Newsgroups: alt.revisionism Subject: Holocaust Almanac - I.G. Farben: The Nuremberg Indictment Summary: The I.G. Farben Indictment summarized Reply-To: kmcvay@nizkor.org Followup-To: alt.revisionism Organization: The Nizkor Project, Vancouver Island, CANADA Keywords: Farben Archive/File: orgs/german/farben.ig farben.003 Last-modified: 1993/06/01 The indictment brought against the I.G. Farben defendants at Nuremberg "...was a catalogue of Nazi inhumanities in which the I.G. defendents played a part, particularly in the most notorious of all extermination centers, Auschwitz." "All of the defendents, acting through the instrumentality of I.G... participated in ...the enslavement of concentration camp inmates...the use of prisoners of war in war operations...and the mistreatment, terrorization, torture, and murder of enslaved persons. In the course of these activities, millions of persons were uprooted from their homes, deported, enslaved, ill-treated, terrorized, tortured, and murdered. ... Farben, in complete defiance of all decency and human considerations, 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, (which was given to inmates while in bed at the barracks), 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 signs of a decline in the production of any such workers, although caused by illness or exhaustion, such workers would be subjected 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 meaning of 'Selektion' and 'Birkenau' was known to everyone at Auschwitz and became a matter of common knowledge. 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 wire fences. As a result of these conditions, the labor turnover in the Buna plant in one year amounted to at least 300 percent. Besides those who were exterminated and committed suicide, up to and sometimes over 100 persons died at their work every day from sheer exhaustion. All depletions occasioned by extermination and other means of death were balanced by replacement with new inmates. Thus, Farben secured a continuous supply of fresh inmates in order to maintain full production. Farben's conduct at Auschwitz can be best described by a remark of Hitler [sic; should be Himmler]: 'What does it matter to us? Look away if it makes you sick.'" (Borkin, 138-139) Work Cited Borkin, Joseph. The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben. New York: The Free Press, 1978, and London: Macmillan Publishing Company.
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