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

by Diarmuid Jeffreys

  In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the Allies took a few weeks to find Hermann Schmitz, Georg von Schnitzler, and the other twenty or so men who ran IG Farben. While it is true that their names had been placed on preprepared watch lists of those to be arrested on sight, they were among a great many prominent Germans given this distinction. The Allies had decided that anyone who had held a position of influence and authority in the Reich was to be at least temporarily detained and questioned as a potential security threat to the occupation forces or as a once integral part of the Nazi regime. Business leaders and industrialists were included on these lists on the not unreasonable grounds that they might have provided the machinery for Hitler’s wars, but few of the military police and intelligence units entering Germany with the combat troops accorded the IG management any larger significance than that.* Others were more determined to track them down. In the process of putting an end to the cartel’s relationship with Standard Oil in 1941, the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and their colleagues in the Treasury had concluded that the IG’s byzantine international network of subsidiaries, coproduction deals, and secret agreements posed a threat to the economic health of the free world and had played a significant part in bringing the world to war. There was little the officials could do about this until Germany was defeated, but they were determined to dismantle the company once the war was over.

  Two of these officials, Russell Nixon and James Martin, managed to track down Georg von Schnitzler. Attached to the U.S. military government’s Cartels Division (one of a number of American agencies—including the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, and the Foreign Economic Administration—now interested in the IG), they arrived in Frankfurt with other colleagues at the end of April 1945 to find the concern’s headquarters in chaos. Somehow the huge building had survived the Allied bombing raids and shelling unscathed but the grounds were knee-deep in a sea of swirling paper.* The U.S. Third Army had taken it over to use as its temporary headquarters and staff officers had ordered that it be “cleared of refuse” in readiness. As a result, several hundred tons of IG documents had been thrown out of windows into the courtyard, where they were now being burned in huge bonfires or carted away by the freed foreign laborers milling aimlessly around the building’s precincts looking for bedding materials and kindling. Desperate to stop the destruction of what might be vital evidence, the investigators arranged for the remainder of these documents to be taken to safety in a nearby Reichsbank building, but the filing system that had once governed their orderly storage was now in tatters and the papers were just thrown into huge muddled heaps. Eventually, the U.S. team found Ernst Struss, Fritz ter Meer’s secretary, and arranged for him to oversee their transfer to safer premises at Griesheim, where he put them back into some kind of shape. But many were never recovered.†

  In the meantime, Nixon and Martin had set out on the trail of Georg von Schnitzler. He had last been seen in Frankfurt at the end of March, about to leave for his country estate at Oberursel. They found him there in the second week of May. The various accounts of their first meeting differ slightly but they all agree that the baron greeted them courteously. He received them wearing his trademark Scottish tweeds and English brogues, sitting with his beautiful wife, Lilly, in a room enhanced by a large Renoir over the fireplace.§ After offering them brandy (which they declined), he said that he was happy “all this unpleasantness is over” and that he was looking forward to seeing his old friends at ICI and DuPont again. When he was asked to accompany his visitors back to Frankfurt, he politely declined. As the SHAEF report of the meeting recalled: “He replied that he was unable to do so as the way was so long and he was so old. The next invitation came from a sergeant with a tommy-gun.… This time the Herr Direktor did come.”

  Hermann Schmitz, on the other hand, was interviewed a few times before he was taken into custody. The first time U.S. investigators called in at his surprisingly modest stucco house in Heidelberg, the IG boss challenged their authority and refused to answer any of their questions. They returned the following day and searched the premises but found nothing except some telegrams from Hitler, Göring, and others congratulating “Geheimrat Schmitz” on his sixtieth birthday. However, after sleeping on it, the investigators returned and made a further search. At the back of the dusty basement they found a door leading to a well-furnished air raid shelter. In it they discovered a trunk stuffed with a thousand or so IG documents. Among them were papers relating to the cartel’s attempts at camouflaging ownership of its U.S. subsidiaries.

  But Major Edmund Tilley of British Army Intelligence made what was perhaps the most telling find. He had dropped in, apparently on a whim, to ask Schmitz some general questions, but his brusque and authoritative manner soon reduced the IG man to tears. It was then that Tilley got Schmitz to reveal the whereabouts of his safe, which was hidden in a closet behind his desk. Among other documents, the major found an album containing photographs of the IG’s infamous Buna-Werke in Upper Silesia. “Page one,” he wrote later, “had a picture with a narrow street of the old Auschwitz. The accompanying drawings depicted the Jewish part of the population in a manner that was not flattering.… The second page began a section entitled ‘Planning the New Auschwitz Works.’” Like someone hoarding pornographic images, the IG boss had kept his most shameful secret under lock and key.

  As the last of Schmitz’s Vorstand colleagues were picked up from their homes and offices and taken into custody, the Allied authorities were considering what to do about German industry in general and IG Farben in particular. In August 1945 the Potsdam Conference (which met to divide Germany into four occupation zones and produced a set of loose guidelines for the future treatment of the defeated nation) tried to determine some of the broader contextual questions, such as reparations and the desired level of renewed industrial production. Eventually the growing difficulties between the Soviet Union and the West would cause many of these agreements to be ignored or countermanded or interpreted differently by the occupying powers, but on one thing there was widespread accord. The German economy should be denazified and decartelized and those industries that had played a leading role in preparing Germany for war should be rendered incapable of accruing so much productive power ever again.

  This meant the end of IG Farben. In September 1945 a report commissioned by General Dwight D. Eisenhower concluded that the company had been crucial to the German war effort and that, without its manufacturing capacity, scientific ingenuity, and technical expertise, Hitler could never have come so close to victory. As a result, the supreme allied commander recommended that any IG plant used for war-making purposes be destroyed, that ownership of remaining plants be dispersed to break up the monopoly, that the company’s research programs and facilities be taken over, and that it be comprehensively stripped for reparations. Six weeks later, the Allied Control Council, the joint occupation authority, passed a law confirming that all of the IG’s assets were to be formally seized and that officers were soon to be appointed to put Eisenhower’s other recommendations into effect. The once great concern was to be broken up.

  Although the process would actually take some years to complete legally and administratively, the principal consequence of this decision was the division of the IG along geographic lines, with the size and shape of surviving businesses corresponding broadly to the factories and works located in each occupation area. Thus Leverkusen and its satellite plants, which were all in the British zone, would form one entity; Ludwigshaven and Oppau in the French zone would form the basis of another; while the old Hoechst businesses around Frankfurt in the U.S. zone would form a third. Other plants in the East once run by the IG would be absorbed into the state-controlled economy of the Soviet Union.

  What this meant in practice depended on how each of the big powers chose to interpret the major IG problem, namely, the extent of its involvement in Hitler’s war. At first the Americans, no doubt influenced by the long-standing antipathy to the co
ncern of its antitrust crusaders, seemed determined to take the strongest line. Even before the Allied Control Council had passed judgment on General Eisenhower’s recommendations, the U.S. Army announced that it was going to blow up three explosives plants in the American zone, “the first of many hundreds of plants … designated for actual destruction.” Ultimately, the U.S. military authorities were able to announce that the IG facilities in their area had been reestablished as forty-seven independent units, pending a final resolution of the matter. In the meantime, new antitrust laws prohibited a whole range of anticompetitive practices, from price and quota fixing to suppression of technology and invention.

  But the tide of events was beginning to turn Allied opinion away from the idea that the IG’s assets should be completely destroyed. For one thing, the attitude of Britain and France to the cartel’s fragmentation was not as clear-cut; the economic circumstances in their zones were more difficult, and they found it harder to be so sanguine about the loss of the concern’s productive capacity. The governments in London and Paris were finding responsibility for the economic well-being of millions of hungry Germans an onerous burden and were reluctant to deprive their former enemies of the chance to fend for themselves. Perhaps more significantly, the international situation was deteriorating. As the West and the Soviet Union moved to take up their cold war positions, conservative commentators in the United States had started to ask why the American authorities were so determined to break up an industry that might one day help Germany become a bulwark against Communist domination of Europe.

  It was not the best atmosphere in which to try IG Farben’s former managers for war crimes.

  14

  PREPARING THE CASE

  The stadium had been badly damaged, but the sight of it could still send a shiver down the spine. Perhaps it was because the images from its heyday had been so deeply etched on the mind. For years the newsreels had faithfully recorded the ghastly choreographed pantomime that had taken place within its walls—the cathedral of searchlights, the flaming torches and banners, the outstretched hands and yearning faces. This was where the delusion had reached its apogee, where a nation had been led toward the abyss. The few visitors who came here nowadays wanted to know that it was really all over, to gain some reassurance that it could never happen again, but they often left feeling ill at ease, as though the echoes of marching feet had not yet faded and some fell spirit still lingered amongst the broken concrete and flourishing weeds.

  Brigadier General Telford Taylor climbed up onto one of the ruined walls and looked across at the Altstadt, the old town. Nuremberg had once been an architectural treasure of gingerbread houses and medieval church spires. Now it was just one big bomb site, a sea of rubble that stretched almost as far as the eye could see.* On his first visit here, in April 1945, he’d been shocked by the damage, but he’d quickly become inured to it. After all, what were mere bricks and mortar compared with the suffering unleashed by those who had once draped this structure in eagles and swastikas? Fourteen years earlier, barely a mile or so from where he now stood, the newly appointed Nazi commissar for Franconia had issued orders that 250 Jewish tradesmen be arrested and “set to plucking the grass out of a field with their teeth.” All had later been murdered.

  Taylor shifted his gaze in the direction of one of the few buildings of any size still intact, the Palace of Justice. He could just make out its gabled roof in the far distance. For over two years he had labored there with hundreds of others to bring to account the perpetrators of the most shocking and brutal crimes in history. There had been some successes, some failures. Now he and his team were about to try again—this time to persuade a panel of judges that twenty-three of Germany’s leading industrialists were guilty of starting an aggressive war, of looting the assets of other countries, of exploiting slave labor, and of mass murder. He knew that at least one of those defendants, but possibly several more, had attended the rallies that had once packed the field in front of him. The huge organization they worked for had given millions of marks to the leaders whose voices had once filled this stadium. And in return they had gained … what? Power, influence, financial stability, immunity from arrest? Whatever it was it hadn’t been enough.

  He stood there for a moment longer, lost in thought, and then started clambering down to the car and his patiently waiting driver. It was time to get to work.

  * * *

  FOR MOST PEOPLE the word Nuremberg is synonymous with the famous International Military Tribunal (IMT) that sat in judgment on twenty-one surviving members of the Nazi leadership in 1946. With one or two exceptions their names were familiar to the outside world, and if not they would soon become so. The events of that trial—the behind-the-scenes clashes between those determined on justice and those bent on retribution, the chilling revelations of barbarity and genocide, the successes and failures of prosecution and defense, the verdicts, sentences, and fates of the accused—have become part of the fabric of our understanding of the world’s response to Nazism, the Holocaust, and World War II, and a point of reference, if not always a model, for the international community’s attitude toward crimes against humanity in the years since.

  But the IMT was only the first of many such prosecutions, trials, and tribunals, of differing degrees of complexity, fairness, integrity, and success, that sought to address aspects of Nazi criminality (and that have continued to do so until comparatively recently). Twelve of the earliest and arguably most significant of these hearings also took place at Nuremberg, under American jurisdiction, in the three years following the IMT. Some were designed to delve into the specifics of the Nazi’s racially motivated inhumanity—the Einsatzgruppen’s persecution of Soviet Jewry, for example—more deeply than had been possible at the earlier trial. Others were aimed at the Wehrmacht high command or at the Luftwaffe or tried to fathom the moral and ethical abyss at the heart of Nazi medical experimentation and euthanasia (the “Doctors’ Trial”). Three of the trials were aimed at prosecuting industrialists associated with the Nazis: the Krupp case, the Flick case, and the IG Farben trial.* The first two of these were important enough. Krupp had been unstinting in its use and abuse of slave labor to make tanks and artillery for the Nazis and had such a clear commercial interest in the deployment of its products that a charge of conspiracy to launch an aggressive war was inevitable. Friedrich Flick, a steel and coal magnate, had contributed to Hitler’s election fund in 1933, joined Himmler’s Circle of Friends, seized businesses in occupied Europe, and made use of slave labor. Conditions down his mines were so bad that workers died in the thousands. But only the IG Farben case, involving one of the largest industrial conglomerates in the world, would have the scale to send a strong message about the crucial role of business in the tragedy Europe had just endured.

  That such a message was sorely needed became clear when Allied zone governments began to disagree about denazification. This process, meant to excise the last remnants of Nazism from German life, had been accepted in principle at the end of the war and theoretically included removing former party supporters from any positions of power, influence, or respect. Each occupation authority, however, had a different interpretation on how denazification should be implemented. The Russians took the most robust view—as might be expected from the nation that had suffered most from Nazism. But the Americans, or at least those Americans running the U.S. military administration, were not far behind. General Lucius Clay, deputy governor under Eisenhower and charged with administering government affairs in the American zone, issued the draconian Law No. 8 of September 1945, which ordered the dismissal of any former Nazi Party member or sympathizer from all employment other than that of a common laborer.*

  Although British officials publicly acceded to American requests that they apply this directive in their zone as well, privately they were determined to be less severe, convinced that rooting out and penalizing every Nazi sympathizer would make it impossible for the country to recover. Anyone who was directly involved i
n the regime or who had served in the SS or had committed a war crime should, of course, be sought out and held to account, but surely such treatment was not appropriate for all the petty officials and minor government servants—postmen, town clerks, teachers, junior policemen—who had joined the party only as a condition of employment. And what about all the ordinary shop assistants, bus drivers, and other workers who had voted for the Nazis or attended a party function or contributed part of their wages to a Nazi fund-raising initiative? Were they to be thrown out of work too? If the directive was taken to its logical conclusion it would apply to 90 percent of the adult German population, leaving almost no one in a job and the country so destitute that it would be relying on Allied handouts for generations. For Britain, this was an appalling prospect. Virtually bankrupted by six years of war, it was now spending around £80 million a year in food aid alone. The new Labour government had been forced to introduce bread rationing in the UK so that wheat could be diverted to Germany—something that hadn’t even happened during the war. If denazification was going to work, Britain determined, it would have to be selectively applied.