Max Faust (1891–1980)
Max Faust was born on April 5, 1891, in Frankfurt am Main. He studied civil engineering and took a job at BASF in Ludwigshafen in 1922. He worked there in BASF’s construction division, and in 1936 he was promoted to senior engineer. Faust joined the NSDAP in May 1933. In 1941, he was made an authorized signatory at BASF. Starting in January 1940, he worked as a site manager for I.G. Farben near Breslau in Silesia, initially during the building of Farben’s third Buna plant in Rattwitz, which was discontinued in the summer of 1940, and then during the construction of the secret nerve-gas plant of I.G. Farbenindustrie in Dyhernfurth.
In January 1941, Max Faust paid his first visit to the construction site in Auschwitz-Monowitz and wrote a positive expert opinion on its suitability for I.G. Farben’s purposes. During this visit, he also learned of the existing Auschwitz concentration camp. In June of the same year, Faust took on the task of construction management for the Auschwitz plant. The official plant manager of I.G. Auschwitz, Otto Ambros, entrusted Faust with the handling of day-to-day operations and made him his on-site representative. In this capacity, Faust led the negotiations with the camp commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Rudolf Höss, on the use of prisoners from that camp at the I.G. Farbenindustrie construction site. In the I.G. Farben Trial in Nuremberg, Faust testified that he once had seen a prisoner shot by an SS man and “on various occasions, exhausted prisoners sitting around or lying down.”[1] He was aware of mistreatment of the prisoners by I.G. Farben employees; after the war, former prisoners accused him of having beaten prisoners himself.
After the war, in the I.G. Farben Trial in Nuremberg, Faust stated in his defense that he had opposed the use of prisoners for business reasons, because they “did far less work than ordinary laborers” and “besides, the mistreatment made a bad impression on the German and foreign [sic] workers.”[2] Max Faust had visited the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp three times and observed that “things were taking place there that the SS had reason to conceal.”[3] However, he did not see I.G. Farben as obligated to worry about the prisoners – from whom the firm profited, mind you, by further hiring them out to subcontractors at many times the original price
(SP; transl. KL)