Hermann Goering, IG Farben and Zyklon-B

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 878

I’ve been reading Nuremberg Interviews (Knopf, 2004) by the American Leon Goldensohn,  a psychiatrist who conducted interviews with 19 of the 24 “premier” Nazis brought to trial at Nuremberg in 1945/6.  Goldensohn had a relatively workman-like approach to dealing with his subjects, leaving many dangling questions and comments not pursued.  On the other hand, he may not have been the type of psychiatrist who asked any questions at all of his patients, so at the very least we do have an interesting insight into these failed people that we would not have had otherwise. 

 

Of all the interviews, I was most struck with the incredible understatements made by Hermann Goering (Field Marshal and once second in line to Hitler as a hand-picked successor) regarding the extermination camps. Goering maintained that he really didn’t know anything about them, at all, but found them offensive to his “chivalric” (if not moral) code. He felt that the killing of the Jews in this manner would “give Germany a black eye” and as a tool of warfare it turned out “not to have been worth much”.  But Goering continues:  “If killing the Jews meant anything, such as that it meant the winning of the war, I would not have been bothered by it”.

Goering continues to explain that the killing of Jews as a result of “Goebbels’ hysterical propaganda” and “is not the way of a gentleman” .Also, the gassing women and children just wouldn’t do.  He found gassing women to be “ungentlemanly, and thus would not have been able to authorize such a thing.  Killing children, he said, would not have been “sportsmanlike”. 

Goering said that he had heard “rumors” of mass killings, but he “knew that it would be useless” to investigate the rumors “even though it would have been easy” to be do so.  His reasoning: he wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it; and faced with that, he concluded, “it would make me feel bad”. 

I’d give the benefit of the doubt to normal folks who would say something like this, that there was an error in translation, or some difficulty, or something.  With Goering, I’d say that this was an accurate statement. Sportsmanship.  He didn’t mention men in the gas chambers, but since he had defined his limits of gentlemanly and sportsman-like conduct, it stands to reason that the men were fair game in his mind.  Only monsters think like this. 

 This was the man who had very well-monied support from American industrialists in the pre-1945, deep connections to Ford and Standard Oil, and thus from Standard to IG Farben, and then to Zyklon-B (and also HERE) and back again to the gas chamber.  These connections are long and arduous, complex—but they really are there, the American support for the Nazi government, developed mainly for money but also for ideology. One of significant front man for the Nazi government is also one of Cornell’s 100 most illustrious alumni, Walter Teagle. Teagle was president of Standard Oil and partnered with the Nazis in 1938, one result being shared research and patents, some of which were crucial war materials like tetraethyl lead and synthetic rubber. (Tetraethyl lead was a fuel additive that in some respects made it possible for the Luftwaffe to attack and bomb London.) I use the term “front man” because of Teagle’s blatant lies to the Securities and Exchange Commission concerning true ownership and control of I.G. Farben’s American subsidiary, American I.G. Chemical Corporation.  (It was happily believed that a Swiss subsidiary controlled the company rather than its Nazi owners. Teagle of course knew the truth.) 

 

This is just one of a geographical dictionary of stories on the American/Nazi business connection and the financing of Hitler. It is a long and winding mass of roads, none of which is particularly pretty, many of which lead straight home, again.  Henry Ford was impossibly ugly in all of this, a moral stain. But there were many like him as well. 

  Farben made a heavy contribution to the Nazi war effort, on many levels, in particular with explosives, where the company produced nearly all of the explosives used by the German army. Farben also swept into countries freshly occupied by the Wehrmacht to take over the industrial complexes, using and discarding indigenous workers as they saw fit and necessary.   I think what most people think of when they think of I.G. Farben is their sustained involvement and investment in the extermination camps.  For example, Auschwitz IG (and Buna-Werke) was a direct subsidiary of IG Farben which ran the Auschwitz III (or Monowitz, Monowice) labor camp, using and consuming some 50,000 slave laborers at a time at its various installments around the vast Auschwitz complex.  These workers would be weeded out from time to time, with those too weak to work sent to the gas chambers at Birkenau.(Zyklon-B was used at Majdanek, Sachsenhausen and Operation Reinhard .)

In the appalling history of the gas chambers, it was almost by accident that Zyklon-B came to be used to exterminate human beings.  Its function to that time was to exterminate bug pests, but experimentation showed that it worked lethally upon humans.  Monumental amounts of Zyklon-B were sent to the extermination camps, all without question. Dr. Fritz ter Meer, one of the directors of Farben and who knew exactly what the vast amounts of Zyklon-B was being used for, was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to seven years in prison for genocide and crimes against humanity, though he was released after four years after the intervention of U.S. High Commissioner for Germany J.J. McCloy. (It was McCloy again, working with Standard Oil and the Rockefellers, who ensured that the massive Farben works at Frankfurt was taken off lists of American bombing targets in 1943 and 1944.)  ter Meer returned to work for Farben after his imprisonment—though it wasn’t the old Farben anymore, the company  having been slightly effaced, broken into several constituent elements.  Ter Meer’s section of Farben was Bayer, as in Bayer aspirin, where he served as Chairman from 1952 to 1961. {Image below: political meeting at IG Farben.]

Dr. Fritz ter Meer, a director of IG Farben who was directly involved in developing the nerve gas, Zyklon-B, which killed millions of Jews, was sentenced to seven years in prison but was released after four years through the intervention of Rockefeller and J.J. McCloy, then U.S. High Commissioner for Germany. An unrepentant Fritz ter Meer, guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity, returned to work in Bayer where he served as Chairman for more than 10 years, until 1961.

Kurt Wurster, another director from Farben who was in charge of the Zyklon-B-producing subsidiary, Degesch ((Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH, or German Corporation for Pest Control), was acquitted of all war crime charges brought against him.  He took charge of another part of the disbanded Farben empire, serving as CEO of BASF from 1962 to 1974.  The directors of Testa, another Farben subsidiary producing Zyklon-B--Bruno Tesch and Karl Weinbacher – met with a different end in a British Military court, and were executed.

And so on and on the story goes, unpretty tales of undeserved redemptions.  For example, in the coming fight against the Soviets, the U.S. government developed a convenient amnesia regarding the atrocities committed by Wernher von Braun et alia, paperclipping them away to the U.S. to help develop the American missile and rocket capacities. 

[Above: one of the many appearances of Hitler on the front page of Farben's newspaper, Von werk zu Werk.]

I think I’ve ground to be a bit of a halt, these posts supposing to be an hour’s effort—there is simply too much to put into a tiny synopsis like this.  I just got stuck on Goering and Farben.  Seeing these images from one of the many Farben publications with so many swastikas and so much  Nazi symbolism made me terrifically sad…Yes, Farben was the largest backer of Hitler in his rise to power in 1931/32 and supplied even more after the election, and of course Farben received the most benefit than any other company in Germany as a result of the victory, but still, there is just so much of it... [See HERE for an interesting short item on the adaptation of Farben to nazism.]

In all of this the survivor has been Zyklon-B itself: it is still in production in the Czech Republic by Draslovka Kolin (Kolin), and is now known as Uragan D2.

[Some vintage footage from the trials at Nuremberg.]

Comments

[mahendra singh]

An excellent & concise post into an area of US-German business/politcal relations which most citizens of both countries know little about. I strongly recommend to you & your readers the well-researched & valuable book by Carolyn Eisenberg, Drawing the Line.

She deals with the immediate post-war decisions by the Allies regarding Germany, culminating in the East-West split. The overwhelming influence of both American & German business interests upon the entire process was morally revolting and politically shortsighted. And as you point out, this was merely the continuation of an equally disreputable pre-war and during-the-war relationship.

Nice guys finish last, eh?

[John Ptak]

Mahendra: thanks so much for your comment. I had a look at the Eisenberg book at the library and it frankly looks too complex to jump into without having (and I'm talking about myself here) a real understanding of what in the h*ll happened at Yalta. And for that matter, the repatriation horrors with the Soviets '45-'47. Anyway I'm just saying that the Eisenberg book looks like it would require more understanding than I have right now. I do thank you for bringing it up here and making me think about it.

[Sharon]

Interesting read John. I too have been reading up on the Nuremberg trials lately and stumbled upon this post. Whilst I haven't read too much on the IG Farben trials per se, I have come to form the opinion that the Testa directors whom were tried and executed did not deserve the death penalty.

Firstly, historical accounts from the Germans have documented evidence that the Nazis went out of their way to hide these secret extermination camps from the German citizens. Thus the allegations that a mere industrialist and his business associate would have privy to such knowledge is undoubtedly refutable.

Secondly, Testa was merely a distributor acting as an intermediary in the supply of the toxic gas as a wholesaler. The business ultimately functions as a fumigation service provider for commercial properties. Whilst it is widely assumed during the trials that the large amounts of Zyklon B gas was used solely for the purposes of mass murder, this assumption had been attributed without verification. On hindsight, historians and investigators have discovered that 95% of the toxic gas was used for delousing (effects and buildings) to contain the typhus epidemic in the concentration camps. Only the remaining 5% had been used for homicidal gassings.

Lastly, the court was only presented with witness accounts of an ex-bookkeeper who had purportedly seen a report which suggests that the defendants had knowledge of the Nazis' homicidal gassing activities. Ultimately, there was inconclusive evidence to implicate the defendants with certainty and this account would not have held in the court of law if it were a fair trial.

What puzzles me the most is how the British Military Tribunal could condemn these 2 men to death with their indirect proximity to the crime when the Nuremberg doctor trials saw short-to-medium terms for a few in the actual concentration camps. The death sentence seems too harsh.

Appeals were also single-handedly denied. It seems they were condemned to death by association and were victims of convenient blame, where their role is serve the public interest by accounting for "international justice".

P.S. you might find this an interesting read - http://vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres10/v4%233.pdf