Hell's Cartel

by Diarmuid Jeffreys

  But for Krauch and the IG worse was yet to come. The events of May 12, 1944, and thereafter brought the besieged plenipotentiary as low as he had ever been. That day, which Speer later identified as the point when “the technological war was decided,” the United States Eighth Air Force sent 935 bombers to attack Germany’s synthetic fuel industry. Two hundred of these planes were dispatched to just one target: the IG’s giant plant at Leuna.

  The next day Speer rushed to the scene and walked through “a tangle of broken and twisted pipe systems” with the IG’s staff. He was aghast at what he saw. The raids, he recognized, represented “a new era in the air war”; if continued they would signal “the end of German armaments production.” Although the damage could be repaired, even the most optimistic forecasts held that fuel production would not resume for some weeks. On May 19 Speer arrived at Hitler’s redoubt on the Obersalzberg to brief the Führer in person. “The enemy has struck us at one of our weakest points,” he said. “If they persist at it this time, we will soon no longer have any fuel production worth mentioning. Our only hope is that the other side has an air force General Staff as scatterbrained as ours!”

  Four days later, Krauch was ordered to bring Heinrich Bütefisch and two other IG fuel experts to an urgent conference with Hitler. Reich Marshal Göring, Speer, and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the high command, also attended. While waiting in the drafty hallway of the Berghof, Speer warned the industrialists to tell “the unvarnished truth.” Göring, who had not wanted the four men to attend the meeting and who, according to Speer, was worried that Hitler would blame him for not providing sufficient air cover for the fuel plants, hastened to insist that they should not say anything too pessimistic.

  But Krauch and Bütefisch did as Speer had asked and informed Hitler that if the raids continued the situation was indeed hopeless, supporting their arguments with the usual impressive array of IG charts and statistics. When Hitler demurred, insisting that surely the situation was not that bad, both Keitel and Göring jumped in to reassure him. The industrialists, however, were “made of sterner stuff,” according to Speer, and stuck doggedly to their predictions. The Führer finally seemed to get the picture, even noting that the concentration of essential war production in one or two places made them far too easy to attack. “In my view,” he said, “the fuel, buna rubber, and nitrogen plants represent a particularly sensitive point for the conduct of the war, since vital materials for armaments are being manufactured in a small number of plants.”

  Göring, eager to steer the Führer away from any discussion of the deficiencies of the Luftwaffe—a subject on which the Reich marshal was feeling increasingly vulnerable—began castigating Krauch for building the plants without adequate camouflage and earthwork protection. Though Krauch must have been deeply shocked by his patron’s reproaches, he managed to remind everyone that the factories had been constructed well before the war, when the only criteria were cost and efficiency. Fortunately, Hitler let the matter drop, but the IG man realized that he could no longer rely on Göring’s support. The Reich marshal had abandoned him and from that moment on Krauch was a marginalized figure.

  In early June, after weeks of feverish repairs, the fuel plants had just come back on line when the USAF struck Leuna and the others again and inflicted even more damage than before. That same day, German-controlled oil refineries at Ploesti in Romania were also attacked. Taken together, the raids reduced the Reich’s fuel production capacity by over 50 percent. Göring responded by promising to send more aircraft to the defense of fuel plants, but when the Allies landed at Normandy later that week he had to divert the Luftwaffe to France instead, leaving the factories open to yet more raids. By the end of June 1944, Speer was warning Hitler that until repairs were carried out the Reich’s ability to produce fuel was down to 10 percent of what it needed to be. Somehow the IG managed to get Leuna back up to three-quarter capacity, but more raids on July 7 and July 19 returned it to rubble once again. The raids were now coming so thick and fast that the only way that larger plants like Leuna could get back on line was if other, smaller fuel factories were stripped of vital equipment—rendering them useless, of course, and further reducing Germany’s fuel capacity. It was as if the IG were trying to build a house of cards, except that each time it was knocked over the concern had to start again with a smaller deck. Eventually, of course, the cards would run out altogether.

  13

  GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG

  Although it was still possible for ordinary Germans to feel hopeful about the eventual outcome of the war, the first few months of 1944 must have sorely tested their optimism. Allied air raids at home were becoming more frequent and intense and the news from various military fronts, even when consumed through a filter of Nazi propaganda, was increasingly depressing. In fact, since the catastrophe at Stalingrad at the start of the previous year, the Reich had suffered a string of reverses: the RAF had launched devastating attacks against Hamburg and Berlin, the Wehrmacht had been savaged at Kursk, Rommel had been driven out of North Africa, Italy had changed sides, and the Red Army had raised the terrible nine-hundred-day siege of Leningrad, crossed the old prewar frontier between the Ukraine and Poland, and captured ten German divisions at Kanev, on the River Dneiper. Elsewhere the Allies had established a beachhead at Anzio, in Italy, and it was already a matter of widespread if discreet speculation that a more substantial invasion in France was coming at some point in the year ahead. Germany wasn’t beaten yet but the days of triumph and certainty were quickly becoming a distant memory. It was also extremely unwise to publicly express any lack of confidence in the Führer’s ability to steer the nation to ultimate victory, and so throughout the Reich people suppressed their doubts and anxieties and carried on as best they could.

  Surprisingly, this state of denial was as prevalent at Auschwitz as it was elsewhere that winter and early spring, even though the town’s German population must surely have felt the looming threat of the Russians a few hundred miles to the east. Indeed, in many respects the camps’ activities continued as usual, except that the manpower shortages created by Germany’s massive military losses had increased the appetite for Jewish slaves. Other firms had now followed the IG to the region—steel and metal industries, coal producers, and other chemical manufacturers—and although none of them came close to matching the Buna-Werke’s continually recycled contingent of eleven thousand concentration camp prisoners, demand for workers was such that a string of smaller subcamps had been established in the area to hold and provide the additional labor.

  The gassings, too, proceeded apace: the old, sick, and very young and those otherwise unable to work were selected for murder much as before. But from the end of 1943, the Operation Reinhard death camps, built specifically to exterminate Jews rather than also exploit their labor, were shut down—Sobibor (200,000 killed), Belzec (550,000), Chelmno (150,000), and Treblinka (750,000). Only Auschwitz was left to absorb what was left of occupied Europe’s Jewish communities.* The largest group of deportees came from Hungary. In preparation for their arrival, the SS opened new crematoria at Birkenau and then extended the rail line right into the camp to make the selection and gassing process more efficient. Between May 15 and July 9, 1944, around 438,000 people were brought there, 85 percent of whom were murdered immediately. The rest were taken into the camps, either to work locally or to be sent on to Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, Gross-Rosen, or the 370 other SS slave labor facilities in and around Poland and Germany.

  One transport of 650 Jews from northern Italy in February 1944 included a young chemist from Turin. Primo Levi was among 125 men selected at the railhead for labor at the Buna-Werke. One of only three survivors from this group, he would later write about his experiences at Monowitz in heartrending, searing detail. Like the thousands of others who had been through the camp before him, he quickly felt the effect of the dreadful conditions.

  A fortnight after my arrival I already had
the prescribed hunger, that chronic hunger unknown to free men, which makes one dream at night, and settles in all the limbs of one’s body. I have already learnt not to let myself be robbed, and in fact if I find a spoon lying around, a piece of string, a button which I can acquire without danger of punishment, I pocket them and consider them mine by full right. On the back of my feet I already have those numb sores that will not heal. I push wagons, I work with a shovel, I turn rotten in the rain, I shiver in the wind; already my own body is no longer mine: my belly is swollen, my limbs emaciated.

  The machine was still functioning, but for the IG managers for whose benefit Primo Levi and the thousands of others were suffering, the Auschwitz project was at last losing its allure. True, there had been some successes: a carbonization plant and carbide furnace were nearing completion, and in late October 1943 the first tanker load of methanol had finally been driven out through the gates—an event celebrated enthusiastically at Auschwitz’s Ratshof pub by senior staff and their special guests, Otto Ambros and Rudolf Höss. But although methanol was a necessary ingredient of aviation fuel and explosives and of great importance to the Third Reich’s continued ability to prosecute the war, it was not buna, not the sticky black rubber substitute on which the IG had pinned so much of its future and spent almost one billion marks. That part of the project was still way behind schedule. Under intense pressure from Berlin, the IG men—Dürrfeld, Faust, and others—knew they had to continue to the bitter end, to drive their army of slave laborers to finish the factory at whatever cost. But the work proceeded extremely slowly, hampered by shortages of raw materials, mechanical breakdowns, the inadequacies of the workforce, and even—although their significance is difficult to quantify—acts of sabotage carried out by Denis Avey and some of the Buna-Werke’s other twelve hundred British POWs. As Avey remembers:

  We weren’t allowed to rivet at first but after a while they let us do it so long as we were supervised; but they couldn’t always watch us that closely, you see, because there was too many of us. So when they weren’t looking we used to weaken the rivets, so that after a couple of months they would pop and they’d have to do it all over. There was one gas holder they had to keep going back to again and again because of that.… Other times we’d take grease off the engines, mix it with sand, and then put it back so that when they started them up it would wreck the gears. Or we’d bend the blades of the cooling fans, things like that. Anything we could get away with, basically. You had to be very careful, though, because the Germans were always on the lookout for sabotage and would test everything. They’d shoot you if you got caught. But I had a stooge on the inside of the chief engineer’s office and we’d know when certain things were going to be used and so we’d only go after the stuff that was going to be lying idle for a few weeks. That way, when it didn’t work, they didn’t know who had worked on it. It caused them no end of problems.

  From mid-1944, enemy air raids made things even more difficult. The U.S. Air Force had been theoretically capable of reaching Auschwitz since establishing air bases at Foggia, in Italy, at the end of 1943, although the first contrails of Allied reconnaissance planes did not appear over the plant until April. Starting in May, however, when Leuna and other fuel plants in Germany were attacked, it seemed likely that the Upper Silesian industrial sites, especially the IG’s fuel production facilities at the Buna-Werke and at Heydebreck, would be the next targets. The realization that American Flying Fortresses might soon be heading their way came as an unpleasant surprise for all those Reich Germans who had come to IG Auschwitz because it was beyond the reach of enemy aircraft. Warning sirens were hastily tested, antiaircraft batteries were set up in the surrounding countryside, and new shelters were dug (work that used up more precious prison labor). Nevertheless, no one was quite ready for the intensity of the daylight raids that began on August 20 and continued intermittently for the next six months. Although Auschwitz was at the outer limits of the range of the Allied planes and pilots had only a few minutes to bomb the plant, they had no trouble finding and hitting so large a target and caused great destruction.

  As the German camp personnel scrambled for cover, prisoners were denied access to the shelters they had built. When Salomon Kohn and some other inmates tried to get into one of them during the first attack, the plant’s director of air defense forced them outside again, shouting, “Get out of here, you swine! This tunnel is not for you. What makes you think this is an occasion for Germans to be together with you Jews?” Primo Levi, who remarkably was still alive five months after his arrival at Monowitz, remembered that “when the earth began to tremble, we dragged ourselves, stunned and limping, through the corrosive fumes of the smoke bombs to the vast waste areas, sordid and sterile, closed within the boundary of the Buna; there we lay inert, piled up on top of each other like dead men, but still aware of the momentary pleasure of our bodies resting.”*

  Things were no better for the British POWs at the plant, who had to rush for whatever cover they could find. Tragically, many of them didn’t make it, as Denis Avey later recalled: “We lost around forty of our people to the American bombing. After the planes had gone I helped to dig their graves, unmarked graves, I’m sorry to say, and then the bombers came back and blew them all out of the ground again. I think in the end we only found the remains of thirteen of them.”

  The raids effectively put an end to any hopes the IG had of producing buna and synthetic fuel at Auschwitz. Given time, the damage was certainly reparable, and an emergency detail of volunteers (a Stoss Kommando of engineers, fuel technicians, and other specialists) was actually dispatched from Ludwigshafen in a last desperate effort to get the plant finished. But time was no longer on the IG’s side: the military situation was deteriorating so quickly that further efforts were pointless and the emergency team was ordered to return. In the interim, the SS had begun the gradual dissolution of the main Auschwitz camps. By November 1944, when Himmler ordered an end to systematic exterminations across the Reich, around half of the 155,000 prisoners had been marched out to concentration camps within Germany. A last orgy of killing—including the extermination of a group of two thousand Jews from Theresienstadt, near Prague, on October 28—saw more than forty thousand murdered. Then the crematoria were shut down and gradually dismantled.* On January 17, 1945, as the Red Army entered Budapest and Warsaw, and with Upper Silesia exposed to imminent assault, the SS began the second and final phase of their evacuation, marching the fifty-eight thousand surviving prisoners from Auschwitz to Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen, Dachau, and other camps to the West. Of these, some ten thousand were from the Buna-Werke and Monowitz—Jews, forced laborers of a dozen nationalities, and POWs.† Only eight hundred prisoners, so sick they were expected to die anyway, were left behind in the camp infirmary. At the Fürstengrube coal mine, inmates too weak to leave the hospital were shot, killed with hand grenades, or burned to death in their huts.

  Thousands perished during the death marches. The SS shot anyone who weakened or fell ill, anyone who tried to rest or flee. “We started counting the shots,” one survivor, Aharon Beilin, later recalled. “It was a long column—five thousand people. We knew every shot meant a human life. Sometimes the count reached five hundred in a single day. And the longer we marched, the more the number of shots increased. There was no strength, no food.” Some died of exposure during overnight stops in the snow. Almost all of the four and a half thousand Jews who had been marched out from Monowitz on January 19 were murdered after they had scattered into a forest during an air raid alert. The SS rounded them up and then opened fire with machine guns. Just over one hundred were left to continue their journey.

  The IG meanwhile had pulled its people home. The last of them left Auschwitz in the second week of January 1945 on two special trains reserved for the town’s remaining civilian male Reich Germans (German women and children had been evacuated in October 1944). In the days before their departure, Walter Dürrfeld and Max Faust had toured the Buna-Werke, supervi
sing the dismantling of key equipment and the destruction of documents that hadn’t been sent back to Frankfurt and Berlin. Despite their efforts (and a last brief Allied raid after their departure on January 19), most of the factory’s infrastructure remained intact. But it mattered not; IG Auschwitz had been an almost total failure. Around 200,000 people (Reich Germans, foreign laborers, POWs, and Auschwitz prisoners) had been engaged at different times on the plant’s construction, at a cost of over 900 million reichsmarks and—estimated conservatively—some 35,000 human lives. This number rises to over 40,000 if the death toll at the IG’s Fürsten-grube and Janina mines is taken into account. Some Nuremberg prosecutors put the figures much higher, concluding that some 200,000 people had died while working for IG Auschwitz, either on-site or as a consequence of being dispatched from the IG’s employ to the gas chambers at Birkenau—but this was almost certainly an overestimate based on the incomplete information available at the time. Whichever figure is correct, one thing is clear: although some explosive-grade methanol was produced, not a single pound of buna rubber or one liter of synthetic gasoline ever emerged from the Buna-Werke’s gates. After nearly four years of intense activity, all that IG Farben really had to show for its efforts was a reputation stained forever with the blood of those murdered in the Holocaust. Now, as the Red Army drew near, the huge Buna-Werke stood silent and waiting, a bomb-scarred monument to the ambition, greed, and folly of a once mighty company.