Profit in Persecution: What the IG Farben Trials Reveal About Industry’s Role in Genocide

The Holocaust as we know and recognise today was carefully prepared for through the Nazification of the literature and the arts, the education system, the culture wars and contributed to by multiple Nazified academic disciplines, from anthropology to physics. During the Nuremberg Trials (1945-46), which remain iconic for the prosecution of the Nazi officers for their role in ‘crimes against humanity’, evidentiary documents drew attention to multiple examples of the genocidal project, an interdisciplinary project of murderous intent. 

But what has not received much attention is a second set of trials in which equally incriminating evidence, from a different field, was produced. A set of 12 trials, now known as the IG Farben trial, was held during 1947-1948. The Farben trial opened the eyes of the world (which subsequently, of course, shut them) to the alliance between a genocidal state, capital, science and technology and the industry. 

The purpose of the industrialists' trial was to show how German industrialists were an integral part of the Nazi regime. As historians note, the all-encompassing Four-Year Plan to revitalise the German economy came to be called the ‘IG Farben Plan’. After the trial IG Farben was segmented into three companies, Bayer, Hoescht and BASF. 

Profits before persecution

One of the leading historians on Nazi Germany, Peter Hayes, titles his 2025 book, Profits and Persecution: German Big Business in the Nazi Economy and the Holocaust. In this he notes the deep ambivalence of the German corporate world towards the Jews during Hitler’s rise to power: they did not quite want to throw out their extremely useful Jewish workforce, but also simultaneously ‘harboured increasing animosity toward Jews’.

Carl Bosch, the Nobel Laureate in Chemistry and Chairman of the IG Farben Board of Directors, in fact met Hitler in early 1933 and protested that the firing of Jewish scientists and researchers would harm German science and industry – Hitler, apparently, gave Bosch a cold hearing.

After Hitler seized power, the bankers and business leaders were increasingly divided, at least initially. Some were supportive of an official antagonism towards the Jews, while others saw antisemitism as economically unviable. IG Farben’s influence, notes Richard J. Evans in The Third Reich in Power, had a major influence in the government’s policies from 1933, even going so far as to establish an Army Liaison Office in 1935, to enable the firm to meet the military requirements of the regime.

It became increasingly clear that ‘industry’s profits from the regime’s promotion of rearmament and autarky’ (Hayes) would far outstrip its profits from conventional production and products. The tie-in of war and industry had become formalised for, in Richard Evans’ words in The Coming of the Third Reich, ‘companies like Siemens and IG Farben…were more willing to compromise’. 

A document, ‘The Most Important Chemical Plants in Poland’ had been prepared in advance in their offices, and updated by salespersons in the months leading up to the invasion. The industry, alongside the military, was gearing up for war. This is how, immediately after the invasion, IG Farben’s teams were able to move in and capture the ear-marked plants in Poland. Such takeovers were part of the Four-Year Plan which called for ‘a mutual integration and linkage of interests’ between Germany, Holland, Belgium, Norway and Denmark – clearly, ‘mutual integration’ was a euphemism.

Profits in persecution

Popular views of the start of the war suggest that many in Germany were caught unawares by the rapid developments. But the industrial houses were perhaps not. It is believed that Dr Claus Ungewitter, Reich commissioner for chemistry at the Economics Ministry and a hardened Nazi, had informed IG Farben’s Georg von Schnitzler of imminent war. Years later von Schnitzler recorded: ‘We of the IG were well aware of this fact.… In June or July 1939, the IG and all heavy industries were completely mobilised for the invasion of Poland’. 

During the course of the war, IG Farben and other firms appointed agents to purchase mining and industrial facilities at ridiculously low prices in Crete, Greece and the nations the Nazis conquered. French chemical firms captured most of the mining and iron-and-steel works in Alsace-Lorraine. Numerous banks across the conquered regions, especially Jewish owned ones, were taken over.

After the conquest of France, its famous dyestuffs industry was choked due to a lack of supplies. It is easy to guess what happened next. IG Farben presented the French with a plan: a single Franco-German dye company in which the German group would hold the principal stake, controlling all export activity. 

IG Farben established a buna (synthetic rubber) plant at Monowitz, and since Monowitz was also one of the Auschwitz network, a neat alignment of economics, industry and extermination in a spatial triad emerged. The construction of Farben’s Monowitz plant was made possible through the supply of labour from the neighbourhood camps. Here industry was inextricably linked to both the war effort on one side and the inhuman exploitation of forced labour on the other – eventually this would be one of the key themes in the IG Farben trials. As Hayes puts it, ‘naming a leading German goods producer that did not become complicit in the slave system is difficult’. 

The rhetoric of industry and profits was never separate from either jingoistic nationalism or the racial economy of war. In 1941, when the first ‘transports’ began, Otto Ambros of IG Farben, said in a speech:

With the Auschwitz project, IG Farben has designed a plan for a new enterprise of giant proportions. It is determined to do everything in its power to build up a virile enterprise that will be able to shape its environment in the same way as many plants in west and central Germany do. In this manner IG Farben fulfills a high moral duty to ensure, with a mobilization of all its resources, that this industrial foundation becomes a firm cornerstone for a powerful and healthy Germanism in the East.

The markers of Nazi ideology were all in place: race, national identity, virility. Naturally, profits went up. Hayes estimates :

IG Farben’s sales and gross profits rose sharply in 1933 and roughly doubled by 1936, those of its explosives subsidiary, the Dynamit AG Troisdorf, more than quadrupled… 

It comes as no surprise then that considerable research time, personnel and funding at IG Farben was directed at developing different kinds of chemicals for the war-and-extermination efforts. IG Farben was about to embark on the production of nerve gases. The aforementioned Ambros was also the head of Albert Speer’s special committee responsible for poison gas. By 1942, chemical agents, Sarin and Tabun, were in production at Breslau. The ‘facilities’, so to speak, for research and development at the camps were excellent. As Diarmuid Jeffreys puts it in his detailed study of IG Farben, Hell’s Cartel :

The experiments at Auschwitz were evidently part of a much wider research program involving IG pharmaceutical preparations and the SS. Certainly, typhus and other fever drugs developed by the IG’s Behring-werke serological department at Marburg were routinely tested on inmates at Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps. The IG also became involved in a secret SS program to develop a method of chemical castration for use in Russia.

Then, in 1941, an accidental discovery of a chemical pesticide’s powerful toxicity – it killed a cat that had wandered into the room in minutes – made the SS wonder if this pesticide could be employed to kill humans as well. And this is how Zyklon-B, manufactured by an IG Farben subsidiary, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung (Degesch) enters the Nazi’s genocidal imagination, and the modern world’s lexicon as well. In September 1941 it was first tested on Greek and then Red Army prisoners.  

Zyklon-B passed with flying colours: a new weapon had just been found. March 20, 1942 is the agreed-upon date when Zyklon-B was first employed in Bunker I and II in Auschwitz to kill the prisoners.

But this was not all. Nazi industry – and I use the term in both its senses – also developed in other directions. Topf and Sons patented the crematoria, or ovens, in which the gassed bodies were burnt (the plans for these crematoria, drawn up by Kurt Prüfer, survive). Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesellschaft (AEG) provided the electrical systems for at least two of the installations at Birkenau camp. Before the gas chambers of Auschwitz, gas vans were pressed into service for the same ends at Chelmno, and these vans were manufactured by the firm of Hoch- und Tiefbau AG. Financiers, banks and insurers also flourished, and Allianz insured most of the workshops of SS-owned companies. Subcontracted firms like Mannesmann Röhrenwerke also expanded their business.

The gold extracted from the fillings in the teeth of the gas victims had to be processed, and the firm of Degussa was given this commission (workers in their testimonies recount how teeth and gums were still attached to the bits of gold fillings, which they then had to separate). It is estimated that Degussa earned 2 million Reichsmarks between 1939 and 1945 from this processing alone. In fact, it is calculated that 95% of the firm’s gold ‘collection’ came from such victim-loot. 

As a consequence, employment at these firms also went up, and Hayes in his earlier work, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (1987) records that ‘the work force of the [IG Farben] combine increased by about 45% in the first four full years of fighting, cresting in 1943 at 333,000’. 

The killing itself was not very expensive: the cost of the Zyklon-B to gas about 900,000 people at Auschwitz, 1942 to 1944, amounted to a mere two German pennies, or one US cent, per corpse. 

Industry on trial

By late 1944, with the outcome of the war a foregone conclusion, the industrial bigwigs began to worry. What would happen to them once their collaboration with the Nazis was revealed, especially in the wake of the accounts of Auschwitz becoming public (the BBC began issuing broadcasts about Auschwitz around the same time)? August von Knieriem, the IG’s chief counsel, drew up a paper examining the prospects for the company after the war. When papers detailing the IG Farben works in Auschwitz, including one titled ‘Planning the New Auschwitz Works’, were seized from its bosses in 1945, the firm’s complicity was already established and in September 1945, Dwight Eisenhower wrote a report detailing this. 

When the charges were filed, the indictments were fairly detailed, as documented in the UN War Crime Commission’s Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals: Vol. X: The IG Farben and Krupp Trials (1949):

[IG Farben] abused its slave workers by subjecting them, among other things, to excessively long, arduous and exhausting work, utterly disregarding their health or physical condition. The sole criterion of the right to live or die was the production efficiency of said inmates. By virtue of inadequate rest, inadequate food, and because of inadequate quarters (which consisted of a bed of polluted straw, shared by from two to four inmates), many died at their work or collapsed from serious illness there contracted. With the first sign of a decline in the productivity of any such workers, although caused by illness or exhaustion, such workers would be subject to the well-known Selektion. Selektion, in its simplest definition, meant that if, upon a cursory examination, it appeared that the inmate would not be restored within a few days to full productive capacity, he was considered expendable and was sent to the Birkenau camp of Auschwitz for the customary extermination … The working conditions at the Farben Buna plant were so severe and unendurable that very often inmates were driven to suicide by either dashing through the guards and provoking death by rifle shot or hurling themselves into the high-tension electrically charged barbed fence…

It also said:

Farben … played a major role in Germany's programme for acquisition by conquest. It used its expert technical knowledge and resources to plunder and exploit the chemical and related industries of Europe, to enrich itself from unlawful acquisitions; to strengthen the German war machine and to assure the subjugation of the conquered countries to the German economy. To that end, it conceived, initiated and prepared detailed plans for the acquisition by it, with the aid of German military force, of the chemical industries of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, France, Russia, and other countries. 

None of the defendants admitted their guilt at the trial. But the verdict was unprecedented. Curtis Shake, one of the judges, read out the following: 

Hitler was the dictator. It was natural that the people of Germany listened to and read his utterances in the belief that he spoke the truth … Can we say that the common man of Germany believed less?… The average citizen of Germany, be he professional man, farmer, or industrialist, could scarcely be charged by these events with knowledge that the rulers of the Reich were planning to plunge Germany into a war of aggression. We reach the conclusion that common knowledge of Hitler’s plans did not prevail in Germany ... The prosecution is confronted with the difficulty of establishing knowledge on the part of the defendants, not only of the rearmament of Germany but also that the purpose of rearmament was to wage aggressive war.… In this sphere the evidence degenerates from proof to mere conjecture. 

24 members of the firm were arraigned, 13 were found guilty, indicted and sentenced to – believe it or not – one to eight years imprisonment. Justice Paul Hebert filed his dissent saying: 

The record of IG Farbenindustrie, during the period under examination in this lengthy trial, has been shown to be an ugly record which went far beyond the activities of normal business. From a maze of statistical and detailed information in the record emerges a picture of gigantic proportions depicting feverish activity by Farben to rearm Germany…The defendants … cannot, in my opinion, avoid sharing a large part of the guilt for numberless crimes against humanity.

We now know that, besides the desire to bring the Nazis to justice for crimes against humanity, other political factors were in play by the time of the IG Farben trial. There was an American insistence on economic recovery over retribution by 1947, when the trial began. IG Farben was quick to cash in on this insistence. As Mark E. Spicka notes in his essay on the trial in the volume Nazi Law: From Nuremberg to Nuremberg:

While the trial of I.G. Farben was ongoing in 1947–48, the firm began to play an increasingly large role in the American plans for West Germany’s reconstruction. As a result, the American commitment in Washington and at the level of the American occupation zone to prosecute the I. G. Farben executives and to break the firm into small, inefficient units began to fade. 

The prosecution’s focus on IG Farben’s crimes against peace, which were more difficult to establish than if the charges were about slavery and exploitation, resulted in the failure to obtain fuller conviction, he notes. There was, then, a definite wheeling-dealing at work, as also a new ideology of economic reconstruction, that produced this odd verdict. 

No war is without its profits. The IG Farben trial, even if the results were unexpected and tame, revealed the close alliance of the war machine and the industry – something we have seen repeated endlessly since then. There is an economics of war, and the industrial houses, fuelled in 1939-1945, not just the Nazi state and jingoism, but literally the extermination camps too. 

When the industry aids and abets a genocidal, or even a totalitarian regime and participates, as it did in the Nazi years, in suppression, exploitation and so-called national aspirations, we can see clearly, there is profit in persecution. 

Thus does Balzac’s dictum come true: behind every great fortune, there is a crime. 

Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the University of Hyderabad.

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