magazines. This was the place, after all, where only twelve months before, the most famous trial in history had been concluded, where twenty-one leading officials of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich had been called to account for crimes so unprecedented and dreadful that new legal definitions had to be found to describe them. Those men were now all gone, of course; gone to suicide, or to the executioner, or to long prison terms, or even, in the case of three of them, to acquittal and freedom—but their names continued to echo through the building and probably always would: Göring, Hess, Speer, Sauckel, Dönitz, Ribbentrop, Streicher, Frank, Jodl, Keitel, Rosenberg, Schacht, Kaltenbrunner …

  Now another tribunal was getting under way at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, a new drama that, like its more famous precursor, promised to address many important questions and consequently, on this first day at least, was attracting almost as much attention. The court was packed. Three hundred spectators had been squeezed into the public gallery and demand for places in the press section was so fierce that reporters had to draw lots for a seat or else retire to an adjoining corridor to listen to the proceedings over a loudspeaker.

  Those who remained gazed down on the full cast assembled in the wood-paneled chamber below. For much of the morning the many supporting players had been the most active: the functionaries, clerks, translators, technicians, and military police of the war crimes trial administrative staff who would be responsible for the smooth running of things in the weeks and months to come. Although it wasn’t strictly necessary for them all to be in court at the same time, it had become something of a tradition to turn up at key moments in important cases and they had all found excuses to be here, bustling about with the papers and equipment that helped to justify their presence.

  At the head of the room, four solemn-faced gray-haired judges sat behind a long elevated wooden desk. One was polishing his glasses on his black robe; another jotted notes on a block of yellow paper. The other two were whispering to each other, perhaps discussing the curious history of their “bench.” Two years earlier, for a few riotous weeks, GIs from the U.S. Army’s First Infantry Division had used it as a bar. Up above, in a space once reserved for a glowering portrait of the Führer, they had hung a picture of the movie star Lana Turner in a provocatively tight sweater. Now the only decoration was a large Stars and Stripes on a stand behind the president’s chair.

  In the central well of the court, the sixty lawyers of the defense team and the dozen or so men and women from the prosecution side sat around tables strewn with documents and law books. Professionally at home in this environment and not easily given to betraying nervousness or anticipation, they were making a languorous show of adjusting their headphones and squaring off their papers.

  The twenty-three defendants sat behind them in a two-tiered dock raised to the eye level of the judges. A couple were writing notes, but most were looking around in bemused indignation as though they couldn’t quite believe where they were. Earlier that morning they had been taken out of their cells and marched along the covered walkway that connected the jail with the court building. The subsequent two hours had passed in something of a blur. First they had been told to stand as the judges were announced and they came face-to-face with the men who would decide their fate. Then a spokesman for their counsel had tried, with great bluster but no obvious expectation of success, to get the trial postponed on the grounds that the defense had not been given sufficient time and resources to adequately prepare. When the motion was denied, a court official had passed among them with a microphone on a long pole and they were asked to answer the charges. Had they been served with a copy of the indictment in German and had they read it? If so, how did they plead? Each of them had replied “Not guilty” but only one or two had made this statement with any real show of defiance. Everyone else just wanted the real proceedings to begin.

  A low, expectant murmur rippled through the public gallery as a crisply uniformed figure got to his feet at the prosecution table and walked across to a lectern in the center of the court. A clerk glanced up at a clock on the wall and made a note of the time. It was shortly before noon on August 27, 1947.

  “May it please the tribunal.”

  As he waited for silence to fall, General Telford Taylor looked across at the men in the dock. They were all older than him, most well into middle age and conservatively dressed in suits and ties. Although they had been in custody for some months and a few had an obvious prison pallor, to his eye they still seemed to exude an air of affronted authority. In another setting they might have been taken for a group of civic dignitaries brought together for a commemorative photograph and tediously detained for a few minutes longer than was necessary. Taylor knew that what he was about to say, and how he said it, could change their lives for better or for worse. He dearly hoped it would be for worse. It had taken a considerable effort to get these men into court: exhausting months of planning and preparation, of frustrating searches for evidence and witnesses, of sifting through thousands of pages of arcane technical documents in an alien language and reading hundreds of statements about shocking crimes. The process had taken a toll on his patience and left him with little sympathy for the lords of IG Farben.

  He looked back at the judges and continued.

  The grave charges in this case have not been laid before the Tribunal casually or unreflectingly. The indictment accuses these men of major responsibility for visiting upon mankind the most searing and catastrophic war in modern history. It accuses them of wholesale enslavement, plunder and murder. These are terrible charges; no man should underwrite them frivolously or vengefully or without deep and humble awareness of the responsibility, which he thereby shoulders. There is no laughter in this case, neither is there any hate.…

  The world around us bears not the slightest resemblance to the Elysian Fields. The face of this continent is hideously scarred and its voice is a bitter snarl; everywhere man’s work lies in ruins and the standard of human existence is purgatorial. The first half of this century has been a black er
a; most of its years have been years of war or of open menace or of painful aftermath and he who seeks today to witness oppression, violence or warfare need not choose his direction too carefully nor travel very far. Shall it be said, then, that all of us, including these defendants, are but children of a poisoned span? And does the guilt for the wrack and torment of these times defy apportionment?

  It is all too easy thus to settle back with a philosophic shrug or a weary sigh. Resignation and detachment may be inviting, but they are a fatal abdication. God gave us this earth to be cultivated as a garden, not to be turned into a stinking pit of rubble and refuse. If the times be out of joint, that is not accepted as a divine scourge, or the working of an inscrutable fate which men are powerless to affect. At the root of these troubles are human failings and they are only to be overcome by purifying the soul and exerting the mind and body.…

  The crimes with which these men are charged were not committed in rage or under the stress of sudden temptation; they were not the slips or lapses of otherwise well-ordered men. One does not build a stupendous war machine in a fit of passion, nor an Auschwitz factory during a passing spasm of brutality. What these men did was done with the utmost deliberation and would, I venture to surmise, be repeated should the opportunity to recur. There will be no mistaking the ruthless purposefulness with which the defendants embarked upon their course of conduct.

  As General Taylor’s words rang through the court, they transfixed the spectators up in the now hushed gallery. They were an eclectic group, with a strong multinational flavor. Some were his professional peers from the Nuremberg war crimes community who had dragged themselves away from their overburdened desks and the lunch tables at the Grand Hotel to see how the new American chief prosecutor would handle this difficult brief.* Others had traveled hundreds or even thousands of miles to be there. A special train from Berlin had brought a sizable contingent from the British, French, and American military administrations, and yet more had come from London and Paris and Washington: legal observers and civil servants tasked with sending regular reports back to their political masters.† Together they greatly outnumbered the few Germans present, relatives and friends of the defendants and one or two of their former colleagues and employees who were brave enough to show their support. Otherwise, there had been no great demand for seats from the countrymen of the accused.

  This apparent indifference might seem curious given the gravity of the allegations that Taylor was laying out before the court—“Planning, Preparation, Initiation and Waging of Wars of Aggression and Invasions of Other Countries,” “Plunder and Spoliation,” and “Slavery and Mass Murder” were just some of the headlines in the indictment. But there was little appetite in what was left of this shattered country for more soul-searching. Outside in the Nuremberg streets, throughout the whole of Germany, in fact, people were more interested in clearing away the rubble and in trying to find food and tracking down missing relatives than in what they saw as another set piece denunciation of the war crimes committed in their name. If pressed, most would lay the blame for such things on Hitler and the other Nazi bigwigs or just shrug and deny any personal knowledge of atrocities. After all, twelve months earlier, here in Nuremberg, the international community had convicted Göring and the others of those crimes. Surely that had been enough? If the Americans wanted to pursue a vendetta against another group of Nazis, no one could stand in their way but, equally, no one was eager to get involved in more proceedings that brought back guilty and shameful memories or raised difficult questions about collective responsibility.

  In any case, as a few bolder skeptics muttered over their rationed ersatz beer in the city’s semiderelict Keller, why put these particular men on trial? The name of IG Farben might once have been instantly recognizable as a proud symbol of the nation’s industrial virility but that, on its own, was no evidence of a crime. Nor was the status of its executives, scientists, and technicians, however exalted the prosecution might claim them to be. If they had worked hard in the nation’s interest in time of war, then surely they had done no more than their patriotic counterparts in Britain and America. It was well known that some of the accused had been responsible for great advances in chemistry and medicine. To suggest that such men could have had any personal influence over the catastrophic events of the past few years or had been directly involved in the grotesque excesses of the Nazi regime was absurd. Laying such charges at the doors of the SS and Gestapo or even the Wehrmacht was one thing; it was something else entirely to point a finger at ordinary businessmen and scientists who were only doing their duty to country and company, probably under duress. Shouldn’t the Americans be focusing their energies and attention on the Bolsheviks instead? The Soviet Union—that was the real menace now.

  These were all wearisomely familiar objections to the prosecution team; they had been hearing much the same things from their own side for weeks and expected to hear them again from the defense in the months to come. But Taylor and his colleagues were convinced they better understood the true nature of the men in the dock. Far from being humble businessmen, the twenty-three defendants and the vast organization they controlled had been fundamental to the success of the Nazi project. Knowingly, willingly, they had put the resources and expertise of Germany’s greatest industrial enterprise at the disposal of Adolf Hitler and his lieutenants. The consequences had been catastrophic for the whole world and that responsibility could not be set aside.

  As General Taylor paused to take a sip of water, a few of his colleagues looked down at the next paragraph in the text of their chief’s opening statement. If there was one passage in it that went to the heart of their case, summing up the motives, intentions, and culpability of the accused and the necessity of bringing them to justice, this was it. The defendants, Taylor attested, had had just one purpose in mind:

  To turn the German nation into a military machine and build it into an engine of destruction so terrifyingly formidable that Germany could, by brutal threats and, if necessary, by war, impose her will and dominion on Europe, and, later, on other nations beyond the seas. In this arrogant and supremely criminal adventure, the defendants were eager and leading participants. They joined in stamping out the flame of liberty, and in subjecting the German people to the monstrous, grinding tyranny of the Third Reich, whose purpose it was to brutalize the nation and fill the people with hate. They marshalled their imperial resources and focused their formidable talents to forge the weapons and other implements of conquest that spread the German terror. They were the warp and woof of the dark mantle of death that settled over Europe.

  * * *

  IN THE SIX DECADES since these words echoed through the Palace of Justice, the Third Reich has been studied and examined from almost every conceivable angle, resulting in a huge body of scholarly—and not so scholarly—appraisal and analysis about this one extraordinary period in history. Yet, remarkably, there are gaps still, facets of the story of Nazi Germany that have been neglected or glossed over or distorted by the passage of time. IG Farben occupies one of these gaps. Sixty years ago, America’s chief war crimes prosecutor stood before four judges and alleged that twenty-three employees of a privately owned chemical company bore a significant share of the responsibility for the suffering that Hitler and the Nazi regime visited on humanity. They were, he said, “the men who made war possible … the magicians who made the fantasies of Mein Kampf come true.” Even allowing for juridical hyperbole, this was an astonishing claim that one might have expected to ring down the years. But it hasn’t. Outside of a dedicated circle of specialist historians and a shrinking group of individuals with some personal reasons for remembering, few people today have more than a vague idea of what IG Farben actually was (the name is actually a short form of Interessen Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft, which can be loosely translated as the Community of Interests of Dye-Making Companies) or the extent to which its executives may have been involved in the events described by the prosecution at N
uremberg. Those with an interest in the history of the Third Reich might have heard something about the concern’s financial support for Hitler, or its production of synthetic fuel and rubber that allowed the Wehrmacht to move across Europe, or its use of slave labor and its association with the horrors of Auschwitz. But much else about the IG—its extraordinary origins and evolution, its enormous political and economic significance to prewar Germany, its innovative science and ruthless business practices, and, above all, the complex reasons behind its slow but inexorable descent into moral bankruptcy—has been either forgotten or ignored.

  Perhaps this is not completely surprising. IG Farben is no more. A company that was once as internationally famous as Microsoft is today effectively ceased to exist at the end of 1945 (although for reasons that will become clear it didn’t vanish entirely until 2003). When so much of the appraisal of Nazi Germany is focused on Hitler and his immediate subordinates, the political and military aspects of World War II, and, of course, the ghastly atrocities of the Holocaust, perhaps some things are bound to get sidelined. But this is a matter of great regret. IG Farben’s story is as important and relevant today (uncannily so, some might say) as it was when General Taylor addressed the court at Nuremberg. It deserves to be remembered.

  At IG Farben’s prewar zenith in the 1930s, it would have seemed inconceivable that its star might wane one day or that the combine might ever be forgotten. The business was then a mighty corporate colossus, a vast, sprawling octopus of an organization with tentacles reaching to every major country. Its domination of the global chemical industry—one of the twentieth century’s most significant economic, political, and scientific fields of endeavor—was profound and all-encompassing. Through a complex network of subsidiaries, holdings, and international partnerships, it controlled the production and sale of many of the world’s most vital commodities. Its tens of thousands of products included pharmaceuticals, intermediate chemicals, dyestuffs, explosives, camera film, fertilizers, light metals, fuels, plastics, rayon, synthetic rubber, magnetic recording tape, paints, pesticides, lightbulbs, auto tires, safety matches, detergents and cleaning products, poison gases, and much, much more. Although it was only—only—the fourth-largest industrial concern in the world (after America’s General Motors, U.S. Steel, and Standard Oil), it was the largest in Europe and so strategically important to Germany that a chancellor of the Weimar Republic, Gustav Stresemann, had once declared, “Without coal and IG Farben I can have no foreign policy.”