Glossary

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I.G. Farben Master Craftsmen and Foremen in Contact with the Concentration Camp Prisoners

 a  Heinz Frank (head of the IGA plant trade school): “I am not aware that an IG employee got into difficulties because he had talked to prisoners.”

(Heinz Frank, hearing of witness, January 19, 1953. HStAW, Sec. 460, No. 1424 (Wollheim v. IG Farben), Vol. II, pp. 252R–256, here p. 253R. (Transl. KL))
 

 b  Testimony of Wilhelm Baymanns, an engineer working for Dr. Walter, an engineer based in Gleiwitz, who by his own admission came to the construction site 40 to 50 times between 1942 and 1945, each time for one day: “The prisoners did not look good. The Kapos looked best of all. But I can’t say that the prisoners looked bad. Late in the war and after the war, workers looked bad in Germany too.”

(Wilhelm Baymanns, hearing of witness, November 20, 1952. HStAW, Sec. 460, No. 1424 (Wollheim v. IG Farben), Vol. I, pp. 133–134, here p. 133R. (Transl. KL))
 
 c  Heinz Frank: “It’s not possible that there would have been a smell of burnt flesh in Auaschwitz and that the fire from the chimneys of the crematorium could have been seen.”
(Heinz Frank, hearing of witness, January 29, 1953. HHStAW, Sec. 460, No. 1424 (Wollheim v. IG Farben), Vol. II, pp. 252R–256, here p. 252R. (Transl. KL))
 
 d  “Each time it cost the plant management months of negotiations with the SS to succeed in getting one privilege or another for the prisoners over the course of the work in Auschwitz.”
(Max Faust, hearing of witness, December 4, 1952. HHStAW, Sec. 460, No. 1424 (Wollheim v. IG Farben), Vol. I, pp. 164R–172R, here p. 165. (Transl. KL))
 
 e  Testimony of Kurt Eisfeld: “Dr. Dürrfeld ordered, not just once but repeatedly, that humane treatment of the prisoners at the construction site should prevail. That it happened more than once was due to the fact that, despite the prohibition, one German or another, even IG employees, had let themselves get carried away and assaulted the prisoners [...] We removed one or two Meister from their positions and dismissed them because they had laid hands on prisoners. With a workforce of 25,000 men, it can certainly happen now and again that one or another steps over the line.”
(Kurt Eisfeld, hearing of witness, January 29, 1953. HHStAW, Sec. 460, No. 1424 (Wollheim v. IG Farben), Vol. II, pp. 248R–252R, here p. 251R. (Transl. KL))
 
 f  “In fact, we are the untouchables to the civilians. They think, more or less explicitly—with all the nuances lying between contempt and  commiseration—that as we have been condemned to this life of ours, reduced to our condition, we must be tainted by some mysterious, grave sin. They hear us speak in many different languages, which they do not understand and which sound to them as grotesque as animal noises; they see us reduced to ignoble slavery, without hair, without honor and without names, beaten every day, more abject every day, and they never see in our eyes a light of rebellion, or of peace, or of faith. They know us as thieves and untrustworthy, muddy, ragged and starving, and mistaking the effect for the cause, they judge us worthy of our abasement. Who could tell one of our faces from another? For them we are Kazet, a singular neuter word.”
(Primo Levi: Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) [first published as If This Is a Man], pp. 120–121.)
 

 g  Norbert Wollheim stated for the record in Nuremberg: “If a Farben supervisor was not satisfied with the tempo of the work, he reported that to the SS command and that meant severe punishment for the individual inmate or for the detail.”

(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.)

 

 h  Testimony of Benedikt Kautsky: “I also know that workers suddenly were sent to our camp from a camp near a mine; these people had mistreated the prisoners there. This civilian worker in the cable detachment was an IG worker. I’ve forgotten his name. He had come from Leuna and was under a senior master craftsman named Faust, who was the Meister for the cable detachment. The head of the cable detachment was an engineer named Diesel. Faust himself was also a beater. I’ve heard that from reliable prisoners. Faust also had a number of run-ins with the SS and got a very strict warning in the summer of 1944. Only after that did he stop beating people.”

(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  Testimony of Benedikt Kautsky: “Civilians frequently said: ‘If you don’t work faster, you’ll be gassed,’ or 'then you’ll be reported.’”

(Benedikt Kautsky, hearing of witness, January 29, 1953. HHStAW, Sec. 460, No. 1424 (Wollheim v. IG Farben), Vol. II, pp. 257–264, here p. 264. (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.  a  

 

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  b , and were unaware of any selections and gassings.  c  They also had witnessed little or nothing of the difficult working conditions, they asserted, saying that almost never were prisoners beaten and forced to work without protective clothing, and if that did occur, it was not I.G. Farben that was to blame for it. Quite the contrary: executive personnel in particular declared that I.G. had taken great pains to alleviate the “regrettable” “lot of a prisoner.”[2]  d  Several witnesses from I.G.  Farben emphasized the compassion that plant manager Walther Dürrfeld had beseeched the employees over and over to exercise in dealing with the prisoners.  e  In fact, the plant management asked the SS in August 1941 to reserve for the concentration camp the “extremely unpleasant scenes that take place at the construction site [during beatings of prisoners],”[3] which were producing a demoralizing effect on the free laborers: It was nothing resembling compassion that led beatings at I.G. Auschwitz to be discouraged; rather, the motive was to spare the free laborers the sight of the consequences of the “ruthless deployment of prisoners.”[4] The scant opportunity available to the German labor force to protest the brutal abuse of the prisoners by stopping work was usually not taken advantage of by most of the German employees of I.G. Auschwitz: they avoided any personal risk and approached the prisoners with indifference or contempt, and some even participated in assaults.  f 

 

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.  g   h  Benedikt Kautsky knew of civilian workers who had threatened prisoners with the gas chambers.  i  British prisoners of war, who also had to work at the construction site, reported mistreatment of the prisoners directly by I.G. employees. Although the trial court’s verdict in Wollheim’s lawsuit against I.G. Farben granted that “I.G. Auschwitz did not intend or deliberately promote inhumane treatment of the workers,”[6] the witness for the defense failed to convince the court that I.G. Farben had taken the necessary precautions to protect the prisoners deployed at its construction site in Auschwitz. On the contrary, the court found that the employees, all the way from ordinary laborers up to the executive level, had indirectly worsened the prisoners’ situation either by using prisoner functionaries as an “extension of their arm” or by reporting the prisoners to the SS for the slightest infractions, thus ensuring their punishment or triggering selections.

(SP; transl. KL)



Sources

Excerpt from Wochenbericht [weekly report] No. 11 for the period August 3–9, 1941, NI-14543. Archive of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Subseqent Nuremberg Trials, Case VI, Prosecution Exhibit 1985, reel 033, pp. 331–332.

Kurt Eisfeld, hearing of witness, January 29, 1953. HHStAW, Sec. 460, No. 1424 (Wollheim v. I.G. Farben), Vol. II, pp. 248R–252R.

Max Faust, hearing of witness, December 4, 1952. HHStAW, Sec. 460, No. 1424 (Wollheim v. I.G. Farben), Vol. I, pp. 164R–172R.

Heinz Frank, hearing of witness, January 29, 1953. HHStAW, Sec. 460, No. 1424 (Wollheim v. I.G. Farben), Vol. II, pp. 252R–256.

Benedikt Kautsky, hearing of witness, January 29, 1953. HHStAW, Sec. 460, No. 1424 (Wollheim v. I.G. Farben), Vol. II, pp. 257–264.

Verdict in the Wollheim suit, June 10, 1953. HHStAW, Sec. 460, No. 1424 (Wollheim v. I.G. Farben), Vol. III, pp. 446–488.

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.

 

Literature

Levi, Primo: Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996 [first published as If This Is a Man].

Setkiewicz, Piotr: “Ausgewählte Probleme aus der Geschichte des IG Werkes Auschwitz.” In: Hefte von Auschwitz 22 (2002), pp. 7–147.

Wagner, Bernd C.: IG Auschwitz. Zwangsarbeit und Vernichtung von Häftlingen des Lagers Monowitz 1941–1945. Munich: Saur, 2000.

[1] Kurt Eisfeld, hearing of witness, January 29, 1953. HHStAW, Sec. 460, No. 1424 (Wollheim v. I.G. Farben), Vol. II, pp. 248R–252R, here p. 252. (Translated by KL)

[2] Kurt Eisfeld, hearing of witness, January 29, 1953, p. 249R.

[3] Excerpt from Wochenbericht [weekly report] No. 11 for the period August 3–9, 1941, NI-14543. Archive of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Subseqent Nuremberg Trials, Case VI, Prosecution Exhibit 1985, reel 033, pp. 331–332, here p. 331. (Translated by KL)

[4] Bernd C. Wagner: IG Auschwitz. Zwangsarbeit und Vernichtung von Häftlingen des Lagers Monowitz 1941–1945 (Munich: Saur, 2000), p. 83. (Translated by KL)

[5] Circular letter from the  Abwehr representative” for I.G.  Farben, cited in Wagner: I.G. Auschwitz, p. 151.

[6] Verdict in the Wollheim suit, June 10, 1953. HHStAW, Sec. 460, No. 1424 (Wollheim v. I.G. Farben), Vol. III, pp. 446–488, here p. 456. (Translated by KL)