Auschwitz: A History Page 4

  Within the SS certain knowledge of the crimes in the camp was spreading. As the murder of the ‘inferior peoples’ ensured their own long-term future in the East, and the German claim to dominance provided ideological justification for such acts, the lives of the SS families and their conception of respectability and morality remained untouched by the murders. Domestic peace did not contradict the professional everyday life of the SS members. In fact the insistently nurtured family idyll may actually have encouraged the killing in the camp, because it gave the SS men the psychological stability they needed. We should not be surprised that SS men could be both mass murderers and loving fathers. The façade of family happiness revealed nothing whatsoever about the men’s humanitarian convictions. Rather, the extermination of ‘inferior’ people was given moral legitimacy by the idea that it was securing the existence of the ‘Aryan race’, and against a background of a biological and genetic value system it was seen as entirely necessary. Mass murder and respectability were not opposites, but were closely interwoven. So to see mass crime as the result of pathological states of mind seems just as implausible as assuming that the perpetrators had fallen victim to a collective split personality. SS family life – like mass extermination – served the construction of the ‘racially pure’ ethnic community. No one better summed up the National Socialist vision of ethics as an issue of racially ideological homogeneity than Heinrich Himmler, when at the beginning of October 1943, in the notorious speech to SS officers in Posnan, he declared that the SS had remained ‘morally decent’ in the mass murder of the European Jews. Himmler clad the unshakeable feeling of respectability in an unbearable dialectic which turned the murder of hundreds of thousands of people into the sentimental tragedy of the perpetrators.

  3

  Forced labour and extermination

  IG Farben

  In the spring of 1941 IG Farben (Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG) built a new factory in Auschwitz. The plant, called IG Auschwitz, was one of the biggest, most ambitious and, at a cost of about 600 million Reichsmarks, most expensive investment projects of the German Reich in the Second World War. IG Farben, founded in 1925 and with its headquarters in Frankfurt am Main, was, as a producer of synthetic substitute materials, important to the war effort, the most important private company in Nazi Germany and one of the biggest chemicals companies in Europe. The Auschwitz works, about 3 kilometres east of the Old Town, and about 7 kilometres away from the concentration camp, was to produce Buna, a kind of rubber synthetically manufactured from coal in support of the war effort.

  IG Farben made Auschwitz the location of the new facility, its fourth site for Buna production after the works in Schkopau, Hüls and Ludwigshafen, at the end of lengthy discussions. It is not easy to say whether the determining factor was the concentration camp and the related possibility of cheap labour, or issues of geographical and economic location. There is much to suggest that the company management wanted to use the concentration camp as a source of labour, but that the existence of the camp was not the sole reason for the choice of location. The assured supply of raw materials and water, as well as helpful transport connections, also had a part to play.

  Before the decision was made in Auschwitz’s favour, other locations were discussed: in the autumn of 1939, after drawing up its four-year plan, the company had started building a Buna factory in Rattwitz near Breslau, and had already invested 4 million Reichsmarks in the project. But in the summer of 1940 building work was halted, because more attractive locations had been made available by the conquest of France. But after the failure of the air offensive against Britain, IG Farben revived the idea of building the Buna works in the conquered East. Though high investment costs were involved, the Reich Ministry of Economy forced through the plan and in return gave their agreement to the construction of another factory in Ludwigshafen. Lest it lost the monopoly on the manufacture of Buna, the company management agreed. So in the end the economic situation was less crucial than simple opportunism.

  In early November 1940 it was quite clear that Silesia would be IG Farben’s new production site. In the discussion of the future location the abandoned construction site at Rattwitz came under consideration, as well as three other sites in the Silesian Old Reich zone: Emilienhof near Gogolin, Groschowitz to the south of Oppeln, and Gross-Döbern to the north. During the initial phase of discussions, on the other hand, Auschwitz was not one of the potential locations. Otto Ambros, a member of the IG Farben board, did not suggest the town until the end of December 1940, on his return from a trip to Silesia. It is not clear how his attention was drawn to Auschwitz. He may have been trying to eliminate an important competitor, because the petroleum company Mineralölbau (Mineral Oil Construction) GmbH had developed plans to erect a hydration plant at the same time and was looking for a site near Auschwitz, the very plot of land in the administrative area of Dwory and Monowitz where the IG Farben factory would later be built. It is quite possible that Ambros beat the competing company to the factory location. The other sites, including Rattwitz, which had been preferred until that point, were no longer mentioned after the beginning of 1941. IG Farben favoured Auschwitz.

  The terrain was sound, being level and flood-free. The necessary raw materials, coal, lime and water, were in abundant supply, the station was close at hand and supplies could be received. One other factor that may have been important to IG Farben was the financial support provided by the National Socialist state within the context of the Eastern Aid programme for the foundation of factories in the Eastern regions. This aspect of the settlement of the East, directly related to the assumption of territorial rights, was thus also crucial to the choice of location. The specific measures to encourage development immensely increased the attractiveness of the place. The Eastern Fiscal Assistance Law of December 1940 guaranteed IG Farben tax exemption on their investments. If the company directors had initially had concerns about the construction of a factory in the East on grounds of cost, the privileges they could expect from the Auschwitz site offered the prospect of soon recouping their outlay.

  The company management contributed, to the cost of the indigenous population, to the safeguarding of economic and political domination in the occupied East. They came to Auschwitz with a spirit of racial superiority, and immediately began to reshape everything they found there. Helping the regime to fulfil its goals, but also acting to a remarkable degree on their own initiative, they accomplished not only the economic task entrusted to them, but beyond that also the ‘racial’ task of ‘Germanizing’ the East.

  On 6 February 1941 Otto Ambros and IG Farben director Fritz ter Meer held a board meeting in Berlin with Carl Krauch, the plenipotentiary general for special questions of chemical production within the chemical industry, who was not only a member of the board of directors of IG Farben, but also a member of the circle of industrialists around the Reichsführer-SS, known as Himmler’s ‘Circle of Friends’. All three assumed that the work-force question could be solved by a ‘large-scale settlement programme’. The link between industrialization and ‘Germanization’ was to a large extent institutionalized – which also meant moving out the indigenous Poles and Jews and bringing large numbers of Reich German workers to Auschwitz.

  Krauch presented the plan to his close friend Hermann Göring, the head of the Four Year Plan authority. On 18 February 1941 Göring asked Himmler, in his role as Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Nationhood, to introduce pro-settlement measures as soon as possible, and to make concentration camp inmates available for the construction of the factory. On 26 February 1941 Himmler issued a ruling containing almost to the letter what the IG Farben company desired: he ordered the rapid expulsion of all Jews from the town of Auschwitz, decreed that all indigenous Poles who were capable of working should be left in the town and forced to work on the building of the IG Farben factory, and ordered that the greatest possible number of concentration camp prisoners be employed in the construction work.

  Hi
mmler’s directive was the first special racial measure applied to Auschwitz because of the factory construction. The town was excluded from the region-specific settlement plans of East Upper Silesia, because IG Farben’s building plan was such a significant project that new guidelines were passed for the redesign. Cooperation with the largest private company in the German Reich gave Himmler the unique chance to realize at last his desire to harness prisoner labour to economic ends, specifically in Upper Silesia, an area important for the munitions industry. Since the mid-thirties, the Reichsführer-SS had been trying to exploit the work-force of concentration camp inmates for munitions-related purposes in quarries, tile factories and gravel-pits, to ensure economic power for the SS, involve them in the production of munitions and build up their own armament production in the camps over the longer term. But these attempts were defeated by the lack of business experience among the SS and the low level of labour efficiency among the prisoners. Cooperation with IG Farben granted the opportunity to achieve those high goals.

  On 1 March 1941, ten days after he had been informed of IG Farben’s plans, Himmler travelled to Auschwitz for the first time. His interest is all the more striking in that he had barely shown the slightest interest in the concentration camp until that time, and had even called off a visit scheduled for October 1940. Himmler’s visit led to crucial innovations: the camp administration assigned 10,000 prisoners to IG Farben, the first of whom were immediately put to work, and urgently applied for the distribution of material and the release of funds for the building of the factory. At the same time Commandant Höss intensified the annexation of the SS zone of interest. Expansion of the Stammlager (‘parent camp’) to a capacity of 30,000 prisoners pressed ahead. The construction of Birkenau camp, on the other hand, was not discussed. On his visit, Himmler merely issued orders concerning the settlement and agriculture projects, and planned future collaboration with IG Farben. The construction of Birkenau, which was to represent a further serious change in the functioning of the Auschwitz camp, and one that still could not be guessed at in the spring of 1941, was planned only a good six months later.

  Intensive cooperation developed between IG Farben and the SS, and Otto Ambros immediately described it as a ‘blessing’. The company contributed to the expansion of SS power, and the SS in turn emphatically supported the building of the factory. The company directors stressed the importance of speed. They planned a construction period of no more than three to four years, to be in production by mid-1943. The Reich Ministry of Economy assigned the project a building urgency level of zero, which was given only to projects important to the war effort. IG Farben immediately acquired the factory site in Dwory and Monowitz. Parts of the company grounds, which had belonged to Polish farmers and had been confiscated, were bought from state offices, and the rest was expropriated.

  The founding meeting of IG Auschwitz was held on 7 April 1941. The invited guests, including senior SS representatives, listened to the address by Otto Ambros, who called the foundation of the factory a mission of settlement policy, and dramatically announced, given the great task facing them, that IG Farben would do anything in its power to advance the ‘Germanization’ of Auschwitz.

  Monowitz and the sub-camps

  IG Farben was the first private company to receive an army of prisoners as forced labourers. Their numbers rose from about 1,000 to twice that by the end of 1942. In 1943 there were 7,000 prisoners, and the peak of 11,000 was reached in 1944. Of about 35,000 working camp inmates more than 25,000 died as a result of their work for the chemicals giant.

  Prisoners formed about a third of all workers in the factorycompound,alongwiththousandsofforced Fremdarbeiter (‘foreign workers’) from many European countries, which the company had acquired in cooperation with state authorities, among them Poles from East Upper Silesia and the General Government, as well as Dutchmen, Belgians, Yugoslavs, Russians, Frenchmen, Italians, Croats, Czechs, Greeks, Ukrainians, Britons and North Africans from Algeria and Morocco. The building site soon reached the size of an average-sized small town. The foreign workers were housed in barracks where, under close guard and divided by nationality, they were subjected to strict racial and hierarchical rules.

  Difficulties involving the nature of the terrain, holdups in the deliveries of material and constant labour shortages slowed down the pace of building the new factory considerably. In the summer of 1942 the declared goal of starting production the following year was postponed to some remote date in the future. Against a background of underachievement by the prisoners that got worse and worse, the company management were spurred on by one particular project: 300 metres away from the building site, on the farmland belonging to the secluded village of Monowitz, a special concentration camp for the factory was to be built. At first the prisoners had been walking the 7 kilometres to the building site, which meant that their working day began at around three o’clock in the morning, and, once they had returned to the camp, ended much later than that of all the other inmates. As many of them arrived already exhausted at the building site in the morning, at the end of July IG Farben introduced a freight train for the prisoners between the parent camp and Dwory. When their work-levels still did not improve, the decision was made to build the Monowitz camp. IG Farben wanted to have at its disposal a source of cheap prisoners that it could use as it saw fit. A typhus epidemic slowed down the work, however, so that the first 2,000 prisoners were moved to the new camp, initially called ‘Buna camp’, only on 30 and 31 October 1942. It was the first concentration camp to be started and financed by a private company.

  In Monowitz, food and so-called ‘health care’ were the responsibility of IG Farben. The camp was guarded by the SS, so that it resembled a state concentration camp even down to the smallest details. Watchtowers, a chicken-wire fence secured with barbed wire and an additional high-tension electric fence, illuminated at night, secured the camp. The site was larger than the parent camp’s, but the barracks were smaller, more confined and just as overfilled. In mid-January 1943 the labour re-education camp in the parent camp was moved to Monowitz, the four barracks being separated by a fence; from that point onwards ‘re-education prisoners’ were also sent to work on the factory building site.

  From the point of view of company finance the prisoners’ work unit was not profitable even once Monowitz had been built. Although the managers agreed with the SS that the average work capacity of a prisoner was 75 per cent that of a free German worker, this prognosis soon proved to be unrealistic. In fact the capacity of the prisoners clearly fell below 50 per cent of that of a German worker, and sometimes reached only 20 per cent. Despite the minimal labour costs, IG Farben made no profit out of the prisoners’ units because productivity, given inadequate nutrition, harassment and punishments, and the physically draining and psychologically humiliating work, fell far short of expectations.

  MAP 4 Monowitz (Buna) sub-camp – end 1944

  With the building of Monowitz camp IG Farben assumed an active role in the policy of the ‘Final Solution’. Selections were made among the predominantly Jewish inmates – their proportion in the autumn of 1943 was between 60 and 75 per cent, and rose by early 1944 to about 90 per cent – as to those who were fit and unfit to work. The managers were convinced of the ‘racial inferiority’ of the prisoners. Being partly responsible for the escalation of the work unit policy, to a great extent – inasmuch as they perceived themselves as unimpeachable representatives of the German ruling class – they bore responsibility for the crimes. Their personal ambition to get the Buna works into operation despite a lack of time and a shortage of material forced them to be unscrupulous. The constant threat of transportation to Birkenau was a way of spurring on the prisoners to work. In pitiful living conditions and with minimal food, the life expectancy of the Monowitz inmates was on average about three months, and was often only a few weeks.

  In exemplary fashion, IG Farben Auschwitz anticipated the links that were gradually forming between the SS and the munition
s industry. The hiring out of prisoners to the company, begun in the spring of 1941, provided the model for systematically introducing forced labour in the war economy by the deployment of concentration camp inmates, and was organized by the newly founded central office for the efficient exploitation of the work-force represented by concentration camp prisoners, the SS Economic Administration Headquarters. Steelworks, companies in the chemicals and metals industries, as well as firms producing consumer goods settled near the Auschwitz camp from 1942, to follow the model of IG Farben in exploiting this cheap workforce. The SS charged 4 Reichsmarks for an unskilled labourer, 6 for a qualified worker; state industries were offered special deals, paying 4 Reichsmarks for qualified workers, and 3 Reichsmarks for unskilled labourers.

  In August 1942 the Hermann Göring Works, one of the largest companies in the German Reich, settled in Auschwitz, followed in June 1943 by the Berg- und Hüttenwerkgesellschaft Teschen (Teschen Mining and Steelworks Company) and Energieversorgung Oberschlesien AG (Upper Silesian Energy Suppliers) and Friedrich Krupp AG. In October 1943 they were joined by the Weichsel Union Metallwerke (Vistula Union Metalworks), which took over the Krupp plant, and in December 1943 the Siemens–Schuckert factory moved in. The Reichsbahn (‘Reich Railways’) also employed camp inmates, as did various coalmines belonging to IG Farben, the Vereinigten Oberschlesischen Hüttenwerke (United Upper Silesian Steelworks), the Oberschlesischen Hydrierwerke (Upper Silesian Hydration Works), the Erdölraffinerie Trzebinia (Trzebinia Oil Refinery), the Vacuum Oil Company, the Deutschen Gasrußwerke, the Schlesischen Schuhwerke (Silesian Shoe Company) and the Schlesische Feinweberei (Silesian Textile Mill).