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Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-17838-9 - Inside IG Farben: Hoechst During the Third Reich Stephan H. Lindner Excerpt More information 1 Introduction At the end came disgrace. The history of the I.G. Farbenindustrie lasted only twenty years. It had been founded on December 9, 1925, with the recording of the merger contract between the German chemical companies Bayer, BASF, Agfa, Griesheim-Elektron, Weiler-ter Meer, and Hoechst. On the basis of the Allies’ Control Commission Law No. 9 of November 30, 1945, the I.G. Farbenindustrie was seized and its dissolution planned. The decision taken by the victorious Allied powers stemmed not just from the company’s entanglement in the crimes of the Nazi regime, but was a result of its active participation in these. “IG Farben” stood and stands for autarky, armament, exploitation, and – Auschwitz. In the U.S. occupation zone, where the IG Farben plant Hoechst was located, the American military commander-in-chief had already taken over the management and control of IG Farben and its capital on July 5, 1945. Finally, at the end of July 1948, twenty-three former managers of IG Farben were tried before an American military tribunal in Nuremberg. All of them were found innocent on charges number one, four, and five (planning, preparation, initiation, and waging of wars of aggression; membership in the SS; and conspiracy). Ten managers also were acquitted of the two other charges. However, thirteen managers were sentenced to prison terms ranging from eighteen months to eight years (minus their time spent in custody), on charges number two (plunder and spoliation) and three (enslavement and murder of civilians, prisoners of war, and concentration camp inmates). The executives Otto Ambros and Walter Du¨ rrfeld, who were directly involved in the construction of the IG Farben plant at Auschwitz, were both sentenced to the longest terms. Carl Ludwig Lautenschla¨ger, the managing director of the IG Farben plant Hoechst, was one of the ten declared innocent on all counts. His deputy, Friedrich Ja¨hne, was sentenced to eighteen months for plunder and spoliation.1 1 See Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10,vols.7–8: The Farben Case (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952–3). 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-17838-9 - Inside IG Farben: Hoechst During the Third Reich Stephan H. Lindner Excerpt More information 2 Inside IG Farben Although the prosecutors in Nuremberg found the verdict of the American judges too mild, the defenders and the accused felt it was too harsh and considered the condemned men “victims” of “victors’ justice,” since the managers of IG Farben had only done their “patriotic duty.” In March 1953, on the occasion of the first Extraordinary General Assembly of the newly founded Farbwerke Hoechst AG, the chairman of the board, Karl Winnacker, who had already been selected to manage the Hoechst works by the former management of the I.G. Farbenindustrie, expounded on this point, when he mentioned the Allies’ decision to dissolve IG Farben: “Almost unnoticed by the majority of the people, who were preoccupied with the fight for their existence, this meant the destruction of the most important undertaking that German science and technology as well as German enterprise had ever developed.” He continued: “In a trial fought with great bitterness, the responsible leaders of the I.G. Farbenindustrie AG, and thus our entire company, were able to rebut all the charges of war crimes, robbery and plunder levied against them.”2 Not a word was said about the conviction of thirteen leading managers by the Nuremberg judges, who, it should be emphasized, consistently followed the motto “in dubio pro reo” throughout the trial. Thus, Lautenschla¨ger and his board colleagues had been cleared of participating in human experiments in concentration camps, since the tribunal pronounced that “where from credible evidence two reasonable inferences may be drawn, one of guilt and the other of innocence, the latter must prevail.”3 Because of its entanglement in and involvement with the crimes of the National Socialist regime, the history of IG Farben during the Third Reich has been examined in numerous books and articles, but its role has been assessed in very different ways. Thus, a number of authors are convinced that IG Farben was much guiltier than the ruling of the Nuremberg Tribunal indicated. The most prominent of these is Joseph Borkin, who happened also to be one of the Nuremberg prosecutors. Accordingly, his book reads in parts like a public prosecutor’s final address to the jury.4 However, a number of other authors have come to a much more positive 2 Karl Winnacker, quoted in Ernst Baümler, A Century of Chemistry (Du¨ sseldorf: Econ, 1963), p. 111. 3 Trials of War Criminals,p.1172; cf. in contrast the Dissenting Opinion of Judge Hebert who considered the accused managers guilty under count 3, pp. 1204–5 and 1307–25. 4 Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of the I.G. Farben (New York: Free Press, 1978); also Josiah E. DuBois, The Devil’s Chemists. 24 Conspirators of the International Farben Cartel Who Manufacture Wars (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952); cf. also historians of the (former) German Democratic Republic such as Dietrich Eichholtz, Geschichte der deutschen Kriegswirtschaft 1939–1945, vol. 1: 1939–41, 3. durchgesehene Auflage (Berlin [East]: Akademie, 1984), pp. 59–61; idem, “Die IG-Farben-‘Friedensplanung.’ Schlu¨ sseldokumente der faschistischen ‘Neuordnung des europaïschen Grossraums,’ ” Jahrbuch fu¨ r Wirtschaftsgeschichte 1966, part 3, pp. 271–332. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-17838-9 - Inside IG Farben: Hoechst During the Third Reich Stephan H. Lindner Excerpt More information Introduction 3 assessment of IG Farben’s role. Unsurprisingly, the most prominent repre- sentatives of this viewpoint are Fritz ter Meer, a former managing director of IG Farben, and Gottfried Plumpe, a historian and executive of the IG Farben successor firm Bayer. Plumpe considered the managers of IG Farben as unhappily compromised through the conditions existing at the time and by their professional dedication to their entrepreneurial and managerial functions.5 Finally, there is the balanced and carefully argued account by the American historian Peter Hayes on IG Farben during the Third Reich. It shows the responsibility, the guilt, and the entanglement of IG Farben’s management without extenuation. But it also highlights the limited options of a company embedded in a state-regulated economy under an increasingly totalitarian regime.6 IG Farben and its managers obviously did not determine the fundamental political and economic conditions of Nazi Germany, but acted within them. Moreover, IG Farben was neither influential in aiding Hitler’s takeover nor among his “stirrup holders.” The “primacy of politics” was Nazi Germany’s hallmark, that is, political premises determined the course of the economy.7 However, as shown by Hayes, the managers of IG Farben were only too ready to adapt to the new conditions and to take advantage of them. The English historian Tim Mason, who decisively contributed to launching the concept of the primacy of politics in Nazi Germany, therefore reached the following conclusion about the relationship between the Nazi state and the German economy: “The fact that numerous industrialists not only passively co-operated in the ‘Aryanization’ of the economy, in the confiscation of firms in occupied territory, in the enslavement of many million people from Eastern Europe and in the employment of concentration camp prisoners, but indeed often took the initiative in these actions, constitutes a damning judgement on the economic system whose essential organizing principle (competition) gave rise to such conduct. But it cannot be maintained that even these actions had an important formative influence 5 Fritz ter Meer, Die I.G. Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft. Ihre Entstehung, Entwicklung und Bedeutung (Du¨ sseldorf: Econ, 1953); Gottfried Plumpe, Die I.G. Farbenindustrie AG. Wirtschaft, Technik, Politik 1904–1945 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1990); Plumpe has been heavily criticized for abridging and doctoring a quotation on the erecting of IG Farben’s plant in Auschwitz, and for not giving that plant the appropriate attention, as this added to the book’s general apologetic tendencies: Peter Hayes, “Zur umstrittenen Geschichte der I.G. Farbenindustrie AG,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 18 (1992), pp. 405–17, and Bernd Wagner, IG Auschwitz. Zwangsarbeit und Vernichtung von Ha¨ftlingen des Lagers Monowitz 1941–1945 (Munich: Saur, 2000), pp. 11–12. 6 Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology. IG Farben in the Nazi Era, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), first published in 1987. 7 Cf. Tim Mason, “Der Primat der Politik – Politik und Wirtschaft im Nationalsozialismus,” Das Argument 8 (1966), pp. 473–94; Henry A. Turner, “Unternehmen unter dem Hakenkreuz,” in Unternehmen im Nationalsozialismus, ed. by Lothar Gall and Manfred Pohl (Munich: Beck, 1998), pp. 15–23. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-17838-9 - Inside IG Farben: Hoechst During the Third Reich Stephan H. Lindner Excerpt More information 4 Inside IG Farben on the history of the Third Reich; they rather filled out in a barbaric manner a framework which was already given.”8 In a totalitarian regime such as the National Socialist one, a company of any military importance had to choose between adapting or running the risk of being taken over by competitors or by the state. Given the internal logic and functioning of a company, this could hardly be the aim of its managers, and the latter option was not just an empty threat, as prewar confiscations in the German steel industry had proved.9 One therefore has to question how the executives of a company could act, when the function and logic of a firm were thus challenged.

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