GRGR: Nazi slave labor

[Doug Millison]

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Germany-Slave-Labor.html
Filed at 12:04 p.m. EDT
By The Associated Press
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) -- Shareholders of IG Farben, a World War II-era
chemical giant that worked thousands of people to death in Nazi camps,
voted Wednesday to set up a fund to compensate former slave laborers.

But Holocaust survivor groups and young leftists protested in and outside
the meeting hall, demanding that IG Farben pay more than the $1.6 million
it has offered for the fund. At one point, security guards hustled out
several young protesters who challenged company officials when the
officials threatened to bar a former slave laborer from speaking.

At the shareholders' meeting, trustees of the former conglomerate
acknowledged IG Farben's ``historic responsibility'' for using slave labor
at concentration camps. They said the fund -- formally a foundation --
would be set up later this year.

First payments will go to former slave laborers older than 80 who toiled
for IG Farben at the Auschwitz death camp, said trustee Otto Bernhardt, a
federal lawmaker. Several hundred survivors would likely be eligible, he
said.

But The Nationwide Alliance Against IG Farben, a German pressure group, has
called the company's fund offer ``ridiculously low.''

Former slave laborers, who see the continued existence of IG Farben as an
insult, want the company liquidated and its $14.9 million in assets
distributed to victims, most of whom are elderly.

``Regardless of the foundation, there will be no peace with IG Farben,''
declared Peter Gingold, an 83-year-old Holocaust survivor whose family died
at the Auschwitz death camp.

The company's shares are ``sticky with blood,'' Gingold told reporters.

IG Farben is one of the most potent remaining symbols of Nazi evil, and its
shareholder meetings have sparked regular protests in recent years.

Formed in 1925, the company was the world's largest chemical concern during
the war. One of its subsidiaries manufactured Zyklon-B, the gas used for
killing Jews and other Nazi concentration camp inmates.

At the Nazi death camp in Auschwitz, IG Farben ran a slave labor plant.
More than 83,000 people worked at the plant at its peak in 1944.

After the war, the allies divided up IG Farben's assets among Hoechst,
BASF, Bayer and other chemical companies. IG Farben remains as a trust to
settle claims and lawsuits from the Nazi era.

Pressure for a gesture by IG Farben has grown since last winter, when major
German companies agreed to set up a compensation fund in hopes of quashing
U.S. lawsuits on behalf of former slave laborers.

About 500 lawsuits are pending against IG Farben in German courts.