Hell's Cartel

by Diarmuid Jeffreys

  Struss said that he had refused to believe the story at the time and dismissed it from his mind but the whispers continued to circulate around the IG. During a subsequent visit to Auschwitz in 1943 he asked Hans Heidebroek, a senior engineer, if they were true. Heidebroek confirmed that they were and added that the victims were gassed before they were burned. Struss said that, profoundly shocked, he had passed this information on to his bosses on his return—information that both Ambros and ter Meer, for obvious reasons, later denied receiving. Around the same time, Carl Lautenschläger, the IG’s solvents and plastic chief, heard about the gassings from junior colleagues at Ludwigshafen (which shows just how far the news had traveled). Meanwhile, Walter Dürrfeld almost certainly told Christian Schneider, the head of Sparte I, during a visit to the Buna-Werke in January 1943, and Martin Müller-Cunradi, the plant manager at Oppau, who also visited the camp, brought Georg von Schnitzler into the loop. Hermann Schmitz, the secretive and detail-obsessed chairman of the Vorstand, must also have had a very good idea of what was going on at Auschwitz. He presided over the most important meetings, reviewed the major reports, and sanctioned all the significant decisions. The Buna-Werke was his company’s largest investment and he frequently exercised his right to cross-examine his lieutenants and subordinates about progress—especially when things were not going well. It is impossible to believe that these people said nothing to Schmitz about the gassing of Jews.

  For others on the Vorstand the dramatically increased demand for Zyklon B pesticide should have sounded the alarm. Zyklon B was produced by an IG subsidiary, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlings-bekämpfung (Degesch), or German Pest Control Company of Frankfurt am Main. IG Farben controlled 42.4 percent of the company’s stock, which translated into five out of eleven seats on Degesch’s supervisory board and three places on the firm’s managing board, held by IG Vorstand members Carl Wurster, Heinrich Hörlein, and Wilhelm Mann. Of these three, Wilhelm Mann, who was also the company’s chairman, was in the best position to know how much Zyklon B was being sold to the SS because he regularly reviewed Degesch’s accounts—although the other two also received copies of the documents.* Whether Mann might have questioned why the SS needed so much pesticide has since been the subject of much debate. It is certainly the case that Gerhard Peters, Degesch’s general manager, who did know about Zyklon B’s use for liquidating large numbers of people, kept the matter secret and didn’t discuss it with anyone outside the SS. Another executive, Bruno Tesch, from Degesch’s distribution and sales agency, Tesch and Stabenow, also knew and mentioned it in a July 1942 report that was seen by two colleagues. But none of these people, it appears, passed this information on to Wilhelm Mann. On the face of it, then, Mann and his IG colleagues would appear to be absolved of any complicity in the deployment of the pesticide as a weapon of mass destruction. If they didn’t know about it, they could hardly be blamed for its use.

  It seems very strange, however, that Mann, who was a trained chemist and well aware of Zyklon B’s lethality, didn’t put two and two together. If knowledge of what was going on at Auschwitz-Birkenau was as much of an open secret among some of his IG colleagues as the evidence suggests, then it is reasonable to suppose that Mann might also have picked up on the stories. Moreover, he was in receipt of figures that showed consumption of Zyklon B at Auschwitz in 1942 and 1943 as ten times that of Mauthausen (a more conventional SS concentration camp). On its own this differential might perhaps have been explained by the fact that Auschwitz-Birkenau was much larger and therefore conceivably needed more pesticide to fumigate buildings and clothing. Put together with the rumors circulating around the IG about gassings at the site, though, it would surely have begun to sound alarms in the mind of even the most mildly curious person, let alone the chairman of the firm that made Zyklon B. Auschwitz’s commandant, Rudolf Höss, certainly thought so. After the war, Höss described how SS trucks had driven to the Degesch plant at Dessau on many occasions in 1942 and 1943.

  I assume with certainty that this firm knew the purpose of the use of the Zyklon B delivered by it. This they would have had to conclude from the fact that the gas for Auschwitz had been ordered continually and in great quantities, while for the other departments of the SS troops, etc., orders were placed only once or in six-monthly intervals. I cannot recall the exact quantities of Zyklon B which we received from Tesch and Stabenow, however I estimate that at least 10,000 cans, that is 10,000 kilos, had been supplied by them in the course of three years.

  Despite this, Wilhelm Mann claimed not to have made the connection. He later denied knowing anything about the use made of Zyklon B and said he had paid little more than routine attention to the Degesch sales figures. Although such diffidence was out of character for an otherwise diligent man, no definitive evidence has ever emerged to directly contradict his claim.

  But Mann clearly knew all about another aspect of the SS’s “work” at Auschwitz, because he personally authorized IG financing for it. The payment was in the form of a check to SS Hauptsturmführer Josef Mengele, Birkenau’s infamous “Angel of Death.” Mengele’s specialty was genetics and in May 1943 he set up a special laboratory next to the prisoners’ infirmary at Birkenau to make use of an estimated one thousand to fifteen hundred pairs of identical twins to try to prove his racial theories. After the children had been identified and taken away from their mothers at selection, they were subjected to the most dreadful medical experiments. Some had organs removed, others were castrated, blinded, or deliberately infected with fatal diseases in order to test prototype serums and drugs—many of which were supplied by the IG’s Bayer pharmaceutical division. One substance, known as B-1034, an experimental Bayer treatment for typhus, was almost certainly among the drugs given to Eva and Miriam Mozes, ten-year-old twins from Portz, in Romania, in May 1944. Following the injections Eva developed a raging fever and her limbs ballooned to several times their normal size, made more excruciatingly painful because SS technicians had tied her to a bed with rubber hoses to keep her still while they administered the substance. At one point Mengele stood at the bottom of her bed and laughed as he read her fever chart. “Too bad she’s so young,” he said to his colleagues. “She has only two weeks to live.”*

  Despite this endless supply of human guinea pigs, Mengele’s work didn’t come cheap, but IG Farben seems to have been willing to foot the bill. As Wilhelm Mann said in a letter to an SS contact at Auschwitz, “I have enclosed the first check. Dr. Mengele’s experiments should, as we both agreed, be pursued. Heil Hitler.”

  Other IG staff at Auschwitz had a more direct involvement in experiments on prisoners. Helmuth Vetter, for instance, was a longtime company employee and SS doctor at Auschwitz and Monowitz. In 1943, when he was not identifying candidates for selection at the IG’s camp hospital, he conducted research on two hundred female prisoners, injecting their lungs with streptococcus bacilli and causing them to die from pulmonary edema. The work was done to test the effectiveness of the new drugs being developed by the IG Bayer pharmaceutical division, and Vetter’s paper on the results was incorporated into a presentation to the Wehrmacht Medical Academy. On another occasion, IG Bayer haggled directly with Auschwitz commandant Höss over the costs of buying 150 women prisoners for use in Vetter’s experiments with sedatives and anesthetics. The SS wanted RM 200 per woman, but the IG was prepared to pay only RM 170. Evidently the cartel got its way, as Bayer wrote again to Höss, “The experiments were performed. All test persons died. We will contact you shortly about a new shipment at the same price.” Vetter clearly enjoyed his job. “I have thrown myself into my work wholeheartedly,” he wrote to colleagues at Leverkusen, “especially as I have the opportunity to test our new preparations. I feel like I am in paradise.” His reports routinely went to Heinrich Hörlein, the IG’s Nobel Prize-winning chief pharmaceutical scientist.

  The experiments at Auschwitz were evidently part of a much wider research program involving IG pharmaceutical preparations and the SS. Certainly, typhu
s and other fever drugs developed by the IG’s Behring-werke serological department at Marburg were routinely tested on inmates at Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps. The IG also became involved in a secret SS program to develop a method of chemical castration for use in Russia. In early November 1942 Karl Tauboeck, a biochemist at Ludwigshafen, was ordered by Martin Müller-Cunradi to brush up on his knowledge of the tropical Caladium seguinum bush, which scientists from a small SS-sponsored pharmaceutical firm in Dresden had recently discovered could be used to sterilize mice. The SS urgently wanted independent confirmation of the firm’s experiments and had asked the IG to supply a suitable expert. Two SS men took Tauboeck to Dresden, where he reviewed the tests and found that the results were indeed genuine, although he realized the plant was also highly toxic to humans. Later that day, “the SS men told me that this research was being carried out on the express orders of Reichsführer SS Himmler, in order to find a way of suppressing births among the eastern nations. After this fact had been revealed to me I was sworn to secrecy.” At some risk to his career, Tauboeck refused to play any further part in the project because of its “criminal character.” The SS subsequently found it impossible to grow Caladium seguinum in Germany, but they did experiment with other sterilization drugs at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

  At Nuremberg, Waldemar Hoven, senior SS doctor at Buchenwald, provided insight into the SS’s dealings with IG Farben’s pharmaceutical departments.

  It is clear that the experiments in the concentration camps with IG preparations only took place in the interests of the IG, which strove with all its might to determine the effectiveness of these drugs. They let the SS deal with the—shall I say—the dirty work in the camps. It was not the IG’s intention to make any of this public, but to put up a smokescreen around the experiments so that they could keep any profits to themselves. The IG took the initiative for these experiments.*

  Taken together then, such evidence makes it hard to see how anyone of any seniority in the IG could have remained ignorant of the activities at Auschwitz—be it medical experiments, or the degradation, torture, and murder of slave laborers and Jews, or the large-scale industrial genocide. Even those executives who had no direct personal engagement with the Buna-Werke project didn’t need to cast their eyes all the way to Upper Silesia to find proof of just how deep into the mire their relationship with the Nazis had taken them. The meeting that took place between Otto Ambros and the Führer in May 1943 would have done just as well. The subject on the agenda was chemical weapons and whether they should be used against the Red Army.

  The matter had arisen because three of Hitler’s closest lieutenants, Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, and Robert Ley (a former IG chemist), were pressing him to correct the worrying reverses at Stalingrad by attacking the Russians with tabun and sarin, the two deadly nerve gases developed by the IG for the Wehrmacht in the late 1930s. Otto Ambros had been the chief facilitator of this project and at the outbreak of war had obtained army funding to set up a top-secret production plant for the weapons (code-named N-Stoff) at Dyhernfurth in Silesia. The factory, jointly run by the IG and the high command through a subsidiary called Anorgana, was now well established, with huge underground galleries and facilities and a surface plant that stretched over one square mile. More than three thousand workers (including five hundred inmates from Auschwitz) labored there under the strictest security and were on their way to creating a tabun stockpile of more than twelve thousand tons, in addition to developing a number of suitable delivery mechanisms—from shells, bombs, and personnel mines to hand grenades, aerial sprays, and machine gun bullets. At other plants, such as that at Gendorf in Bavaria, the IG was also producing thousands of tons of World War I–era chemical weapons, including mustard gas, chlorine gas, and phosgene. It would later emerge that some of these were tested on concentration camp inmates. At Dyhernfurth a number of inmates died after accidental contamination with tabun and sarin.

  Ambros had been brought to the meeting—a secret conference at Hitler’s East Prussian headquarters—by Albert Speer, the new minister for armament and war production, who was strongly opposed to the use of tabun and sarin but who wanted the Führer to have all the facts. Hitler was mostly keen to hear whether it was likely that the Allies had also developed the gases, because the risk of retaliation in kind would affect his decision to use them. He was clearly disappointed when Ambros told him that the Allies quite possibly had the weapons—the basic chemistry had been in the public domain since 1902—and might even have developed the industrial capacity to manufacture them in larger quantities than Germany.* This seemed to settle the matter for the moment, although it was raised again the following year. In the meantime, Ambros and the IG were left to ponder the wisdom of having produced weapons of mass destruction for a regime that was beginning to show such signs of anxiety.

  * * *

  ALTHOUGH THEY HAD survived the first enemy air attacks in 1940 and 1941 in reasonable shape, the IG’s Rhine plants remained vulnerable to Allied bombing. Even if they weren’t always direct targets, the factories’ proximity to other major German manufacturing centers meant that work was often interrupted by disruption to local power and water supplies and transportation links. Oppau, for example, which was close to the cities of Mannheim and Ludwigshafen, produced a range of synthetic and heavy chemical products that were all absolutely vital to the war economy, especially nitrogen, which was needed for fertilizers and explosives, and isobutyl oil, which was used for synthetic fuels. Oppau was better prepared for attacks than some older IG plants because it was built with steel frames and reinforced concrete rather than bricks and mortar, but after the late autumn of 1943 the plant began to suffer serious collateral disruption from area bombing. Eventually, it became a target itself, and by the middle of 1944 it was taking a repeated battering. The venerable BASF works at Ludwigshafen, more vulnerable because of their brick construction and their location closer to the heart of the city, also became a frequent target. Repairs at the factory were especially difficult because it was still recovering from a huge explosion, unrelated to the bombing, that had torn the heart out of the works on July 19, 1943. In that incident, fifty people had been killed and almost seven hundred injured, including Matthias Pier, the scientist who had first created synthetic methanol. When Allied bombers began adding to the damage at Ludwigshafen in October, it took several weeks before production of some lines could be resumed.*

  It was much the same story elsewhere in late 1943 and early 1944. Leverkusen was hit a number of times, as were the Hoechst plant at Frankfurt, the explosives plants at Schiebusch and Duisberg, and several other places. The Allied strategic bombing campaign that would cripple German industry in late 1944 and 1945 had not yet hit its stride, but the intensity of the attacks was growing nonetheless and every raid took its toll in lives and destruction.

  Inevitably, the killed and wounded included some of the large army of foreign workers and slave laborers that the IG increasingly relied upon to man its production plants. As the war in the East called up ever more German nationals, the number of foreign “employees” soared. By 1943 around a third of the IG’s workforce in Germany, some sixty thousand people, was composed of French, Dutch, Belgian, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, and Russian forced laborers, along with a substantial number of POWs (British, Russian, and Italian). This figure would rise to over a hundred thousand by the end of the war. Many of the civilians had been led to believe that they could leave after a period of time but as the IG grew more desperate for manpower, that possibility evaporated. In truth, the vast majority were held against their will, especially those from the East, who routinely received the worst treatment. Most of the non-POW workers were housed in camps—five major installations in the Ludwigshafen-Oppau area alone—that were at best rudimentary and at worst as primitive as those in Upper Silesia. Many camps had their own jails where workers were imprisoned for minor offenses (drunkenness and unexcused absences from work were among the most
common) and the laborers lived in constant fear of informers and the Gestapo, who were always on the lookout for “saboteurs” and “Bolshevik infiltrators.”*

  For the IG’s middle-ranking and senior executives life continued much as normal, or what passed for normal in a police state that was at war with most of the world. The more senior enjoyed privileges that were denied to ordinary Germans, although their workload became markedly more onerous as they struggled to keep plants going amid the bombing and shortages of labor and raw materials. Their task became even harder when it became apparent that some of the previous influence they had had in Nazi circles was diminishing, with Carl Krauch’s star in particular beginning to wane. Although Krauch continued to hold his position as general plenipotentiary for chemical production and Hitler had awarded him the Knight’s Cross for his distinguished service, his clout was mostly derived from the patronage of Hermann Göring, whose own power was coming under pressure from other contenders for the Führer’s favor—most notably Heinrich Himmler (who wished to accrue ever more economic influence for his SS) and, increasingly, Martin Bormann, Hitler’s shadowy head of the party secretariat. Krauch’s authority was also being undermined by Armaments Minister Albert Speer, who, from his appointment in 1942, had made it plain that he had his own ideas of where Germany’s production priorities should lie. He declared that the chemical sector would have to wait in line with other war industries that needed essential raw materials. From now on, it would have to live within existing quotas unless there were particularly extenuating circumstances. Krauch’s protests that these quotas would make it impossible to increase production of buna, fuel, and other war goods were ignored. Hans Kehrl, chief of the planning and raw material department at the Economic Ministry and an old antagonist of IG Farben’s, rubbed more salt in Krauch’s wounds by suggesting tartly that perhaps the time had come to assign some of his responsibilities to other agencies. By March 1943 Krauch had been forced to relinquish control over production at chemical plants, although he retained his authority over research, development, and the construction of new factories.