With its plants running smoothly, IG Farben was finally able to focus on the foreign markets it had neglected in the last few weeks of peace. The cartel’s erstwhile overseas partners welcomed the prospect of renewed engagement, but they were soon to find out that a relationship with a wartime IG came with some unexpected strings attached.
* * *
THE EVENTS of September 1939 came as a shock to William E. Weiss of Sterling Products, Inc. Since his deal with Carl Duisberg in the 1920s he had maintained good relations with IG Bayer. The two companies squabbled occasionally over who owned exactly which rights to the Bayer brand in which countries, and sometimes lawyers had to argue matters out in court, yet Weiss never let these disputes get in the way of his personal friendships, especially with Wilhelm Mann, the head of the IG’s pharmaceutical division. Weiss read the newspapers, of course, and heard all the torrid stories about Adolf Hitler and the dramatic changes taking place in Germany, but he had a remarkably unsophisticated grasp of European politics. Consequently, when Mann played down the more distasteful aspects of the new regime, telling him that the new rulers were probusiness and that there was no truth in the allegations that Jews were being persecuted, Weiss accepted these reassurances at face value. He remained sanguine even when he learned that Max Wojahn, the IG’s representative in Latin America, had been forced to suspend advertising in popular anti-Nazi newspapers and that the cartel’s traveling sales teams in the region were distributing Nazi propaganda. Eventually, however, the penny dropped. When Sterling was asked to pay an annual fee of $100,000 for rights that it had acquired almost twenty years earlier, just to placate the German regime, Weiss finally realized the true scale of the Nazis’ influence on the cartel.
Even so, the pace of events caught him unprepared. When the war began, the British blockaded German exports across the Atlantic just as they had done twenty years earlier, jeopardizing shipments of the hugely profitable aspirin brand Cafiaspirina, which was sold in South America.* Weiss concluded that the only way around this obstacle was to make the medicine at Sterling’s own factory at Rensselaer and export it south from there instead. He also knew from experience that the IG might see his move as an attempt to cut it out of one of its most lucrative markets. So he came up with an inducement. He offered to take over the manufacture and sale of all the IG’s drugs sold in Latin America and to run these businesses in trust for the Germans until the war was over. This proposal was music to Hermann Schmitz’s ears: the IG boss was looking for ways to conceal a range of the IG’s American assets and was mindful, too, of the importance of protecting the IG’s lucrative South American markets.† Indeed, he had already sanctioned a similar “cloaking” arrangement for the IG’s exports of solvents and photographic materials to the continent, involving one Alfredo Moll, an intermediary working out of Buenos Aires. Schmitz’s only condition for accepting Weiss’s offer, therefore, was that absolutely binding contracts be drawn up to ensure the status quo was reestablished once normality returned. And so the agreement went ahead, hidden like so many of the IG’s foreign dealings behind an elaborate chain of front companies. Unfortunately for Weiss, there was one massive drawback: the deal made Sterling, to all intents and purposes, a direct subsidiary of a company that much of the world now saw as an integral part of the Nazi regime.
What followed had the smack of inevitability about it. In June 1940 the Luftwaffe began bombing London, and, with every newsreel that was shown in U.S. cinemas, public opinion against Germany hardened further. The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover urged the Justice Department to open an investigation into Nazi infiltration of American industry. The Senate followed suit and soon details of its findings were being leaked to the press. On May 29, 1941, the New York Herald Tribune published a purple account of dirty dealings in the U.S.–South American pharmaceutical trade—which it claimed was being secretly manipulated by Hitler to pay for the war—and cited Cafiaspirina and Sterling Products as chief culprits. In short order, everyone from the Treasury Department to the Securities and Exchange Commission was paying uncomfortably close attention to William Weiss’s affairs.
Given the degree of scrutiny, it didn’t take long for government investigators to uncover Weiss’s secret deals with the IG and he was accused of collaborating with a potentially hostile foreign power. His business began to collapse under the pressure. Sterling’s Rensselaer plant stopped making and shipping IG drugs to South America, in late June its assets were temporarily frozen by the Treasury Department, and even the lucrative Cafiaspirina brand was sacrificed—the company had to commit to launching a new product with a new name to compete with the German-produced aspirin from which it had made so much money in the past. Weiss was distraught, but he knew that the alternative could be criminal charges. On August 15, 1941, he cabled Leverkusen to inform the IG that he had to end all of their agreements. IG Farben’s angry reply, insisting on the fulfillment of its contractual rights, went unanswered. Two days later the U.S. authorities banned Weiss from holding any position in Sterling Products, although the company was allowed to continue in business under new management. Weiss died in a car accident twelve months later.
Meanwhile, Standard Oil, the concern’s largest U.S. partner, was in an even more difficult position. The outbreak of war had found Frank Howard in Paris, battling with the disrupted French telephone system as he tried to finalize Standard’s last-minute deal to buy the IG’s 20 percent share of their joint enterprise, the Standard-IG Company. Although the sale had gone ahead, everything had happened in such a rush that many details had been left unresolved, not least the crucial matter of how the IG’s all-important patents were to be legally transferred to Standard. Unable to contact Frankfurt or Berlin directly, Howard was forced to ask New York to do so for him, suggesting that a meeting with IG officials in a nonaligned country be set up as quickly as possible.
The meeting was finally arranged for September 22, 1939, at The Hague in Holland (which was still neutral at the time), but only after both sides had resolved complicated travel difficulties and obtained permission to negotiate from their respective governments. Howard had a fairly easy time of it; hastening to London, he got the go-ahead from Joseph Kennedy, the U.S. ambassador to Britain, who also somehow smoothed things over with the British Foreign Office.* But the IG was able to get approval only by sending its synthetic fuel specialist, Heinrich Bütefisch, to plead with the Nazi authorities. He managed to convince them that the concern’s sale of its share in the Standard-IG Company was merely temporary, a way of camouflaging its assets and the best means of protecting strategically important patents that would otherwise surely be seized by enemy governments. Once the war was over, the rights would be returned. In the meanwhile, Bütefisch assured the Nazis, “German interests would not be prejudiced.”
Howard turned up at the meeting to find Friedrich Ringer, an IG patent expert, waiting for him. Most of the outstanding issues were quickly resolved. Ringer signed over the rights to more than two thousand patents and they agreed that henceforth Standard could exploit them exclusively in America and in Allied nations, while the rest of the world would remain IG territory. Ringer also told Howard the IG now recognized that assigning the cartel’s 50 percent share in the Jasco venture to Walter Duisberg had been a mistake: the U.S. authorities were bound to see it as an attempt to camouflage the IG’s interests in the business. As a result, Ringer was authorized to offer Duisberg’s Jasco stake to Standard instead. The Jasco business came with the IG’s long-coveted buna rights so Howard was naturally thrilled, but the edge of his delight was blunted somewhat when it became clear that the concern was still unable or unwilling to provide the technical knowledge necessary to actually manufacture the product. Ringer promised to take the matter up with his superiors when he got back to Germany, insisting that he had no authority to sanction the transfer of technical information.
On October 16, 1939, the IG sent Standard a cable with its final words on the subject. As agreed, documents were being prepared fo
r the transfer of the buna patents, but “referring to your question with respect to technical information … we have to inform you that under present circumstances we will not be able to give such information.” Right to the last, the concern had managed to withhold the know-how that really mattered. Just as Bütefisch had promised, German interests had been protected.
No so American interests. The full consequences of Farben’s zealous guardianship of the secrets of buna became clear only after December 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and sent its armies across Southeast Asia. Cut off from the world’s largest supply of natural rubber, the United States was thrown back onto its own resources. Many painful months later, as the shortage of rubber became increasingly critical, American scientists finally devised their own technical solutions to the buna problem, but not without an immense and costly effort.
Of more immediate consequence for Standard, the outbreak of war with Japan and Germany gave added impetus to an antitrust investigation that the Department of Justice had begun, in March 1941, to unravel the oil giant’s relations with IG Farben. Soon every facet of Standard Oil’s partnership with the Germans was revealed. The result was that Standard Oil and six subsidiaries, plus Walter Teagle, Frank Howard, and Walter Farish (Teagle’s successor as president of the company), were indicted and convicted on charges of criminally conspiring with IG Farben to restrict trade in synthetic oil and rubber throughout the world. At the same time, the U.S. alien property custodian, Leo Crowley, seized all the IG’s assets in the United States, including all the stock and patents in Standard-IG and Jasco. Although the oil executives’ lawyers managed to negotiate the resultant individual penalties down to a mere five-thousand-dollar fine per person, Teagle, Farish, and Howard were soon being summoned to explain themselves in front of outraged Senate committees and were publicly disgraced. In November 1942 pressure from shareholders forced them to resign. Equally predictably, after a board reshuffle, Standard Oil itself survived. In time of war no government is going to force the collapse of the biggest national oil business—no matter how disgracefully its top management has behaved.
* * *
IF ANYONE AT IG Farben in 1940 felt a moment of embarrassment about the problems they had caused their former U.S. partners, they shrugged it off or kept it to themselves. The most important thing was that Germany had managed through sleight of hand to hold on to the secrets of a technological process that was proving very valuable. Indeed, the Reich’s appetite for synthetic rubber was exceeding all expectations. The Schkopau plant had reached its annual production target of forty thousand tons by January 1940 and production levels at the IG’s second factory, at Hüls, were close to the maximum by June, yet still the Wehrmacht demanded more. By the late summer of 1940 the army’s senior commanders knew that the campaigns in Poland and Western Europe had seriously depleted resources, and with Britain determinedly holding out on the other side of the Channel the war looked set to continue for some time. In September 1940 Hitler’s generals warned the Führer that the deficit in raw materials would have to be remedied, especially if he went ahead with plans to attack the Soviet Union. High on their list of requirements was a scheme to increase the manufacturing capacity of buna.
In November 1940 the Economic Ministry and the Wehrmacht high command summoned IG representatives to a series of top-secret conferences and told them of the Reich’s needs. It was quickly agreed that two new synthetic rubber plants would be set up. One could be easily added onto existing facilities at Ludwigshafen; the other would be built in the new territories to the east, out of range of Allied bombers and of a size capable of meeting the anticipated surge in demand. Speed was essential; all bureaucratic barriers to construction would be lifted; a site would have to be identified as soon as possible.
Thus it was that the IG’s Otto Ambros embarked on a detailed survey of possible locations in Silesia. He was looking for a place that had coal, water, good rail links, and, above all, an abundant supply of labor. On February 6, 1941, he sat down with Fritz ter Meer and Carl Krauch to discuss his findings. He had discovered just the right place, he told them. It was near a small town in occupied Poland.…
11
BUNA AT AUSCHWITZ
As far as Denis Avey could remember, the day had begun much like any other. Early that morning his section had been marched to the site and allotted a task: laying cable for one of the plant’s soon-to-be-built electricity substations. As usual the men had gone about it as leisurely as they dared, fumbling with their equipment, deliberately getting in one another’s way, and grabbing the opportunity whenever their guards’ attention drifted elsewhere to discreetly put down their tools and take a rest. During one of these breaks, Avey stood up to stretch his aching back and looked around, his attention caught momentarily by the bright arc and sparks of a welding gun, high up on the scaffolding that surrounded one of the five giant smokestacks looming over building 921, the largest on the site. Some wag in the camp had dubbed these towers the Queen Mary, after the famous transatlantic liner, but it hadn’t really caught on.
A few dozen yards away, under the expressionless eyes of an armed SS trooper, a Kommando of “stripeys” was working in a ditch.* It had been raining for hours and the soil had long since liquefied into a freezing black slime that clung to their emaciated faces and hands and rendered them almost unrecognizable as human beings. Yet human they undoubtedly were, one group slipping and sliding in the mud as they grappled with a set of heavy ceramic pipes, another, armed with picks and shovels, fighting a losing battle against the sludge beneath their feet, flinging it up onto the lip of the trench, where it stuck for a moment before sliding back down. Avey knew that if any one of the men in the Kommando showed the slightest intention of easing up on this fruitless task, their gang leader, or kapo—his status as a favored criminal prisoner signified by a green triangle on his striped tunic—would bring a stick whistling down on their heads.
For the hundredth time he was struck by the contrast in their positions. As a British POW he was significantly more fortunate than the starving, exhausted Häftlinge in the ditch. He was better fed, better dressed, and less liable to be beaten. Under his battered army greatcoat, for example, he wore a thick battle dress tunic, which, though patched and ill fitting, at least afforded him some measure of protection against the biting wind and rain. He also had boots, whereas the stripeys were forced to shuffle along in broken wooden shoes that filled with water and were forever falling apart. Nevertheless, as he gazed around he cursed the fates that had brought him to this dreadful place. In every direction he could see groups of men, each with their gang leader and attendant SS sentry, being harried through the mud that lay between the half-completed buildings. Some pushed wheel-barrows piled absurdly high with bricks and bags of cement; others were bent double under the weight of monstrous iron girders or metal pipes or wooden railway sleepers. Much of this activity was being carried out at a shambling trot, the bellowed orders of the kapos rising high above the background clamor of hammering, and welding and the barks of overexcited guard dogs. And over everything, over the sour stench of wet cement, unwashed bodies, latrines, and cabbage soup that always permeated the site, there hung another, more dreadful smell, a sweetish gagging corruption that caught at the throat and nose and clung to clothes and hair. Its source lay a few miles to the west, but the wind often brought it their way.
Avey would never forget that smell. “We all knew what it meant and where it came from. When it drifted over, part of you would try and ignore it. Something happens in the brain and you have to think just about your own survival, not what is happening to everyone else. But it was there a lot and I had nightmares about it for years afterwards.”
A long sequence of events had brought Denis Avey to this moment in his life. A trainee engineer who had joined the British army in 1939, he had been captured while fighting with the Seventh Armored Division against the Italians in Libya. Three unsuccessful escape attempts and numerous changes of prison c
amp later—including one fearsomely punishing spell deep in a German coal mine—he had ended up here with twelve hundred other British POWs, forced to work alongside thousands of Jews, Russians, and Polish political prisoners on the Third Reich’s biggest construction project. After several months in appalling conditions, he was beginning to doubt whether he could endure much more: “The beatings, the constant brutality. It was all around you. I would see about six or seven people killed every day or drop dead where they worked. I had to tell myself to look away, to try and become inured to it.”
But he wasn’t inured to it. On this particular day, something snapped. As he stood there stretching, a Jewish prisoner shuffled past in the mud, struggling to maintain his grip on a large plank of wood. It slipped from his grasp and before he could pick it up an SS guard pounced, pushing the man to the ground, screaming abuse, and hitting him repeatedly about the head with the butt of his rifle. “I didn’t stop to think. I don’t know why. I’d seen many so people get a beating, but this time I couldn’t stop myself. So I got involved. Unfortunately I didn’t see this SS officer come up behind me. He took out his pistol and hit me in the face with it. I later lost my eye.” Avey blacked out without ever learning the identity of the Jewish prisoner on whose behalf he had intervened or what may have happened to him. But he has no illusions. “If he wasn’t killed there and then, most likely he was taken a couple of miles up the road to Birkenau and gassed like the rest.”
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