IG Farben process

The defendants, photo taken on August 27, 1947

In the IG Farben process , the “United States vs. Carl Krauch et al. “, 23 executives of IG Farbenindustrie AG had to answer before a US military court in 1947 . On July 30, 1948, 13 of the defendants were sentenced to prison terms, while the remaining ten were acquitted on the evidence.

It was the sixth of a total of twelve follow-up lawsuits against those responsible as part of the Nuremberg Trials of the German Reich at the time of National Socialism . The verdicts were used to punish “ looting ” of foreign companies in the former enemy countries of Germany, Poland, Norway, France and the Soviet Union. Another offense was " enslavement ", the planned use of forced labor from the specially for the construction of the Buna-Werke built Monowitz concentration camp . The production of poison gas ( Zyklon B ) and its delivery to the SS for extermination purposes in concentration camps was also dealt with in the process.

prehistory

During the Second World War, the allies USA and USSR had jointly regarded the economic imperialism of Nazi Germany as one of the reasons for the war. Large industrialists were assigned a key role in planning and carrying out this criminal war. The American point of view was influenced by the IG Farben report by the Kilgore Commission and the political scientist Franz Neumann's description of Germany as Behemoth , and the aim was to bring big industrialists to justice and to smash their cartels.

Aerial view of the Monowitz concentration camp (Auschwitz III), January 1945

IG Farben had been needed by the National Socialists to wage a war of aggression, had enriched itself through the looting and appropriation of foreign property in Germany and the occupied territories, delivered Zyklon B to the concentration and extermination camps, profited from human experiments in concentration camps , and numerous at the end of the war Employed forced laborers and built the Monowitz concentration camp (Auschwitz III) in order to have labor available for the newly built Buna works . The corporate leaders, who were overwhelmingly not convinced National Socialists, had increased profits fivefold since 1933.

As early as April 1945, investigators from General Eisenhowers' Finance Division moved into the IG Farben building in Frankfurt to collect incriminating material that was supposed to make the involvement of IG Farben in the unjust National Socialist state visible in public criminal proceedings. With the Control Council Act No. 9 , the entire property of IG Farben was confiscated.

According to the Potsdam Agreement of August 1945, Germany was to be democratized , denazified , demilitarized and de-cartelized in order to fund the moral and economic reconstruction through a change of elite. In the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals , important legal policy decisions were made on the use of forced labor (as a criminal “slave labor” program) and the SS as a criminal organization. But no industrialist had been convicted, as the only private industrialist accused was, due to a mistake, the seriously ill Gustav Krupp , who was unable to negotiate . A second major international war crimes trial focused on the economy was discarded for financial reasons and because the Soviets did not want to offer the Soviets an opportunity for a tribunal against the capitalist system. By turning to the reintegration of Germany as a bulwark against communism within the framework of the Marshall Plan , the funds for the industrial trials were reduced and only the trials against members of Flick , IG Farben and Krupp before a National Military Tribunal (NMT) of the Americans and in the case of the Röchling Group before a French tribunal.

The process

The United States against Carl Krauch et al. took place from August 14, 1947 to July 30, 1948 before the National American Nuremberg Military Tribunal VI under Control Council Act No. 10 in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice .

Telford Taylor, chief prosecutor

The accusers

• Brigadier General Telford Taylor , Chief Prosecutor
• Josiah E. DuBois, deputy chief prosecutor
• Drexel A. Sprecher, head of the prosecution team in the IG Farben case

The charges

Based on the indictment dated May 3, 1947, charges were made on the following counts:

1. Crimes against peace through planning, preparing, initiating and conducting wars of aggression and invasions of other countries
2. War crimes and crimes against humanity through looting and robbery of public and private property in armed countries
3. Enslavement of the civilian population in areas occupied or controlled by Germany, conscription of these civilians for forced labor , participation in the enslavement of concentration camp inmates within Germany, in the illegal use of prisoners of war in acts of war , mistreatment, intimidation, torture and murder of enslaved people
4. Membership of three board members ( Christian Schneider , Heinrich Bütefisch , Erich von der Heyde ) in the SS , which had been classified as a criminal organization by the International Military Tribunal in the previous main trial
5. Conspiracy to commit crimes against peace

The judge

The jury consisted of the following personalities:

• President: Curtis Grover Shake , former Indiana Supreme Court Justice
• James Morris , North Dakota State Supreme Court Justice
• Paul M. Hebert , Law School, Louisiana State University
• Clarence F. Merrell , Indiana State

The defendants

Charges were brought against 23 people in 1948. Your position up to 1945, the charge (if convicted), the sentence pronounced, the early release and the following activities - if known - are shown in the following table:

Overview of the defendants

image	Defendant and function	Charges					Sentence and dismissal	Subsequent activities
		I.	II	III	IV	V
	Carl Krauch * 1887; † 1968 Chairman of the Supervisory Board of IG Farben	U	U	S.	-	U	Dismissed six years in 1950	1955 member of the supervisory board of Hüls GmbH
	Otto Ambros * 1901; † 1990 board member of IG Farben, planning IG Auschwitz	U	U	S.	-	U	Dismissed for eight years in 1952	from 1954 various board positions in the pharmaceutical industry and other areas, e.g. B. Grünenthal GmbH , or as a consultant for FK Flick
	Ernst Bürgin * 1885; † 1966 board member of IG Farben	U	S.	U	-	U	Dismissed two years in 1949	?
	Heinrich Bütefisch * 1894; † 1969 member of the board of IG Farben, gasoline synthesis IG Auschwitz	U	U	S.	U	U	Dismissed for six years in 1951	1952 member of the supervisory board a. a. from Ruhrchemie and Deutsche Gasolin AG
	Walter Dürrfeld * 1899; † 1967 operator of the Buna plant in Auschwitz III - Monowitz concentration camp	U	U	S.	-	U	Dismissed for eight years in 1951	several supervisory board mandates
	Fritz Gajewski * 1885; † 1965 board member IG Farben, contact to Dynamit Nobel AG	U	U	U	-	U	acquittal	1949 managing director and 1952 chairman of the board of Dynamit Nobel AG
	Heinrich Gattineau * 1905; † 1985 SA leader, director of IG Farben	U	U	U	-	U	acquittal	u. a. on the Executive Board of WASAG-Chemie AG ( Krupp Group ); 1975 the Great Order of Merit of the Federal Cross of Merit of the FRG
	Paul Häfliger * 1886; † 1950 board member of IG Farben	U	S.	U	-	U	Dismissed two years in 1948	-
	Erich von der Heyde * 1900; † 1984 SS-Hauptscharführer, agricultural scientist at IG Farben	U	U	U	U	U	acquittal	-
	Heinrich Hörlein * 1882; † 1954 board member of IG Farben, chairman of the supervisory board of Behringwerke and DeGeSch	U	U	U	-	U	acquittal	1952 Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Bayer AG Senator at the Max Planck Society
	Max Ilgner * 1899; † 1966 board member of IG Farben	U	S.	U	-	U	Dismissed three years in 1948	active on behalf of the Evangelical Church in Germany , u. a Planning and supervision of the refugee town Espelkamp
	Friedrich Jähne * 1879; † 1965 board member IG Farben, chief engineer	U	S.	U	-	U	one year, six months 1948 released	1955 member of the supervisory board of the "new" Farbwerke Hoechst , 1960 Grand Order of Merit with a star in the FRG
	August von Knieriem * 1887; † 1978 lawyer and business leader	U	U	U	-	U	acquittal	Development of BASF and chairman of the supervisory board of "IG-Farben-Industrie AG i. L. "
	Hans Kugler * 1900; † 1968 Head of IG Farben; Advisory board for export issues of the chemistry examination office	U	S.	U	-	U	one year, six months 1948 released	u. a. on the board of Cassella Farbwerke Mainkur AG
	Hans Kühne * 1880; † 1969 board member IG Farben	U	U	U	-	U	acquittal	Employment at Bayer in Elberfeld
	Carl Lautenschläger * 1888; † 1962 military economic leader	U	U	U	-	U	acquittal	took over the management of the denazification of the plant,
	Wilhelm Rudolf Mann * 1894; † 1992 manager of IG Farben	U	U	U	-	U	acquittal	1949 Head of Pharmaceutical Sales at Bayer AG
	Fritz ter Meer * 1884; † 1967 member of the board, administrator IG Auschwitz	U	S.	S.	-	U	Dismissed seven years in 1950	1955 member of the supervisory board of Bayer AG
	Heinrich Oster * 1878; † 1954 board member of IG Farben	U	S.	U	-	U	Dismissed two years in 1949	1949 member of the supervisory board of Gelsenberg AG
	Hermann Schmitz * 1881; † 1960 CEO of IG Farben, CFO	U	S.	U	-	U	Dismissed four years in 1949	1952 member of the supervisory board of Deutsche Bank Berlin West, 1956 honorary chairman of the supervisory board of Rheinische Stahlwerke ( defended by Rudolf Dix )
	Christian Schneider * 1887; † 1972 General Manager IG Farben	U	U	U	U	U	acquittal	Member of the supervisory board of Süddeutsche Kalistickstoff-Werke AG in Trostberg
	Georg von Schnitzler * 1884; † 1962 board member of IG Farben	U	S.	U	-	U	Dismissed five years in 1949	President of the German-Ibero-American Society
	Carl Wurster * 1900; † 1974 board member of IG Farben, administrative board of the German Society for Pest Control (DeGeSch)	U	U	U	-	U	acquittal	1952 CEO of the "new" BASF a. v. m.

S - guilty verdict;  U - Innocent as charged

Defense strategy

The defense challenged the court because it was a case of victorious justice , which violated the legal principle of nullum crimen sine lege, nulla poena sine lege and was based on an inadmissible subsequent law ( ex post facto ). The proceedings put the defense at a disadvantage compared to the prosecution and ultimately it is only a matter of indicting an entire profession on a collective basis.

The defense endeavored to deny individual guilt for the alleged crimes and to portray the role of each defendant as insignificant. In the case of proven crimes, it was alleged to have acted under a state of emergency , with the person issuing the order having since died.

Under the guidance of Fritz ter Meer, the defense and the defendants did not shy away from putting co-defendants and witnesses under massive pressure to deliberately lie and submit statements of favor in the form of affidavits .

Individual charges and verdict

On Counts 1, 4 and 5, all of the accused were acquitted. At the acquittal in point 1 - assistance in rearmament and support in wars of aggression - the court justified that participation in rearmament was not a criminal offense. The accused had not been proven that they had knowledge of the planning of the wars of aggression. This also meant that the indictment under Item 5, the conspiracy for a war of aggression, was dropped.

Also the accusation of the prosecution that the IG supported Hitler's rise to power through a donation was not accepted by the court. None of the leading men of the IG-Farben was present at Hitler's speech at the Düsseldorf Industrial Club ; she had participated in a fundraising campaign for the NSDAP at a time when Hitler was already Chancellor of the Reich.

Counts 1 and 5: Planning, preparing and conducting wars of aggression

The prosecution invested a lot of time and effort in prosecuting the IG Farben managers, who would have made the wars of aggression possible and who would have longed for conquest. The hurdles for a conviction were very high due to the previous acquittals of Albert Speer and Hjalmar Schacht on these charges in the Nuremberg trial of major war criminals.

The court acquitted all of the defendants on items 1 and 5. Firstly, they had no knowledge of the Reich leadership's plans to attack; secondly, such accusations were factually limited to the closest leadership and mass punishment was not possible after a collective charge. According to the court, the roles of the defendants in planning and conducting the wars of aggression were those of fellow travelers, not leaders.

Count 2: Looting and Robbery

As in the Flick precedent with the Aryanizations , the court did not regard property crimes in public or private property as crimes against humanity under Control Council Act No. 10, but saw jurisdiction only in the case of robbery, looting and exploitation under the Hague Land Warfare Code . It is therefore not responsible for criminal offenses in connection with the annexation of Austria or the incorporation of the Sudetenland, since there was no martial law at that time. In the occupied and annexed areas, IG Farben enriched itself according to a clearly worked out plan with changing and complicated contracts and expanded its chemical company at the expense of the previous owners. Overall, a number of property crimes in Poland, Norway and France with Alsace-Lorraine as war crimes have been proven by individual defendants. The following were found guilty: Schmitz, ter Meer, von Schnitzler, Ilgner, Bürgin, Häflinger, Oster, Jähne and Kugler. There were already far-reaching plans for looting in the Soviet Union, but these could no longer be implemented due to the military defeat, so that the defendant Ambros was acquitted.

Count 3: Zyklon B, human experiments, forced labor

The court found convincing evidence of the prosecution that IG-Farben was involved in the delivery of large quantities of the pesticide Zyklon B to the SS through the German Society for Pest Control , and that the gas was used in the mass extermination of concentration camp inmates . However, it considered the prosecution's assumption to be ruled out that any of the accused had knowledge of this improper use of the pesticide. An assessment to which large parts of historical research have now come.

Medicines from IG Farben were used for human experiments in concentration camps and the test results were made available to the company. During the trial it could not be proven beyond doubt that the accused had knowledge of the illegal use, so that no guilty verdict was made. According to historical research, some of those responsible knew about the human experiments, approved them and made themselves liable to prosecution.

Charge 4: Membership in a criminal organization

In the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals, the SS was classified as a criminal organization. All three defendants in the Farben trial who were charged with membership in this organization were acquitted on this charge. Schneider was only a paying member. Von der Heyde only worked with the Reiter-SS , which was not counted among the criminal organizations and Bütefisch was only an honorary member without ever having performed a function and had taken the oath and had refused to wear the uniform.

Punish

The convicts were taken to Landsberg Prison , unless their term had already been served by remand . All of the defendants sentenced to prison terms were released early from prison. It is not clear when the last prisoners were released. In the current literature, however, most of the time 1952 or 1951 is mentioned.

Most of the defendants returned to supervisory boards within a very short time, and some were even awarded the Federal Cross of Merit.

literature

• Grietje Baars: Capitalism's Victor's Justice? The Hidden Stories Behind the Prosecution of Industrialists Post-WWII . In: The Hidden Histories of War Crime Trials . Ed .: Heller and Simpson, Oxford University Press 2013, ISBN 978-0-19-967114-4 , p. 163 ff.
• Peter Heigl : Nuremberg Trials. = Nuremberg Trials. Carl, Nuremberg 2001, ISBN 3-418-00388-5 .
• Jens Ulrich Heine: Mind & Fate. The men of IG Farbenindustrie AG (1925–1945) in 161 short biographies. Verlag Chemie, Weinheim u. a. 1990, ISBN 3-527-28144-4 .
• Kevin Jon Heller : The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law. Oxford University Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-19-955431-7 .
• Florian Jeßberger : From the origins of an "international economic criminal law": IG Farben in court. In: Legal journal . 2009, pp. 924-932.
• Stefan H. Lindner: The verdict in the IG Farben trial . In: NMT - The Nuremberg Military Tribunals between History, Justice and Righteousness . Ed .: Priemel and Stiller, Hamburger Edition 2013, ISBN 978-3-86854-577-7 , p. 405 ff.
• Office of Military Government for Germany, United States (OMGUS). Investigations against IG Farbenindustrie AG. September 1945. Translated and edited by the documentation center for Nazi social policy in Hamburg. Greno, Nördlingen 1986, ISBN 3-89190-019-8 .
• Gerd R. Ueberschär (Ed.): The National Socialism in front of the court. The allied trials of war criminals and soldiers 1943–1952 (= Fischer pocket books. The time of National Socialism 13589). Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-13589-3 .
• Annette Weinke : The Nuremberg Trials (= Beck'sche series 2404 CH Beck knowledge ). Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-53604-2 .
• Udo Walendy (ed.): Auschwitz in the IG-Farben trial. Holocaust documents? Verlag für Volkstum u. Contemporary history research, Vlotho / Weser 1981, ISBN 3-922252-15-X .
• International Military Tribunal (Ed.): Trials of War Criminals before Nuernberg, Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10 . tape 7 . United States Government Printing Office, Washington 1953, OCLC 315875936 ( loc.gov [PDF]).

Web links

Commons : IG Farben Process  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• The IG Farben Trial - The United States of America vs. Carl Krauch et al. , Humboldt University Berlin, pdf
• About the IG Farben process
• Profit Over Life , largely complete microfilm copies of the court files (files: primarily English, website: multilingual)
• Video collection on the Nuremberg trials of the Robert H. Jackson Center, including recordings from the IG Farben trial (1947/48) and memories of Belle Mayer Zeck ( part 1 & part 2 ), public prosecutor in the IG Farben trial.
• Wollheim Memorial

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Grietje Baars: Capitalism's Victor's Justice? The Hidden Stories Behind the Prosecution of Industrialists Post-WWII . In: The Hidden Histories of War Crime Trials . Ed .: Heller and Simpson , Oxford University Press 2013, ISBN 978-0-19-967114-4 , pp. 163, 169 f.
2. ↑ Florian Jeßberger: IG Farben in court . P. 925.
3. ↑ Florian Jeßberger: IG Farben in court . P. 925.
4. ↑ Kim Christian Priemel: Flick - A corporate history from the German Empire to the Federal Republic . Wallstein 2007. ISBN 978-3-8353-0219-8 , p. 616 ff.
5. ↑ Priemel and Stiller: NMT - The Nuremberg Military Tribunals between History, Justice and Righteousness. Hamburg Edition 2013, ISBN 978-3-86854-577-7 , p. 773 ff.
6. ^ National Council of the National Front of Democratic Germany, Documentation Center of the State Archives Administration of the GDR (ed.): Braunbuch. War and Nazi criminals in the Federal Republic and West Berlin. State, economy, administration, army, justice, science. 3rd, revised and expanded edition. Staatsverlag der DDR, Berlin 1968, (online) ( Memento of the original from November 19, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
7. ↑ Braunbuch - War and Nazi Criminals in the Federal Republic and West Berlin (1968; PDF; 2.2 MB), p. 62.
8. ↑ 1945–1955: Nuremberg Trials and separation of IG Farben ( Memento from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
9. ↑ Stefan H. Lindner: The verdict in the IG Farben trial. P. 415.
10. ↑ Stefan H. Lindner: The verdict in the IG Farben trial. P. 411 f.
11. ↑ Stefan H. Lindner: The verdict in the IG Farben trial . P. 412 f.
12. ↑ Stefan H. Lindner: The verdict in the IG Farben trial . P. 408 f.
13. ↑ Florian Jeßberger: IG Farben in court . P. 927.
14. ↑ Stefan H. Lindner: The verdict in the IG Farben trial . P. 418.
15. ↑ Stefan H. Lindner: The verdict in the IG Farben trial . P. 420.
16. ↑ Stefan H. Lindner: The verdict in the IG Farben trial . P. 420 f.
17. ↑ Kevin Jon Heller: The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law. P. 292 ff.