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responsible for the management of a vast industry of international
scope, and a strong Germany would help to make their enterprise more
profitable. As for the carnage of war and the slaughter of innocents, these
were the regrettable deeds of Hitler and the Nazis, to whose dictatorship they,
too, were subject. What has happened is, indeed, most unfortunate, they will
admit, but we will be assured that there was nothing that any of them could
possibly have done about it.
However plausible, this is not the truth.
These are men who stopped at nothing. They were the magicians who made the
fantasies of "Mein Kampf" come true. They were the guardians of the military
and state secrets of the Third Reich. They were the master builders of the
Wehrmacht; they and very few others knew just how many airplane and truck tires
and tank treads were being built from Farben buna rubber and just how large the
stockpile of explosives was. They knew every detail of the intricate and
enormous engine of warfare, and watched its growth with an architect's pride.
They knew that the engine was going to be used, and they planned to use it
themselves. Europe was dotted with mines and factories which they coveted, and
for each step in the march of conquest there was a program of industrial
plunder which was put into prompt and ruthless execution. These are the men who
made war possible, and they did it because they wanted to conquer.
Did
they plan an easy yoke for the peoples they were determined to subject? Were
they benevolent despots under whose sway the humanities would flourish? Can we
hear any note of idealism cut through the din and clangor of war? In 1940, the
defendants were planning the construction of their fourth plant for the
manufacture of synthetic rubber, the output of which would be vitally necessary
if the war was to be long continued. They decided to build it in eastern
Europe, and the defendant Ambros went prospecting for a suitable location. In
conquered Poland, Ambros was shown a town where one of Himmler's largest
concentration camps had just been built. The town was Oswiecim, known to the
Germans as Auschwitz. Ambros found the site otherwise suitable, and was
particularly interested in the possibility of using the concentration camp
inmates to erect the plant, all of which was reported to the other defendants.
They agreed, and construction of the Farben Auschwitz plant was promptly
undertaken. What happened at Auschwitz during those years will later be set
forth in some detail. Himmler, for a price, furnished the defendants with the
miserable inmates of his camp, who slaved and died to build the buna factory.
It is a revolting story of brutality and murder. But this scheme was part of
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