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[accord…] ingly. In the course of the war, certain intermediate
products of peacetime industry were used as intermediate products of war
industry. This is a necessary development and a phenomenon which lies in the
nature of the chemical industry, which, in the final analysis, always resorts
to the same basic products. The only exception is the
sulfur-trioxide-chlorsulfonic acid solution (Nebelsaeure) which was supplied
for military purposes even in peacetime. However, even before 1933, Hoechst had
supplied this product to the small German Army and tiny German Navy for purely
defensive purposes. The explosive hexogen was neither invented nor manufactured
in Hoechst. On the contrary, some chemists at the plant merely discovered a new
manufacturing process in the laboratory in 1935 — at a time, therefore,
when Director Jaehne was not yet deputy plant manager of the Hoechst plant and
deputy chief of the plants of the Works Combine Main River Valley.
In
the count relating to "spoliation," the name of my client is mentioned in the
documents of the indictment only in connection with the oxygen and acetylene
factory in Metz-Diedenhofen. In this matter, several letters of information
were forwarded, among other places, also to Director Jaehne. Any active
participation on the part of my client cannot be construed from these
documents. The defense will prove that the negotiations were conducted by the
commercial and legal departments while the technicians were only consulted in
regard to questions of assessment. The defense will further prove that actually
only a lease and not a sale was concluded and that the value of the plant
increased quite considerably as a result of the investments made by the I.G.
Farben. Jaehne had no knowledge of the fact that shortly before the end of the
war, a small installation from a Polish factory had been moved to Offenbach on
the Main, since it involved only a few machines with the insignificant value of
about RM 20,000, and the Hoechst plant had neither induced the sale nor
received any information about it. Herr Jaehne had nothing to do with the
recruitment and the employment by the IG of foreigners and concentration camp
inmates. Whenever applications for credit, submitted by the plants for the
construction of huts for German workers, foreign laborers, etc., passed through
the office of the Technical Committee [TEA] or were approved in technical
respects by the Engineering Committee [TEKO], it was nothing but a formal
procedure, in view of the fact that the type of huts, their numbers and size
(including the additional buildings for a specific number of workers), had been
fixed long since, and therefore also the costs for each bed space. The funds
were granted to the individual plants which requested |
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