Ig farben haus hitler biography
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After the defeat of the Third Reich at the International Military Tribunal held in Nuremberg, the United States, as the occupying power, conducted trials against the top officials of three major industrial concerns- Krupp, Flick, and I. G. Farben.
The IG Farben Trial was the largest of all industrial trials.
The Gauleiter of Upper Silesia Bracht, SS-General Schmauser, SS – Lieutenant General Kammler also take part.
After a full tour of the various industrial and agricultural project Himmler attends the full extermination process at Birkenau, where he witnesses the unloading, the selection of the able-bodied, the mass murder by gassing in Bunker 2.
Following this Himmler and his retinue undertake a tour of the Buna plant and the installation of a sewage gas plant.
However, this evidence failed to impress two of the three judges.
All the defendants were acquitted of the first count, nine were found guilty of the second. Hans Poelzig's 1930 IG-Farben building in Frankfurt am Main - today a branch of Goethe University and a place of student beginnings - became Eisenhower's headquarters after Hitler's defeat and the collapse of National Socialist industry.
In 1948, the building became the headquarters of the American armed forces in Germany. At its peak in 1944, this factory made use of 83,000 slave laborers. The major charges were:
1. In order to be profitable the new IGF products needed an assured market, and Hitler indicated that he would be ready to give guarantees for the purchase by the state of these products, in appropriate quantities.
At a meeting of leading German industrialists with Hjalmar Schacht, Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler, held on the 20 February 1933, IGF contributed 400,000 reichsmarks to the Nazi Party, the largest single amount in the total sum of 3 million reichsmarks raised at this meeting by German industrialists for the Nazi Party’s election campaign.
Notwithstanding the presence on the IGF board of several Jewish members, and the fact that even after 1933 Nazi propaganda continued for a time to attack IGF as an example of an international Jewish firm that was exploiting its workers, the contacts between IGF’s management and the government became increasingly close, since the products of the great chemical conglomerate were an indispensable element in the Nazi’s drive to re-arm.
The Four- Year plan proposed by Hitler in 1936, which intended to put the entire German industry on a war footing, further enhanced IGF’s influence.
Crimes against humanity by looting the occupied territories.
3. Furthermore, three defendants were indicted for SS membership.
The prosecutors were convinced that their material would provide ample evidence that even long before Hitler’s accession to power, the managers of IG Farben had desired a dictatorship that would be "able to act without taking the whims of the masses into consideration" and that they had wanted to "dominate the entire European chemical industry, if possible also outside Europe".
After Bosch’s death on the 26 April 1940 , Krauch took his place as chairman of the board, adding this position to the different posts he held in the Four-Year Plan administration.
More than anyone else, Krauch personified the link between private industry and the growing government involvement in economic life during the Nazi period.
In connection with the economic preparations for the forthcoming war against the Soviet Union, the IGF board, with government support, decided to establish an additional Buna works and installations for the production of synthetic fuels.
The board decided on Auschwitz in Upper Silesia, as the place where the new installation was to be located, not only because of the excellent rail links and the proximity of its coal mines, but primarily because the concentration camp being constructed offered IGF with a considerable and cheap workforce, up to 10,000 prisoners to build the new plant.
Board members Otto Ambros and Heinrich Butefisch were responsible for the Auschwitz plant in their capacity as the managers in charge of Buna and gasoline respectively.
A member of the board, Carl Krauch, was given a leading position in the organisation, headed by Goering that had the task of implementing the Four – Year Plan. Farben was a German Limited Company that was a conglomerate of eight leading German chemical manufacturers, including Bayer, Hoechst and BASF, which at the time were the largest chemical firms in existence.
Today, the building is part of the University of Frankfurt.
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IGF did not pay any compensation to non-Jewish forced labourers and prisoners.
Sources:
The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, New York, London: The Free Press,Borkin, Joseph
Die I.G.
Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft (1925-1933): Ein Chemiekonzern in der Weimarer Republik, Berlin: H. Tammen
Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust - Israel Gutman (Ed) - New York 1990
The Auschwitz Chronicle by Danuta Czech published by Henry Holt and Company New York 1990
Holocaust Historical Society
National Archives Kew
Wiener Library
Copyright 2010 Chris Webb H.E.A.R.T
The Headquarters of the American Forces in Germany in the Former I.G.
Farben Building in Frankfurt am Main (1949)
Source
Abstract
I.G. In addition, the German Corporation for Pest Control [Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung or Degesch], a company in which I.G. Farben had a significant share, supplied death camps in eastern Europe with the poisonous gas Zyklon B.
On November 30, 1945, with Law No. 9, the Allied Control Council seized I.G. Farben and put it under Allied control.
Prior to the First World War these firms had established a “community of interests – Interessengemeinschaft – hence the initials I.G. which merged into a single company on the 25 December 1925, thus constituting the largest chemical enterprise, in the whole world.
I.G.
All defendants were indicted for the same crimes as the Krupp defendants: planning and waging of wars of aggression, conspiracy for this purpose, economic plundering, and forced labour and enslavement of prisoners of wars, deported persons, and concentration-camp inmates. In the eyes of the artist, broad staircases, delineated by segmented stonework with a meandering decor, and lofty wall and window facades are related to the minimalist building blocks of today's architects (O.
The Buna production never got started – in part because of the Allied air attacks – and only small quantities of synthetic fuels were actually produced.
On the 17 July 1942 Reichsfuhrer- SS Heinrich Himmler carries out a second inspection tour of the Auschwitz complex. The pesticide Zyklon B, for which IG Farben held the patent, was manufactured by Degesch (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung), which IG Farben owned 42.2 percent of (in shares) and which had IG Farben managers in its Managing Committee.
Designed by architect Hans Poelzig and built between 1928-1930, this six-wing, nine-story structure included more than 25,000 square meters of office space, making it one of Europe’s largest buildings until the 1950s. Everything here strives upwards.