Group dismisses IG Farben offer to ex-slaves (fwd)

[Gerry Rouff]

For the IG Farben files:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 95 9:10:12 PDT
From: Reuter / David Crossland <C-reuters at clarinet.com>

	 FRANKFURT (Reuter) - Representatives of surviving slave
workers of German Nazi-era chemicals conglomerate IG Farben
Thursday dismissed an offer of compensation from the company's
successor firm as a delaying tactic.
	 Shareholders of IG Farben in Liquidation, formed in 1955 to
settle legal claims on property after the chemicals group was
broken up, decided Wednesday to pay ex-slave workers a share of
any assets it reclaimed in east Germany.
	 They voted to start talks with the German government aimed
at obtaining compensation for land seized from IG Farben by the
Soviet Union after World War II.
	 But representatives of those forced to toil for the company
that made the ``Zyklon B'' gas used in Nazi death camps rejected
the offer. They said such talks with Bonn would drag on until
all ex-slave workers had died.
	 IG Farben has appealed against an initial court ruling that
it has no claim to assets in east Germany. No final decision is
expected this year.
	 ``It's exactly the tactic IG Farben has used for the past 50
years,'' Philipp Mimkes, a leader of the ``Never Again'' group
campaigning for compensation, told Reuters. ``They want to wait
for the biological solution, until all the slaves have died.''
	 IG Farben was broken up after the war and its plants
transferred to Hoechst AG, Bayer AG and BASF, now Germany's
three largest chemical firms.
	 Neither those firms nor IG Farben accept responsibility for
the suffering of about 350,000 slave workers used by the
conglomerate during the war.
	 Mimkes said it was a ``scandal'' that IG Farben paid
shareholders more than $70 million in dividends in 1993 while
slave workers, its ``real creditors,'' got nothing.
	 IG Farben, which provided Hitler's war machine with
everything from drugs to synthetic rubber, ran its own
concentration camp at Monowitz in Poland to ensure it had a
regular supply of labor for its nearby rubber plant.
	 Workers at Monowitz lost weight rapidly due to a poor diet.
Those on hard labor had a life expectancy of six to eight weeks.
	 One former inmate said the workers were regularly lined up
naked in front of SS guards and IG Farben managers. Those that
were too thin were sent to be gassed at Auschwitz.
	 Ernst-Joachim Bartels, IG Farben's liquidator, believes it
is up to the German government as successor to the Third Reich
to compensate the slave workers.
	 ``It's not necessarily the responsibility of IG Farben that
the prisoners were so badly treated. All big firms used
concentration camp prisoners, there was not enough labor at the
time,'' Bartels told Reuters.
	 Asked how much IG Farben would pay the former slaves if it
did reclaim assets in east Germany or obtain government
compensation, he said: ``It's up to the shareholders. We
(liquidators) won't obstruct it, in fact we would welcome it.''