The Devil's Chemists
By Josiah E. DuBois,Jr.
Preface
By Josiah E. DuBois,Jr.
Preface
To UNDERSTAND THE FULL SIGNIFICANCE of this story, bear in
mind that today the main characters - defendants in the most far reaching criminal trial in history - are all alive and free to work
against the way of life you and I cherish.
Today a great struggle is being waged for the political allegiance
of men. The United States of America has been steadily -losing
in that struggle since the end of World War 11. In seven years
the free world has lost to Communism half of Europe and large
areas of Asia. This amounts to the loss of over eight hundred
million people who once regarded themselves as our friends and
allies.
The foreign policy of the United States demonstrates that most
of our leaders understand little of what has happened in Europe
and Asia during the last generation. We have challenged disillusioned hearts with only a hodgepodge of defensive tactics. It is
my belief that we lost the support of most of these people because
we appealed to them almost entirely through our own fears, with
little regard for their real hopes, dreams, and needs. To replace
Communist bread, often we have spread our own table reluctantly
and too late. Often we have countered the vicious Communist
evangelism only by negative argument. Most important, we have
poured salt on the ugly wounds which certain hated industrialists
have cut into four continents.
For ten years the average European and Asian has understood
my story better than our leaders yet understand it. I believe also
that the average American, should he read this book, will have a
better understanding than his government of how Europeans and
Asians feel about the facts. To those who sickened in the 1930's
at the news that American scrap iron was being sold to Japan; to
those who later observed with disgust the failure of the League of
Nations to put teeth into its economic "sanctions" against Italy
when she invaded Abyssinia; to those who recently cried shame
on the shipment of British war-potential goods through Hong
Kong to the Chinese Red Army; to those who are flatly opposed
to doing strategic business with any totalitarian institution, whether by direct sales or outright political subsidy - to all those, this
book is recommended.
The full story of all the industrial groups that have deliberately
bred war, or have deliberately shut their eyes to the breeding of
war, could not be contained in ten books. I have limited my story
to the single group of men whose vast influence epitomizes all the
others - a group that is still many years ahead of all others in the
techniques of waging, in "peacetime," a future war.
Unbelievable as it seems, the defendants in that trial are back
in power in Germany today. Their Oriental collaborators are
back in power in Asia. We have been so afraid of Communism
that we have been willing to resort to almost any expedient in our
hysterical effort to stem the tide. Fearful reaction has lost us all
those who looked to democracy for an inspired and positive program. The wisdom of helping such men form a vital bulwark of
defense against Communism will be seriously questioned, I am
sure, by almost every reader. To rely upon the generals-in-gray suits who shared the responsibility for World War 11, to ally ourselves with groups which have been allied with Russia more than
once before, suggests the probability that if World War I11 breaks
out, they will be fighting for Soviet Russia, not for the West. And
in treating such groups as friends, we are losing true friends all
over the world.
The crucial question to ask after reading this book is: What will
happen if these men and the forces they represent align themselves
with Communist aggression rather than with the freedom-loving
peoples of the world?
In condensing 150 large volumes of testimony within one average-size book, a great deal of material has necessarily been
eliminated. Nevertheless, I believe that every significant aspect of
this historic criminal trial has been brought to the attention of
the reader. If material has been taken out of context, it has been
done in such a way as not to distort its basic meaning.
As a guide to the reader, we have included in the appendix an
organization chart of the industrial concern known as I. G. Farben
and a list of the twenty-four defendants in the trial, together with
the positions they held.
J. E. D.
PART ONE
TOTALITARIAN INDUSTRY -
THREAT WORLD PEACE?
1.
Easter Hats and Wild Horses
THIS IS THE STORY of twenty-four geniuses who changed the face
of the earth. The most brilliant men in Europe, they headed the
industry known to the newspaper reader as "I. G. Farben."
I. G. Farben first subdued nature in ten thousand ways, then
shipped the marvelous products of that victory across the seven
seas. Its business has touched the life of every man and woman in
the world. Often an unrecognized guest, it has visited every American home, with dyes, plastics, fabrics. If Farben did not make
your bathroom fixtures, your shaving mug, or even your razor,
your wife surely owes much of her prettification - from Easter
hat to synthetic stockings - to I. G. Farben.
Long before the age of plastics and nylons, I. G. Farbenindustrie was known to many Americans as simply the world's
best druggist. Every reputable pharmacy, every physician's bag,
every good family medicine cabinet, stocks some of Farben's 6000
medicines. The firm invented a drug that is still the best cure
for epilepsy. They made atabrine, the quinine-substitute for
treating malaria. And from the aspirin tablet alone, I. G. Farben
made a vast fortune.
But the founders were not concerned merely with balance sheets.
They drew their inspiration from the gurgling of water, the perfume
of damp earth, and every vegetable and mineral in the earth. Could
health, personal beauty - yes, even universal brotherhood - be
created by two dozen men of dynamic chemical genius? They believed it could. By 1925, they had nursed food from arid lands,
made fats and fuels from coal and water, and were dreaming of
making copper out of clay.
A few years later, their talents crowned a combine that overshadowed even the giant United States corporations. From the sun a competitor in nurturing such things as cotton -they had
learned many economies of mass production. Now the sun shone
with subservient benevolence on a fabulous industrial empire, from
the Rhineland to the Hudson Valley to the muddy Yangtze River.
I. G. Farben's holding companies and plants then blanketed Europe, its house banks and research firms and patent firms clustered
around every important commercial center in both hemispheres.
This success did not curb their seemingly strange vision. The
Farben "president" transferred millions of dollars into other hands
on faith alone. On faith he transferred the legal ownership of a
$100,000,000 U. S. combine to a friend in Switzerland.
This combine was the old American I. G. Chemical Corporation. From 230 Park Avenue, New York City, its main office
governed five subsidiaries, all producing marvels of modem chemistry. They were the Ozalid Corporation of Johnson City, the
General Dyestuffs Company, the old Hudson River Color Works,
the Agfa-Ansco factory which manufactured cameras and films,
and a research plant in Pennsylvania.
Dyes were the basis of American I. G. Chemical's entire business, just as dyes were the financial and scientific wellspring of all
the Farben companies. Yet in a brief memo Farben's president
let the American I. G. go. This poetic magnanimity - unless it
concealed a desperate gamble of some kind - was more typical of
an artist-scientist than of a financial wizard. One might not have
been surprised at a show of generosity from, say, the Farben
director who founded the photo-chemistry whose cameras were
sold around the world under the Agfa-Ansco trademark. He had
helped to develop color photography, too. At the trial, he testified:
"I did not like to see beauty just in a dark room somewhere.
I wanted to see my child, or some fish or game I had caught, in
color - to see it in all its beauty. And we succeeded."
So, even at their trial, these men did not think as robber barons
are supposed to think. Exclaimed another of the directors on the
witness stand:
Chemistry is a dynamic science. Thank goodness, every people is
inventive. The effects of everyday life are noticed in everything we see - fibers, everything that is dyed, plastic articles, and parts of automobiles and radios. It was the climax of my life when Dr. ter Meer sent me to the forests of Ceylon and the Malay States, to study how nature
produces rubber. These studies were so enlightening that Dr. ter Meer
entrusted me with the on-the-spot management of synthetic rubber development. We were dealing with the unknown. . . .
That was Dr. Otto Ambros - a member of I. G. Farben's
Vorstand, or board of directors - speaking. To his mentor, Dr.
Friedrich ter Meer, all the natural substances like rubber were "wild
horses that must be broken to the reins." But mankind was no wild
horse to him, if Dr. ter Meer's witnesses were telling the truth. During the first World War, Dr. ter Meer had owned a dyestuffs plant
near the French border, and French prisoners of war who still
recalled working there called him "Director Bon." Ambros apparently was a good man, too; younger than Ter Meer, he enjoyed
similar respect from many French workers during the second
World War. For two years after the war ended, he worked for
the French government; several times they refused to give him up.
"The first stages of the collapse promised everything but that I
would be arrested," Ambros told the court with a smile. It was
the same smile that had greeted the vanguard of American soldiers
that rolled into Gendorf, Bavaria, in 1945.
They noticed him immediately. Even when he stopped smiling,
his lips munched pleasantly under a prematurely gray moustache.
The other townsfolk protested innocence in various degrees of
cunning and sophistication, while Ambros seemed to lend his
Bavarian folksiness without obligation. He sniffed the air deeply.
He was like a rabbit who had come out of the near-by hills, standing alertly on its hind legs, watching with devilish friendliness these
taller beings straggling warily around the town.
The G.I.'s liked him, but the commanding officer wanted to
know why he was wearing a fancy suit among the jerkined. What
were his rank and serial number?
His name, the man said, was Ambros, and he had no rank or
serial number. He was a "plain chemist." Although he was a
German, he had many French friends; in fact, he had lived at
Ludwigshafen, only forty kilometers from the French border, which
made him very nearly a Frenchman.
The commanding officer was suspicious. A few days later an
advance detail of General Patton's army arrived in Gendorf. The
two C.O.'s, after putting their heads together, ordered the "plain
chemist" held for questioning. If he was almost a Frenchman,
what was he doing here, way over on the other side of Germany?
Ambros answered that he'd had "no reason to flee" and every
reason to be in Gendorf. As a director of I. G. Farbenindustrie,
he had been in charge of a synthetics factory here.
They inspected the factory, peeking into vats of soaps and detergents. Lining the walls of Ambros' office were spectrum cards
exhibiting the many-colored lacquers also made there.
Every day troops arrived who had not washed for a month.
Some of their vehicles were faded and dirty. Not only was this
fellow a welcome quartermaster, but working for him were the
best of all character witnesses - refugees from the concentration
camps across the Polish border. He had brought them here, and
while they didn't talk much, they worked hard for him and said
nothing to refute his claim that he had picked them all and trained
them so that, when they returned home, they would have skilled
professions.
Ambros stayed in Gendorf for a few more months. Higher commanders rolled into town and had him picked up to answer more
significant questions. The factory was underground. He pointed
out that most of the underground factories in Germany had been
bombed; surely the Allied air forces would have bombed this one
if it had had any strategic value! He referred to his activity here
as dedicated to "once more preparing for the coming peacetime
industry."
He passed soap out to the soldiers personally -it was good
to have somebody dropping gifts in their hands for a change. The
brass felt the same way when he issued cleaning agents and paints
for the vehicles. They were not scientists, but any scientist worth
his salt could talk about technical things simply and with a smile.
This fellow Ambros could tell you how to make a hundred wonders from one chemical element: ethylene oxide.
He knew more about rubber than anything else. A synthetic rubber factory had much in common with him: civilized, neat,
more reminiscent of perfected nature than of Man. A rubber plant
had to be absolutely clean; a speck of dust mingling with the liquid
rubber could mean a blowout on the highway some day. To plan
a rubber factory, you did not begin with materials; you put your
finger to the wind, because the wind had to blow in the right direction to take off the carbide dust so that it "would not be thrown in
your neighbor's face."
The judges of the court listened as the soldiers had, as if waiting
for a twig to crackle. Somehow the fortunes of war had placed
this picture of a spotless industrial installation in a horrible setting,
beside a river (not the calm Hudson or the turbulent Rhine) that
ran red with a dye no chemist could synthesize. There sprawled
the buna-rubber plant, and three kilometers away was a concentration camp. Surely this good-natured, earthy chemist had nothing
to do with that! One of Farben's top employees, assistant to both
Dr. ter Meer and Dr. Ambros, was testifying:
In my compartment there was a man, a working man, and he told
with loud voice to the other men and wives in the compartment that in Auschwitz concentration camp people -people were burned
in a crematorium (he said not the word "crematorium") and in large numbers. And then the whole air in Auschwitz was filled with the
smell of death. I was very deeply impressed and I sprang up and
said he should not say such lies.
The prosecutor pressed the witness for more details:
Q. And the smell of burning flesh was known at the buna plant - you understood him to say that? All right, go ahead, what did you do when you heard that?
A. I sprang up and said, "They are lies," and he said, "No, they are not lies; there are 10,000 men or more at Auschwitz and all of
them know it."
Q. You say, then, that in the beginning of 1942 you heard of
Auschwitz concentration camp, about the burnings and cruelties ping on there, and you learned that from an open discussion on the train
ride?
A. Yes, he said it to all present. There were 10 or 15 in the
compartment, and they all heard it.
Q. Were you convinced when the workman said, "No, they are not lies.
A. No, I was not convinced. . . .
Q. In the summer of 1943 you visited Auschwitz again. Did it
occur to you that you should investigate it then?
A. I asked in Auschwitz a responsible man, the chief engineer Heidebroek.
Q. What did you ask him?
A. He said it was true. I can give you from Frankfurt the exact
date.
Q. You reported to the chief engineer what the workman said on
the train, and the chief engineer said what the workman had said was
true?
A. Yes. . . . I think he also told me that the people were gassed
before they were burned.
Q. Then in the summer of 1943 you knew that people were being burned and gassed?
A. Yes.
Q. Is this your statement, Dr. Struss: "After I spoke to Heidebroek
I was convinced that the situation at the Auschwitz concentration
camp was as bad as they had told me, but I was hoping that it was
not true"? Is that a fair statement?
A. Yes, that is a fair statement. I had only 1 per cent of hope
that it was not true.
A few months before this witness, Dr. Struss, told his story, one
of the judges of the court had summed up his reaction to I. G.
Farbenindustrie: "This is simply a big business concern the like
of which there are many throughout the world." The judge had
not yet heard of Struss's conversation on the train, nor had he
heard the many witnesses for the prosecution who had worked at
Farben's buna plant in Poland. But he had been hearing for weeks
about aweb of interests more influential than any ever spun by
Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, or Fisk - about acts of aggression and
conquest on a scale difficult to comprehend. No, there was only
one I. G. Farbenindustrie. But if a judge who tried the facts firsthand could not believe his ears, what might one expect of other
intelligent men?
My understanding of Farben has developed in the last ten
years, during which seven government missions abroad have carded me through fifty countries. Farben first came forcibly to my
attention on a mission to Latin America in 1941. I met Farben
in North Africa in 1943, in France in 1944, and in Europe and
Asia from 1945 through 1948. During the war a report had crossed
my desk in Washington from a town in Poland called Auschwitz.
The men who wrote the report had spent two years in Auschwitz
before their escape. At three o'clock every morning, they were
herded with hundreds of others to a tremendous plant, several kilometers square, called "Buna." At noon they sucked up a little
turnip soup. The evening meal - "evening" was eleven o'clock at
night - was a crust of bread. When I read this report in 1944,
I speculated as to whether this "Buna" plant in Poland was a
Farben venture. I too found it hard to believe.
2.
Anything Intact
Was Beautiful
DECEMBER 1946 -a long time ago reckoned by the hours of
national futility that have since gone by.
December 1946 - there was a lot of war going on. The Jewish
underground in Palestine was attacking Tel Aviv; in Iran the leftists fought the government with sticks and stones and leaflets and
broken-down tanks salvaged from larger armies. But the Cold War
hadn't yet been named. Although threats between nations were
commonplace, Andrei Vishinsky, speaking a few days before at
Madison Square Garden, had said that the "capitalist" and "socialist" systems could get along together. And Molotov announced
that Russia would not veto any United Nations provisions for international inspection of arms.
As the air cleared for one false moment, the average citizen,
long tossed on a sea of suspicion, looked about for a tiny raft of
faith. I was looking, too, I suppose. One day early in that month,
I was standing at my office window in Camden, New Jersey, when
the phone rang. Ordinarily, to me the weather is little more than
a guide for what to wear; yet let that afternoon come back - as it often does - and I see too clearly the lines of roofs and
doorways through a fog scowling down to the gutters. I have to
think twice to realize that even the later consequences weren't
foreshadowed by two consecutive moments at the window.
Although the phone call was the most far-reaching of my life, I
don't recall it very well.
I answered it, of course. Then I was back at the window sensing
the ethereal exaggeration of roofs and doorways, walls whole and
larger than they really are. It wasn't quite time for the shops to be
decorated in evergreen and neon, the Walt Whitman Hotel to be
girdled by colored lights. Still, I saw the coming season in squat
buildings and dirty streets. For a long time, I had spent most of my
holidays in a crumbling scene, and I had come to a time when
anything intact was beautiful.
My secretary came in to announce that the client in the outer
office was impatient. Whatever the matter was -a will to prepare, a divorce, a deed - I handled it before going into the adjoining office to face my brother Herb. He looked up from his desk.
Behind tortoise-shell glasses he blinked slowly as he always does
to hide his incessant curiosity.
"Washington just called," I said. "The government wants me to
come back."
His face was still tanned from Army life - he'd been discharged
a few months before. But his tan did not hide the deeper color
of anger.
"I thought you were fed up. You just got home a couple of
months ago."
"Now, don't get excited," I said. "I told them I wouldn't come."
He settled back in his chair.
"Good! What was the proposition? Did they want you to draw up the papers to lease Alaska to
the Russians?
"Germany," I said. "This mission would not be like any of
the others." Then I gave a brief, maybe even vague, report of
the conversation. What difference did it make? "I told them I'm
not going anywhere but right here in Camden. But I'm going to
Washington on that tax case anyway, and I can stop in at the
War Department and talk it over."
"Here we go! All the government has to do is phone you, and
you jump. You've left us four times, every time before we get
established here. Haven't you had enough?"
Yes, I thought, I've had enough. But, leaving my office early,
I drove slowly. And at the traffic circle outside Camden, I missed
the turn to Westmont, where I lived, and found myself on another
highway, driving past other intact buildings, trying to feel that I
belonged to their sturdy perspective, trying to pretend, a year and
a half since the war ended, that I had danced in the streets on V-E
and V-J Days.
It was dark when I drove up to my house. My wife was in the
doorway, and before I stepped in, I said: "The War Department
wants me to go to Nurnberg. The Farben industrialists may be
put on trial. They want me to head up the prosecution. I'm not
going, of course."
'I'll get supper," she said.
Both the kids were in bed, and we ate supper alone. Over
coffee, she asked some questions. How many Farben men were being held by the Military Government? About ten, I guessed.
And what were they going to be tried for? Well, no indictment
had been issued yet.
"They've been loosely accused of deliberately helping to bring
on the war, you know," I added. "But I'm sick of it, and I told
Herb so."
"If you really don't want to go, that's fine."
She watched me intently. "Farben again," she said. Her coffee
cup clattered nervously in the saucer.
"Yes, it seems to follow us everywhere."
To explain why a huge organization far removed from our supper table had a special meaning to my wife, too, would take
volumes. Farben had a most artless full name, "Interessen
Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft," which means
"Community of Interests of the Dyestuffs Industry, Incorporated."
In more pleasant days, when my wife first heard the name, she
had commented that it sounded like a cross between a service club and Easter eggs.
During one war year, Farben had employed
more people than three of the world's largest corporations put
together: DuPont de Nemours of Wilmington, Delaware, Standard
Oil Company (New Jersey), and Imperial Chemical Industries of
London. Holding companies, coke ovens, lignite-coal mines: what
woman would care that these were part of the Farben empire?
Yet Farben to her meant all of Farben, a thing that had become in
our house like the name of a former spouse.
"It follows us everywhere, Joe, doesn't it?"
It, she had said, not "Farben." "Farben" was four years of old fashioned convictions that had led to failure. Even to many people
who saw some of the facts as we saw them, Farben was only "the
German question." To us, as to only a few others, it was a world
question. Though Farben had been the industrial czar of Germany
for half a century, its empire included more than 880 firms throughout Europe, Africa, North and South America, east and west Asia.
I had good reason to know that Farben was the Machiavellian planner for all institutions in the world that had allied themselves with
military aggression.
Quietly we finished our second cup of coffee. Then I went down
to . - the basement. Near the furnace were the four packing boxes and
one trunkful of papers I had gathered during my service with the
Treasury Department and on three Presidential missions. I shouted
up to her: "What happened to all that stuff I had on Farben?"
"What are you doing?"
"I'd be able to find things if you didn't move stuff all around
down here. It won't be funny if those boxes catch fire."
"I'll come down now and help you move them."
"Never mind, never mind."
"I thought you didn't want to take the job."
"I don't! You and Herb! I was just curious."
She came down for a minute to remind me that I had planned
to seal up those boxes and lock the trunk. I myself had put all the
stuff near the furnace. Now, she pointed out, I wanted to move
it away.
"Stop being psychological," I said. "What's so important about
that?"
She was right, of course. Whether or not I wanted those records
to burn, I wanted to forget. And how would one seal up a viewpoint that had been slowly burning away anyhow? The last page - that would be the previous May. Seven months before, Edwin Pauley had just left on a round-the-world mission to find out for
the President how effectively the U.S. reparations program was being carried out. On our previous missions to Europe and the Far
East, we had recommended programs whereby the vanquished economies were to be helped to their feet with equipment and assets
which the aggressors had used to foment the war, and with the
spoils they had taken from the conquered countries. Pauley had
asked me to go along as legal advisor, as I had been on the first
two missions.
But that May had ended seven and a half years of my service in
the government, and that May the program in Europe and Asia
was being "carried out" - on a stretcher. My brother and I had
a talk then, too, and I had declined. But again Pauley wired me
from Tokyo. In July I joined the mission.
Besides dealing with "reparations" in the limited sense, this last
mission, like the previous ones, had gleaned a thousand-and-one impressions of how Uncle Sam, with new international responsibilities
he couldn't escape, was getting along in the battle to win the peoples of the world to ourside. Asia had emerged from the last war
in revolution. Dangerously aimless, this revolution was a chaotic
ground swell rolling up against centuries of hunger and oppression.
Its momentum lay not in leaders whose principles might be negotiated, but in millions and millions of aroused people.
Yet by the craziest political paradox in American history, our
political mind had tended, since 1945, to attribute all unrest in
Asia to the Communists, and all understanding in this country of
that unrest to starry-eyed sympathizers with Communism. The
most frightful danger to us was that we would go on treating the
Communist role, which was already playing the part where it could,
as the revolution itself. Abroad, the descendants of 1776 shunned
the very word "revolution" while the Communists shouted it. The
Communists had by this time gained the initiative so far that, while
appealing to the Asiatics in terms of "people" and "democracy,"
they had succeeded in making even these words suspect in many an
American mind.
What did the Asiatics really want? They wanted economic reform, including land reform. They wanted national independence, and this desire had led to Asiatic nationalism. "Asia for the Asiatics" was the rallying cry. The Communists had appealed to these irrepressibly popular urges for years, and with some success. But 1945 had still not been too late for us to take moderate action.
The Pauley missions hadn't gone to Asia to support a revolution, as the French had supported the American colonies in 1776. We went to play a few hands in a game the United States would surely lose if it didn't sit in as more than a tactless kibitzer. Our mission was mainly economic, for the dangerous resentments in Asia, going hand-in-hand with the demands for new freedoms, were economic resentments.
We submitted our program to President Truman in 1945. It had advised that the excessive industrial capacity built up in Japan for conquest should be distributed as quickly as possible to other countries in the Far East, particularly China, Korea, Indo-China, and the Philippines. Ambassador Pauley had warned that unless China particularly was strengthened economically, it might well fall to the Communists. He had warned of the same danger in many European countries. Japan was not to be reduced to a nonindustrial society, but the key war industries were to be taken from the hands of the industrialists who had gained their strangle hold on the other Far Eastern countries by aggression and aggression alone, and placed in the hands of peace loving businessmen in Japan and the other countries.
But now the Zaibatsu cartel- whose ill-gotten gains in the other countries had come from fraud, swindling, and full support of the Japanese war machine -was still openly supported by American policy in Asia. Zaibatsu, the Oriental face of I.G. Farben. The partner that had sat at Farben's feet. The Communists were still exploiting the people's resentment on this score, extending it to innocent Japanese businesses and interpreting American support of the Zaibatsu as an outright American desire to bring war again to Asia, as the Japanese had.
At the top of the trunk, gathering dust, lay the Pauley recommendations on the Far East. I dug deeper. My wife was calling: "You may be thinking of me. I would hate to get into this Farben mess again. But if you are thinking of me, I just wonder, too: Who would do the job if you didn't?"
She was in the living room. I went in, my arms loaded with Farben papers. You couldn't help thinking back once in a while, I remarked.
She agreed at first. It was too late to go back. Six missions - to Paris, Moscow, Potsdam, Tokyo, Algiers, London. Eight wasted years. For the past four of those years, the United States, acting on the fairly reasonable assumption that Communism and capitalism must soon fight, had handed the Communists their best weapon by stupidly failing to dissociate itself from institutions that had allied themselves with naked aggression.
"What good does it do to go on one mission after another that leads nowhere?" I asked. "Farben has won again, that's all."
She said: "If Farben represents the whole problem, wouldn't a trial get the facts to people better than anything has in the past?"
'Does that mean you want me to go?"
"You won't go anyway if you don't want to. I think you should do what you want. Why don't you write to Ed Pauley?"
I wondered what Pauley would say. "It's bad poker," he had once remarked to me in Tokyo, "to assume that all these Communists in Europe and Asia are being made by Joe Stalin or Karl Marx." But Pauley thought my interest in Farben was unusually intense; often he had referred to me as "I.G. Joe." I wondered whether he, as a businessman, might not shy away from the idea of criminally prosecuting foreign businessmen with close connections in this country.
"All right," I said. "I'll write to Pauley and ask what he thinks."
No use trying to concentrate! Frost bit the window, designing it into two uneven panes. Winter in Washington was usually a comfortable prospect, after the miserably humid summers; but this time I would feel alone even if comfortable. The man who had introduced me to I.G. Farbenindustrie would not be there. He was Bernard Bernstein, Assistant General Counsel of the Treasury Department during the years before Pearl Harbor. Early in 1941 erns stein had wired me in Camden to come down and help out for the "short while" that had lasted over six years.
As Bernstein's Chief Counsel of Foreign Funds Control, I had helped to freeze I.G. Farben's assets in the Western Hemisphere. Bernstein and I had worked on the executive order which placed under the vigilant eye of the Treasury Department Farben's main holdings in the United States - the companies of the old American I. G. Chemical Corporation, which was renamed "General Aniline and Film Corporation."
Then the Treasury had sent me on a journey through a dozen Latin American countries, to try to get their co-operation in defending the whole hemisphere economically. I found that I.G. Farben dominated the political and economic life of many small countries. Guatemala was practically a Farben subsidiary. In June 1942 I was secretary of a conference in which twenty American republics finally agreed to do battle against Farben, the Japanese Zaibatsu, and similar interrelated interests. According to the exact words of the conference, as I remembered them, these interests had "been plotting the downfall of the free peoples who gave them an opportunity to prosper and grow rich by honest trade."
This agreement had not been easily reached. To an extent unknown even by the presidents of the Latin American republics, Farben had so extended its influence in synthetics, and had gained control of so many banks, that to close down or boycott their interests would have led to serious economic depressions. The United States had urged the taking over of General Aniline as an example to the other American governments; we offered to start a school to show them how to do it. But the Latin American representatives had tactfully pointed out how naive the United States was. "A school! It's all right for you in the United States to close down one big company. That has perhaps a small effect on your economy. But a move like this would wreck us. Can you tell us how to replace the employees that I.G. Farben would take out of the country? Can you replace their scientific knowledge? Have you got the people to send us from the United States?"
But now, on the eve of 1947, although the current activities of General Aniline and Film were still extremely important, few people in Washington cared any longer what General Aniline did.
After taking care of my tax case at the Treasury, I wandered around to F Street, where the Capitol Theater was playing "The Best Years of Our Lives." Remembering the picture, I envied the veterans -not the wounds of battle, nor, later, their trying to find homes and jobs, but the fact that they had won something. When a battalion captures a town, foreign policy cannot take away the victory. When the Allied troops were splashing onto the Normandy beachhead, I was preparing to go to London to work out France's makeshift money system. Already we had closed down factories by financial blockade, had frozen the enemies' assets. These measures, as well as tactics and medicines, had saved some lives. But our battle was now a stalemate, and the men who believed that economic warfare never ended had left the government, feeling so out of line with the new policy that it would be useless to stay.
Again I thought of Bernard Bernstein. General Eisenhower had appointed him his financial advisor, on recommendation of Secretary Morgenthau, when the prospective invasion of Africa was still a well-guarded secret. Although Bernstein was a colonel, he carried the war of money personally to the front lines. The North African invasion took place in November 1942, and I joined Bernstein there in December. Together we worked out the system to block enemy assets in Algiers, Tunis, and Casablanca and to set up a sound currency. There was no thought then of bringing to trial any businessmen.
After I left North Africa to go back to my desk in the Treasury, Bernstein had traveled with the invading troops, into Sicily and Italy and France. Then, just before the Allies invaded Germany, he gathered under his command a group of infantrymen who had been Treasury investigators, to search for the business records and the history of every important firm on the continent. My brother Herb, who had marched into Germany as an infantryman, had been requisitioned by Bernstein to find the gold which the Nazis had hidden in salt mines, in chicken yards, and in the Bavarian mountains. The gold-hunters unearthed 99 per cent "of all the gold bars in Germany, most of which had previously been stolen by Germany from the countries it overran. Again, I.G. Farbenindustrie had been only one objective; the mission's purpose was to discover what influence industry and investments had played in the coming of war. They would still play their part in future wars .
I couldn't get up the courage to go over to the War Department without first phoning Bernstein.
I went into a comer store and called Bernstein's New York office. His deep voice greeted me without preliminaries. "Hello, Joe. I understand you're in Washington. Are you thinking of going to Nuremberg?"
"No," I said. "The news travels fast. I did want to ask you what you thought about it. Why don't you take the job?"
"No, thanks."
"I didn't expect you would, after just getting back into practise."
"There's that and - well. I don't believe it would be a good idea,, under the circumstances, for me to head up any prosecution of German industrialists."
We chatted for a few minutes. I waited for him to say, "Go ahead, you take it, it's an opportunity." But he didn't. He laughed. "If you do go, Joe, get Abe Weissbrodt to go with you. He's always good for a laugh."
"You're kidding. You really don't think he'd go?"
'No - just a joke."
We said good-by, and that was that.
Bernstein's final report on Farben had gone to the Kilgore subcommittee. Much of it was still secret. It was not like him to make a joke of anything involving his service with the government. Stories of his bravery had become legendary, but he'd been so implacably serious that some of the boys who had worked for him asserted that his bravery was unconscious - that to him bullets were mere annoyances in an economic war.
Get Weissbrodt? Weissbrodt was a very capable man; it was surprising that Bernstein had recommended his prankishness rather than his ability. Weissbrodt, who had tracked down some of the first evidences of Farben's influence on the Continent, had been an infantry corporal ready for discharge by the time he got the call from SHAEF. Three times he ignored orders to leave his company and proceed to SHAEF headquarters in London. Then he was given a choice: investigate or take a court-martial. By this time Colonel Bernstein was in North Africa.
"But where in North Africa, sir?" he asked his commanding officer.
"Somewhere in North Africa. Go find him and report."
Some days later the corporal found him in Palermo, Sicily. A raid was going on. The Allied command area was deserted except for Colonel Bernstein, who was striding down the headquarters street with two briefcases under each arm, looking neither right nor left, apparently oblivious to the enemy bombs falling all around him. The corporal caught up with him and saluted. The colonel answered by raising two of the briefcases in the general direction of his face, and smiled faintly to acknowledge their past association in the Treasury. Then the corporal started to run, and the colonel called him back.
"Weissbrodt, where are you going?"
"To find a shelter, Colonel."
"Weissbrodt, I have a nice job for you. You go find the Banca d'ltalia and close it. Shut her up tight."
"But, sir, I haven't got time to close any banks."
Bernstein was offended. It was reported later that he honestly felt he was giving the corporal an opportunity to distinguish himself. "Weissbrodt!" he exclaimed. "Where did you ever get a chance in your lifetime before either to open or close a bank?"
I found myself in the Statler Hotel, phoning another of the first Farben investigators who had stayed on in the government. What was I doing in town? I told him. Deftly he shifted the talk to the Washington weather -it was warm for December. Had I got mixed up in something that had lately turned subversive? . . . This very week the President had established a Temporary Loyally Commission, and that had scared many of the absolutely loyal, along with a few who were presumably disloyal. I thought: Whatever else you might say about the Roosevelt administration, at times a genial friendliness rose above even the most unutterable confusions; people stopped to ask you the time. In its place was a wary watchfulness.
I stayed at the Statler longer than I should have, listening to three men at a table near the bar. Their politics were not disclosed. Discussing the last war, they were turning their backs on it, looking forward to the next. Between the two wars they found not even a psychological connection. They agreed vociferously and bitterly that the last war had been unnecessary, whereas the next was inevitable. We had fought the wrong enemies, apparently by our own choice and without a single righteous reason. But the next war would have an honest moral basis.
Everyone was afraid these days, I told myself. In 1932 the American people had been afraid too; but their fear had sunk to a warmly communicable despair that often yielded positive action and a defiant release from the thing Franklin Roosevelt called "fear itself." Now the fear which the government should be meeting with vigorous courage expressed itself in an apathy and cynicism more disturbing than bonus marchers or farmers on their front steps with pitchforks in their hands.
These men in the Statler bar - their views were exceptional, maybe. But how many normal voices were heard in Washington? How many others, fearing the evil prospect, would greet the future world with solutions that stood upon the worst features of an equally evil past? Fear may come to the mind long before physical danger. Footsteps may march up and down the hallway time and again before the knock comes on the door. Then a sudden terror, as if your mind, loosely planted, has been uprooted before it can reach down to the soil or up to the sunlight. . . .
Colonel Mickey Marcus, who was later killed in Palestine, headed the War Crimes Division of the War Department. In the labyrinthine Pentagon Building, his office was distinguished from hundreds of others only by the name plate beside his door. He and I had got to know each other while drawing up the Army laws for invasion-and-occupation currencies. Having served at one time as Commissioner of Correction in New York City, and having helped to draft the Italian, German, and Japanese surrender terms, he could be tough and gentle by turns - although it never seemed' to me that he enjoyed the tough role. He had my letter before him.
"As I get it, you're interested enough to discuss it seriously.".
"That's right," I said.
"Do you think there is enough evidence to connect them with the war plans?"
"I haven't seen the evidence. But I doubt it." Mickey began to pace, occasionally stopping abruptly, frowning back at me. Now he came back and sat down.
"Certainly a trial would have great military value if we could get all the proofs together. Right here in Alexandria there is a warehouse full of Farben records that no agency has studied. Other countries went digging for Farben documents, too. In the heat of victory they wanted them; then they stuck them away in corners.''
"Why couldn't the prosecution staff be increased?"
He ignored my question. "Maybe the Farben leaders were masters of economic warfare, but if I were a judge, I would want to know how you blame a war on men who weren't even in the Army or the foreign office. I'd want to know what made Farben any different from, say, DuPont in this country."
"Don't you think the Farben leaders were different?"
"Yes, I do. Still, they didn't pull any triggers."
I agreed. What puzzled me most was that a staff had been over in Nurnberg for months, and a lot of accusations against the Farben directors had been flung around, but no single idea had been presented to show why these men, above all industrialists in the world, were the kind of men who would deliberately bring on a war. "Yet I don't think we have to show that these directors lusted for blood," I said. "We don't have to show that they enjoyed pushing pins around on a map. But suppose we could show that they had power far greater than any general in the field. Then how would the War Department feel?''
He was slouching in his chair, swiveling slowly.
"In this Department,, we're thinking about two things: Russia and the atom. God knows these things are important, but I think myself - just my own opinion- that we may have a lot more to fear from the Russians if we don't consider some other facts, too. Many of these Farben men were chemists. Chemistry played its part in the atom bomb - right? There are also other deadly chemical weapons that a country can make in secret. These men made some of these weapons, we know that. A country cannot very easily test an atom bomb in secret, but for ten years these guys did make secret weapons that are still important strategically. How did they do it? There's a question a trial might answer. Chemistry today is still the greatest secret weapon."
He loosened his tie, climbed out of the chair, and walked around the office with his hands in his pockets, as he explained that chemistry was the sperm of World War II.
"I know, I know: you're going to say I'm reversing myself. But it's true. In this war, in Germany at least, chemical production was not just production. It was strategy. It takes a long time to make an atom bomb. But without retooling any machines, without changing anything but the label and the size of the can, in a few months the great chemists of Germany made enough Prussic acid to kill millions. And in Germany, chemistry was I.G. Farben, wasn't it? These men could make a kind of war people don't even know about. Let them go free, and they alone, working for the Russians, might have the decisive influence on whether there's to be a war."
"Or working for us?"
"Or for us, yes. They might also place Germany in a position to play the game both ways, for or against the Russians. We know that they can make a rocket tomorrow out of the nitrogen that would dye your wife's old dress today. When the war ended Farben was working on a rocket that would make the destruction of Hiroshima look like a small auto accident.''
His knowledge of Farben chemical power made an almost unbelievable tale, much of which I had never heard. I had heard of Tabun, the Farben poison gas so deadly it could penetrate any gas mask in existence. But Farben had developed, he said, the gas Sarin, as deadly as Tabun and more persistent in its future effects than the atom bomb. On instant contact Sarin sends the victim out of his head. In one secret raid, carried by less air power than an old barnstorming circus, this Sarin could exterminate three or four cities -and it might be a hundred years before people could again live in them.
"I don't get it," I said. "You tell me all this; then you weakly ask me to take a job you're not especially anxious to have filled."
"You don't get what I'm trying to tell you, Joe. I personally don't want to discourage you, but a lot of people in this Department are scared stiff of pinning a war plot on these men. There's no law by which we can force industrialists to make war equipment for us right now. A few American manufacturers were Farben stooges. And those who weren't can say, 'Hell, if participating in a rearmament program is criminal, we want no part of it.' "
"We'd have to show more than just manufacturing, you know that. We'd have to show that the defendants made the Stuff intending it should be used for aggression."
"All right, I accept that - but would the DuPonts and the Fords?"
"Then if everyone around here is cool on a trial, what's keeping the idea alive?"
He smiled. "The picture isn't all black yet. As far as I'm concerned, you could go over there for as long or as short a time as you liked."
It didn't occur to me that I had to say yes, in so many words. I had never before imagined Farben production on the brink of war. If the Farben directors were guilty, their business tactics and their production must have so merged with military tactics as to make the three things almost indistinguishable.
"I'm not convinced that we can accomplish what such a trial should accomplish. Four months ought to be long enough for me to find out."
"I have no objection to that. Within a few days after you get home, you should get a wire from Telford Taylor agreeing to it."
General Telford Taylor, former General Counsel for the Federal Communications Commission, had succeeded Justice Jackson as American war-crimes chief in Europe. Taylor was running into opposition on the whole idea of continuing the Nuremberg trials. Farben's Dr. Otto Ambros was still working in the French zone, and the French wouldn't give him up. And the British had refused to give up another of Farben's great industrial scientists. If the various governments weren't strongly behind a trial, how could you blame businessmen in this country for thinking that the trial was being pushed by crackpots?
"Just one more question. If I go over there, will you back me up the best you can?"
"My only duty is to tell you we don't like having an aggressive war charge. But if you can prove it, go ahead, and I'll try to see to it that nobody over here dictates the terms of the indictment."
At home, a telegram from California awaited me. I should have known Ed Pauley would stick his neck out!
DEAR JOE:
YOUR LETTER HAS JUST NOW COME TO MY ATTENTION. YOU ARE THE BEST QUALIFIED MAN IN THE UNITED STATES TO DO THIS JOB AND WILL BE MAKING A GREAT CONTRIBUTION TO THE NATION AND FOR THE PEACE OF THE WORLD.
What did the Asiatics really want? They wanted economic reform, including land reform. They wanted national independence, and this desire had led to Asiatic nationalism. "Asia for the Asiatics" was the rallying cry. The Communists had appealed to these irrepressibly popular urges for years, and with some success. But 1945 had still not been too late for us to take moderate action.
The Pauley missions hadn't gone to Asia to support a revolution, as the French had supported the American colonies in 1776. We went to play a few hands in a game the United States would surely lose if it didn't sit in as more than a tactless kibitzer. Our mission was mainly economic, for the dangerous resentments in Asia, going hand-in-hand with the demands for new freedoms, were economic resentments.
We submitted our program to President Truman in 1945. It had advised that the excessive industrial capacity built up in Japan for conquest should be distributed as quickly as possible to other countries in the Far East, particularly China, Korea, Indo-China, and the Philippines. Ambassador Pauley had warned that unless China particularly was strengthened economically, it might well fall to the Communists. He had warned of the same danger in many European countries. Japan was not to be reduced to a nonindustrial society, but the key war industries were to be taken from the hands of the industrialists who had gained their strangle hold on the other Far Eastern countries by aggression and aggression alone, and placed in the hands of peace loving businessmen in Japan and the other countries.
But now the Zaibatsu cartel- whose ill-gotten gains in the other countries had come from fraud, swindling, and full support of the Japanese war machine -was still openly supported by American policy in Asia. Zaibatsu, the Oriental face of I.G. Farben. The partner that had sat at Farben's feet. The Communists were still exploiting the people's resentment on this score, extending it to innocent Japanese businesses and interpreting American support of the Zaibatsu as an outright American desire to bring war again to Asia, as the Japanese had.
At the top of the trunk, gathering dust, lay the Pauley recommendations on the Far East. I dug deeper. My wife was calling: "You may be thinking of me. I would hate to get into this Farben mess again. But if you are thinking of me, I just wonder, too: Who would do the job if you didn't?"
She was in the living room. I went in, my arms loaded with Farben papers. You couldn't help thinking back once in a while, I remarked.
She agreed at first. It was too late to go back. Six missions - to Paris, Moscow, Potsdam, Tokyo, Algiers, London. Eight wasted years. For the past four of those years, the United States, acting on the fairly reasonable assumption that Communism and capitalism must soon fight, had handed the Communists their best weapon by stupidly failing to dissociate itself from institutions that had allied themselves with naked aggression.
"What good does it do to go on one mission after another that leads nowhere?" I asked. "Farben has won again, that's all."
She said: "If Farben represents the whole problem, wouldn't a trial get the facts to people better than anything has in the past?"
'Does that mean you want me to go?"
"You won't go anyway if you don't want to. I think you should do what you want. Why don't you write to Ed Pauley?"
I wondered what Pauley would say. "It's bad poker," he had once remarked to me in Tokyo, "to assume that all these Communists in Europe and Asia are being made by Joe Stalin or Karl Marx." But Pauley thought my interest in Farben was unusually intense; often he had referred to me as "I.G. Joe." I wondered whether he, as a businessman, might not shy away from the idea of criminally prosecuting foreign businessmen with close connections in this country.
"All right," I said. "I'll write to Pauley and ask what he thinks."
3.
Before Armies March
A FEW DAYS BEFORE THAT CHRISTMAS of 1946,I caught the Washingtonian out of Philadelphia. That was the week the United States
called on the United Nations to urge the Spanish people to get rid
of Franco, and a Senate committee had gone down to Jackson,
Mississippi, to look into the campaign practices of Senator Bilbo.
Some time during that week I must have wondered wearily why the
State Department had abetted Franco to power in the first place,
and why the upper chamber had ever seated the Senator from Mississippi. Throwing the New York Times onto the rack above my
seat, I zipped open my briefcase and pulled out my file on the
tax matter. No use trying to concentrate! Frost bit the window, designing it into two uneven panes. Winter in Washington was usually a comfortable prospect, after the miserably humid summers; but this time I would feel alone even if comfortable. The man who had introduced me to I.G. Farbenindustrie would not be there. He was Bernard Bernstein, Assistant General Counsel of the Treasury Department during the years before Pearl Harbor. Early in 1941 erns stein had wired me in Camden to come down and help out for the "short while" that had lasted over six years.
As Bernstein's Chief Counsel of Foreign Funds Control, I had helped to freeze I.G. Farben's assets in the Western Hemisphere. Bernstein and I had worked on the executive order which placed under the vigilant eye of the Treasury Department Farben's main holdings in the United States - the companies of the old American I. G. Chemical Corporation, which was renamed "General Aniline and Film Corporation."
Then the Treasury had sent me on a journey through a dozen Latin American countries, to try to get their co-operation in defending the whole hemisphere economically. I found that I.G. Farben dominated the political and economic life of many small countries. Guatemala was practically a Farben subsidiary. In June 1942 I was secretary of a conference in which twenty American republics finally agreed to do battle against Farben, the Japanese Zaibatsu, and similar interrelated interests. According to the exact words of the conference, as I remembered them, these interests had "been plotting the downfall of the free peoples who gave them an opportunity to prosper and grow rich by honest trade."
This agreement had not been easily reached. To an extent unknown even by the presidents of the Latin American republics, Farben had so extended its influence in synthetics, and had gained control of so many banks, that to close down or boycott their interests would have led to serious economic depressions. The United States had urged the taking over of General Aniline as an example to the other American governments; we offered to start a school to show them how to do it. But the Latin American representatives had tactfully pointed out how naive the United States was. "A school! It's all right for you in the United States to close down one big company. That has perhaps a small effect on your economy. But a move like this would wreck us. Can you tell us how to replace the employees that I.G. Farben would take out of the country? Can you replace their scientific knowledge? Have you got the people to send us from the United States?"
But now, on the eve of 1947, although the current activities of General Aniline and Film were still extremely important, few people in Washington cared any longer what General Aniline did.
After taking care of my tax case at the Treasury, I wandered around to F Street, where the Capitol Theater was playing "The Best Years of Our Lives." Remembering the picture, I envied the veterans -not the wounds of battle, nor, later, their trying to find homes and jobs, but the fact that they had won something. When a battalion captures a town, foreign policy cannot take away the victory. When the Allied troops were splashing onto the Normandy beachhead, I was preparing to go to London to work out France's makeshift money system. Already we had closed down factories by financial blockade, had frozen the enemies' assets. These measures, as well as tactics and medicines, had saved some lives. But our battle was now a stalemate, and the men who believed that economic warfare never ended had left the government, feeling so out of line with the new policy that it would be useless to stay.
Again I thought of Bernard Bernstein. General Eisenhower had appointed him his financial advisor, on recommendation of Secretary Morgenthau, when the prospective invasion of Africa was still a well-guarded secret. Although Bernstein was a colonel, he carried the war of money personally to the front lines. The North African invasion took place in November 1942, and I joined Bernstein there in December. Together we worked out the system to block enemy assets in Algiers, Tunis, and Casablanca and to set up a sound currency. There was no thought then of bringing to trial any businessmen.
After I left North Africa to go back to my desk in the Treasury, Bernstein had traveled with the invading troops, into Sicily and Italy and France. Then, just before the Allies invaded Germany, he gathered under his command a group of infantrymen who had been Treasury investigators, to search for the business records and the history of every important firm on the continent. My brother Herb, who had marched into Germany as an infantryman, had been requisitioned by Bernstein to find the gold which the Nazis had hidden in salt mines, in chicken yards, and in the Bavarian mountains. The gold-hunters unearthed 99 per cent "of all the gold bars in Germany, most of which had previously been stolen by Germany from the countries it overran. Again, I.G. Farbenindustrie had been only one objective; the mission's purpose was to discover what influence industry and investments had played in the coming of war. They would still play their part in future wars .
I couldn't get up the courage to go over to the War Department without first phoning Bernstein.
I went into a comer store and called Bernstein's New York office. His deep voice greeted me without preliminaries. "Hello, Joe. I understand you're in Washington. Are you thinking of going to Nuremberg?"
"No," I said. "The news travels fast. I did want to ask you what you thought about it. Why don't you take the job?"
"No, thanks."
"I didn't expect you would, after just getting back into practise."
"There's that and - well. I don't believe it would be a good idea,, under the circumstances, for me to head up any prosecution of German industrialists."
We chatted for a few minutes. I waited for him to say, "Go ahead, you take it, it's an opportunity." But he didn't. He laughed. "If you do go, Joe, get Abe Weissbrodt to go with you. He's always good for a laugh."
"You're kidding. You really don't think he'd go?"
'No - just a joke."
We said good-by, and that was that.
Bernstein's final report on Farben had gone to the Kilgore subcommittee. Much of it was still secret. It was not like him to make a joke of anything involving his service with the government. Stories of his bravery had become legendary, but he'd been so implacably serious that some of the boys who had worked for him asserted that his bravery was unconscious - that to him bullets were mere annoyances in an economic war.
Get Weissbrodt? Weissbrodt was a very capable man; it was surprising that Bernstein had recommended his prankishness rather than his ability. Weissbrodt, who had tracked down some of the first evidences of Farben's influence on the Continent, had been an infantry corporal ready for discharge by the time he got the call from SHAEF. Three times he ignored orders to leave his company and proceed to SHAEF headquarters in London. Then he was given a choice: investigate or take a court-martial. By this time Colonel Bernstein was in North Africa.
"But where in North Africa, sir?" he asked his commanding officer.
"Somewhere in North Africa. Go find him and report."
Some days later the corporal found him in Palermo, Sicily. A raid was going on. The Allied command area was deserted except for Colonel Bernstein, who was striding down the headquarters street with two briefcases under each arm, looking neither right nor left, apparently oblivious to the enemy bombs falling all around him. The corporal caught up with him and saluted. The colonel answered by raising two of the briefcases in the general direction of his face, and smiled faintly to acknowledge their past association in the Treasury. Then the corporal started to run, and the colonel called him back.
"Weissbrodt, where are you going?"
"To find a shelter, Colonel."
"Weissbrodt, I have a nice job for you. You go find the Banca d'ltalia and close it. Shut her up tight."
"But, sir, I haven't got time to close any banks."
Bernstein was offended. It was reported later that he honestly felt he was giving the corporal an opportunity to distinguish himself. "Weissbrodt!" he exclaimed. "Where did you ever get a chance in your lifetime before either to open or close a bank?"
I found myself in the Statler Hotel, phoning another of the first Farben investigators who had stayed on in the government. What was I doing in town? I told him. Deftly he shifted the talk to the Washington weather -it was warm for December. Had I got mixed up in something that had lately turned subversive? . . . This very week the President had established a Temporary Loyally Commission, and that had scared many of the absolutely loyal, along with a few who were presumably disloyal. I thought: Whatever else you might say about the Roosevelt administration, at times a genial friendliness rose above even the most unutterable confusions; people stopped to ask you the time. In its place was a wary watchfulness.
I stayed at the Statler longer than I should have, listening to three men at a table near the bar. Their politics were not disclosed. Discussing the last war, they were turning their backs on it, looking forward to the next. Between the two wars they found not even a psychological connection. They agreed vociferously and bitterly that the last war had been unnecessary, whereas the next was inevitable. We had fought the wrong enemies, apparently by our own choice and without a single righteous reason. But the next war would have an honest moral basis.
Everyone was afraid these days, I told myself. In 1932 the American people had been afraid too; but their fear had sunk to a warmly communicable despair that often yielded positive action and a defiant release from the thing Franklin Roosevelt called "fear itself." Now the fear which the government should be meeting with vigorous courage expressed itself in an apathy and cynicism more disturbing than bonus marchers or farmers on their front steps with pitchforks in their hands.
These men in the Statler bar - their views were exceptional, maybe. But how many normal voices were heard in Washington? How many others, fearing the evil prospect, would greet the future world with solutions that stood upon the worst features of an equally evil past? Fear may come to the mind long before physical danger. Footsteps may march up and down the hallway time and again before the knock comes on the door. Then a sudden terror, as if your mind, loosely planted, has been uprooted before it can reach down to the soil or up to the sunlight. . . .
Colonel Mickey Marcus, who was later killed in Palestine, headed the War Crimes Division of the War Department. In the labyrinthine Pentagon Building, his office was distinguished from hundreds of others only by the name plate beside his door. He and I had got to know each other while drawing up the Army laws for invasion-and-occupation currencies. Having served at one time as Commissioner of Correction in New York City, and having helped to draft the Italian, German, and Japanese surrender terms, he could be tough and gentle by turns - although it never seemed' to me that he enjoyed the tough role. He had my letter before him.
"As I get it, you're interested enough to discuss it seriously.".
"That's right," I said.
"Do you think there is enough evidence to connect them with the war plans?"
"I haven't seen the evidence. But I doubt it." Mickey began to pace, occasionally stopping abruptly, frowning back at me. Now he came back and sat down.
"Certainly a trial would have great military value if we could get all the proofs together. Right here in Alexandria there is a warehouse full of Farben records that no agency has studied. Other countries went digging for Farben documents, too. In the heat of victory they wanted them; then they stuck them away in corners.''
"Why couldn't the prosecution staff be increased?"
He ignored my question. "Maybe the Farben leaders were masters of economic warfare, but if I were a judge, I would want to know how you blame a war on men who weren't even in the Army or the foreign office. I'd want to know what made Farben any different from, say, DuPont in this country."
"Don't you think the Farben leaders were different?"
"Yes, I do. Still, they didn't pull any triggers."
I agreed. What puzzled me most was that a staff had been over in Nurnberg for months, and a lot of accusations against the Farben directors had been flung around, but no single idea had been presented to show why these men, above all industrialists in the world, were the kind of men who would deliberately bring on a war. "Yet I don't think we have to show that these directors lusted for blood," I said. "We don't have to show that they enjoyed pushing pins around on a map. But suppose we could show that they had power far greater than any general in the field. Then how would the War Department feel?''
He was slouching in his chair, swiveling slowly.
"In this Department,, we're thinking about two things: Russia and the atom. God knows these things are important, but I think myself - just my own opinion- that we may have a lot more to fear from the Russians if we don't consider some other facts, too. Many of these Farben men were chemists. Chemistry played its part in the atom bomb - right? There are also other deadly chemical weapons that a country can make in secret. These men made some of these weapons, we know that. A country cannot very easily test an atom bomb in secret, but for ten years these guys did make secret weapons that are still important strategically. How did they do it? There's a question a trial might answer. Chemistry today is still the greatest secret weapon."
He loosened his tie, climbed out of the chair, and walked around the office with his hands in his pockets, as he explained that chemistry was the sperm of World War II.
"I know, I know: you're going to say I'm reversing myself. But it's true. In this war, in Germany at least, chemical production was not just production. It was strategy. It takes a long time to make an atom bomb. But without retooling any machines, without changing anything but the label and the size of the can, in a few months the great chemists of Germany made enough Prussic acid to kill millions. And in Germany, chemistry was I.G. Farben, wasn't it? These men could make a kind of war people don't even know about. Let them go free, and they alone, working for the Russians, might have the decisive influence on whether there's to be a war."
"Or working for us?"
"Or for us, yes. They might also place Germany in a position to play the game both ways, for or against the Russians. We know that they can make a rocket tomorrow out of the nitrogen that would dye your wife's old dress today. When the war ended Farben was working on a rocket that would make the destruction of Hiroshima look like a small auto accident.''
His knowledge of Farben chemical power made an almost unbelievable tale, much of which I had never heard. I had heard of Tabun, the Farben poison gas so deadly it could penetrate any gas mask in existence. But Farben had developed, he said, the gas Sarin, as deadly as Tabun and more persistent in its future effects than the atom bomb. On instant contact Sarin sends the victim out of his head. In one secret raid, carried by less air power than an old barnstorming circus, this Sarin could exterminate three or four cities -and it might be a hundred years before people could again live in them.
"I don't get it," I said. "You tell me all this; then you weakly ask me to take a job you're not especially anxious to have filled."
"You don't get what I'm trying to tell you, Joe. I personally don't want to discourage you, but a lot of people in this Department are scared stiff of pinning a war plot on these men. There's no law by which we can force industrialists to make war equipment for us right now. A few American manufacturers were Farben stooges. And those who weren't can say, 'Hell, if participating in a rearmament program is criminal, we want no part of it.' "
"We'd have to show more than just manufacturing, you know that. We'd have to show that the defendants made the Stuff intending it should be used for aggression."
"All right, I accept that - but would the DuPonts and the Fords?"
"Then if everyone around here is cool on a trial, what's keeping the idea alive?"
He smiled. "The picture isn't all black yet. As far as I'm concerned, you could go over there for as long or as short a time as you liked."
It didn't occur to me that I had to say yes, in so many words. I had never before imagined Farben production on the brink of war. If the Farben directors were guilty, their business tactics and their production must have so merged with military tactics as to make the three things almost indistinguishable.
"I'm not convinced that we can accomplish what such a trial should accomplish. Four months ought to be long enough for me to find out."
"I have no objection to that. Within a few days after you get home, you should get a wire from Telford Taylor agreeing to it."
General Telford Taylor, former General Counsel for the Federal Communications Commission, had succeeded Justice Jackson as American war-crimes chief in Europe. Taylor was running into opposition on the whole idea of continuing the Nuremberg trials. Farben's Dr. Otto Ambros was still working in the French zone, and the French wouldn't give him up. And the British had refused to give up another of Farben's great industrial scientists. If the various governments weren't strongly behind a trial, how could you blame businessmen in this country for thinking that the trial was being pushed by crackpots?
"Just one more question. If I go over there, will you back me up the best you can?"
"My only duty is to tell you we don't like having an aggressive war charge. But if you can prove it, go ahead, and I'll try to see to it that nobody over here dictates the terms of the indictment."
At home, a telegram from California awaited me. I should have known Ed Pauley would stick his neck out!
DEAR JOE:
YOUR LETTER HAS JUST NOW COME TO MY ATTENTION. YOU ARE THE BEST QUALIFIED MAN IN THE UNITED STATES TO DO THIS JOB AND WILL BE MAKING A GREAT CONTRIBUTION TO THE NATION AND FOR THE PEACE OF THE WORLD.
EDWIN PAULEY
4
"If We Lose the Next War"
SOON AFTER WE TOOK OFF from Washington National Airport,
bound for Paris, the plane ran into a cold front and deep pockets.
We were driven north. I had flown in storms before; yet I was
uneasy.
Nor did I feel much better after the pilot picked up the report
that all was calm to the south. Then the C-47 rode on leveled
winds, but its gray fuselage was still smudged from combat. And I
remembered the "peacetime" of my college days and how simple
it had been then just to argue war away. On the University of
Pennsylvania campus, our devils were not Dr. Ambros or Dr.
ter Meer; they were Hiram Percy Maxim, inventor of the silencer,
and Vickers-Armstrong of England and Schneider-Creusot of
France. Some student organizations thought they could banish war
simply by resolving that these men should not make munitions.
Even then, I.G. Farben had been more important than the others,
though we had not known it.
The plane dipped across an archipelago of green forests. We
flew low over a tiny lake. The Azores - one place where Farben
had never been!
At home was my son to whom I hadn't said goodnight often
enough, and a little girl who sat on my lap with wary dignity. If
they survived another war, would they get from their parents nothing better than the stale generality that one man, or one ideology,
or one type of industry, had robbed them of the best years of their
lives? No -if indeed the Farben directors were guilty, they must
have done more than produce. When did munitions become not
just a war need but a power in itself to start or stop a war? If these
men were guilty, there must have been many times when they could
have turned back and didn't. Their power must have accumulated
for months, maybe years, before the outbreak. In the time before
armies marched were staked the guideposts, miles ahead, of future
peace. The possibilities were breathtaking.
We flew straight for the Old World. At Paris the plane stopped
for an hour before we took off again, for Frankfurt, Germany.
Over Luxemburg, we cruised opposite the northern tip of the
Saar Basin. A mist veiled the city of Luxemburg. The slate spires, the ancient fortifications, looked no larger and no more
vulnerable than a bird's-eye view in a history book. Then east
of the city the mist cleared, and we saw clearly the apex of that
first industrial line of defense to face the Nazis as they began
their march into the Lowlands of Western Europe. By a unique
strategy, in spite of Nazi decrees against German exploitation, I.G.
Farben had waged a separate battle in this strip. Thanks to the
Allied Military Government, the territory from Luxemburg down
past Strassburg in Lorraine, and south to Mulhausen in Alsace,
was still largely Farben country. Farben had stolen oxygen plants,
acetylene plants, and dyestuff properties.
The end of our flight was Frankfurt. Here the American Military Government headquarters was housed in the home office of
I.G. Farben. Though the vicinity lay in ruins, this huge building
had not been bombed. Checking in, I was told that General Taylor
was in Nuremberg. No plane was scheduled for Nurnberg next
day. I decided to fly to Berlin to check in with General Clay.
The landing strip at Tempelhof Airport pointed the way to
pyramids of granite stacked along the gutted avenues. Under the
rubble the dead still smelled, though a year and a half had passed
since the surrender. Almost two years from today, long after my
assignment was to have been completed, I would come through
Berlin again, and, passing close to one pile of debris, sniff the
same carrion odor.
I phoned General Clay's office. His secretary gave me an appointment for late afternoon. I wandered over to the Unter den
Linden. Some distance north, Farben's Berlin office, "Northwest
7," had towered above the tony dress shops and modem apartments with Gothic balconies on this, Berlin's most famous avenue.
I wondered whether Berlin Northwest 7 had survived the awful
bombings. Farben's president, Hermann Schmitz, had set up the
office in 1927 as his personal filing cabinet. Then he had turned
it over to his nephew, Max Ilgner, another Farben director. In
the spring of 1929, soon after taking charge at Berlin Northwest 7,
Max Ilgner came to the United States to set up a new company to
sell Farben products in America. This was the American I.G.
Chemical Corporation. He expanded the sale of dyes and ozalid
paper and Agfa cameras quickly enough to arouse notice even
during the first year of the Depression. While American I.G. was
a "family firm," shared largely by the younger relatives of Ger- I
many's chemical moguls, most of these men became American
citizens. And within two years, the board of directors included
Walter Teagle, president of Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) ;
Charles Mitchell, president of the National City Bank of New
York; and Edsel Ford.
So far. so good. But in 1931 Ilgner returned to the United
States to form another New York corporation called "Chemnyco."
The stated purpose of Chemnyco was to handle patent arrangements for Farben with U.S. firms. One of Chemnyco's directors
was the son of Carl Duisberg, Germany's most noted older scientist
and first chairman of Farben's board of directors. A prominent
stockholder was the son of Walther vom Rath, the first vice-chairman, under Duisberg, of Farben's board. The young Duisberg
and the young Vom Rath became American citizens.
Then the United States government got curious about the whole
setup. Ilgner was a statistician, and his Berlin office was called
a "statistical office." Not a patent expert, why was he the head
of this patent firm? Ilgner belonged to business organizations in
twenty countries. Businessmen generally had regarded this as an
eccentricity; still, several facts suggested that it might be a front
for undercover activities.
In 1934, Max Ilgner appointed his brother Rudolf, long an
American citizen, to manage both firms. And in 1937 Max and
Rudolf transferred the "statistical unit" of American I.G. Chemical
Corporation to Chemnyco. A spate of secret dispatches flowed
between the Chemnyco office at 520 Fifth Avenue and Ilgner's
Berlin office.
The Department of Justice finally subpoenaed Chemnyco's
"statistical records," while investigating alleged violations of the
anti-trust laws. These records had been destroyed by Rudolf
Ilgner. Rudolf was indicted only for "obstructing justice." He
pleaded guilty and was fined $1000.
Records destroyed in New York- records buried in Berlin.
Had anyone on the prosecution staff solved that mystery? Berlin
Northwest 7 was too long a walk from Tempelhof Airport. The
answer would have to wait until I got to Nurnberg.
I stopped at a newsstand. The Farben issue was not dead in
Berlin. One of the Soviet-licensed papers featured the charge
that I.G. Farben was still going strong. The workers were exhorted
to rise against their "Western oppressors." That reminded me of
the Communist line I had heard everywhere I went: You have lived through the Fascist terror, and now you are being overwhelmed by super-capitalism. Everywhere the Communists wildly
charged that capitalism and Fascism were brothers under the
skin. Instead of pulling out the slivers so that we might hold out
healthy hands in answer, we had agreeably helped the charge along
by treating outfits like I.G. Farben as normal private enterprise.
Was this a deliberate American policy? Of course not. Four times
in the last year, the American Military Government had announced
that "in accordance with American policy" I.G. Farben had been
broken up into smaller units. The fact was that under the same
old management - save for a few men in jail, who were permitted
to carry on half their duties - Farben shares were doing a lively
business on the Bourse. And the office of the American Military
Governor, General Clay, was doing nothing about it.
Between visits to friends around the city, I had plenty of time
to ponder what General Clay's reception would be. My thoughts
went back to July of 1946 when I had joined Pauley in Paris on
his third mission. We had been directed to look over conditions
in Germany, but President Truman had also instructed us to attend
the Paris Conference. Pauley had divided his staff. Luther Gulick
(one of Truman's advisors on reorganizing the executive branch),
Pauley, and I checked in at the Prince de Galles Hotel in Paris.
The rest of the staff, under Martin Bennett, went on to Berlin.
Pauley had given Bennett a letter to General Clay explaining
what co-operation the mission would require. Among other things,
Bennett was to find out whether the dismantling of certain German
war plants for delivery to European countries was proceeding on
schedule, and how far Clay had gone toward restoring property
which the Nazis had stolen in overrunning Europe. Since the
Farben influence had been predominant, Bennett was to check
specifically on the Farben plants.
On the day Bennett arrived at Clay's headquarters, we got a
phone call from Bennett. Pauley was paged in the dining room.
'Why don't you boys come up to the suite with me?" he said.
'Bennett may have some questions for you, too."
In his room, we sat on the bed while Pauley picked up the
phone. ". . . Yes, yes, this is Mr. Pauley. . . . I understand Mr.
Bennett is calling from Berlin. . . . Yes. . . . Hello, Martin." There
was a long pause. "Well, did you show him your credentials? . . . All right, Clay will be here tomorrow. Just sit tight until I talk to
him."
Hanging up, he turned to us. "Well, boys, Bennett showed our
papers and it seems they're not good enough. Maybe we'll have to
get into Germany by way of the underground."
Bennett had shown his credentials to General Clay, and Clay
had said that he thought it a very serious question whether Pauley
had any valid authority to make this investigation. Bennett was
flabbergasted. What more valid credentials could he present than
a letter from the representative of the President? Clay answered
that he was going to Paris tomorrow and that he would talk to
Pauley then. Bennett had then asked Clay what he should do in
the meantime, and Clay had said: "You may talk to the staff if you
wish, with the understanding that it's not official."
Gulick and I were flabbergasted, too.
Bennett had been on one Presidential mission, and, besides,
was friendly and diplomatic by nature. Gulick and I figured immediately that Clay must have doubted Pauley's authority because
he considered Pauley a dead duck politically. Only a few weeks
before, Harold Ickes and others had tried to persuade the Senate
that Pauley would not make a competent Undersecretary of the
Navy.
Pauley was amused, and not as excited as Gulick and I. He
said, "Well, boys, I may be dead but I'm not buried yet. If he's
looking for a fight, he's going to get it." He turned to me. "That's
about what I'd like to say. You put it in official form." He picked
up the phone and ordered a round of drinks.
Gulick and I discussed the approach; then I called in a secretary
and dictated a letter reciting Pauley's written directives from the
President. I concluded by saying that if, after reading this letter,
Clay still felt that the mission did not have proper authority, Mr.
Pauley would have no alternative but to cable the President that
he was unable to carry out his orders because Clay had, in effect,
canceled them.
After reading the draft, Pauley said, "This'll do it, OK. Let's
have this delivered to Clay's suite so that he will get it when he
arrives from Berlin tomorrow afternoon. Also, Joe, as a matter
of course, let's cable a copy of the letter to Justin Wolfe." He
smiled. "Wolfe might get a kick out of this."
Pauley's Washington office was in the State Department Building.
His on-the-spot assistant there was Justin Wolfe. Being on a
Presidential mission, however, we used White House stationery
and appropriately cited the White House as our authority. So we did not think it significant - although it gave us a good laugh - when next morning we got this cablegram:
CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR LETTER TO CLAY. IT WAS
A BEAUT.
WOLFE - WHITE HOUSE
Gulick looked at the cablegram and said: "Does General Clay
know Justin Wolfe?"
"I don't know," I said. "Why?"
"Because this cable was relayed through Clay's headquarters in
Berlin. Apparently Washington doesn't realize we have arrived
in Paris. Wouldn't it be funny if Clay thought this cable was coming from the President direct instead of from Wolfe?"
That afternoon General Clay and his economic advisor, General
Draper, checked in at the Prince de Galles. During the 1920's
Draper, an executive in Dillon Reed Company of New York, had
made many investments in enterprises in Germany.
Clay and Draper were talking heatedly as they left the desk.
They came over and sat on a sofa with their backs to me. From
a couple of loud remarks I overheard, I surmised that they must
have been informed of Wolfe's cable. I went back up to Pauley's
suite and told him what to expect. About an hour later, the phone
rang and Pauley answered. "I'll be able to come right away."
He hung up. "Here we go, boys."
Pauley got back from his conference a half-hour later. He was
shaking his head. "I can't believe it," he said. "This is getting to
be pretty serious. As soon as I walked into the room General
Clay said, 'I'm resigning.' "
Pauley explained that for some time after he'd entered, Clay
had been literally shaking and kept repeating, "I'm resigning.
Either I'm the boss in Germany or I'm not."
"Well, Lucius," Pauley had answered, "do what you want; but
I believe you would be doing a great disservice to our country to
pull out at this time. You are doing a grand job and to quit over
an issue like this seems rather silly."
We were all puzzled at this amazing development and speculated
that Draper might have been egging Clay on. By all reports Clay
had been working day and night, and he looked very tired. It was
my personal opinion that Clay must have thought the cable from \
"Wolfe - White House" had the support of the President and
amounted to a Presidential rebuke.
Clay never did officially admit our authority, nor did he resign.
Pauley sensed this at the time and telephoned Bennett to "go
ahead anyway unless they stop you."
Since the Paris Conference, I had come to believe that perhaps
the clash between Clay and Pauley signified more than a personal
incident, and that General Clay exemplified, more than any other
official in Germany, the paradox of our policy in Europe. This
policy had become steadily more perplexing. At Paris, Molotov
announced Russia's program to build a strong industrial Germany.
This was the first public bid for the favor of the German interests
which had supported Hitler industrially. After the Paris Conference, of course, both East and West began openly outbidding
each other. I believed that the discrepancy between the Potsdam
agreement of the year before and these conflicting bids for German
favor was never far from Clay's mind and must have had something to do with his reaction to the Pauley mission.
But in January 1947 bygones were bygones, apparently. After
I was announced, General Clay flung open the door and came
into his executive office, hands outstretched. "Come in and sit
down."
We soon came to a discussion of the theme I had been preaching
since 1944. To build up Germany again as the industrial heart
of Europe, particularly if controlled by the very businessmen who
had helped lead Europe to war, would lose us our best European
friends.
As he saw it, Clay answered, the problem was how to keep
Germany strong enough industrially to maintain a healthy economy,
without permitting such an economy to serve the German groups
which were still fanatically militaristic. Certain provisions of the
Potsdam agreement had been designed to forward exactly that
aim, and Clay was not enforcing these provisions - though I did
not believe this was all his fault. The program for turning over
excess German war plants (and there were many more such
plants intact than was generally known) to the devastated countries, for the rebuilding of the general European economy, had been
unpopular among many top officials of the State and War Departments.
I remarked that since 1945 we had done little to reassure the European peoples that Germany wouldn't, sooner or later, become
a dominant military power again, with the blessing and support
of the West. Even supposing that never happened, hundreds of
thousands feared it, and this fear had driven many to an alliance
with the East. I added that I felt that the trial of the I.G. Farben
directors might at least help reassure the Europeans that the Americans were opposed to restoring the power of the aggressive German industrialists.
Clay replied that he was "in general sympathy" with the Farben
trial, though he had some questions which no doubt would be
answered as time went on. He was vehement in saying that no
German general should be tried on the charge that his part in
the war was a crime. "If we lose the next war," Clay said, "that
would be a precedent for trying our American generals."
"Only," I pointed out, "if the American generals conspired to
launch an attack against defenseless neighbors."
I was pretty discouraged. Clay was boss here. By this time, his
political advisor, Robert Murphy, had refused to hand over to
General Taylor a good, deal of incriminating evidence against
some of the German diplomats. Most generals didn't want the
generals tried; the diplomats didn't want the diplomats tried; our
industrialists didn't want the industrialists tried; and now, I thought,
it would be logical for Truman and Attlee to proclaim that the trial
of Goering was a mistake. Then, after any future war there would
be only one group left to try - the victims-in their graves.
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