I.G. Farben Master Craftsmen and Foremen in Contact with the Concentration Camp Prisoners
(Norbert Wollheim, hearing of witness, November 13, 1947. Archive of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, Case VI, Prot. (e), reel 005, Vol. 11, pp. 3700–3718, here p. 3707.)
(Benedikt Kautsky, hearing of witness, January 29, 1953. HHStAW, Sec. 460, No. 1424 (Wollheim v. IG Farben), Vol. II, pp. 257–264, here p. 260. (Transl. KL))
“I spoke with Dr. Faust and Dr. Dürrfeld about it many a time, and we speculated about what could be causing the rapid deterioration of these people. We came to the conclusion that it was a purely psychological matter. When a person who is unused to physical labor is arrested and taken to such a concentration camp, in many cases the emotional strain may have tipped the scales so that even a slight illness could be his undoing.”[1]
The senior managers, engineers, clerks, and workers of I.G. Farben and the domestic and foreign construction firms under subcontract to I.G. Auschwitz frequently had daily contact with the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp prisoners used for forced labor. Often they were the direct superiors of the prisoners and responsible for supervising their work. Even though contact with concentration camp prisoners was officially off limits for them, establishing contact did not necessarily result in punishment of the Germans.
The statements about the prisoners’ situation made by former I.G. employees in the two postwar trials of relevance here (I.G. Farben Trial at Nuremberg, Wollheim Suit) frequently are in glaring contrast to the statements made by surviving prisoners. The I.G. staffers often claimed at first to have been uninformed regarding the circumstances of the inmates’ lives and deaths, alleging that they had not noticed the extremely poor physical condition of the prisoners
This impression altered just slightly as the construction work progressed, and from mid-1943 on, detachments of skilled workers also began to include prisoners. Now contact between civilians and prisoners began to increase. New regulations were passed, designed to maintain the gap between the civilians and the prisoners. For example, the Abwehr representative at I.G. Auschwitz, who was responsible for counterespionage, ordered “the prisoners and POWs deployed in the offices to be isolated so that use of the telephone and overhearing of telephone conversations and other important official discussions are impossible.”[5]
Former prisoners tell of isolated instances of minor assistance provided by “good” civilian workers who gave them foodstuffs. At the same time, they describe blows inflicted by bullies, who certainly were not limited only to SS men and prisoner functionaries: Norbert Wollheim refers to abuse by I.G. employees.
(SP; transl. KL)