The concentration camp, which was opened in October 1942, was located on the I.G. Farben plant grounds, on the site of the previously demolished Polish village of Monowice (Monowitz). At first it was known as the “Buna camp,” Lager Buna.[1] The name of the concentration camp was taken from the term for synthetic rubber, Buna (from butadiene and Natrium, the German word for sodium). Buna was a synthetically produced rubber patented by I.G. Farben in 1927; it was made by polymerizing butadiene, using sodium as a catalyst. Buna rubber was to be made in the projected plant, along with synthetic fuels, precursor agents for chemical weapons, explosives, and other chemicals.

The name of the concentration camp subsequently underwent repeated modifications due to administrative changes. On November 22, 1943, Supreme Commander of the SS (Reichsführer SS) Heinrich Himmler ordered the Auschwitz concentration camp to be subdivided into three administrative units, Auschwitz I (main camp), Auschwitz II (Birkenau), and Auschwitz III (Monowitz and subcamps). Apart from the subcamps with agricultural cultivation and production facilities, which were the responsibility of the commandant’s office of Auschwitz II (Birkenau), Himmler thus placed all the subcamps for industrial enterprises under the SS camp commandant’s office in Monowitz. In December 1943, the name of the concentration camp known as the “Buna camp” was changed to Arbeitslager Monowitz, the “Monowitz labor camp.” [2] Only a few weeks before the camp’s evacuation, the administrative lines of authority were rearranged once again. In a garrison order on November 25, 1944, the commandant of Auschwitz returned the oversight of the Auschwitz II extermination camp (Birkenau) to the main camp, while the Arbeitslager Monowitz was made independent and renamed the Konzentrationslager Monowitz.[3] In internal I.G. Farben documents, the camp also was referred to as “Camp IV,” Lager IV.[4]The term “Auschwitz IV,”[5] erroneously used by Joseph Borkin for the corporate concentration camp of Buna/Monowitz, does not exist in the historical sources.

For reasons of understandability, the website of the Norbert Wollheim Memorial uses the term Buna/Monowitz concentration camp, apart from a few passages in which the administrative subordination has historical significance.

(FS; transl. KL)