Hell's Cartel
Page 44
COUNSEL: Mr. Witness, you stated in your affidavit that the accommodations in Monowitz were the best possible for the prisoners. Now isn’t it a fact that the concentration camp Buchenwald, in which you were also, had better barracks than the Monowitz barracks, since the Buchenwald barracks were divided into two parts and contained day-rooms?
DIETRICH: Yes, that is correct.
COUNSEL: Isn’t it also a fact that in the main camp of Auschwitz the housing of the inmates was much better than in Monowitz?
DIETRICH: That is true.
COUNSEL: There were large stone buildings in Main Auschwitz, were there not?
DIETRICH: Yes.
COUNSEL: Now, Mr. Witness, isn’t it a fact that during the winter days as many as twenty inmates at a time were carried away from the Farben site back into Monowitz because they couldn’t walk by themselves anymore?
DIETRICH: Yes.
COUNSEL: And could you say what the average weight of the inmates would be?
DIETRICH: 100 to 120 pounds.
COUNSEL: Now, Mr. Witness, is it not a fact that the IG foremen used to write evaluation sheets each night?
DIETRICH: Yes.
COUNSEL: And isn’t it also true that if the Farben foremen reported the battalion under 70 percent, the inmates would be punished with twenty-five strokes each.
DIETRICH: If he reported it—yes, that is true.
COUNSEL: And wasn’t the whipping post at Monowitz?
DIETRICH: I don’t know that.
COUNSEL: Mr. Witness, you speak of there being no instruments of torture at Monowitz. Now isn’t it a fact that there was a standing cell in Monowitz?
DIETRICH: Yes.
COUNSEL: Were there gallows in Monowitz?
DIETRICH: Yes.
COUNSEL: And didn’t you often pass those gallows when an inmate had been hanged?
DIETRICH: Unfortunately.
COUNSEL: Mr. Witness, I asked you: Isn’t it a fact that you often passed those gallows when an inmate had been hanged at Monowitz?
DIETRICH: I said, “unfortunately.” …
COUNSEL: Mr. Witness, isn’t it a fact that two or three times a week, open trucks drove along the IG Farben plant, going from Monowitz to Birkenau with inmates who were no longer able to work?
DIETRICH: That is true.
COUNSEL: Wasn’t it common knowledge among the inmates that those inmates no longer able to work were being sent to Birkenau to be gassed?
DIETRICH: Yes.
When Minskoff had finished, Dietrich was in tears and had to be helped off the stand. The next defense witness, deployed to suggest that the IG supervisors couldn’t possibly have known what was going on at Birkenau, was an SS officer. After a few minutes, Minskoff had gotten him to admit that the stench of the crematorium could be detected at Katowice, some thirty miles away. None of this made it any easier for the defendants themselves when they were cross-examined. Suddenly their protestations of ignorance about conditions at Auschwitz and the Fürstengrube were beginning to sound very hollow.
COUNSEL: Dr. Bütefisch, I show you this weekly report to you from Auschwitz, where the SS states that they gave repeated warning to the Fürstengrube management to stop beating the inmates because it might eventually lead to their deterioration. Was that called to your attention at the time?
BÜTEFISCH: The mining leader concerned would have to tell you that. I don’t know these things.
COUNSEL: I call your attention to this exhibit, another weekly report by Farben’s mine personnel. “Can one therefore blame a foreman or shaft supervisor for hitting out? In spite of the salutary effects of beatings, the Labor Office [SS] has forbidden it.” Does that refresh your recollection that the prohibition against beating came from the Labor Office rather than Farben?
BÜTEFISCH: I couldn’t read all the weekly reports. But it is my opinion that what had been put down here is someone’s own personal, impulsive opinion. This type of action is quite out of the question for us. I was far away from the site.
COUNSEL: You were far away from the site? May I ask whether, on your visits to IG Auschwitz—that is, the buna plant and the mine—you took any interest in finding out the conditions under which the forced workers were working there?
BÜTEFISCH: As far as I had time. I, of course, had reports from Mr Dürrfeld. We talked about food. Dürrfeld showed me the charts. That was my endeavour.
COUNSEL: Did you know that in 1942 they had as many as 3,000 foreign workers living in one barracks, mind you, with only three huts for washing facilities?
BÜTEFISCH: No, that was not reported to me and I cannot imagine it.
Exchanges like this had taken place throughout the trial and would often go on for hours, with defendants doggedly insisting that they hadn’t been informed or that they hadn’t read the reports they had been sent. But in this session, under relentless pressure, Bütefisch’s claims began to seem increasingly improbable.
COUNSEL: Dr. Bütefisch, how much money was invested on the Leuna [fuel] part of Auschwitz?
BÜTEFISCH: In the course of four years, about 160,000,000 reichsmarks.
COUNSEL: Now as to these weekly construction reports—the reports covering the progress of that investment—I ask you to strike [calculate] some average of their length. Would you say about five lines, ten—here’s one that’s about thirty lines. Would you say twenty-five lines was the average length?
BÜTEFISCH: These are details, minor things.
COUNSEL: Supposing you read about twenty to thirty pages an hour. Would it take you more than a couple of hours a month to read every single one of these weekly reports covering an investment of one-fifth of a billion reichsmarks?
BÜTEFISCH: It depends on the contents. These men [my subordinates] just reported to me that “nothing happened.”
COUNSEL: But although you say you didn’t read the reports, do I understand that you meant to say that what was reported was not to be taken quite literally?
BÜTEFISCH: Certainly not literally. If I may apply these reports to the technical field, you might compare them to an analysis commission where someone might say, “It is all nonsense.” These are personal notes of a man who is expressing his opinion.
COUNSEL: The prosecution wishes to offer one of these weekly reports (NI 14515) which states that a chamber for 30 to 40 corpses was constructed for the accommodation of the inmates at Monowitz. Can you explain why a mortuary for 30 to 40 corpses was required at Monowitz?
BÜTEFISCH: I can only say that in every big camp, every small city, there is a need for a mortuary for purely sanitary purposes. The overall condition was the important thing to us.
Some defense tactics were more successful. For example, lawyers for Schmitz, Krauch, von Schnitzler, and ter Meer were able to show that the IG had helped to protect the former Jewish Aufsichtsrat member Carl von Weinberg (although not his brother Arthur) by getting him out of Germany and setting him up in Italy with an IG pension. This information provided a valuable counterweight to suggestions that they had been indifferent to the plight of the Jews. But when Fritz Gajewski’s lawyers tried a similar ploy it went spectacularly wrong. They introduced the affidavit from Gerhard Ollendorf, the former Jewish member of the Vorstand whose release from custody in 1939, through the intercession of Gajewski, had enabled him to leave the country. But Gajewski was then called to the stand by the prosecution’s Morris Amchan, who confronted him with the evidence showing it had been his tipping off the Gestapo that had brought about Ollendorf’s arrest in the first place. Even some of Gajewski’s fellow defendants could not help but smile at this revelation.
Toward the end of the trial, the defendants came to the stand to make statements on their own behalf. Some of the men were rambling and self-serving, some were brief and to the point, but they all repeated the same message that their defense lawyers had drummed into them: everything they had done during the Nazi period had been out of patriotism or because they were following orders or because the consequences of n
ot toeing the Nazi line would have meant drastic repercussions for themselves or their families. One or two did show a touch of remorse but their contrition seemed halfhearted and unconvincing. Wilhelm Mann, for example, had been embarrassed when the prosecutors made much of his early and enthusiastic support of the Nazi Party, and presumably he felt an explanation was due. But as he struggled to describe to the court how his views had now changed, his words seemed instead to reflect his regret that things hadn’t quite worked out as he hoped.
From the very beginning I objected to certain points of the party program; however, I have admitted here that during the first years, on account of the particular misery in Germany and on account of circumstances that are very difficult to judge for a foreigner, I was actually of the opinion that National Socialism, at that time, was the only possibility of saving Germany.… I did not give up my optimism as long as I believed that, through influences either from within or without, a change in some respects could and would occur. To give you the exact date as to when I quite suddenly changed my inner attitude, that is very difficult.
Probably the most effective defense came from Carl Krauch. His lawyers knew that as Göring’s special plenipotentiary for chemical production Krauch was potentially more vulnerable than anyone else to the charge of planning and preparing an aggressive war. So they put forth an argument that they guessed would immediately appeal to the two most conservative judges on the tribunal: “Replace IG by ICI for England, or DuPont for America, or Montecatini for Italy and at once the similarity will become clear to you.” In other words, Carl Krauch was simply an honest, industrious, God-fearing businessman who had worked for his country’s defense—just as any patriotic American in a similar position might have done on behalf of the United States.
None of the defendants, needless to say, not even Ambros, Bütefisch, or Dürrfeld, admitted to any participation in the crimes at Auschwitz.
* * *
ON MAY 28, 1948, the judges retired to consider their verdict. The trial had involved 152 days in court, 189 witnesses, 2,800 affidavits, and six thousand documents. The transcript ran to almost sixteen thousand pages. That same week the Communists took over in Czechoslovakia and the following month the Soviet Union imposed a blockade on West Berlin, which lay within the Russian occupation zone. Within a few days all traffic by road, rail, or water was cut off and the United States and Britain began organizing an airlift. As Josiah DuBois tidied up his office and prepared to take a long-postponed vacation, he tried to reassure himself: “Surely, I thought, the judges would not read from the current situation the motives of the defendants several years ago.”
Two months later the whole cast reassembled in the courtroom at Nuremberg. Rarely since the first day had the gallery and press benches been as crowded. Telford Taylor came in and sat at the prosecutors’ table but Belle Mayer was no longer present. Exhausted by her search for documents and witnesses, she had gone back to America to recover. DuBois was there, though, and Minskoff and Sprecher and Amchan and most of the other lawyers who had arrived at the Palace of Justice almost two years earlier fired up with idealism and enthusiasm and a determination to seek justice for the innocent victims of a cruel war. They were wearier now and more cynical, perhaps inevitably given what they had seen and heard over the previous twelve months. But they still believed that their case had been compelling enough. Who, after all, could argue with Auschwitz?
Three judges came in. (Clarence Merrell chose not to be in court.) Before they delivered their verdicts, Curtis Shake wished to say a few words. The previous day there had been a massive explosion at the Ludwigshafen plant. In an eerie repetition of the blast at Oppau in 1921, two hundred people had been killed and thousands more injured. Shake said that he wanted to express the tribunal’s deepest sympathy for the victims and their families and asked the court to stand for a moment’s silence. Then, with a glance at the twenty-three men in the dock, Shake settled down to read the verdicts. It took much of the morning but the message that emerged from the opinion was quite simple: the court did not believe the evidence against most of the defendants.
He dealt first with counts one and four, concerned with the preparation of and waging of aggressive war and conspiracy:
Hitler was the dictator. It was natural that the people of Germany listened to and read his utterances in the belief that he spoke the truth. The statesmen of other nations, conceding Hitler’s successes by the agreements they made with him, affirmed their belief in his word. Can we say that the common man of Germany believed less?… The average citizen of Germany, be he professional man, farmer, or industrialist, could scarcely be charged by these events with knowledge that the rulers of the Reich were planning to plunge Germany into a war of aggression. We reach the conclusion that common knowledge of Hitler’s plans did not prevail in Germany.… The prosecution is confronted with the difficulty of establishing knowledge on the part of the defendants, not only of the rearmament of Germany but also that the purpose of rearmament was to wage aggressive war.… In this sphere the evidence degenerates from proof to mere conjecture.
All of the defendants, even Carl Krauch, were acquitted on counts one and four. Count two concerned spoliation and plunder, the takeover of property against the owner’s will: “When action by the owner is not voluntary because his consent is obtained by threats, intimidation, pressure, or by exploiting the position and power of the military occupant under circumstances indicating that the owner is being induced to part with his property against his will, it is clearly a violation of the Hague regulations.” On this basis, nine of the defendants, including Schmitz, von Schnitzler, and Max Ilgner, were found guilty for their actions in Poland, France, and elsewhere. Fourteen were acquitted.
On count three, which charged the defendants with slavery and mass murder, Shake said the court was mindful of the dangers facing those who disobeyed the orders of the Nazi state. The probability that the IG had no choice but to comply with the mandates of the Hitler government possibly gave the accused a defense of necessity: “There can be but little doubt that the defiant refusal of a Farben executive to carry out the Reich production schedule or to use slave labor to achieve that end would have been treated as treasonable sabotage and would have resulted in prompt and drastic retaliation.”* However, Shake went on, the defense of necessity was not applicable “where the party seeking to invoke it was himself responsible for the existence or execution of such order or decree, or where his participation went beyond the requirements thereof, or was the result of his own initiative.”
On this basis, then, “the use of concentration camp labor and forced foreign workers at Auschwitz with the initiative displayed by the officials of Farben in the procurement and utilization of such labor is a crime against humanity and, to the extent that non-German nationals were involved, also a war crime, to which the slave labor program of the Reich will not warrant the defense of necessity.”
But as Shake continued he made it plain that in the court’s view the conditions at the camp had not been as bad as the prosecution had alleged. While there had been some occasional unpleasantness, there had also been acts of corporate generosity: “Camp Monowitz was not without inhumane incidents. Occasionally beatings occurred by the Farben supervisors. While the food was inadequate, as was the clothing, especially in winter,… Farben voluntarily and at its own expense provided hot soup for the workers on the site at noon. This was in addition to the regular rations.”
The three directors considered to have a direct connection with Auschwitz were found guilty: Ambros, Bütefisch, and Dürrfeld, as well as two others adjudged guilty by inference: Fritz ter Meer, because it was thought that Ambros must have talked to him about the use of slave labor, and Carl Krauch, because he had asked Göring to send him concentration camp inmates. All the other defendants were acquitted without a word of censure or disapproval, including Hermann Schmitz, who had scrutinized the contracts with the SS and sanctioned the subsequent actions of his subordinates; Ch
ristian Schneider, August von Knieriem, and Friedrich Jaehne, who between them had visited the site on many occasions; Wilhelm Mann, who had sent checks to pay for Dr. Mengele’s experiments; and all the other directors, who had received the company’s construction reports, approved the huge expenditure, and heard the rumors about gassings but did nothing.
In the afternoon Shake passed sentence on those adjudged guilty:
Otto Ambros: eight years’ imprisonment for slavery and mass murder
Walter Dürrfeld: eight years’ imprisonment for slavery and mass murder
Fritz ter Meer: seven years’ imprisonment for plunder and spoliation, slavery and mass murder
Heinrich Bütefisch: six years’ imprisonment for slavery and mass murder
Carl Krauch: six years’ imprisonment for slavery and mass murder
Georg von Schnitzler: five years’ imprisonment for plunder and spoliation
Hermann Schmitz: four years’ imprisonment for plunder and spoliation
Max Ilgner: three years’ imprisonment for plunder and spoliation
Paul Haefliger: two years’ imprisonment for plunder and spoliation
Heinrich Oster: two years’ imprisonment for plunder and spoliation
Ernst Bürgin: two years’ imprisonment for plunder and spoliation
Friedrich Jaehne: eighteen months’ imprisonment for plunder and spoliation
Hans Kugler: eighteen months’ imprisonment for plunder and spoliation
All of the rest were set free: Heinrich Gattineau, who had chatted about synthetic oil with Hitler and helped finesse the IG’s first connections with the Nazis; August von Knieriem, who had provided the legal justification for the takeover of other people’s companies and somehow never noticed the stench of burning bodies at Auschwitz; Fritz Gajewski, who had informed on his old friend to the Gestapo; Carl Wurster, Heinrich Hörlein, and Wilhelm Mann, who had been on the board of the company that produced Zyklon B but who apparently never thought to ask why it had suddenly become so profitable.