The Devil's Chemists
By Josiah E. DuBois,Jr.
PART TWO
By Josiah E. DuBois,Jr.
PART TWO
THE INVESTIGATION
5.
Furth Airport
As I WALKED DOWN THE PLANE RAMP, a woman and a man
hurried across the runway. She took long strides that would have
been ungainly in anyone not so tall; her high heels struck the
macadam so vigorously that her long blonde hair - she wore no
hat - bounced up in an answering rhythm. He paid no attention
to her until, dropping my bags, I shook her hand and said, "Hi,
Belle."
Belle Mayer had worked under me when I was Assistant to the
Secretary of the Treasury. It was she who had suggested to Genera! Taylor that I take over the prosecution of the Farben directors.
He kept nodding at her impatiently until she introduced us.
"This is Sprecher, He's been commanding the troops since the
previous prosecutor left."
"Commanding the troops" was a funny way to put it. I smiled.
We shook hands - or, rather, his grip subjugated mine. He had
a pleasant, deep voice. "I won't be brushed off by ,a single name.
The name is Drexel Sprecher. I have a great deal to report to
you, and there's no time like the present."
"You don't have to be so eager; it can wait, Sprecher," she said
briskly. "I know Joe will want to freshen up first, won't you?"
Before I could answer, Sprecher said: "I'll carry your bags. I'll
handle everything."
"That's all right," I said. "I can get them." But he had already
seized my bags; he swung them back and forth as easily as if they
were empty. I am a fast walker, but I had trouble keeping up with
them. We threw the bags in the back of the staff car, and the three
of us got into the front seat. "To the hotel?" Sprecher asked.
"I'd like to stop at my office, if I have one - just to drop off
these briefcases." Sprecher smiled, obviously pleased that I
would head first for the office.
Sprecher drove fast, repeating briskly that there was "no time
like the present" to brief me on the case. As he drew his breath
to begin, Belle admonished him, "Slow down, Sprecher," but we
sped along until we rolled from the black dust onto the highway
to Nurnberg. Now and then a windowpane flashed at our lights,
but most of the time we rode in an abandoned world of jagged
shadows, gaunt apartments. It was after curfew. The statistics of
damage meant nothing; those shadows were the whole of the city's
life. Even the piles of white rocks beside the curb were a futile
neatness which in a few days would again be blotched with the
color of devastation. "All the German cities are alike after dark,"
I said.
"All except Heidelberg," Belle Mayer said. "Slow down,
Sprech!" But he kept driving as fast as before, and she turned
quickly to me. "How was the flight?"
"Fine! I had a perfect view of Luxemburg. Reminded me of
Karl Wurster, of course. He took the lead in grabbing the chemical
industries of Luxemburg and Alsace and Lorraine for Farben. We
might have a spoliation charge against him at least. What do
you think?"
"What do the French think, that's what matters."
"So the French have Wurster too."
"Yes." She was watching Sprecher again; she didn't care to talk.
Sprecher said: "Most of those plants in Alsace and Lorraine have
been returned to their original owners."
"That's no defense for Wurster," I said. "But it does weaken the
effect."
"Wurster took the initiative all right," she said idly. "Still, maybe
he will say that all that happened after the war started - 'and how
about you Americans and your booty!' "
Sprecher laughed. "I have a fifth of brandy up in my room, and
it will not be returned to the original owner."
"As if there's any left to be returned," she scoffed.
"All right, Belle, all right."
I said quickly: "Is Wurster working with Dr. Ambros?"
"They're both in Farben-Ludwigshafen in the French zone,"
she said. "We've tried to get them several times, and the French
still won't let them go."
I broke the tense silence again. "I spent last night in Berlin.
Saw General Clay. Berlin was worse hit than a lot of cities,
wasn't it? What do you hear from the Berlin Northwest 7 office?
I understand that's where Farben kept most of its hot records."
She tugged at my arm, very excited. "Wait'll you hear. I'm
working on a tip now. When I first came here everybody was saying, 'Go to Berlin Northwest 7'; so I went up there and there was
nothing but rubble. The Russians got there first when the war
ended, and it was rumored that they excavated and took huge
quantities of Northwest 7 documents to Gross Behnitz - know
where that is?"
"Never heard of it."
"It's a castle, near Naven, up above Berlin."
"So that's the tip!',
"No, no. Let me tell you what happened. So I sent a couple
of G.I.'s up to Gross Behnitz and they -"
The car swerved as Sprecher slammed on the brakes. "Oh,
what's the use of talking?" she said. "Where did you get your
license, Sprech?"
"You told me to slow down." He laughed.
We pulled into a driveway. A gas lamp a block behind us lit
t the parking lot, casting only enough dull yellow light on the
building ahead to turn it into a Gargantuan shadow. This, she explained, was the Palace of Justice.
She went up the walk, bent forward but beckoning us to follow
as if an invisible enemy were dragging her away. Near the entrance she was stopped by a slender young man who apparently
had come up another walk. They said hello in German, and
she rummaged in her handbag and came up with several cigarettes
which she handed to him. He bowed. "Tomorrow?"
"I don't know," she said. "I'll let you know."
She explained as we went up to the first floor of the Palace.
The young man was a student who had translated some documents
for her. "Unofficial personnel" - her voice was exasperated.
Sprecher added: "None of the lawyers here have enough translators or analysts."
"But some," she said, "have more than others, haven't they,
Sprech?"
"I can't help it, Belle," he said.
A rectangle of light cut the dark hallway in two. We stopped
in the office doorway. "This is not yours, Joe," she said. "Come
in and meet Jan Charmatz."
Our voices had echoed loudly, but not until we came several
steps into the room did the bald man at the desk notice us. He looked up through thick-lensed glasses, nodded, and got up from
the desk.
"Jan," she said. "This is Joe DuBois. Jan Charmatz."
I remarked that he was working quite late. He walked to the
back window and pointed to the dim light from another building
not far behind the Palace. "Belle can tell you we have encountered
some difficulties." He spoke precise, imperturbable English. "The
Farben directors have eighty lawyers and hundreds of Farben
employees working for them. We have twelve lawyers and less
than twelve interrogators and investigators."
She laughed. "The prisoners may be worried, but I think they
get more sleep in the jail than we get outside.'
As we went on down the hall, she began to praise Charmatz
while Sprecher cleared his throat. She and Charmatz had worked
together for months; yet all she knew about him was that he had
been a professor at the University of Prague. He had never explained why he had come to Nurnberg. "He doesn't drink, he
doesn't smoke, he doesn't dance and he doesn't get fresh and he
never speaks about anything but work. You know me, Joe; I
tell him about my home in Suffern and my sweet sister - well,
he's never mentioned any sisters or brothers. I don't think he
even had a mother and father. He must have been born out of
a book."
"Yes," Sprecher said. "Every staff needs a toiler."
She flared up. "You're a toiler, too," she said. "Without Jan
we wouldn't have a chance on an aggressive-war charge. He'll be
there till three tomorrow morning. Or if he can't get his translator's
work done by then, he'll stay till four."
Sprecher shook his head in admiration. It couldn't be helped;
personnel had been overworked in Numberg since he had come
here to be one of Justice Jackson's administrative assistants in the
Goering trial. But maybe Charmatz could take a little time off.
''Sure,'' she said. "A long vacation to the water fountain and
back."
Stopping in front of another office, they flanked the doorway as if they'd measured their distances from it equally on each side. Whatever the matter was, both were trying to be fair. I switched on the light and went in.
This, my new office, was topsy-turvy with documents. I laughed: "The thief who ransacked this room got away without a thing." They did not hear; their voices came in from the hall. She was not complaining about overwork, she said; no, it was just that he, Sprecher, was demanding the impossible now that she and Jan had lost their best assistant. Sprecher had given her a deadline for the preparation of some documents, and they would not be able to meet it without help. " 'Either get it by that date,' " she mimicked him, " 'or don't get it at all.' " Didn't he understand it was impossible? As they came into the office, Sprecher patted her on the back, saying that if she were not so capable she wouldn't have to get along with less help than some of the other lawyers - she'd have to do the best she could.
"I'll leave my briefcase here," I said. "Do I need to lock the door?"
"No." They spoke amiably. But they were not anxious to leave the office.
Contrasted to the methodical Charmatz, they both moved with ceaseless energy, Sprecher covering the floor in long strides while Belle sat, rose, marched to the window, her hands kneading each other all the while. I was very tired, but things were in a mess. The previous prosecutor had resigned suddenly, giving as his reason that some of the prospective judges were unqualified. Actually, he came from New York City; many of the judges came from other sections of the country, and he knew little about them.
Two tables along the wall were piled high with documents. I put my briefcase on the pile, but it slid onto the floor. "Don't pick it up," Sprecher said. "As long as you can find yourself around here, you're lucky."
I nodded. "Well, personnel problems will have to wait until tomorrow. Before I check in, just brief me on the status of the investigation. Where were we? Supposedly, the Russians excavated at Berlin Northwest 7, and you heard that they had taken the documents to -"
"To that castle up at Gross Behnitz," she said. "So I sent a couple of G.I.'s up there."
'I assume Sprecher approved that," I said diplomatically.
He nodded.
"Yes, he did. Well, the G.I.'s said to the guard: 'We want the records that were shipped up here from Berlin Northwest 7.' The guard said that the documents were in one of the big rooms there in the castle but he could not enter and no one else could because the room had been sealed up by the Swedish legation! The guard insisted the Russian government would be committing an act of hostility against the Swedes if they opened that room up. Then we wasted days contacting the Swedish officials in Berlin, but they claimed they didn't know anything about it. So I sent a translator and a couple of really tough Army boys up to Gross Behnitz, and they just walked in and broke the seal."
'What did they find?"
'The room was empty."
"Empty! Where did the stuff go to?"
"You figure that," she said. "Colonel Bahaar in Berlin - he's about the only Russian there whose word might be counted on - backed up the Swedish legation. Bahaar swears the Russians never excavated at Berlin Northwest 7. But Hermann Schmitz had a huge personal fortune in Sweden and plenty of influence there. Now, who's lying?"
"Could be the Russians," Sprecher said. "They take an empty room and seal it up; then they let the Americans know so that they'll come snooping around and tell Tovarich all about the big secret the Americans are looking for!"
"Maybe," she said laughing. "Maybe not. Anyway, we have to figure back to Berlin. Berlin Northwest 7 was part of the Laenderbank Building. We know there were two basements. In the top basement were the vaults, and Colonel Bernstein's men found some of Schmitz's and Ilgner's belongings there. Then under some debris they found a safe that was empty except for one file. The question is: If the Russians didn't rifle that safe, who did?"
I suggested that Farben men might have cleaned out the safe in a hurry, leaving that one file by mistake. The other records might have been destroyed before the Russians got there. Belle shook her head.
"Maybe Farben men dug up some of those records later, but they wouldn't have destroyed them."
"If they were incriminating records, why not?"
"Don't fool yourself. With their efficiency, they'd take a chance even on getting hanged, rather than destroy them."
"What was in the second basement, below the vaults?"
She slapped a fist info her other palm. "That's it, don't you see, that's the tip! Ever since 1945, it's been rumors, rumors, rumors about Berlin Northwest 7, and now we'll find out once and for all whether anybody excavated below those vaults. Yesterday, Sprech and I sent two more G.I.'s up there with a steam shovel. They should be back next week."
But where to begin? Every day the prisoners are holding board of-directors meetings, confident that they will soon be released because of insufficient evidence. You pick up a document; it will have to wait until Charmatz' translator returns, for all the other translators are busy. Besides, it doesn't make sense to take in one fact after another without a theory or a direction.
You decide to wait until the two G.I.'s come back from Berlin. But then you have to laugh at the incongruity of two soldiers, neither of them engineers, trying to push a steam shovel forty feet down, looking for something or nothing. No, you cannot wait. You shut yourself off and work your way down one passage after another until you have a clear statement of at least part of your confusion.
The investigation leads, as it led two years before, to two German cities: Frankfurt and Heidelberg. The trail is no better marked now than it was in 1945, when the investigators had gone to the site of Berlin Northwest 7. There they heard the rumor that Max Ilgner had shipped two carloads of documents to Heidelberg, then reshipped them to the Hoechst plant at Frankfurt am Main. The investigators had found a shipping ticket, but the railroad car had vanished. So the trail had led first to a dead end in Frankfurt in the winter of 1945.
When the American Third Army arrived in Frankfurt, they found the Farben administration building crammed and littered with so many documents that it might have been a berserk paper factory. None of the Farben directors was there. D.P.'s were burning documents to keep warm. On the ground floor, nearly a thousand "employees," apparently more anxious to celebrate their freedom from Farben peonage than to keep warm, shouted and laughed as they tossed bundles of records out the windows. Rumors ran rife that below those records, scattered over every foot of the ground floor, were jewels, money, wine. Every rumor turned to dust. Soldiers began carrying archives into the courtyard to clear the upper floors for the American headquarters; some of the soldiers fell, struck by bundles which tumbled down the stairs.
The Third Army had not fought on paper; they were short of file cabinets and folders. To salvage these, they tossed away vital Farben evidence. More than a hundred tons of records lay dispersed over an area larger than a city block when the Bernstein investigators came down from Berlin Northwest 7.
To salvage the records temporarily, the investigators pitched them like hay into the Reichsbank, near the administration building. But soon the records overflowed to an annex and back into the yards again. Apparently only a Farben expert could straighten out the mess.
Near the administration building, at the Hoechst plant, they found Dr. Ernst Struss, whom they put in charge' of moving and arranging the remaining records. Struss did the job in an amazingly short time; it appeared he had a voluminous memory of the Frankfurt records, recalling even how many copies of each document should be found. Struss organized the workmen, who moved the records from the Reichsbank by horses and wood-burning trucks to another building at Griesheim, a half-mile away. A bucket brigade of workmen passed the documents up three flights of stairs. The workmen were thorough, meticulous. At exactly noon the foreman would make a speech explaining what they were to do in the afternoon. They set their watches by his. At 12 : 55 not a soul had come back to work - but promptly at 1 : 00 they returned and took up where they had left off. So Struss succeeded in quickly reconstructing the system.
The investigators checked the new files. Every single document belonged to the Farben administration office; none had come on Max Ilgner's shipping ticket. They questioned Struss; surely his ' remarkable memory must include a knowledge of those secret records.
Of Berlin Northwest 7, Struss had nothing to say, but he was talkative about the Farben directors. In the basement of the administration building, the investigators had found money and silverware belonging to Schmitz and Ilgner. Where had these two gone? Struss told them.
Soon after Frankfurt came under heavy bomb attack, Hermann Schmitz and several other directors decided to leave their quarters in Frankfurt and go to their homes in Heidelberg. But important business of some kind had persuaded Schmitz to return to Frankfurt once more. So it was that during the last days of the American advance, Schmitz and several other Farben directors were shuffled around in a railway carriage between the fighting lines, trying to reach Frankfurt. They were shot at several times. At the first shot, Schmitz threw himself into the aisles. The picture of a munitions king, so paralyzed with terror that he stayed on the floor until the train had wound its way back down to Heidelberg, was very amusing to Struss. Obviously, Struss did not like Schmitz, and the investigators were soon to discover that he was not alone in that opinion.
The investigators went on down to Heidelberg. The American Seventh Army was occupying that old city on the Neckar River as a headquarters. The investigators asked a timid old man the way to Hermann Schmitz's house, and by mistake he directed them to the University of Heidelberg. There, in the college office, fifty clerks were busily working, equally unconcerned by the rumbling of tanks on the Autobahn not far away, by the boisterous soldier voices on the campus, and by the 25-odd American civilians who alternately hovered over their desks and inspected the dueling swords on the walls.
This was the new Farben headquarters. The twenty-five civilians were a team from the Office of Strategic Services and the Foreign Economic Administration, who had been briefed on Farben and flown to Heidelberg. They were quick to remind the Army investigators that though they had been there a couple of months, they were still unable to get food and billets from the Seventh Army. Although the Seventh Army headquarters was still, after several months, unable to govern one town well, the Farben office had been operating smoothly since the surrender.
Nor did the investigators work together. Assigned to look into the mysterious General Aniline and Film Corporation, they were convinced that Schmitz was still involved in that firm, since his interest in its predecessor, American I.G. Chemical Company, was well known. The war over, the Department of Justice had again failed to show an American court that General Aniline was Farben-owned. Standard Oil's President Walter Teagle had sworn he didn't know who owned the $100,000,000 combine - though he was drawing $50,000 a year as a director. Somehow the Department of Justice had put through a hands-off order on all documents in this new Farben office, hoping perhaps that someday someone from Washington would drop in and solve the mystery. None of the three investigating teams could inspect the files.
The OSS men, instead of twiddling their thumbs, decided to look around Heidelberg for traces of money. Someone had told them that where they found Schmitz, there they would find money. Schmitz had come up the hard way from a commercial school in Essen, the iron city, and had risen from bank clerk to staff member of the Kaiser's war machine. He had been a director of Farben's predecessor firm, Badische Anilin und Sodafabrik. Also a director of the Deutsches Reichsbank, he was thought to be the wealthiest banker in Germany. In world affairs he had gained considerable respectability as director of the Bank of International Settlements in Geneva.
It is not known why the OSS never found Hermann Schmitz. The Army investigators, leaving the University of Heidelberg campus in search of an imposing figure not unlike J.P. Morgan, jeeped around looking for the "Schmitz castle." But the mistaken directions of the timid old man had been quite understandable. No one would associate the legend of Schmitz with the house he lived in.
On the verdant hillside overlooking Heidelberg, the house looked like a stucco pillbox. A short, bull necked man came to the door and asked the men who they were. Only after consulting his wife, a dumpy Frau in a spotless gingham dress, did he admit that his name was Hermann Schmitz.
They had intended to search the house at once, but he directed them to a small sitting room. They were Enlisted Men - a fact they could not forget because he sat without inviting them to sit and looked up and down the sleeve of one, a corporal, then the other, a sergeant. They felt as if they were in the presence of their own colonel. The feeling soon passed, for after Schmitz had answered all their questions by questioning their authority, they smiled openly at the information on the wall that God was the head of this house. Frau Schmitz offered to brew a pot of Kaffee. Sternly he said Nein. Not in the least offended, she stood beside his chair waiting for the next command. And now if that would be all, Schmitz said, they could leave.
They came back the next day, after recovering their equilibrium. Schmitz's face was ruddy with anger when they insisted on a search. By whose authority did they search? Whoever you like, sir, they said; shall we say Eisenhower or Roosevelt?
Schmitz's study was poorly furnished. The desk was plain; the bottom of two drawers fell out as they searched; but they found nothing important there. Beside the desk were two large paper file boxes- not the famous Farben-made fiber boxes. In them the G.I.'s found a collection of telegrams from Hitler, Goering, and others congratulating the "Geheimrat Schmitz" and "Justizrat Schmitz" on his sixtieth birthday. The investigators addressed him sarcastically by his titles. Geheimrat meant Privy Councilor, and when they called him that in mock-respectful tones, he nodded in curt acknowledgment. But he understood he was being ridiculed when they prefaced a question with the address Justizrat - Doctor of Laws.
"Doctor of Laws Schmitz, how much money do you have in the house and where is it?" He shook his head.
In the other file box they found a shiny red wooden box, locked. Breaking it open, they found a set of well-made miniature tools. Frau Schmitz explained that this had been a birthday present to their son a few days before. Herr Doktor had taken it back because he'd thought it was too good for a boy. She flushed at her slip of the tongue, adding that of course it was too good for the boy - much too good.
Then they searched the upstairs. In one bedroom they found the equivalent of $15,000 in marks. In the basement they found nothing.
Back in their room at the hotel, they talked it over. They'd been thorough, and neither of the Schmitz's had offered any hint that they had anything to hide. That was just it; the locking of a toy tool kit in a box-within-a-cabinet was pathologically secretive. The sergeant got to impersonating Schmitz, comparing him to a couple of green lieutenants who had dived on their faces at the first sound of a shell two miles away.
"Schmitz stayed up in Frankfurt a lot of the time, didn't he? One day he takes the train up there, and when somebody takes a pot shot, he comes right back to Heidelberg to stay. But that was before the war was over. Why Heidelberg? Because it's not a strategic city; it was bombed only twice. But he didn't know at that time whether it would be bombed again, or did he?"
"That's it," the corporal said. "An air-raid shelter. We never looked for that."
In the Schmitz basement, behind the furnace, soot had disguised the cracks in the door. One of Schmitz's secretaries, a buxom woman who alternated fond looks at the Geheimrat with laments about the invasion of his privacy, said: No, there was nothing in there, and since the Geheimrat hadn't been in the Nazi army, why didn't they go away?
The shelter was lined with the most durable materials. An old trunk disclosed a thousand disorganized papers. Among them, they found something which, to this day, the Department of Justice has been unable to get into evidence against the General Aniline and Film Corporation - proof of one of the slickest cloaks in financial history.
In the mid-thirties, the United States government had begun an investigation of American I.G. Chemical Corporation. There was considerable mystery as to where some of its products and profits were going. To counter this investigation, Schmitz legally changed the name to "General Aniline and Film Corporation." The General Aniline files showed that their new owner was a Swiss company, I.G. Chemie of Basel, Switzerland. Obviously, I.G. Chemie was a dummy for somebody.
Not until late in 1938 was the United States government able to prove that I.G. Chemie (of which Schmitz was once president) was being run by a man named Gadow, Schmitz's brother-in-law. Whereas Max Ilgner's brother Rudolf had become an American citizen, this man Gadow became a Swiss citizen, which under Swiss law gave him complete secrecy of operation. Through Gadow, during several years of our national defense effort, General Aniline and Film handled a major part of all the chemical business in the United States. And its profits went into the Farben till.
But there was no proof acceptable in a United States court. Just before Pearl Harbor, the Treasury Department used its emergency powers and at last cut off the millions of dollars from General Aniline sales which I.G. Chemie had been relaying to I.G. Farben.
Meantime, while denying ownership in the United States, Farben had been paying taxes to the Nazi government on their General Aniline receipts. When Farben stopped paying these taxes, the collector asked two other directors: Why have you stopped reporting General Aniline income? These directors replied that Farben had sold its stock direct to I.G. Chemie. Then the tax authorities went to Schmitz. He refused to answer, saying that to give information would harm "the German national interest."
Indeed, Schmitz had sold to I.G. Chemie Farben's stock in General Aniline and Film. But the joker was this brief memo found in the trunk in his air-raid shelter. It was an "option" by which Gadow agreed that Farben, through Schmitz, could buy back General Aniline from I.G. Chemie at any time. Gadow also agreed never to sell to anyone but Farben.
The fox, though crafty, cannot unload the hunter's gun. Hermann Schmitz was of a shrewder breed. If Gadow didn't pay off, Farben could take back the firm. Yet the profits were not shown to be "legal profits" either in the United States or in Germany.
Having flimflammed two governments, Schmitz now made a move to flimflam his fellow directors. In 1937, I.G. Chemie had "agreed" to pension Schmitz, when he retired, at 80,000 Swiss francs a year. In 1940, he baldly demanded the pension. Here in the trunk was I.G. Chemie's reply: Until he was retired from Farben, which kept its hidden control through him, he wasn't retired from I.G. Chemie.
The other directors, who were being interrogated in Frankfurt, were as surprised to learn of this deal as the investigators had been. Schmitz had a pension with I.G. Chemie? They'd never heard of it. They ordered an employee named Selke to investigate Schmitz. "Find out all his interests," they said.
Selke appeared in Heidelberg a few days later. He was close to tears. To find out some of the Geheimrat's interests was possible -but all of them? But the investigators were asking Schmitz about other things then, and he was wrought up enough to call in Max Ilgner and the family lawyer who lived down the road. The icebreaker was a British major who happened by one day. This major, named Tilley, had no apparent reason for being there, since the British had ordered no investigation. But his rank and authoritative manner for the first and only time reduced Schmitz to tears.
Working his way around the walls of the study, Tilley never let up on his questioning. Finally, Schmitz showed him a tiny safe in a closet behind the desk. In the safe Tilley found photographs of the I.G. Farben plant at Auschwitz. Tilley later wrote:
They became highly emotional. The photographs were in a wooden inlaid cover dedicated to Hermann Schmitz on his 25th Jubilee, possibly as a Farben director, and purported to describe pictorially the achievements of the Auschwitz rubber plant. Page 1, for example, had a picture with a narrow street of the old Auschwitz. The accompanying drawings depicted the Jewish part of the population in a manner that was not flattering to them. The legend underneath said, "The Old Auschwitz," or "As it Was," or "Auschwitz in 1940." The second page began a section entitled "Planning the New Auschwitz Works.
She apologized as if she, rather than the United States government, were at fault. For months, file cabinets, more typewriters, and stationery had been on requisition. "I asked those two G.I.3 to drop off another requisition for your desk at AMG, so maybe that will come this week." She sighed. "What's keeping them up there in Berlin?"
"Maybe the steam shovel fell on them," I said. "While we're waiting, let's dispose of Schmitz as of the moment." I tapped the black folder on my desk.
"Surely," she said, "the Reich government would have cracked down if he hadn't been playing some bigger game with them."
"I don't know." I tossed the folder on the high pile of documents beside my desk. "Probably the pension is good material for the defense. Schmitz was playing a lone hand on it. Suppose the directors plead his secretiveness as a defense to everything?"
"Maybe they will," she admitted. "But he's even surer than the others that he'll get off. His attorneys are boasting. Schmitz says his captors were G.I. eager beavers, and when his 'friends' come he'll be set free. Lately, he just frowns and blinks. He's got everybody baffled. . . . You don't suppose those guys are hitting the Berlin night clubs?"
She was striding back and forth in front of my desk. Unless she could work a steam shovel by remote control, I said, she might as well relax.
"Joe, maybe if you sent me to Heidelberg again?" I shook my head. "No? Very well, but I can't get over the idea that Schmitz may be the key to the entire aggressive-war count."
She was so enthusiastic that it seemed the case couldn't fail. She understood that we were searching for more than facts. Where better to run down some of the facets of Schmitz's motives and intentions than in his home town of Heidelberg?
Old Dr. Karl Duisberg had lived in Heidelberg. Before he became Farben's first head, Duisberg was the father of industrial , chemistry throughout the world. Heidelberg was the scientific wellspring that fed the first synthetic-dye and basic-chemical enterprises that grew up in the Rhine Valley about the time of the Civil War in America and during the period when Bismarck was unifying the German states. Taking an industry rural in its origin - furnishing fertilizers to the Rhineland farmer, textiles and dyes to the peasant and weaver, medicines to the druggist - Karl Duisberg had led the drive at the end of the nineteenth century for combination of several big German chemical firms, by pooling arrangements, to control market and price conditions and to protect their joint interests in the export trade. In 1904, Duisberg urged that the entire German chemical industry should be brought together in a cartel. He said: "The now existing domination of the German chemical industry over the rest of the world would then, in my opinion, be assured."
Dr. Carl Bosch, inventor of the Bosch magneto, had lived in Heidelberg all his life. Dr. Bosch could recite, in tones of austere sentimentality, from A Child's Garden of Verses. Bosch was also interested in the nitrates that were an essential ingredient in the manufacture of explosives. For years the' principal source of nitrates had been saltpeter from Chile. At the turn of the century, German explosives manufacturers perceived the danger that in a future war Germany might be cut off from this Chilean nitrate supply. In 1913, Bosch - with a Dr. Haber, also a Heidelberg resident - invented a fixation process that yielded the synthetic nitrates without which Germany would have lost World War I a few months after it began.
"Now," said Belle. "We come to the Schmitz era in Farben. The other directors say Schmitz held his position because he was reticent, and that's a perfect explanation for their defense, because it holds up. His older associates say that even in his clerking days at Frankfurt, he wore this perplexed look, as if the simplest arithmetic was too big for his head to solve. He trusted nobody. What could be sweeter for their defense? As he got older, he confessed he was puzzled that he couldn't recall the status of this transaction and that. Perfect - for him and them, too!"
Certainly, Schmitz's power was in no wise affected by his social inferiority. The younger Duisbergs and Bosches came often to share his frugal hospitality. It was said that when business was under discussion Schmitz walked into a room ahead of them, and when anything else was being discussed he walked closely - too closely - behind them. Through his influence his nephew Max Ilgner became the guiding influence abroad, above the younger Duisbergs and Bosches.
"Joe, the trouble is that all three of them - Schmitz and his lawyer Von Knieriem and Ilgner - were picked up together. They were thrown into Prungsheim jail there in Frankfurt, and they were all in the same cell block for months. We throw them together and we say, 'O.K., boys, fix up your story.' "
The telephone rang. It was Drexel Sprecher. After hearing what he had to say, I hung up; and I didn't know how to break the news easily to her.
'They got the requisition," I said.
"What did Sprecher say?"
"He said my desk ought to be along. The boys left the requisition with the AMG."
"And -"
"They excavated but they didn't find anything."
She sat down. " 'Berlin Northwest 7' - the address that wasn't there." She put her head on the table. Her voice was choking. "Oh, what a beautiful day!"
'The best way to forget it is to go right ahead. There was one file found in the vault, wasn't there? Let's prepare it for introduction in court."
"Go right ahead. Snap out of it! Who cares about one file?"
'I'm sorry. I know you've been under a strain; I know everyone here has been under a strain."
In a minute she lifted her head; her fingers flew at the pile of documents. A couple of minutes later she threw a few papers on my desk. They were still in German.
"Haven't these been translated yet?"
She was trembling. "I haven't been able to get a translator," she said. "I can read a little. But Charmatz is better at German than I."
She went over to the hotel to rest.
In a few minutes Charmatz was in my office. He stood over my shoulder. His translation was so fluent that it seemed only a few minutes before he'd finished. Actually, it was night time, and we had become so engrossed that later neither of us could remember who had switched on the light in my office.
This Northwest 7 file revealed that before Hermann Schmitz rose to the presidency, every factory which I.G. Farben operated carried the Farben name. In 1935, when they began to produce for the government, the directors became more modest.
Some of the Farben factories made products that were interchangeable for peace or war - buna rubber, synthetic gasoline, and the ethylene oxide that would yield either Prestone or poison gas.
The contracts for these interchangeable products carried the Farben name. Reading them, one would decide that their signers believed this production was only to help build up the German economy. Farben financed these factories from its own funds, with the Reich agreeing to pay off any losses.
The other factories, however, made products that had no large peacetime use, such as the explosives-intermediate hexogen. The total production was financed by the Wehrmacht. The factories were built exclusively for war; Farben insisted on this form of financing because "the production is war material and no assured peacetime market can be expected." Farben refused the use of its name. To many Germans, and to many more people in the outside world, these Farben-Wehrmacht factories were known simply by the names of the cities where they were located.
The idea of punishing war plots and invasions had almost no legal foundation before World War I. Between the two World Wars, the Geneva and Paris Conventions had condemned such acts and in fact declared them generally outlawed. Until the international trial at Nurnberg, however, none of these declarations had even been tested judicially.
Proof was not easy. Conquest and its despicable code were part and parcel of every offense. We were investigating, not assault with a deadly weapon by a single defendant, but floggings of slaves who would never have been within reach of the lash if they hadn't been needed to produce for a war machine. We were studying, not a single armed robbery, but many acts of plunder in the wake of advancing armies -not a single premeditated killing, but a vast plan of aggression, all of whose evil roots could never be dug up, for they were not planted by the urge-to-power of a single man or a resentful violence that burned steadily for days only. The precedents were recent, but the motives were in the centuries; and many acts which were crimes within one nation's borders were automatically pardoned by the special immoralities of war.
Where could one place a finger on the map of Europe and conclude: This is where the last war really began? The moment when any man forms the first impulse to violence usually remains lost in the world of undiscovered psychology. Here the great barriers to discovery were social, political, and economic as well as individual. The question was - how to expose the aggressive acts for which neither the Nazi regime nor the position of these directors furnished any plausible excuse?
Drexel Sprecher and I talked it over. I appointed him administrative head of a new setup, asked him to get the facts and interpret them more quickly.
During the next few weeks I worked on many documents. I was interrupted now and then by a puff of white powder, a tickling reminder that the crumbled glory of Nurnberg, the shrine of the Nazi Party, still blew in the streets two years after the surrender. Then one day Drexel Sprecher came in to demand that we set a deadline for issuing the indictment. We had quite an argument. The staff had read hundreds of documents and sifted the facts through at least four legal theories. "Not only are the facts insufficient," I said, "but we still haven't found any theory that will tie everything together."
"It's simple enough to some Congressmen," he said. "You've seen the clippings that Public Relations has been sending over the last few days. If Congress ever gets the idea that we haven't got a case, we're through."
"We can't help that."
"Something has to be done, and there's no time like the present. We're not moving fast enough."
I sighed. He was right. Only about one-third of the existing material had been summarized. Some of the staff, Sprecher pointed out, felt we should go ahead and issue the indictment anyway and back it up later. Certainly we had before us a picture of unique business aggrandizement that could support charges of plundering. But what else? "On the aggressive-war charge," I said, "we should have at least a prima facie case."
"Prima facie case?" Sprecher was exasperated. "What is a prima facie case of war?"
"That is the question we shall have to answer for the court. I know it's complex. But the simplest thing we should be able to prove - their slave-labor activities - is troublesome, too. Let me show you something. This brief came to me this morning, as proof ."
He scanned the brief the staff had prepared. Slavery was horribly depicted, no doubt of that. Here was the story of manhunts in the streets of Germany- at the motion-picture houses, at churches, and at night in private houses. Outside Germany, some of the Nazi methods had their origin in the blackest period of the African slave trade. "When in searching villages it has been necessary to burn them down," read one order to fifty offices in the Ukraine, "the whole population will be put at the disposal of the Commissioner by force. As a rule, no more children will be shot." Fritz Sauckel, Hitler's labor plenipotentiary, hanged at Numberg the year before, had testified that of five million workers who came to Germany, fewer than two hundred thousand came of their own will. His orders of April 1942 were: "All the men must be fed, sheltered, and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable expenditure."
In a few choice words, Sprecher cursed the Nazi regime. "Sure," I agreed. "It's horrible. But here we have Hitler and Sauckelthat's about all."
"You know we've got more than this on Farben," he insisted.
"Not much. I sent the rest of the stuff back to the central file room yesterday. You don't mind taking a run down there, do you?"
A half-hour later, when he strode into my office, he held a dozen papers, fanned out in one large hand; in the other hand he carried two files.
He spread the papers out on my desk, scanning them again, shaking his head.
"Where's the rest of the dope?" "You tell me." Here was evidence that before the war became widespread Farben representatives had scoured all the occupied countries to get workers. In the countries of Western Europe, Farben first asked the impressed laborer to sign a contract. Those who refused to sign were forced to come to Germany anyway. If they did not come, their ration cards would be taken away; they would be denied work in their homelands, and reprisals would be taken against members of their families. Even the more fortunate, after arriving at the Farben plants, were not free to change jobs or go home when they pleased; they had no freedom of movement. If they escaped, the Gestapo hunted them down - by an arrangement with Farben. Some who were lucky enough to escape Gestapo torture were returned to the Farben plants.
This "recruiting" was ruthlessly successful. By 1941 Farben had already assigned to its plants 10,000 slaves. In 1942, according to Farben figures, their slave employment rose to 22,000; in 1943 to 58,000; and by 1945 to well over 100,000. These figures represented only the number of slaves at any given time; there was a tremendous turnover.
By the time Fritz Sauckel took office in March 1942 to direct the Reich's slave-labor program, he was surprised to discover that I.G. Farben had already been "wildly recruiting foreign labor." As late as 1943 the Reich's Minister of Economics wrote to the Farben offices not with commands, but seeking suggestions as to how the government might best exploit its conquered workers.
"This tells us what the institution of Farben was doing " I said. "But how is the evidence tied up with each director?"
Altogether, there wasn't much more evidence than Bernstein had turned up two years before. There had been thousands of forced laborers working in the Farben plants; yet here there wasn't a single statement from any of them to pin responsibility for their plight on any Farben director. Also puzzling was the absence of direct evidence about the Farben buna plant at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The "album of dedication" which Major Tilley had found at Geheimrat Schmitz's house had disappeared. Two weeks before, Drew Pearson. at my request, had advertised over the radio for its return. His appeal had got no response. I exclaimed: "Farben must have kept some records at the Auschwitz site."
"None that we know of."
"You mean to tell me there is not a word on this up at Griesheim?"
"Not a word."
I recalled again the freed workers in the Farben administration building at Frankfurt, burning records to keep warm - and, later, the wood-burning trucks moving under Ernst Struss's direction from that building to the new document center at Griesheim. I mentioned these events. Half-hopefully, I said: "You don't think there's any chance they vanished at that time?"
"I wouldn't know how to question a wood-burning truck. I'll have the next guy who goes to Frankfurt check again at Griesheim. But we can't count on anything there."
"All right, where do we make another beginning? Who besides Schmitz 'recruited' those slave workers? Who manned these Farben offices?"
Sprecher dropped a second folder on my desk and continued to pace the room.
"We have Von Schnitzler's accusations."
"Is this Von Schnitzler?" I fingered the second folder.
Sprecher nodded.
After Schmitz, Ilgner, and Von Knieriem had been picked up in Heidelberg, Baron Georg von Schnitzler was picked up in Frankfurt.
Von Schnitzler was the one Farben director whose family did not center in Heidelberg. Of the Frankfurt aristocracy, he was the nephew of Baron Dr. Walther vom Rath, a Frankfurt Junker and oldest head of the largest firm which was absorbed in the Farben cartel. In fact, it had been said that the cartel took its name from Baron vom Rath's firm, Farbenwerke vorm.
Farben meant "dyestuffs"; the Von Schnitzler-Vom Rath families were eminent in German dyestuffs. Not long after he married Lillian vom Rath, Baron von Schnitzler took special training in dyestuffs and became, in 1928, the head of Farben's powerful Dyestuffs Committee.
Though his bags were packed, Von Schnitzler denied that he was going anywhere. He denied that he was a Nazi. When he realized he would be detained anyway, he was eager to talk. The investigators liked him, for he admitted his own "mistakes" before putting the finger on any of his fellow directors. He might as well tell everything, he said; yes, he had been head of the Dyestuffs Committee, and he had been about to leave for Spain. Why Spain? Well, not long before he had bought a house in Madrid, and he and the Baroness had many good friends there. The investigators had uncovered records showing that Farben had backed the Caudillo Franco with huge sums, and they asked him about that. "It is not so improbable," he said, "that we should foster interior movements in foreign countries." He asked carefully: "Do you have any proofs?" They showed him a ledger of Farben "contributions" in Spain.
He felt guilty about some things. Farben's own slave-labor program, he said, was a vicious offspring of the war. Supposing his statements were competent, I.G. Farben had not just played an acquiescent role but been the leading instigator in the greatest program of slavery and mass murder in the history of the world. Apparently Hermann Schmitz's remorseful tears, when the investigators had found the album, had been shed for more than one slave factory.
Before Fritz Sauckel took over the conscription of labor; before Himmler committed the incredibly sadistic deeds that finally led him to suicide; before Hitler announced for the Jews an extermination that was to spread like an instant fever to Poland and then to the whole of Europe; before enforced labor of any kind was a Reich policy, foreigners and prisoners of war had already been enslaved, at Schmitz's direction, in the I.G. Farben plants.
"If these statements are acceptable," I commented to Sprecher, "they prove, too, that Dr. Ambros should have received the notoriety that Hitler himself got for the most infamous industrial project in history, the camp at Auschwitz. But Von Schnitzler himself - ?"
"No doubt you're thinking Von Schnitzler is not the best evidence?"
"That's right. Thousands of people were there on the site at Auschwitz, but we can't make a house-to-house carvas all over Europe to find out who our witnesses were. We've got to find those records. As for the rest of the Baron's testimony, it puts the finger on Schmitz alone."
Sprecher argued persuasively. He doubted that Schmitz had acted without the consent of the entire managing board. Von Schnitzler had been a member of the board. Not long after he had been promoted to the chairmanship over dyestuffs, Von Schnitzler became chairman of Farben's powerful Commercial Committee as well. "His knowledge of sales gave him an accurate idea of how many employees Farben was 'hiring.' "
"It's not direct enough," I said.
"If I could get him on the stand, 'I'd get something more direct for you."
Maybe Sprecher would, I thought. Obviously he was a shrewd cross-examiner. Before coming to Nurnberg he'd been an interrogator with the OSS; for four years before the war he had been a trial counsel for the National Labor Relations Board. "But suppose he doesn't take the stand?"
'He will. If he talked in 1945, he'll talk again."
'It's weak; it's not defin
ite enough. Put Charmatz on it," I said. "We can't spare Charmatz on aggressive war, I'm afraid."
'I'm going to talk to Taylor tomorrow about getting another man. Ever hear of Duke Minskoff?"
"Never met him."
"He's a lawyer with the Treasury Department. He was over here once as head of the division that investigated personal assets. He talked Emma Goering out of over a half-million dollars worth of jewels and a sizable amount of cash."
"He's the man then!"
It was after midnight before Sprecher and I finished reading for the fourth or fifth time Von Schnitzler's 1945 statements.
In 1935, as Farben was about to go in for government production, Hermann Goering had set up a new agency. The purpose was to make Germany economically independent of the outside world. To do this meant that Germany must develop a tremendous increase in raw materials - that is, to make more Farben synthetics. Goering wanted a top scientist to head the new agency, and the Farben board donated its director Carl Krauch, the eminent former professor of chemistry at the University of Heidelberg.
One day in mid-summer, according to Von Schnitzler (the invasion of Poland was still four years in the future), Carl Krauch moved his office from Frankfurt to the Berlin Northwest 7 building.
On the surface, the move seemed quite innocent. Having gone into the government, Krauch moved to where the government was. His new office was called Vermittlungsstelle Wehrmacht, which meant "Army Liaison." Had the office operated openly, few suspicions would have been aroused, for part of Farben's business had always come from supplying armies with munitions components.
Yet if Krauch was to head a raw-materials office, publicized in glowing releases as the agency to make Germany at last self-sufficient economically, why was his remaining Farben contact military? And why was the Vermittlungsstelle Wehrmacht a secret office whose mail came addressed simply "Berlin Northwest 7"?
Von Schnitzler offered an amazing explanation. "For twelve years," he said of the whole enterprise in which Krauch's Berlin office played a vital part, "the Nazi foreign policy and the I.G. foreign policy were largely inseparable. I also conclude that I.G. was largely responsible for Hitler's foreign policy."
Damning words! Would a court believe that, without Farben, Hitler's long-festering plans to march across Europe could never have crystallized into an official policy?
My four-month tenure was drawing to an end. If I resigned now it would mean a fatal administrative interruption. That's what I told myself, anyway. Twice within a week, Telford Taylor's office telephoned to detail the problem in dollars and cents. Unless his office got another appropriation, all pre-trial investigations like this would have to come to an end. "March is almost over. Can you give us an estimated deadline for issuing the indictment? And an estimated duration of trial, if there's to be a trial?"
"Right now," I said, "it depends on how much weight the court would attach to Von Schnitzler."
"Will you try to get the indictment out in a month?"
I promised to try.
There was a crisis in the wind that blew in several directions. Newsmen began coming to my office every afternoon. Their questions were as tensely pertinent as those asked by newsmen at the end of a day in court. One had the premature feeling that the trial was already going on, and that it would be ended before we got into the courtroom.
The newsmen reported Congressional opposition. On the House floor, Representative Dondero of Michigan had spoken savagely. How long, he wanted to know, would the American taxpayer stand for this vengeful nonsense? Joining his crusade was Representative Rankin of Mississippi. In the Senate, Taft had denounced the whole concept of "ex post facto" justice; the losers were being tried merely because they had lost. Taft's denunciation, unsound though it might be shown to be, spoke for the majority of the German people and many in American Military Government.
Then one day after the last snows were dried up, I called a special staff meeting and announced that we could begin drafting the accusations. At last we had enough evidence, including the Von Schnitzler admissions, to make a prima facie case on all counts.
"Sometime next month, we'll issue the indictment, win or lose. There are still many puzzles, but May it is. We'll put the charges together and take them apart as we go along. Send your proofs along with each paragraph."
They were still applauding when a messenger came in from the jail. He handed me an envelope. The staff stopped clapping.
It took me a few minutes to scan the contents. In two statements, Baron von Schnitzler had cast doubt on practically everything he had said in 1945. I told them the news. The Baron now said that he "had not been technically qualified" to say many of the things he'd said. As for the other admissions, he "had been in a state of intense mental depression in 1945 ."
Sprecher shouted above the din. Might as well face it - without Von Schnitzler, half the case would collapse. Belle Mayer thrust a finger near his face. "Let's be reasonable! Most of his admissions were not technical at all - so where does he get off with that argument? And of course he was suffering 'intense mental depression.' Did you ever know anybody to admit anything very damaging without being depressed about it?"
Were the Baron's 1945 statements voluntary? Everywhere the basic law of the courts for accepting admissions of this sort was simple. The prosecution must show that admissions were "voluntarily made." But the definitions of "voluntary" differed according to the jurisdiction where the case was tried. And if we on the staff could not agree, we couldn't expect the court to agree.
A rubble heap on the Unter den Linden. . . . A .Baron suddenly frightened by God knew what. Where did we go from here?
The Farben policy after 1935, although it stemmed from the brilliance of its wanderlust board of directors, was oriented around Berlin. Von Schnitzler had made that plain. But Professor Krauch, while agreeing that he had nursed the "raw-materials economy," insisted that his Berlin office had been just a place to hang his coat.
According to Von Schnitzler, this coat was many sizes too large for one man. But now Von Schnitzler had taken another look and agreed with the others: Nothing very important happened in Berlin.
I decided to have Max Ilgner interrogated again. Ilgner had hung his coat in Berlin ever since Farben was Farben. He had rated enough pull with the Nazis to save from death the only survivor of the Roehm plot on Hitler's life in 1933, and he'd hired this man in his office.
Yet Ilgner's "pull" was cosmopolitan. The world's greatest joiner, he had refused to join the Nazi Party in 1934 while at the same time he joined International Rotary against express orders from Goebbels. He was a queer duck, all right.
I believed that Ilgner knew more than anyone about Farben's fabulous expansion abroad. But without Von Schnitzler's testimony, could even Ilgner be brought to justice? Belle Mayer strongly believed Ilgner guilty. She might get more out of him than anyone else on the staff. In fact, she was too convinced of the case against Ilgner.
"What have we got to lose?" I argued. "You've interrogated him several times, and you should know how to throw him off balance."
"He was off balance already. After he and Schmitz and Von Knieriem were put in Prungsheim jail, they were released every day for a few hours to be interrogated over at the Reichsbank building. You'd think they'd never been in jail, the way they went out to the staff car. And Ilgner always ran out first. I can see him now walking up to the car all set to step in, when Uncle Hermann called out for him to wait. And then the three of them stood there on the sidewalk jockeying each other. Who had the right to step in first? Hermann Schmitz, the boss? Von Knieriem, Schmitz's lawyer? Or Ilgner? Well, you guess."
'Schmitz first," I said.
"That's right. Uncle Hermann brushed Max aside and stepped in. Then Ilgner. And last came Von Knieriem, even though he had more degrees than either of them and was a Prussian aristocrat besides. People may have made fun of Ilgner, but they did it behind his back. He jumped for only two people."
"Schmitz and who else?"
"Carl Krauch. Ilgner tried to push Uncle Hermann around once in a while, but when Carl Krauch walked into Berlin Northwest 7, Max Ilgner stood at attention."
I said: "So Ilgner kowtowed to Krauch because of Krauch's position in the Reich." "Maybe. You ask, Why didn't he join the Nazi Party until later? It's because he was too ambitious. The Party would put a crimp into his belonging to everything else. I don't know why Krauch should have cowed him."
"Maybe you can cow him. Someone has to do the job alone, because he shuts up when two interrogators are around."
Some of my notes on her report next morning are lost, but the official interrogation was saved, and as for the rest my memory is fairly accurate.
The jail sergeant had told her on the phone that she could see Ilgner any time during the evening.
'The others talk at night," the guard explained, jangling his keys as he led her and the interpreter through the damp cement corridor. "But Ilgner writes. When he has nothing else to write, he goes back and makes one big statement out of all the smaller ones he's done before." Belle laughed. She had thirty or so Ilgnerstatements with her.
In the center of the cell block, the guard halted. Under a dingy light, Ilgner faced the cell wall, scribbling. As the key scraped in the lock, he turned to tell the guard to go away. "Already too often I have been interrupted by this woman - and while I was writing in my own hand."
All she saw of his piglike face was the thin pouting lower lip, propped up by an apex of deep wrinkles. He nodded curtly to her. It was, he said, a gross insult for a man of his standing to be questioned by any woman.
Belle announced that she was staying anyway. She was interested in Farben's overseas representatives, she said. Hermann Schmitz had first told these men to report trends in the market; then he, Ilgner, had developed this simple practice into an intelligence service that operated every place where Farben had an office. This was the outgrowth of the seemingly purposeless gathering of statistics that had been going on in his office for years. Then the leading executives abroad had been commissioned as agents. Ilgner had given them the title Verbindungsmanner, and he had appointed all of them himself. Were these facts correct?
"You have the answers in my own hand." His voice was strident; each cheek showed one large dimple. "Yes, there was a plan for getting information. This was not a development from the idea of anyone else, you understand. I ere-ated it. I ere-ated the name Verbindungsmänner; that was entirely my creation - yes, indeed. These men were not agents in the American sense. You see, I am quite familiar with the United States, having known many people there; men of ability, I may add - many."
"Now, these agents, the Verbindungsmänner, picked up their intelligence in foreign countries and reported it to you?"
"Intelligence? Economic intelligence, if one chooses so to call it. I wish to make this distinction as I have already done in - "
"In your own hand, I know," Belle said. "We are referring to military intelligence."
He frowned. "If any information of that kind was gathered, I must have been out of the country at the time. You would have to ask my colleagues about that. Dr. Reithinger, perhaps."
"You mean the Dr. Reithinger you hired to head your statistical department. Well, we have evidence that he submitted regular reports to the German high command."
"Is that so? During the war, I assume you mean."
"Before the war, too."
"Is that so? I have heard that my colleague, Dr. Reithinger, submitted a few reports to General Thomas, but you must understand that General Thomas was not the military head of the high command. I wish to make the distinction that Thomas was the economic head of the high command. Again, I wish to distinguish between the economic, the military, and the political.''
"We understand that," Belle said. "You are making the point that although Herr Thomas was a general, he was not in the Army in the military sense! But Dr. Reithinger was under you."
"Oh, yes, I had absolute authority over my Dr. Reithinger. But I did not have absolute knowledge. You see, I was out of the country six months of the year - in England, the United States, South America, Central America - "
"And the Verbindungsmann sent your office reports on prices and tariffs - very well, that was economic." Belle showed him a letter written by Ilgner to the General Aniline and Film Corporation. "This, it appears, is also in your hand: 'Inform us immediately and with the utmost precision of each step taken by our chemical competitors, especially DuPont.' "
"Yes, yes, business - why deny it?"
"And your Dr. Gattineau was put in charge of the political department of your office - the same Gattineau you saved from execution?"
"Yes, yes. My Dr. Gattineau."
"And every change in the South and Latin American governments was reported by your agents to Gattineau."
"Of course."
"And the number of ships in South American harbors - before 'Â¥th war."
His head snapped down.
"The number and kinds of ships in South American harbors."
"Nein."
"I have a list here of some of those reports. The organization of the Chilean army. A map of potential bombing targets outside Buenos Aires. You remember receiving those at Berlin Northwest 7, I assume."
"The organization of the Chilean army, perhaps -we may have had a contract to supply them. The others - nein." He gave her a shrewd look. "You have the actual records?"
"They went to the German High Command."
"Naturally, anything is possible while one is away from his office. I was ill at times. My colleague Dr. Gattineau might be able to assist you on that question."
"Mr. Ilgner, here we have a letter of commendation. It was sent from German Intelligence to Berlin Northwest 7. It says that your agents, trained to collect information while they sold your products, were more valuable than the Army espionage service, because they would not be suspected, like cloak-and-dagger spies."
"I know nothing of that."
"Your agents became foreign citizens, and in many cases their local company was not even called by a Farben name. So, if they were detected, they could confess without implicating either Farben or Germany."
He shook his head. "Nein, nein."
"You learned nothing of these reports while you were abroad, and yet you were away from your office when they were received. You must have lived on the ocean."
"As I have said, we collected only business intelligence."
"All right." Belle sighed. "Here is a letter from Berlin Northwest 7. It directs your overseas salesmen to 'confess,' if necessary. It went out from your office, and you were responsible."
"I was in command, but I was not responsible for that."
"If you got only business information, what would these men have to 'confess' to?"
He said nothing.
"All right, here's your last chance to explain. Just give me straight, quick answers. What was a Bayer-aspirin salesman doing with aerial photographs of the Port of New York -in 1936?"
"I did not know of that."
"And your so-called patent company Chemnyco in New York City?" she asked. "What was in those records that your brother Rudolf destroyed before the United States government could examine them?"
He replied wearily. "Chemnyco had sent data on political economy to my colleagues' office at Northwest 7, from which inferences in regard to American armament could be made. And, apparently, one felt concerned that American authorities might establish such conclusions."
"By 'one,' you mean your brother Rudolf and yourself; is that right?"
He looked into space.
'I was not in New York at the time."
The sun was a halo around the parapet which rose above the jail's east eave. In our conference room, cigarette smoke mingled with the sunlight. Usually the staff straggled in, forming pre-meeting groups, but this morning they were all early and they were all talking together.
What was the sense of crying about it? Ilgner "owned" all the good Doctors when there was something to brag about, but when incriminating things happened, they were his "colleagues."
Sprecher shouted: "O.K., the party's over." They came to order, some sitting on the floor, some on the desk, and a few on the one couch which had been sent down at last from AMG.
I began: "By the look on your faces, we are all agreed that we cannot do without Von Schnitzler."
Sprecher, who had done several laps around the room, stopped. 'If there's no other solution to consider, let's assume we could get Von Schnitzler to repeat everything he said in 1945."
Belle was the first to jump to her feet. "It's ridiculous to waste our time thinking about it. He says now he didn't mean it. So we are going to ask him to say again that he did?"
Most of the staff agreed that we'd have to go ahead assuming the court would take Von Schnitzler's earlier testimony as it stood. But considering the background of those earlier statements with the Baron's recent weakening, Sprecher and I were both struck with the uncertainty of such a course.
Sprecher took the floor. "In my opinion, we can't risk using those early statements in their present form. Somebody's got to talk to him again." There were several dissenters, but Sprecher, who had been in Germany at the time, pictured the chaotic last days of the war. Von Schnitzler had volunteered information, but he'd also made it clear to the investigators that he was afraid to refuse. The Allied Command had passed a law making it a crime "to fail to disclose information on request" - a perfectly good law for wartime, to protect the occupying troops from ambush and sabotage. But Von Schnitzler had no intention of ambushing anyone, and this fact might be used as an argument that he had been coerced. He had suffered, the argument ran, the "duress of occupation."
The colloquy became a controversy, with Sprecher holding out against the rest of the staff.
"Duress of occupation"? Nothing Von Schnitzler admitted had anything to do with troop tactics or sabotage."
"Maybe not. But those who were questioned at that time were not given any interpretations. They were just told: 'Talk or else.' Grabbed in the midst of the fighting, Von Schnitzler says a lot of things he later regrets."
"But he didn't even mention that law then."
'That's true, he didn't. We might even say that his main fear was his own conscience. We can say that. But the judges are not going to look at one sentence and say, 'Here the Baron was remorseful,' and then look at another and say, 'Here he was worrying about that occupation statute.' Why are the boys in the jail preparing all these statements right now emphasizing how depressed he was? They've been preparing all along to have him claim the 'duress of occupation.' "
"We must remember," Sprecher wound up his argument, "that drafters of the London Charter and Allied Control Council Law No. 10 didn't set forth any rules as to what makes an admission voluntary. The judges can lean to any viewpoint that has any support at all."
Why hadn't Sprecher brought up this argument before? Because he hadn't thought of it until so much depended on Von Schnitzler.
"If Von Schnitzier's statements were really voluntary then, he might be persuaded to repeat them again now. I'd like to test his conscience, anyway - that is, if I can be spared." Sprecher turned to me.
"We can't spare anybody. What do you want to do?"
"Let me take off for a few days to talk to him."
Sprecher's request was fantastic, yet I O.K.'d it. What kind of fool was I? The Baron had most to fear now from putting a noose around his own neck. Like the others, I was absolutely convinced that he would not talk again.
Sprecher's assignment didn't help the morale of the staff. The idea of a prosecutor going into "conference" with a potential defendant! Belle Mayer cornered me. "DO you know what some of the staff are saying?"
"Probably just what I'm telling myself. But this contention of duress is very strong. I couldn't do anything else."
"They say that with the indictment only three weeks off, you won't go through with it unless Sprech succeeds."
"We'll face the failure when it comes upy" I said.
"If only we could get out the indictment a few days early! That might help."
"I've set the date and that's all there is to it. The paragraphs and supporting proof better keep rolling in here if they want to make a case."
"If we did get out the indictment, Joe, it would be so much harder for anyone to quash the case."
"Don't you think I know that?"
Several of us were in my office, feeling pretty low, when Belle rushed in waving a large orange tissue. She did a rhumba around me. "Nineteen forty-five. Nineteen forty-five. Lo, the poor Russians and the poor Swedes - "
Finally, I snatched the paper. "Where did you get this?"
"I found it in the Army files in the Farben building at Frankfurt." It was a shipping ticket, complete with listings, for Berlin Northwest 7 documents that had been shipped from Berlin to the United States War Department in 1945. She was almost hysterical.
"Since 1945 they've been sitting in Washington. Wait till Bemstein hears about this - and the OSS- and the Department of Justice. If the Russians and the Swedes only knew!"
"Go to Alexandria first," I said. "What a fool I was not to remember! Before I came here? Mickey Marcus told me there was a warehouse full of records there. Go to Alexandria first."
"Me?"
"You've been saying you needed a rest. How long will it take you to get packed?"
"One hour."
"We'll be sweating out Von Schnitzler here. You do the best you can over there."
In 1945, Von Schnitzler had been more afraid of himself than anything else, Sprecher felt. Most of the Baron's statements read like ramblings of conscience, not guided disclosures. He had even hinted at Farben blame for some things where he wasn't too sure of the facts.
"These statements are loose, some of them full of hearsay, but to the ordinary reader amazingly believable," Sprecher said. "Don't worry; he'll confirm everything before I get through.''
"It just doesn't make sense that he qualified those statements,'' I said. "What stopped him from taking it all back a long time ago?"
"For two years, Joe, he had the courage to stick to his guns, then suddenly - " Sprecher frowned. "Just play along with me, will you?"
"I'll play along for a few days."
But I was not happy about it, and my uneasiness concerned the interrogator as much as Von Schnitzler. Before this time, one might often observe Drexel Sprecher striding up the jail walk like a shavetail going to review his troops. In this simple but seemingly hopeless assignment, I expected him to slow down a bit, but not to saunter, as he did, to the jail every day. He was not the grass-chewing type.
Within a few days, Von Schnitzler had confirmed about onefourth of his 1945 testimony. I thought we were getting somewhere. Sprecher didn't agree,
"If he was depressed in 1945, and if that was 'duress,' it may still be duress, because right now he is the most depressed fellow I ever saw. Do you know what he said to me today? 'Mr. Sprecher, you are not the first American I have met who understood the soul, but you are the first who has not bragged about it.' But there is still something holding him back and I am going to find out what it is.''
"Someone must have really worked on him," I said. "Maybe if we take another look at his statements, we can get a lead."
We studied the statements again, and in fifteen minutes we had an answer.
We were looking for the man who had belittled the Baron's
knowledge. The indications pointed to a technical man - else
why would Von Schnitzler have said that he "wasn't technically
qualified"?
We looked at the dates and places of incarceration, and the dates of a11 Von Schnitzler's 1945 statements, and the facts led straight to one man- Dr. Fritz ter Meer, the great developer of the bunarubber process.
In 1945 Von Schnitzler had said absolutely nothing significant while Dr. ter Meer was around. Whenever Ter Meer landed in the same jail with him, he stopped talking. Ter Meer was now at Dachau, and he was slated to come back to Numberg for questioning within a few days.
"If we're right about this," Sprecher said, "Von Schnitzler knows Ter Meer is coming, and he doesn't relish seeing him."
"We could arrange it so he won't have to," I said.
The next afternoon Sprecher walked briskly into the office. "We had it figured to a T," he said. "He almost cried. It seems Ter Meer was working on him for months, whenever they were in the same jail. Ter Meer kept hammering away at the idea that Von Schnitzler was not qualified to speak for Farben policy because he was not a true, all-round scientist. He humiliated Von Schnitzler by referring to him in front of the others as 'that salesman.' Brother, Von Schnitzler was mad today."
"How did you loosen him up?"
"I began by asking him if he had heard from Dr. ter Meer. He wanted to know why I asked .that- said it wasn't easy to send letters from one jail to another. I said we liked to have all the directors together sometimes so that they could plan their case until they got permanent counsel, and I mentioned casually that Ter Meer would be coming back here soon anyway, unless there was some reason why he should stay at Dachau for another week or so. That did it. He said he didn't know whether he could revalidate everything he had said in 1945, but he wouldn't be able to co-operate at all if we brought Ter Meer to plague him. He said that Dr. ter Meer was the best all-round scientist Farben had, but that he had no noble rank whatever and he didn't know any more about dyestugs than he, the Baron von Schnitzler, knew. Then he got sarcastic. Ter Meer, he said, knew everything except how to get them out of jail."
"Great! How about the statements?"
"Here. He worked along well with me today. We can hold Ter Meer there in Dachau. But the way it's going, there'll still be some exceptions to the 1945 statements. When I get through with this interrogation, I think we ought to send Von Schnitzler someplace where he can be alone and think it over."
On the day Ter Meer was put on the train for Nurnberg, Sprecher released Von Schnitzler from the Nurnberg jail and put him on the train for Munich, the rail point nearest Dachau. Ter Meer and Von Schnitzler crossed in transit, so to speak. Von Schnitzler was told merely to "rest and think it over."
A week later Von Schnitzler was back in the Numberg jail. He requested of another lawyer an immediate interview with Herr Sprecher. "What's it all about?" the other lawyer asked, but the Baron replied: "1 will speak to no one else. It's personal."
I got hold of Sprecher, and he hurried over to the jail. The next hour was my most eventful hour since coming to Nurnberg.
First, there was the call from Washington. Although the line was not busy, there was a cacophony of excited voices as if tests were being made on Bell's first telephone. Too bad, I thought, that Farben's technical men hadn't gotten into this field! I hung up to wait for a better connection.
The call finally came through. Belle was reporting. Vaguely I got the idea that she was in the process of setting up another United States government at Alexandria. I yelled back: She might at least have picked Washington or Philadelphia. What was the matter with the connection? There, that was better! The first batch of documents had been pulled from the Alexandria warehouse, by a crew which would soon be known as "Mayer's WPA." She enthusiastically described the operation. One guy about to leave the government had volunteered for a few days; she'd run across a few other employees whose duty orders were sufficiently abstruse for her to interpret them onto the job. "Can you hear me?" she shouted.
"I can hear you, although I don't understand why you should have much trouble. Mickey Marcus will help you there, you know that. What have you found?"
"Nothing is translated yet. I'll just report the trend. Vermitt1ungsteLLe W. - got that?"
"I got it."
"We found hundreds - repeat hundreds - of orders from the Wehrmacht to Farben's V. W. - got that?"
"Yes. How about V.W. suggestions to the Wehrmacht? Did you find any of those?"
"Not yet. But we haven't scratched the surface."
"Did you get any dope on the judges?"
She reported that a Judge Curtis Shake of Vincennes, Indiana, was coming to Nurnberg. He had been a chief justice of the Indiana supreme court and chairman of one of Indiana's Democratic conventions.
As she finished telling me about Judge Shake and hung up Sprecher rushed in. "I am quoting the Baron," Sprech shouted. " 'Mr. Sprecher, I am convinced that the first statements I made are correct. I have thought it over, and I am sure that, without exception, they are the whole truth.' "
After examining Von Schnitzler's latest utterances, I asked General Taylor's office to release the indictment. Count 1 charged the preparation and waging of aggressive war; Count 2 the plunder and spoliation of the industries and economies of other countries; and Count 3 the enslavement, mistreatment, and murder of human beings, including medical experimentations upon enslaved persons.
A few days later, Belle Mayer returned. There was feverish digging in all the Farben rooms of the Palace. Since the indictment had been issued, more newsmen than ever were hanging around waiting for a story. The shipment from Alexandria had arrived, but there would be no story for some time; the documents had to be indexed, analyzed, and translated before they could be used. But two other stories did break, one indirectly from Secretary of War Patterson, and the other from a Congressman who was not exactly an admirer of Secretary Patterson.
The Secretary relayed to us this telegram he had received from Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) :
DURING THE ENTIRE PERIOD OF OUR BUSINESS CONTACTS, WE HAD NO INKLING OF FARBEN'S CONNIVING PART IN HITLER'S BRUTAL POLICIES. WE OFFER ANY HELP WE CAN GIVE TO SEE THAT COMPLETE TRUTH IS BROUGHT TO LIGHT, AND THAT RIGID JUSTICE IS DONE.
Then, a few days before we wound up the investigation, Judge
Shake came to Germany. He was designated by General Clay to
preside over the Farben Tribunal, which would have two other
regular judges and one alternate. His arrival made me nervous.
The Bernstein investigators, in their haste to collect information
for other purposes, had frequently put data in a form that was not
technically admissible in a trial. Some of the statements were unsworn. Some of the most convincing testimony showing Farben's
rearmament activities lacked dates. In one form or another about
five hundred documents needed fixing.
The staff had an angry debate.
"YOU want guarantees! Our London Charter doesn't say all statements have to be sworn. You want dates! Everybody knows how far back this thing goes. Without the Haber-Bosch process, World War I would have ended in 1915 -there's your answer whose side they were on!"
"Yes, but we are not trying 1915, or Haber and Bosch. We are not even trying World War 11. We are trying those men in the jail over there."
"All right, take those men! They produced Germany right into this war, and without them, Germany could never have gone to war."
"Without this and without that - that's not proof. We must show their positive intentions. Probably these judges will bend over backward to apply the principles of Anglo-American law. We have to have those dates clear, and we have to have the unsworn statements sworn to, wherever possible, even if it delays our going to trial."
Finally the advocates of a quicker trial date began to yield on this point. When we started to discuss the next point - being prepared to produce in open court those people who had given us affidavits - the battle raged again.
It would be a gigantic task, of course, to produce in open court the hundreds of people who had given us statements. In fact, the drafters of Allied Control Council Law No. 10 had foreseen this dilemma, and had provided that "affidavits" were admissible as evidence. But the American Constitution provided that the accused must be confronted by his accuser. I felt that we must be prepared to produce at least those witnesses whose affidavits were objected to by the defense. That meant we would have to start checking on the availability of witnesses all over Europe.
"It can't be helped," I said.
Belle Mayer blew up. "We haven't time to do both jobs. I can understand our preparing to get some of the witnesses, but these documents are signed and witnessed. Now just because they didn't say 'I swear' -we'll let the whole world crumble while we play legal tiddlywinks. It would be different if these papers were deliberately falsified."
"I know, I know."
"Time, time, time!" Each repetition of the word sounded bruised. "You're hopeless. Why don't you go ahead and defend them yourself?"
I was too perturbed to answer.
I'm sorry," she said. "Just consider what I said, not the way I said it."
She was tired; she hadn't slept much for a long time.
She was up early the next morning, organizing field trips to Berlin, Frankfurt, and Paris. Her jeep left Nurnberg with five people and two large suitcases bulging with documents. All of them would be traveling on nerve - getting clarifying statements, signatures, and oaths.
I made my usual morning visit to the snack bar to get a cup of coffee and pick up the Stars and Stripes. The lead story prolonged my recess. It was a blast by Representative George Dondero of Michigan against Secretary of War Patterson for his "failure to ferret out 'Communist sympathizersy " who had "infiltrated into key Army posts."
Representative Dondero had made this charge on the floor of the House. He had named ten of these "sympathizers.~~ My name was among them. The story recited my present position and quoted Dondero as saying that I was a "known left-winger from the Treasury Department who had been a close student of the Communist Party line."
During the next days I was called on often to answer this charge. There was quite a flurry at the Grand Hotel, center of American community life in Nurnberg. One day Judge Shake, a medium-built man with a look of honest curiosity, greeted me from his chair in the lobby. He was reading the Stars and Stripes. It was ridiculous - but I felt ill at ease. Four of the ten people named I didn't know at all. Suppose one of them was a Communist? I shook off the question.
The obvious cause of the attack didn't occur to me at first. My statement to the press did point out that five of the men named had worked at one time or another on War Department investigations of I.G. Farbenindustrie. I knew them, of course. 1 challenged Dondero to repeat his charge off the floor of Congress where he would not be immune from a libel suit. And although this was some months before one could conclude that absolutely groundless charges in Congress always went hand-in-hand with cowardice in the accuser, I added that Representative Dondero was "apparently the type of man who, so far from deserving a seat in the United States Congress, should not be trusted with official responsibility of any kind." That wasn't the end of it. There were calls from Washington and Berlin, requesting further denials. How can you add to a denial?
Then the Congressional Record arrived to solve the mystery. Dondero's speech before the House had not begun with the Communist labels, but rather with a blast against those "who had been trying to blacken the name of I.G. Farben." The newspapers had recently reported that the Farben trial staff had been investigating alleged stockpiles of magnesium which the Dow Chemical Company had shipped to Farben when our defense program was critically short of magnesium. Was it more than a coincidence that Dow Chemical was located in Dondero's district? How often had he lobbied in their interest? I determined to forget the incident, telling myself it should have no influence on the court.
No one slept much during the last few days before the tria!. The last of the corrected documents were brought in. General Taylor went to Paris; appearing before the full French cabinet,he demanded for the last time that the French give up Dr. Wurster and Dr. Ambros. After a long debate, the cabinet voted their extradition from the Farben plant at Ludwigshafen, in the French zone.
next
''They Will Not Dare Go on With This " 40s
Stopping in front of another office, they flanked the doorway as if they'd measured their distances from it equally on each side. Whatever the matter was, both were trying to be fair. I switched on the light and went in.
This, my new office, was topsy-turvy with documents. I laughed: "The thief who ransacked this room got away without a thing." They did not hear; their voices came in from the hall. She was not complaining about overwork, she said; no, it was just that he, Sprecher, was demanding the impossible now that she and Jan had lost their best assistant. Sprecher had given her a deadline for the preparation of some documents, and they would not be able to meet it without help. " 'Either get it by that date,' " she mimicked him, " 'or don't get it at all.' " Didn't he understand it was impossible? As they came into the office, Sprecher patted her on the back, saying that if she were not so capable she wouldn't have to get along with less help than some of the other lawyers - she'd have to do the best she could.
"I'll leave my briefcase here," I said. "Do I need to lock the door?"
"No." They spoke amiably. But they were not anxious to leave the office.
Contrasted to the methodical Charmatz, they both moved with ceaseless energy, Sprecher covering the floor in long strides while Belle sat, rose, marched to the window, her hands kneading each other all the while. I was very tired, but things were in a mess. The previous prosecutor had resigned suddenly, giving as his reason that some of the prospective judges were unqualified. Actually, he came from New York City; many of the judges came from other sections of the country, and he knew little about them.
Two tables along the wall were piled high with documents. I put my briefcase on the pile, but it slid onto the floor. "Don't pick it up," Sprecher said. "As long as you can find yourself around here, you're lucky."
I nodded. "Well, personnel problems will have to wait until tomorrow. Before I check in, just brief me on the status of the investigation. Where were we? Supposedly, the Russians excavated at Berlin Northwest 7, and you heard that they had taken the documents to -"
"To that castle up at Gross Behnitz," she said. "So I sent a couple of G.I.'s up there."
'I assume Sprecher approved that," I said diplomatically.
He nodded.
"Yes, he did. Well, the G.I.'s said to the guard: 'We want the records that were shipped up here from Berlin Northwest 7.' The guard said that the documents were in one of the big rooms there in the castle but he could not enter and no one else could because the room had been sealed up by the Swedish legation! The guard insisted the Russian government would be committing an act of hostility against the Swedes if they opened that room up. Then we wasted days contacting the Swedish officials in Berlin, but they claimed they didn't know anything about it. So I sent a translator and a couple of really tough Army boys up to Gross Behnitz, and they just walked in and broke the seal."
'What did they find?"
'The room was empty."
"Empty! Where did the stuff go to?"
"You figure that," she said. "Colonel Bahaar in Berlin - he's about the only Russian there whose word might be counted on - backed up the Swedish legation. Bahaar swears the Russians never excavated at Berlin Northwest 7. But Hermann Schmitz had a huge personal fortune in Sweden and plenty of influence there. Now, who's lying?"
"Could be the Russians," Sprecher said. "They take an empty room and seal it up; then they let the Americans know so that they'll come snooping around and tell Tovarich all about the big secret the Americans are looking for!"
"Maybe," she said laughing. "Maybe not. Anyway, we have to figure back to Berlin. Berlin Northwest 7 was part of the Laenderbank Building. We know there were two basements. In the top basement were the vaults, and Colonel Bernstein's men found some of Schmitz's and Ilgner's belongings there. Then under some debris they found a safe that was empty except for one file. The question is: If the Russians didn't rifle that safe, who did?"
I suggested that Farben men might have cleaned out the safe in a hurry, leaving that one file by mistake. The other records might have been destroyed before the Russians got there. Belle shook her head.
"Maybe Farben men dug up some of those records later, but they wouldn't have destroyed them."
"If they were incriminating records, why not?"
"Don't fool yourself. With their efficiency, they'd take a chance even on getting hanged, rather than destroy them."
"What was in the second basement, below the vaults?"
She slapped a fist info her other palm. "That's it, don't you see, that's the tip! Ever since 1945, it's been rumors, rumors, rumors about Berlin Northwest 7, and now we'll find out once and for all whether anybody excavated below those vaults. Yesterday, Sprech and I sent two more G.I.'s up there with a steam shovel. They should be back next week."
6.
Digging -January 1947
THIS JOB IS UNLIKE ANY JOB you've ever had, in or out of govemment. There is little time to get acquainted. The morning after
you arrive, you make a tour in search of a staff that is scattered
at various points throughout the ramshackle Palace. Like Belle
Mayer and Drexel Sprecher, everyone is on edge from the frustration of trying to do too much with too little, and from the fear that
what they have done will get nowhere in the end. You delegate
much of the personnel work to Drexel Sprecher for the next week.
Then you begin to survey the evidence. But where to begin? Every day the prisoners are holding board of-directors meetings, confident that they will soon be released because of insufficient evidence. You pick up a document; it will have to wait until Charmatz' translator returns, for all the other translators are busy. Besides, it doesn't make sense to take in one fact after another without a theory or a direction.
You decide to wait until the two G.I.'s come back from Berlin. But then you have to laugh at the incongruity of two soldiers, neither of them engineers, trying to push a steam shovel forty feet down, looking for something or nothing. No, you cannot wait. You shut yourself off and work your way down one passage after another until you have a clear statement of at least part of your confusion.
The investigation leads, as it led two years before, to two German cities: Frankfurt and Heidelberg. The trail is no better marked now than it was in 1945, when the investigators had gone to the site of Berlin Northwest 7. There they heard the rumor that Max Ilgner had shipped two carloads of documents to Heidelberg, then reshipped them to the Hoechst plant at Frankfurt am Main. The investigators had found a shipping ticket, but the railroad car had vanished. So the trail had led first to a dead end in Frankfurt in the winter of 1945.
When the American Third Army arrived in Frankfurt, they found the Farben administration building crammed and littered with so many documents that it might have been a berserk paper factory. None of the Farben directors was there. D.P.'s were burning documents to keep warm. On the ground floor, nearly a thousand "employees," apparently more anxious to celebrate their freedom from Farben peonage than to keep warm, shouted and laughed as they tossed bundles of records out the windows. Rumors ran rife that below those records, scattered over every foot of the ground floor, were jewels, money, wine. Every rumor turned to dust. Soldiers began carrying archives into the courtyard to clear the upper floors for the American headquarters; some of the soldiers fell, struck by bundles which tumbled down the stairs.
The Third Army had not fought on paper; they were short of file cabinets and folders. To salvage these, they tossed away vital Farben evidence. More than a hundred tons of records lay dispersed over an area larger than a city block when the Bernstein investigators came down from Berlin Northwest 7.
To salvage the records temporarily, the investigators pitched them like hay into the Reichsbank, near the administration building. But soon the records overflowed to an annex and back into the yards again. Apparently only a Farben expert could straighten out the mess.
Near the administration building, at the Hoechst plant, they found Dr. Ernst Struss, whom they put in charge' of moving and arranging the remaining records. Struss did the job in an amazingly short time; it appeared he had a voluminous memory of the Frankfurt records, recalling even how many copies of each document should be found. Struss organized the workmen, who moved the records from the Reichsbank by horses and wood-burning trucks to another building at Griesheim, a half-mile away. A bucket brigade of workmen passed the documents up three flights of stairs. The workmen were thorough, meticulous. At exactly noon the foreman would make a speech explaining what they were to do in the afternoon. They set their watches by his. At 12 : 55 not a soul had come back to work - but promptly at 1 : 00 they returned and took up where they had left off. So Struss succeeded in quickly reconstructing the system.
The investigators checked the new files. Every single document belonged to the Farben administration office; none had come on Max Ilgner's shipping ticket. They questioned Struss; surely his ' remarkable memory must include a knowledge of those secret records.
Of Berlin Northwest 7, Struss had nothing to say, but he was talkative about the Farben directors. In the basement of the administration building, the investigators had found money and silverware belonging to Schmitz and Ilgner. Where had these two gone? Struss told them.
Soon after Frankfurt came under heavy bomb attack, Hermann Schmitz and several other directors decided to leave their quarters in Frankfurt and go to their homes in Heidelberg. But important business of some kind had persuaded Schmitz to return to Frankfurt once more. So it was that during the last days of the American advance, Schmitz and several other Farben directors were shuffled around in a railway carriage between the fighting lines, trying to reach Frankfurt. They were shot at several times. At the first shot, Schmitz threw himself into the aisles. The picture of a munitions king, so paralyzed with terror that he stayed on the floor until the train had wound its way back down to Heidelberg, was very amusing to Struss. Obviously, Struss did not like Schmitz, and the investigators were soon to discover that he was not alone in that opinion.
The investigators went on down to Heidelberg. The American Seventh Army was occupying that old city on the Neckar River as a headquarters. The investigators asked a timid old man the way to Hermann Schmitz's house, and by mistake he directed them to the University of Heidelberg. There, in the college office, fifty clerks were busily working, equally unconcerned by the rumbling of tanks on the Autobahn not far away, by the boisterous soldier voices on the campus, and by the 25-odd American civilians who alternately hovered over their desks and inspected the dueling swords on the walls.
This was the new Farben headquarters. The twenty-five civilians were a team from the Office of Strategic Services and the Foreign Economic Administration, who had been briefed on Farben and flown to Heidelberg. They were quick to remind the Army investigators that though they had been there a couple of months, they were still unable to get food and billets from the Seventh Army. Although the Seventh Army headquarters was still, after several months, unable to govern one town well, the Farben office had been operating smoothly since the surrender.
Nor did the investigators work together. Assigned to look into the mysterious General Aniline and Film Corporation, they were convinced that Schmitz was still involved in that firm, since his interest in its predecessor, American I.G. Chemical Company, was well known. The war over, the Department of Justice had again failed to show an American court that General Aniline was Farben-owned. Standard Oil's President Walter Teagle had sworn he didn't know who owned the $100,000,000 combine - though he was drawing $50,000 a year as a director. Somehow the Department of Justice had put through a hands-off order on all documents in this new Farben office, hoping perhaps that someday someone from Washington would drop in and solve the mystery. None of the three investigating teams could inspect the files.
The OSS men, instead of twiddling their thumbs, decided to look around Heidelberg for traces of money. Someone had told them that where they found Schmitz, there they would find money. Schmitz had come up the hard way from a commercial school in Essen, the iron city, and had risen from bank clerk to staff member of the Kaiser's war machine. He had been a director of Farben's predecessor firm, Badische Anilin und Sodafabrik. Also a director of the Deutsches Reichsbank, he was thought to be the wealthiest banker in Germany. In world affairs he had gained considerable respectability as director of the Bank of International Settlements in Geneva.
It is not known why the OSS never found Hermann Schmitz. The Army investigators, leaving the University of Heidelberg campus in search of an imposing figure not unlike J.P. Morgan, jeeped around looking for the "Schmitz castle." But the mistaken directions of the timid old man had been quite understandable. No one would associate the legend of Schmitz with the house he lived in.
On the verdant hillside overlooking Heidelberg, the house looked like a stucco pillbox. A short, bull necked man came to the door and asked the men who they were. Only after consulting his wife, a dumpy Frau in a spotless gingham dress, did he admit that his name was Hermann Schmitz.
They had intended to search the house at once, but he directed them to a small sitting room. They were Enlisted Men - a fact they could not forget because he sat without inviting them to sit and looked up and down the sleeve of one, a corporal, then the other, a sergeant. They felt as if they were in the presence of their own colonel. The feeling soon passed, for after Schmitz had answered all their questions by questioning their authority, they smiled openly at the information on the wall that God was the head of this house. Frau Schmitz offered to brew a pot of Kaffee. Sternly he said Nein. Not in the least offended, she stood beside his chair waiting for the next command. And now if that would be all, Schmitz said, they could leave.
They came back the next day, after recovering their equilibrium. Schmitz's face was ruddy with anger when they insisted on a search. By whose authority did they search? Whoever you like, sir, they said; shall we say Eisenhower or Roosevelt?
Schmitz's study was poorly furnished. The desk was plain; the bottom of two drawers fell out as they searched; but they found nothing important there. Beside the desk were two large paper file boxes- not the famous Farben-made fiber boxes. In them the G.I.'s found a collection of telegrams from Hitler, Goering, and others congratulating the "Geheimrat Schmitz" and "Justizrat Schmitz" on his sixtieth birthday. The investigators addressed him sarcastically by his titles. Geheimrat meant Privy Councilor, and when they called him that in mock-respectful tones, he nodded in curt acknowledgment. But he understood he was being ridiculed when they prefaced a question with the address Justizrat - Doctor of Laws.
"Doctor of Laws Schmitz, how much money do you have in the house and where is it?" He shook his head.
In the other file box they found a shiny red wooden box, locked. Breaking it open, they found a set of well-made miniature tools. Frau Schmitz explained that this had been a birthday present to their son a few days before. Herr Doktor had taken it back because he'd thought it was too good for a boy. She flushed at her slip of the tongue, adding that of course it was too good for the boy - much too good.
Then they searched the upstairs. In one bedroom they found the equivalent of $15,000 in marks. In the basement they found nothing.
Back in their room at the hotel, they talked it over. They'd been thorough, and neither of the Schmitz's had offered any hint that they had anything to hide. That was just it; the locking of a toy tool kit in a box-within-a-cabinet was pathologically secretive. The sergeant got to impersonating Schmitz, comparing him to a couple of green lieutenants who had dived on their faces at the first sound of a shell two miles away.
"Schmitz stayed up in Frankfurt a lot of the time, didn't he? One day he takes the train up there, and when somebody takes a pot shot, he comes right back to Heidelberg to stay. But that was before the war was over. Why Heidelberg? Because it's not a strategic city; it was bombed only twice. But he didn't know at that time whether it would be bombed again, or did he?"
"That's it," the corporal said. "An air-raid shelter. We never looked for that."
In the Schmitz basement, behind the furnace, soot had disguised the cracks in the door. One of Schmitz's secretaries, a buxom woman who alternated fond looks at the Geheimrat with laments about the invasion of his privacy, said: No, there was nothing in there, and since the Geheimrat hadn't been in the Nazi army, why didn't they go away?
The shelter was lined with the most durable materials. An old trunk disclosed a thousand disorganized papers. Among them, they found something which, to this day, the Department of Justice has been unable to get into evidence against the General Aniline and Film Corporation - proof of one of the slickest cloaks in financial history.
In the mid-thirties, the United States government had begun an investigation of American I.G. Chemical Corporation. There was considerable mystery as to where some of its products and profits were going. To counter this investigation, Schmitz legally changed the name to "General Aniline and Film Corporation." The General Aniline files showed that their new owner was a Swiss company, I.G. Chemie of Basel, Switzerland. Obviously, I.G. Chemie was a dummy for somebody.
Not until late in 1938 was the United States government able to prove that I.G. Chemie (of which Schmitz was once president) was being run by a man named Gadow, Schmitz's brother-in-law. Whereas Max Ilgner's brother Rudolf had become an American citizen, this man Gadow became a Swiss citizen, which under Swiss law gave him complete secrecy of operation. Through Gadow, during several years of our national defense effort, General Aniline and Film handled a major part of all the chemical business in the United States. And its profits went into the Farben till.
But there was no proof acceptable in a United States court. Just before Pearl Harbor, the Treasury Department used its emergency powers and at last cut off the millions of dollars from General Aniline sales which I.G. Chemie had been relaying to I.G. Farben.
Meantime, while denying ownership in the United States, Farben had been paying taxes to the Nazi government on their General Aniline receipts. When Farben stopped paying these taxes, the collector asked two other directors: Why have you stopped reporting General Aniline income? These directors replied that Farben had sold its stock direct to I.G. Chemie. Then the tax authorities went to Schmitz. He refused to answer, saying that to give information would harm "the German national interest."
Indeed, Schmitz had sold to I.G. Chemie Farben's stock in General Aniline and Film. But the joker was this brief memo found in the trunk in his air-raid shelter. It was an "option" by which Gadow agreed that Farben, through Schmitz, could buy back General Aniline from I.G. Chemie at any time. Gadow also agreed never to sell to anyone but Farben.
The fox, though crafty, cannot unload the hunter's gun. Hermann Schmitz was of a shrewder breed. If Gadow didn't pay off, Farben could take back the firm. Yet the profits were not shown to be "legal profits" either in the United States or in Germany.
Having flimflammed two governments, Schmitz now made a move to flimflam his fellow directors. In 1937, I.G. Chemie had "agreed" to pension Schmitz, when he retired, at 80,000 Swiss francs a year. In 1940, he baldly demanded the pension. Here in the trunk was I.G. Chemie's reply: Until he was retired from Farben, which kept its hidden control through him, he wasn't retired from I.G. Chemie.
The other directors, who were being interrogated in Frankfurt, were as surprised to learn of this deal as the investigators had been. Schmitz had a pension with I.G. Chemie? They'd never heard of it. They ordered an employee named Selke to investigate Schmitz. "Find out all his interests," they said.
Selke appeared in Heidelberg a few days later. He was close to tears. To find out some of the Geheimrat's interests was possible -but all of them? But the investigators were asking Schmitz about other things then, and he was wrought up enough to call in Max Ilgner and the family lawyer who lived down the road. The icebreaker was a British major who happened by one day. This major, named Tilley, had no apparent reason for being there, since the British had ordered no investigation. But his rank and authoritative manner for the first and only time reduced Schmitz to tears.
Working his way around the walls of the study, Tilley never let up on his questioning. Finally, Schmitz showed him a tiny safe in a closet behind the desk. In the safe Tilley found photographs of the I.G. Farben plant at Auschwitz. Tilley later wrote:
They became highly emotional. The photographs were in a wooden inlaid cover dedicated to Hermann Schmitz on his 25th Jubilee, possibly as a Farben director, and purported to describe pictorially the achievements of the Auschwitz rubber plant. Page 1, for example, had a picture with a narrow street of the old Auschwitz. The accompanying drawings depicted the Jewish part of the population in a manner that was not flattering to them. The legend underneath said, "The Old Auschwitz," or "As it Was," or "Auschwitz in 1940." The second page began a section entitled "Planning the New Auschwitz Works.
7.
The Address That Wasn't There
As BELLE MAYER TALKED, for a moment I almost thought I was
back at public school in Woodbury, New Jersey, where I grew
up. The floor of my new office was dark with oil, my desk was
so small I couldn't get both elbows on it. "Two years since the
Army took over," I said. "And not even a blotter to hide the
scratches." She apologized as if she, rather than the United States government, were at fault. For months, file cabinets, more typewriters, and stationery had been on requisition. "I asked those two G.I.3 to drop off another requisition for your desk at AMG, so maybe that will come this week." She sighed. "What's keeping them up there in Berlin?"
"Maybe the steam shovel fell on them," I said. "While we're waiting, let's dispose of Schmitz as of the moment." I tapped the black folder on my desk.
"Surely," she said, "the Reich government would have cracked down if he hadn't been playing some bigger game with them."
"I don't know." I tossed the folder on the high pile of documents beside my desk. "Probably the pension is good material for the defense. Schmitz was playing a lone hand on it. Suppose the directors plead his secretiveness as a defense to everything?"
"Maybe they will," she admitted. "But he's even surer than the others that he'll get off. His attorneys are boasting. Schmitz says his captors were G.I. eager beavers, and when his 'friends' come he'll be set free. Lately, he just frowns and blinks. He's got everybody baffled. . . . You don't suppose those guys are hitting the Berlin night clubs?"
She was striding back and forth in front of my desk. Unless she could work a steam shovel by remote control, I said, she might as well relax.
"Joe, maybe if you sent me to Heidelberg again?" I shook my head. "No? Very well, but I can't get over the idea that Schmitz may be the key to the entire aggressive-war count."
She was so enthusiastic that it seemed the case couldn't fail. She understood that we were searching for more than facts. Where better to run down some of the facets of Schmitz's motives and intentions than in his home town of Heidelberg?
Old Dr. Karl Duisberg had lived in Heidelberg. Before he became Farben's first head, Duisberg was the father of industrial , chemistry throughout the world. Heidelberg was the scientific wellspring that fed the first synthetic-dye and basic-chemical enterprises that grew up in the Rhine Valley about the time of the Civil War in America and during the period when Bismarck was unifying the German states. Taking an industry rural in its origin - furnishing fertilizers to the Rhineland farmer, textiles and dyes to the peasant and weaver, medicines to the druggist - Karl Duisberg had led the drive at the end of the nineteenth century for combination of several big German chemical firms, by pooling arrangements, to control market and price conditions and to protect their joint interests in the export trade. In 1904, Duisberg urged that the entire German chemical industry should be brought together in a cartel. He said: "The now existing domination of the German chemical industry over the rest of the world would then, in my opinion, be assured."
Dr. Carl Bosch, inventor of the Bosch magneto, had lived in Heidelberg all his life. Dr. Bosch could recite, in tones of austere sentimentality, from A Child's Garden of Verses. Bosch was also interested in the nitrates that were an essential ingredient in the manufacture of explosives. For years the' principal source of nitrates had been saltpeter from Chile. At the turn of the century, German explosives manufacturers perceived the danger that in a future war Germany might be cut off from this Chilean nitrate supply. In 1913, Bosch - with a Dr. Haber, also a Heidelberg resident - invented a fixation process that yielded the synthetic nitrates without which Germany would have lost World War I a few months after it began.
"Now," said Belle. "We come to the Schmitz era in Farben. The other directors say Schmitz held his position because he was reticent, and that's a perfect explanation for their defense, because it holds up. His older associates say that even in his clerking days at Frankfurt, he wore this perplexed look, as if the simplest arithmetic was too big for his head to solve. He trusted nobody. What could be sweeter for their defense? As he got older, he confessed he was puzzled that he couldn't recall the status of this transaction and that. Perfect - for him and them, too!"
Certainly, Schmitz's power was in no wise affected by his social inferiority. The younger Duisbergs and Bosches came often to share his frugal hospitality. It was said that when business was under discussion Schmitz walked into a room ahead of them, and when anything else was being discussed he walked closely - too closely - behind them. Through his influence his nephew Max Ilgner became the guiding influence abroad, above the younger Duisbergs and Bosches.
"Joe, the trouble is that all three of them - Schmitz and his lawyer Von Knieriem and Ilgner - were picked up together. They were thrown into Prungsheim jail there in Frankfurt, and they were all in the same cell block for months. We throw them together and we say, 'O.K., boys, fix up your story.' "
The telephone rang. It was Drexel Sprecher. After hearing what he had to say, I hung up; and I didn't know how to break the news easily to her.
'They got the requisition," I said.
"What did Sprecher say?"
"He said my desk ought to be along. The boys left the requisition with the AMG."
"And -"
"They excavated but they didn't find anything."
She sat down. " 'Berlin Northwest 7' - the address that wasn't there." She put her head on the table. Her voice was choking. "Oh, what a beautiful day!"
'The best way to forget it is to go right ahead. There was one file found in the vault, wasn't there? Let's prepare it for introduction in court."
"Go right ahead. Snap out of it! Who cares about one file?"
'I'm sorry. I know you've been under a strain; I know everyone here has been under a strain."
In a minute she lifted her head; her fingers flew at the pile of documents. A couple of minutes later she threw a few papers on my desk. They were still in German.
"Haven't these been translated yet?"
She was trembling. "I haven't been able to get a translator," she said. "I can read a little. But Charmatz is better at German than I."
She went over to the hotel to rest.
In a few minutes Charmatz was in my office. He stood over my shoulder. His translation was so fluent that it seemed only a few minutes before he'd finished. Actually, it was night time, and we had become so engrossed that later neither of us could remember who had switched on the light in my office.
This Northwest 7 file revealed that before Hermann Schmitz rose to the presidency, every factory which I.G. Farben operated carried the Farben name. In 1935, when they began to produce for the government, the directors became more modest.
Some of the Farben factories made products that were interchangeable for peace or war - buna rubber, synthetic gasoline, and the ethylene oxide that would yield either Prestone or poison gas.
The contracts for these interchangeable products carried the Farben name. Reading them, one would decide that their signers believed this production was only to help build up the German economy. Farben financed these factories from its own funds, with the Reich agreeing to pay off any losses.
The other factories, however, made products that had no large peacetime use, such as the explosives-intermediate hexogen. The total production was financed by the Wehrmacht. The factories were built exclusively for war; Farben insisted on this form of financing because "the production is war material and no assured peacetime market can be expected." Farben refused the use of its name. To many Germans, and to many more people in the outside world, these Farben-Wehrmacht factories were known simply by the names of the cities where they were located.
8.
American Addresses
FEBRUARY, MARCH, APRIL - the first problems were simple, compared to those that followed. Our dozen lawyers, with a handful of
assistants, were overwhelmed. We all felt the hazy evidence of
single deeds overshadowed by a vast cloud of industrial influence
billowing out far beyond sight. The idea of punishing war plots and invasions had almost no legal foundation before World War I. Between the two World Wars, the Geneva and Paris Conventions had condemned such acts and in fact declared them generally outlawed. Until the international trial at Nurnberg, however, none of these declarations had even been tested judicially.
Proof was not easy. Conquest and its despicable code were part and parcel of every offense. We were investigating, not assault with a deadly weapon by a single defendant, but floggings of slaves who would never have been within reach of the lash if they hadn't been needed to produce for a war machine. We were studying, not a single armed robbery, but many acts of plunder in the wake of advancing armies -not a single premeditated killing, but a vast plan of aggression, all of whose evil roots could never be dug up, for they were not planted by the urge-to-power of a single man or a resentful violence that burned steadily for days only. The precedents were recent, but the motives were in the centuries; and many acts which were crimes within one nation's borders were automatically pardoned by the special immoralities of war.
Where could one place a finger on the map of Europe and conclude: This is where the last war really began? The moment when any man forms the first impulse to violence usually remains lost in the world of undiscovered psychology. Here the great barriers to discovery were social, political, and economic as well as individual. The question was - how to expose the aggressive acts for which neither the Nazi regime nor the position of these directors furnished any plausible excuse?
Drexel Sprecher and I talked it over. I appointed him administrative head of a new setup, asked him to get the facts and interpret them more quickly.
During the next few weeks I worked on many documents. I was interrupted now and then by a puff of white powder, a tickling reminder that the crumbled glory of Nurnberg, the shrine of the Nazi Party, still blew in the streets two years after the surrender. Then one day Drexel Sprecher came in to demand that we set a deadline for issuing the indictment. We had quite an argument. The staff had read hundreds of documents and sifted the facts through at least four legal theories. "Not only are the facts insufficient," I said, "but we still haven't found any theory that will tie everything together."
"It's simple enough to some Congressmen," he said. "You've seen the clippings that Public Relations has been sending over the last few days. If Congress ever gets the idea that we haven't got a case, we're through."
"We can't help that."
"Something has to be done, and there's no time like the present. We're not moving fast enough."
I sighed. He was right. Only about one-third of the existing material had been summarized. Some of the staff, Sprecher pointed out, felt we should go ahead and issue the indictment anyway and back it up later. Certainly we had before us a picture of unique business aggrandizement that could support charges of plundering. But what else? "On the aggressive-war charge," I said, "we should have at least a prima facie case."
"Prima facie case?" Sprecher was exasperated. "What is a prima facie case of war?"
"That is the question we shall have to answer for the court. I know it's complex. But the simplest thing we should be able to prove - their slave-labor activities - is troublesome, too. Let me show you something. This brief came to me this morning, as proof ."
He scanned the brief the staff had prepared. Slavery was horribly depicted, no doubt of that. Here was the story of manhunts in the streets of Germany- at the motion-picture houses, at churches, and at night in private houses. Outside Germany, some of the Nazi methods had their origin in the blackest period of the African slave trade. "When in searching villages it has been necessary to burn them down," read one order to fifty offices in the Ukraine, "the whole population will be put at the disposal of the Commissioner by force. As a rule, no more children will be shot." Fritz Sauckel, Hitler's labor plenipotentiary, hanged at Numberg the year before, had testified that of five million workers who came to Germany, fewer than two hundred thousand came of their own will. His orders of April 1942 were: "All the men must be fed, sheltered, and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable expenditure."
In a few choice words, Sprecher cursed the Nazi regime. "Sure," I agreed. "It's horrible. But here we have Hitler and Sauckelthat's about all."
"You know we've got more than this on Farben," he insisted.
"Not much. I sent the rest of the stuff back to the central file room yesterday. You don't mind taking a run down there, do you?"
A half-hour later, when he strode into my office, he held a dozen papers, fanned out in one large hand; in the other hand he carried two files.
He spread the papers out on my desk, scanning them again, shaking his head.
"Where's the rest of the dope?" "You tell me." Here was evidence that before the war became widespread Farben representatives had scoured all the occupied countries to get workers. In the countries of Western Europe, Farben first asked the impressed laborer to sign a contract. Those who refused to sign were forced to come to Germany anyway. If they did not come, their ration cards would be taken away; they would be denied work in their homelands, and reprisals would be taken against members of their families. Even the more fortunate, after arriving at the Farben plants, were not free to change jobs or go home when they pleased; they had no freedom of movement. If they escaped, the Gestapo hunted them down - by an arrangement with Farben. Some who were lucky enough to escape Gestapo torture were returned to the Farben plants.
This "recruiting" was ruthlessly successful. By 1941 Farben had already assigned to its plants 10,000 slaves. In 1942, according to Farben figures, their slave employment rose to 22,000; in 1943 to 58,000; and by 1945 to well over 100,000. These figures represented only the number of slaves at any given time; there was a tremendous turnover.
By the time Fritz Sauckel took office in March 1942 to direct the Reich's slave-labor program, he was surprised to discover that I.G. Farben had already been "wildly recruiting foreign labor." As late as 1943 the Reich's Minister of Economics wrote to the Farben offices not with commands, but seeking suggestions as to how the government might best exploit its conquered workers.
"This tells us what the institution of Farben was doing " I said. "But how is the evidence tied up with each director?"
Altogether, there wasn't much more evidence than Bernstein had turned up two years before. There had been thousands of forced laborers working in the Farben plants; yet here there wasn't a single statement from any of them to pin responsibility for their plight on any Farben director. Also puzzling was the absence of direct evidence about the Farben buna plant at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The "album of dedication" which Major Tilley had found at Geheimrat Schmitz's house had disappeared. Two weeks before, Drew Pearson. at my request, had advertised over the radio for its return. His appeal had got no response. I exclaimed: "Farben must have kept some records at the Auschwitz site."
"None that we know of."
"You mean to tell me there is not a word on this up at Griesheim?"
"Not a word."
I recalled again the freed workers in the Farben administration building at Frankfurt, burning records to keep warm - and, later, the wood-burning trucks moving under Ernst Struss's direction from that building to the new document center at Griesheim. I mentioned these events. Half-hopefully, I said: "You don't think there's any chance they vanished at that time?"
"I wouldn't know how to question a wood-burning truck. I'll have the next guy who goes to Frankfurt check again at Griesheim. But we can't count on anything there."
"All right, where do we make another beginning? Who besides Schmitz 'recruited' those slave workers? Who manned these Farben offices?"
Sprecher dropped a second folder on my desk and continued to pace the room.
"We have Von Schnitzler's accusations."
"Is this Von Schnitzler?" I fingered the second folder.
Sprecher nodded.
After Schmitz, Ilgner, and Von Knieriem had been picked up in Heidelberg, Baron Georg von Schnitzler was picked up in Frankfurt.
Von Schnitzler was the one Farben director whose family did not center in Heidelberg. Of the Frankfurt aristocracy, he was the nephew of Baron Dr. Walther vom Rath, a Frankfurt Junker and oldest head of the largest firm which was absorbed in the Farben cartel. In fact, it had been said that the cartel took its name from Baron vom Rath's firm, Farbenwerke vorm.
Farben meant "dyestuffs"; the Von Schnitzler-Vom Rath families were eminent in German dyestuffs. Not long after he married Lillian vom Rath, Baron von Schnitzler took special training in dyestuffs and became, in 1928, the head of Farben's powerful Dyestuffs Committee.
Though his bags were packed, Von Schnitzler denied that he was going anywhere. He denied that he was a Nazi. When he realized he would be detained anyway, he was eager to talk. The investigators liked him, for he admitted his own "mistakes" before putting the finger on any of his fellow directors. He might as well tell everything, he said; yes, he had been head of the Dyestuffs Committee, and he had been about to leave for Spain. Why Spain? Well, not long before he had bought a house in Madrid, and he and the Baroness had many good friends there. The investigators had uncovered records showing that Farben had backed the Caudillo Franco with huge sums, and they asked him about that. "It is not so improbable," he said, "that we should foster interior movements in foreign countries." He asked carefully: "Do you have any proofs?" They showed him a ledger of Farben "contributions" in Spain.
He felt guilty about some things. Farben's own slave-labor program, he said, was a vicious offspring of the war. Supposing his statements were competent, I.G. Farben had not just played an acquiescent role but been the leading instigator in the greatest program of slavery and mass murder in the history of the world. Apparently Hermann Schmitz's remorseful tears, when the investigators had found the album, had been shed for more than one slave factory.
Before Fritz Sauckel took over the conscription of labor; before Himmler committed the incredibly sadistic deeds that finally led him to suicide; before Hitler announced for the Jews an extermination that was to spread like an instant fever to Poland and then to the whole of Europe; before enforced labor of any kind was a Reich policy, foreigners and prisoners of war had already been enslaved, at Schmitz's direction, in the I.G. Farben plants.
"If these statements are acceptable," I commented to Sprecher, "they prove, too, that Dr. Ambros should have received the notoriety that Hitler himself got for the most infamous industrial project in history, the camp at Auschwitz. But Von Schnitzler himself - ?"
"No doubt you're thinking Von Schnitzler is not the best evidence?"
"That's right. Thousands of people were there on the site at Auschwitz, but we can't make a house-to-house carvas all over Europe to find out who our witnesses were. We've got to find those records. As for the rest of the Baron's testimony, it puts the finger on Schmitz alone."
Sprecher argued persuasively. He doubted that Schmitz had acted without the consent of the entire managing board. Von Schnitzler had been a member of the board. Not long after he had been promoted to the chairmanship over dyestuffs, Von Schnitzler became chairman of Farben's powerful Commercial Committee as well. "His knowledge of sales gave him an accurate idea of how many employees Farben was 'hiring.' "
"It's not direct enough," I said.
"If I could get him on the stand, 'I'd get something more direct for you."
Maybe Sprecher would, I thought. Obviously he was a shrewd cross-examiner. Before coming to Nurnberg he'd been an interrogator with the OSS; for four years before the war he had been a trial counsel for the National Labor Relations Board. "But suppose he doesn't take the stand?"
'He will. If he talked in 1945, he'll talk again."
'It's weak; it's not defin
ite enough. Put Charmatz on it," I said. "We can't spare Charmatz on aggressive war, I'm afraid."
'I'm going to talk to Taylor tomorrow about getting another man. Ever hear of Duke Minskoff?"
"Never met him."
"He's a lawyer with the Treasury Department. He was over here once as head of the division that investigated personal assets. He talked Emma Goering out of over a half-million dollars worth of jewels and a sizable amount of cash."
"He's the man then!"
It was after midnight before Sprecher and I finished reading for the fourth or fifth time Von Schnitzler's 1945 statements.
In 1935, as Farben was about to go in for government production, Hermann Goering had set up a new agency. The purpose was to make Germany economically independent of the outside world. To do this meant that Germany must develop a tremendous increase in raw materials - that is, to make more Farben synthetics. Goering wanted a top scientist to head the new agency, and the Farben board donated its director Carl Krauch, the eminent former professor of chemistry at the University of Heidelberg.
One day in mid-summer, according to Von Schnitzler (the invasion of Poland was still four years in the future), Carl Krauch moved his office from Frankfurt to the Berlin Northwest 7 building.
On the surface, the move seemed quite innocent. Having gone into the government, Krauch moved to where the government was. His new office was called Vermittlungsstelle Wehrmacht, which meant "Army Liaison." Had the office operated openly, few suspicions would have been aroused, for part of Farben's business had always come from supplying armies with munitions components.
Yet if Krauch was to head a raw-materials office, publicized in glowing releases as the agency to make Germany at last self-sufficient economically, why was his remaining Farben contact military? And why was the Vermittlungsstelle Wehrmacht a secret office whose mail came addressed simply "Berlin Northwest 7"?
Von Schnitzler offered an amazing explanation. "For twelve years," he said of the whole enterprise in which Krauch's Berlin office played a vital part, "the Nazi foreign policy and the I.G. foreign policy were largely inseparable. I also conclude that I.G. was largely responsible for Hitler's foreign policy."
Damning words! Would a court believe that, without Farben, Hitler's long-festering plans to march across Europe could never have crystallized into an official policy?
My four-month tenure was drawing to an end. If I resigned now it would mean a fatal administrative interruption. That's what I told myself, anyway. Twice within a week, Telford Taylor's office telephoned to detail the problem in dollars and cents. Unless his office got another appropriation, all pre-trial investigations like this would have to come to an end. "March is almost over. Can you give us an estimated deadline for issuing the indictment? And an estimated duration of trial, if there's to be a trial?"
"Right now," I said, "it depends on how much weight the court would attach to Von Schnitzler."
"Will you try to get the indictment out in a month?"
I promised to try.
There was a crisis in the wind that blew in several directions. Newsmen began coming to my office every afternoon. Their questions were as tensely pertinent as those asked by newsmen at the end of a day in court. One had the premature feeling that the trial was already going on, and that it would be ended before we got into the courtroom.
The newsmen reported Congressional opposition. On the House floor, Representative Dondero of Michigan had spoken savagely. How long, he wanted to know, would the American taxpayer stand for this vengeful nonsense? Joining his crusade was Representative Rankin of Mississippi. In the Senate, Taft had denounced the whole concept of "ex post facto" justice; the losers were being tried merely because they had lost. Taft's denunciation, unsound though it might be shown to be, spoke for the majority of the German people and many in American Military Government.
Then one day after the last snows were dried up, I called a special staff meeting and announced that we could begin drafting the accusations. At last we had enough evidence, including the Von Schnitzler admissions, to make a prima facie case on all counts.
"Sometime next month, we'll issue the indictment, win or lose. There are still many puzzles, but May it is. We'll put the charges together and take them apart as we go along. Send your proofs along with each paragraph."
They were still applauding when a messenger came in from the jail. He handed me an envelope. The staff stopped clapping.
It took me a few minutes to scan the contents. In two statements, Baron von Schnitzler had cast doubt on practically everything he had said in 1945. I told them the news. The Baron now said that he "had not been technically qualified" to say many of the things he'd said. As for the other admissions, he "had been in a state of intense mental depression in 1945 ."
Sprecher shouted above the din. Might as well face it - without Von Schnitzler, half the case would collapse. Belle Mayer thrust a finger near his face. "Let's be reasonable! Most of his admissions were not technical at all - so where does he get off with that argument? And of course he was suffering 'intense mental depression.' Did you ever know anybody to admit anything very damaging without being depressed about it?"
Were the Baron's 1945 statements voluntary? Everywhere the basic law of the courts for accepting admissions of this sort was simple. The prosecution must show that admissions were "voluntarily made." But the definitions of "voluntary" differed according to the jurisdiction where the case was tried. And if we on the staff could not agree, we couldn't expect the court to agree.
A rubble heap on the Unter den Linden. . . . A .Baron suddenly frightened by God knew what. Where did we go from here?
The Farben policy after 1935, although it stemmed from the brilliance of its wanderlust board of directors, was oriented around Berlin. Von Schnitzler had made that plain. But Professor Krauch, while agreeing that he had nursed the "raw-materials economy," insisted that his Berlin office had been just a place to hang his coat.
According to Von Schnitzler, this coat was many sizes too large for one man. But now Von Schnitzler had taken another look and agreed with the others: Nothing very important happened in Berlin.
I decided to have Max Ilgner interrogated again. Ilgner had hung his coat in Berlin ever since Farben was Farben. He had rated enough pull with the Nazis to save from death the only survivor of the Roehm plot on Hitler's life in 1933, and he'd hired this man in his office.
Yet Ilgner's "pull" was cosmopolitan. The world's greatest joiner, he had refused to join the Nazi Party in 1934 while at the same time he joined International Rotary against express orders from Goebbels. He was a queer duck, all right.
I believed that Ilgner knew more than anyone about Farben's fabulous expansion abroad. But without Von Schnitzler's testimony, could even Ilgner be brought to justice? Belle Mayer strongly believed Ilgner guilty. She might get more out of him than anyone else on the staff. In fact, she was too convinced of the case against Ilgner.
"What have we got to lose?" I argued. "You've interrogated him several times, and you should know how to throw him off balance."
"He was off balance already. After he and Schmitz and Von Knieriem were put in Prungsheim jail, they were released every day for a few hours to be interrogated over at the Reichsbank building. You'd think they'd never been in jail, the way they went out to the staff car. And Ilgner always ran out first. I can see him now walking up to the car all set to step in, when Uncle Hermann called out for him to wait. And then the three of them stood there on the sidewalk jockeying each other. Who had the right to step in first? Hermann Schmitz, the boss? Von Knieriem, Schmitz's lawyer? Or Ilgner? Well, you guess."
'Schmitz first," I said.
"That's right. Uncle Hermann brushed Max aside and stepped in. Then Ilgner. And last came Von Knieriem, even though he had more degrees than either of them and was a Prussian aristocrat besides. People may have made fun of Ilgner, but they did it behind his back. He jumped for only two people."
"Schmitz and who else?"
"Carl Krauch. Ilgner tried to push Uncle Hermann around once in a while, but when Carl Krauch walked into Berlin Northwest 7, Max Ilgner stood at attention."
I said: "So Ilgner kowtowed to Krauch because of Krauch's position in the Reich." "Maybe. You ask, Why didn't he join the Nazi Party until later? It's because he was too ambitious. The Party would put a crimp into his belonging to everything else. I don't know why Krauch should have cowed him."
"Maybe you can cow him. Someone has to do the job alone, because he shuts up when two interrogators are around."
Some of my notes on her report next morning are lost, but the official interrogation was saved, and as for the rest my memory is fairly accurate.
The jail sergeant had told her on the phone that she could see Ilgner any time during the evening.
'The others talk at night," the guard explained, jangling his keys as he led her and the interpreter through the damp cement corridor. "But Ilgner writes. When he has nothing else to write, he goes back and makes one big statement out of all the smaller ones he's done before." Belle laughed. She had thirty or so Ilgnerstatements with her.
In the center of the cell block, the guard halted. Under a dingy light, Ilgner faced the cell wall, scribbling. As the key scraped in the lock, he turned to tell the guard to go away. "Already too often I have been interrupted by this woman - and while I was writing in my own hand."
All she saw of his piglike face was the thin pouting lower lip, propped up by an apex of deep wrinkles. He nodded curtly to her. It was, he said, a gross insult for a man of his standing to be questioned by any woman.
Belle announced that she was staying anyway. She was interested in Farben's overseas representatives, she said. Hermann Schmitz had first told these men to report trends in the market; then he, Ilgner, had developed this simple practice into an intelligence service that operated every place where Farben had an office. This was the outgrowth of the seemingly purposeless gathering of statistics that had been going on in his office for years. Then the leading executives abroad had been commissioned as agents. Ilgner had given them the title Verbindungsmanner, and he had appointed all of them himself. Were these facts correct?
"You have the answers in my own hand." His voice was strident; each cheek showed one large dimple. "Yes, there was a plan for getting information. This was not a development from the idea of anyone else, you understand. I ere-ated it. I ere-ated the name Verbindungsmänner; that was entirely my creation - yes, indeed. These men were not agents in the American sense. You see, I am quite familiar with the United States, having known many people there; men of ability, I may add - many."
"Now, these agents, the Verbindungsmänner, picked up their intelligence in foreign countries and reported it to you?"
"Intelligence? Economic intelligence, if one chooses so to call it. I wish to make this distinction as I have already done in - "
"In your own hand, I know," Belle said. "We are referring to military intelligence."
He frowned. "If any information of that kind was gathered, I must have been out of the country at the time. You would have to ask my colleagues about that. Dr. Reithinger, perhaps."
"You mean the Dr. Reithinger you hired to head your statistical department. Well, we have evidence that he submitted regular reports to the German high command."
"Is that so? During the war, I assume you mean."
"Before the war, too."
"Is that so? I have heard that my colleague, Dr. Reithinger, submitted a few reports to General Thomas, but you must understand that General Thomas was not the military head of the high command. I wish to make the distinction that Thomas was the economic head of the high command. Again, I wish to distinguish between the economic, the military, and the political.''
"We understand that," Belle said. "You are making the point that although Herr Thomas was a general, he was not in the Army in the military sense! But Dr. Reithinger was under you."
"Oh, yes, I had absolute authority over my Dr. Reithinger. But I did not have absolute knowledge. You see, I was out of the country six months of the year - in England, the United States, South America, Central America - "
"And the Verbindungsmann sent your office reports on prices and tariffs - very well, that was economic." Belle showed him a letter written by Ilgner to the General Aniline and Film Corporation. "This, it appears, is also in your hand: 'Inform us immediately and with the utmost precision of each step taken by our chemical competitors, especially DuPont.' "
"Yes, yes, business - why deny it?"
"And your Dr. Gattineau was put in charge of the political department of your office - the same Gattineau you saved from execution?"
"Yes, yes. My Dr. Gattineau."
"And every change in the South and Latin American governments was reported by your agents to Gattineau."
"Of course."
"And the number of ships in South American harbors - before 'Â¥th war."
His head snapped down.
"The number and kinds of ships in South American harbors."
"Nein."
"I have a list here of some of those reports. The organization of the Chilean army. A map of potential bombing targets outside Buenos Aires. You remember receiving those at Berlin Northwest 7, I assume."
"The organization of the Chilean army, perhaps -we may have had a contract to supply them. The others - nein." He gave her a shrewd look. "You have the actual records?"
"They went to the German High Command."
"Naturally, anything is possible while one is away from his office. I was ill at times. My colleague Dr. Gattineau might be able to assist you on that question."
"Mr. Ilgner, here we have a letter of commendation. It was sent from German Intelligence to Berlin Northwest 7. It says that your agents, trained to collect information while they sold your products, were more valuable than the Army espionage service, because they would not be suspected, like cloak-and-dagger spies."
"I know nothing of that."
"Your agents became foreign citizens, and in many cases their local company was not even called by a Farben name. So, if they were detected, they could confess without implicating either Farben or Germany."
He shook his head. "Nein, nein."
"You learned nothing of these reports while you were abroad, and yet you were away from your office when they were received. You must have lived on the ocean."
"As I have said, we collected only business intelligence."
"All right." Belle sighed. "Here is a letter from Berlin Northwest 7. It directs your overseas salesmen to 'confess,' if necessary. It went out from your office, and you were responsible."
"I was in command, but I was not responsible for that."
"If you got only business information, what would these men have to 'confess' to?"
He said nothing.
"All right, here's your last chance to explain. Just give me straight, quick answers. What was a Bayer-aspirin salesman doing with aerial photographs of the Port of New York -in 1936?"
"I did not know of that."
"And your so-called patent company Chemnyco in New York City?" she asked. "What was in those records that your brother Rudolf destroyed before the United States government could examine them?"
He replied wearily. "Chemnyco had sent data on political economy to my colleagues' office at Northwest 7, from which inferences in regard to American armament could be made. And, apparently, one felt concerned that American authorities might establish such conclusions."
"By 'one,' you mean your brother Rudolf and yourself; is that right?"
He looked into space.
'I was not in New York at the time."
The sun was a halo around the parapet which rose above the jail's east eave. In our conference room, cigarette smoke mingled with the sunlight. Usually the staff straggled in, forming pre-meeting groups, but this morning they were all early and they were all talking together.
What was the sense of crying about it? Ilgner "owned" all the good Doctors when there was something to brag about, but when incriminating things happened, they were his "colleagues."
Sprecher shouted: "O.K., the party's over." They came to order, some sitting on the floor, some on the desk, and a few on the one couch which had been sent down at last from AMG.
I began: "By the look on your faces, we are all agreed that we cannot do without Von Schnitzler."
Sprecher, who had done several laps around the room, stopped. 'If there's no other solution to consider, let's assume we could get Von Schnitzler to repeat everything he said in 1945."
Belle was the first to jump to her feet. "It's ridiculous to waste our time thinking about it. He says now he didn't mean it. So we are going to ask him to say again that he did?"
Most of the staff agreed that we'd have to go ahead assuming the court would take Von Schnitzler's earlier testimony as it stood. But considering the background of those earlier statements with the Baron's recent weakening, Sprecher and I were both struck with the uncertainty of such a course.
Sprecher took the floor. "In my opinion, we can't risk using those early statements in their present form. Somebody's got to talk to him again." There were several dissenters, but Sprecher, who had been in Germany at the time, pictured the chaotic last days of the war. Von Schnitzler had volunteered information, but he'd also made it clear to the investigators that he was afraid to refuse. The Allied Command had passed a law making it a crime "to fail to disclose information on request" - a perfectly good law for wartime, to protect the occupying troops from ambush and sabotage. But Von Schnitzler had no intention of ambushing anyone, and this fact might be used as an argument that he had been coerced. He had suffered, the argument ran, the "duress of occupation."
The colloquy became a controversy, with Sprecher holding out against the rest of the staff.
"Duress of occupation"? Nothing Von Schnitzler admitted had anything to do with troop tactics or sabotage."
"Maybe not. But those who were questioned at that time were not given any interpretations. They were just told: 'Talk or else.' Grabbed in the midst of the fighting, Von Schnitzler says a lot of things he later regrets."
"But he didn't even mention that law then."
'That's true, he didn't. We might even say that his main fear was his own conscience. We can say that. But the judges are not going to look at one sentence and say, 'Here the Baron was remorseful,' and then look at another and say, 'Here he was worrying about that occupation statute.' Why are the boys in the jail preparing all these statements right now emphasizing how depressed he was? They've been preparing all along to have him claim the 'duress of occupation.' "
"We must remember," Sprecher wound up his argument, "that drafters of the London Charter and Allied Control Council Law No. 10 didn't set forth any rules as to what makes an admission voluntary. The judges can lean to any viewpoint that has any support at all."
Why hadn't Sprecher brought up this argument before? Because he hadn't thought of it until so much depended on Von Schnitzler.
"If Von Schnitzier's statements were really voluntary then, he might be persuaded to repeat them again now. I'd like to test his conscience, anyway - that is, if I can be spared." Sprecher turned to me.
"We can't spare anybody. What do you want to do?"
"Let me take off for a few days to talk to him."
Sprecher's request was fantastic, yet I O.K.'d it. What kind of fool was I? The Baron had most to fear now from putting a noose around his own neck. Like the others, I was absolutely convinced that he would not talk again.
Sprecher's assignment didn't help the morale of the staff. The idea of a prosecutor going into "conference" with a potential defendant! Belle Mayer cornered me. "DO you know what some of the staff are saying?"
"Probably just what I'm telling myself. But this contention of duress is very strong. I couldn't do anything else."
"They say that with the indictment only three weeks off, you won't go through with it unless Sprech succeeds."
"We'll face the failure when it comes upy" I said.
"If only we could get out the indictment a few days early! That might help."
"I've set the date and that's all there is to it. The paragraphs and supporting proof better keep rolling in here if they want to make a case."
"If we did get out the indictment, Joe, it would be so much harder for anyone to quash the case."
"Don't you think I know that?"
Several of us were in my office, feeling pretty low, when Belle rushed in waving a large orange tissue. She did a rhumba around me. "Nineteen forty-five. Nineteen forty-five. Lo, the poor Russians and the poor Swedes - "
Finally, I snatched the paper. "Where did you get this?"
"I found it in the Army files in the Farben building at Frankfurt." It was a shipping ticket, complete with listings, for Berlin Northwest 7 documents that had been shipped from Berlin to the United States War Department in 1945. She was almost hysterical.
"Since 1945 they've been sitting in Washington. Wait till Bemstein hears about this - and the OSS- and the Department of Justice. If the Russians and the Swedes only knew!"
"Go to Alexandria first," I said. "What a fool I was not to remember! Before I came here? Mickey Marcus told me there was a warehouse full of records there. Go to Alexandria first."
"Me?"
"You've been saying you needed a rest. How long will it take you to get packed?"
"One hour."
"We'll be sweating out Von Schnitzler here. You do the best you can over there."
In 1945, Von Schnitzler had been more afraid of himself than anything else, Sprecher felt. Most of the Baron's statements read like ramblings of conscience, not guided disclosures. He had even hinted at Farben blame for some things where he wasn't too sure of the facts.
"These statements are loose, some of them full of hearsay, but to the ordinary reader amazingly believable," Sprecher said. "Don't worry; he'll confirm everything before I get through.''
"It just doesn't make sense that he qualified those statements,'' I said. "What stopped him from taking it all back a long time ago?"
"For two years, Joe, he had the courage to stick to his guns, then suddenly - " Sprecher frowned. "Just play along with me, will you?"
"I'll play along for a few days."
But I was not happy about it, and my uneasiness concerned the interrogator as much as Von Schnitzler. Before this time, one might often observe Drexel Sprecher striding up the jail walk like a shavetail going to review his troops. In this simple but seemingly hopeless assignment, I expected him to slow down a bit, but not to saunter, as he did, to the jail every day. He was not the grass-chewing type.
Within a few days, Von Schnitzler had confirmed about onefourth of his 1945 testimony. I thought we were getting somewhere. Sprecher didn't agree,
"If he was depressed in 1945, and if that was 'duress,' it may still be duress, because right now he is the most depressed fellow I ever saw. Do you know what he said to me today? 'Mr. Sprecher, you are not the first American I have met who understood the soul, but you are the first who has not bragged about it.' But there is still something holding him back and I am going to find out what it is.''
"Someone must have really worked on him," I said. "Maybe if we take another look at his statements, we can get a lead."
We studied the statements again, and in fifteen minutes we had an answer.
We looked at the dates and places of incarceration, and the dates of a11 Von Schnitzler's 1945 statements, and the facts led straight to one man- Dr. Fritz ter Meer, the great developer of the bunarubber process.
In 1945 Von Schnitzler had said absolutely nothing significant while Dr. ter Meer was around. Whenever Ter Meer landed in the same jail with him, he stopped talking. Ter Meer was now at Dachau, and he was slated to come back to Numberg for questioning within a few days.
"If we're right about this," Sprecher said, "Von Schnitzler knows Ter Meer is coming, and he doesn't relish seeing him."
"We could arrange it so he won't have to," I said.
The next afternoon Sprecher walked briskly into the office. "We had it figured to a T," he said. "He almost cried. It seems Ter Meer was working on him for months, whenever they were in the same jail. Ter Meer kept hammering away at the idea that Von Schnitzler was not qualified to speak for Farben policy because he was not a true, all-round scientist. He humiliated Von Schnitzler by referring to him in front of the others as 'that salesman.' Brother, Von Schnitzler was mad today."
"How did you loosen him up?"
"I began by asking him if he had heard from Dr. ter Meer. He wanted to know why I asked .that- said it wasn't easy to send letters from one jail to another. I said we liked to have all the directors together sometimes so that they could plan their case until they got permanent counsel, and I mentioned casually that Ter Meer would be coming back here soon anyway, unless there was some reason why he should stay at Dachau for another week or so. That did it. He said he didn't know whether he could revalidate everything he had said in 1945, but he wouldn't be able to co-operate at all if we brought Ter Meer to plague him. He said that Dr. ter Meer was the best all-round scientist Farben had, but that he had no noble rank whatever and he didn't know any more about dyestugs than he, the Baron von Schnitzler, knew. Then he got sarcastic. Ter Meer, he said, knew everything except how to get them out of jail."
"Great! How about the statements?"
"Here. He worked along well with me today. We can hold Ter Meer there in Dachau. But the way it's going, there'll still be some exceptions to the 1945 statements. When I get through with this interrogation, I think we ought to send Von Schnitzler someplace where he can be alone and think it over."
On the day Ter Meer was put on the train for Nurnberg, Sprecher released Von Schnitzler from the Nurnberg jail and put him on the train for Munich, the rail point nearest Dachau. Ter Meer and Von Schnitzler crossed in transit, so to speak. Von Schnitzler was told merely to "rest and think it over."
A week later Von Schnitzler was back in the Numberg jail. He requested of another lawyer an immediate interview with Herr Sprecher. "What's it all about?" the other lawyer asked, but the Baron replied: "1 will speak to no one else. It's personal."
I got hold of Sprecher, and he hurried over to the jail. The next hour was my most eventful hour since coming to Nurnberg.
First, there was the call from Washington. Although the line was not busy, there was a cacophony of excited voices as if tests were being made on Bell's first telephone. Too bad, I thought, that Farben's technical men hadn't gotten into this field! I hung up to wait for a better connection.
The call finally came through. Belle was reporting. Vaguely I got the idea that she was in the process of setting up another United States government at Alexandria. I yelled back: She might at least have picked Washington or Philadelphia. What was the matter with the connection? There, that was better! The first batch of documents had been pulled from the Alexandria warehouse, by a crew which would soon be known as "Mayer's WPA." She enthusiastically described the operation. One guy about to leave the government had volunteered for a few days; she'd run across a few other employees whose duty orders were sufficiently abstruse for her to interpret them onto the job. "Can you hear me?" she shouted.
"I can hear you, although I don't understand why you should have much trouble. Mickey Marcus will help you there, you know that. What have you found?"
"Nothing is translated yet. I'll just report the trend. Vermitt1ungsteLLe W. - got that?"
"I got it."
"We found hundreds - repeat hundreds - of orders from the Wehrmacht to Farben's V. W. - got that?"
"Yes. How about V.W. suggestions to the Wehrmacht? Did you find any of those?"
"Not yet. But we haven't scratched the surface."
"Did you get any dope on the judges?"
She reported that a Judge Curtis Shake of Vincennes, Indiana, was coming to Nurnberg. He had been a chief justice of the Indiana supreme court and chairman of one of Indiana's Democratic conventions.
As she finished telling me about Judge Shake and hung up Sprecher rushed in. "I am quoting the Baron," Sprech shouted. " 'Mr. Sprecher, I am convinced that the first statements I made are correct. I have thought it over, and I am sure that, without exception, they are the whole truth.' "
After examining Von Schnitzler's latest utterances, I asked General Taylor's office to release the indictment. Count 1 charged the preparation and waging of aggressive war; Count 2 the plunder and spoliation of the industries and economies of other countries; and Count 3 the enslavement, mistreatment, and murder of human beings, including medical experimentations upon enslaved persons.
A few days later, Belle Mayer returned. There was feverish digging in all the Farben rooms of the Palace. Since the indictment had been issued, more newsmen than ever were hanging around waiting for a story. The shipment from Alexandria had arrived, but there would be no story for some time; the documents had to be indexed, analyzed, and translated before they could be used. But two other stories did break, one indirectly from Secretary of War Patterson, and the other from a Congressman who was not exactly an admirer of Secretary Patterson.
The Secretary relayed to us this telegram he had received from Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) :
DURING THE ENTIRE PERIOD OF OUR BUSINESS CONTACTS, WE HAD NO INKLING OF FARBEN'S CONNIVING PART IN HITLER'S BRUTAL POLICIES. WE OFFER ANY HELP WE CAN GIVE TO SEE THAT COMPLETE TRUTH IS BROUGHT TO LIGHT, AND THAT RIGID JUSTICE IS DONE.
F. W. ABRAMS,
CHAIRMAN OF BOARD
The staff had an angry debate.
"YOU want guarantees! Our London Charter doesn't say all statements have to be sworn. You want dates! Everybody knows how far back this thing goes. Without the Haber-Bosch process, World War I would have ended in 1915 -there's your answer whose side they were on!"
"Yes, but we are not trying 1915, or Haber and Bosch. We are not even trying World War 11. We are trying those men in the jail over there."
"All right, take those men! They produced Germany right into this war, and without them, Germany could never have gone to war."
"Without this and without that - that's not proof. We must show their positive intentions. Probably these judges will bend over backward to apply the principles of Anglo-American law. We have to have those dates clear, and we have to have the unsworn statements sworn to, wherever possible, even if it delays our going to trial."
Finally the advocates of a quicker trial date began to yield on this point. When we started to discuss the next point - being prepared to produce in open court those people who had given us affidavits - the battle raged again.
It would be a gigantic task, of course, to produce in open court the hundreds of people who had given us statements. In fact, the drafters of Allied Control Council Law No. 10 had foreseen this dilemma, and had provided that "affidavits" were admissible as evidence. But the American Constitution provided that the accused must be confronted by his accuser. I felt that we must be prepared to produce at least those witnesses whose affidavits were objected to by the defense. That meant we would have to start checking on the availability of witnesses all over Europe.
"It can't be helped," I said.
Belle Mayer blew up. "We haven't time to do both jobs. I can understand our preparing to get some of the witnesses, but these documents are signed and witnessed. Now just because they didn't say 'I swear' -we'll let the whole world crumble while we play legal tiddlywinks. It would be different if these papers were deliberately falsified."
"I know, I know."
"Time, time, time!" Each repetition of the word sounded bruised. "You're hopeless. Why don't you go ahead and defend them yourself?"
I was too perturbed to answer.
I'm sorry," she said. "Just consider what I said, not the way I said it."
She was tired; she hadn't slept much for a long time.
She was up early the next morning, organizing field trips to Berlin, Frankfurt, and Paris. Her jeep left Nurnberg with five people and two large suitcases bulging with documents. All of them would be traveling on nerve - getting clarifying statements, signatures, and oaths.
I made my usual morning visit to the snack bar to get a cup of coffee and pick up the Stars and Stripes. The lead story prolonged my recess. It was a blast by Representative George Dondero of Michigan against Secretary of War Patterson for his "failure to ferret out 'Communist sympathizersy " who had "infiltrated into key Army posts."
Representative Dondero had made this charge on the floor of the House. He had named ten of these "sympathizers.~~ My name was among them. The story recited my present position and quoted Dondero as saying that I was a "known left-winger from the Treasury Department who had been a close student of the Communist Party line."
During the next days I was called on often to answer this charge. There was quite a flurry at the Grand Hotel, center of American community life in Nurnberg. One day Judge Shake, a medium-built man with a look of honest curiosity, greeted me from his chair in the lobby. He was reading the Stars and Stripes. It was ridiculous - but I felt ill at ease. Four of the ten people named I didn't know at all. Suppose one of them was a Communist? I shook off the question.
The obvious cause of the attack didn't occur to me at first. My statement to the press did point out that five of the men named had worked at one time or another on War Department investigations of I.G. Farbenindustrie. I knew them, of course. 1 challenged Dondero to repeat his charge off the floor of Congress where he would not be immune from a libel suit. And although this was some months before one could conclude that absolutely groundless charges in Congress always went hand-in-hand with cowardice in the accuser, I added that Representative Dondero was "apparently the type of man who, so far from deserving a seat in the United States Congress, should not be trusted with official responsibility of any kind." That wasn't the end of it. There were calls from Washington and Berlin, requesting further denials. How can you add to a denial?
Then the Congressional Record arrived to solve the mystery. Dondero's speech before the House had not begun with the Communist labels, but rather with a blast against those "who had been trying to blacken the name of I.G. Farben." The newspapers had recently reported that the Farben trial staff had been investigating alleged stockpiles of magnesium which the Dow Chemical Company had shipped to Farben when our defense program was critically short of magnesium. Was it more than a coincidence that Dow Chemical was located in Dondero's district? How often had he lobbied in their interest? I determined to forget the incident, telling myself it should have no influence on the court.
No one slept much during the last few days before the tria!. The last of the corrected documents were brought in. General Taylor went to Paris; appearing before the full French cabinet,he demanded for the last time that the French give up Dr. Wurster and Dr. Ambros. After a long debate, the cabinet voted their extradition from the Farben plant at Ludwigshafen, in the French zone.
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''They Will Not Dare Go on With This " 40s
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