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that Farben and DAG had a community-of-interests agreement dating
from 1926, under which Farben had the power to dissolve DAG at will upon the
performance of certain conditions; that the defendant Schmitz, chairman of
Farben's managing board, was also chairman of the supervisory board
(Aufsichtsrat) of DAG; that the DAG was attached to Farben's Sparte (Main
Group) III, the chief of which was the defendant Gajewski; that the defendant
Gajewski was a member of the supervisory board of DAG; and that Paul Mueller,
the chairman of the managing board of DAG, attended the meetings of Farben's
Technical Committee and Farben's Commercial Committee. However, the defense
offered evidence in support of the claim that Mueller, the chairman of DAG's
managing board, had a definite agreement that the management of DAG was to be
independent of Farben; that the DAG was particularly independent of Farben in
technical matters; that the official secrecy surrounding DAG's production of
explosives and gunpowder for military purposes was such that the defendants
were prevented from learning anything substantial about the nature and extent
of DAG's military production; and that even greater secrecy surrounded the
activities of a DAG subsidiary, the Verwertchemie, which constructed and
operated numerous plants for the Armed Forces.
Strangely enough, some
of the issues with respect to DAG's position as an independent concern had been
litigated in a turnover tax suit before German agencies and German courts
between 1938 and 1943, and in this litigation DAG and Farben had taken the
position that DAG was a dependent subsidiary of Farben, similar in nature to
other specialized plants and branches of Farben. In one of its petitions the
DAG argued: “If the facts of the case are properly appraised, there is no
disputing the fact that our corporation was dependent upon IG. Farbenindustrie
A.G., Frankfurt/Main, in financial, economic, and organizational respects, not
merely in the period from 1 January 1927 till 30 November 1938, as acknowledged
by the Reich Finance Administration (Reichsfinanzverwaltung) after repeated
audits, but that this dependence also fully subsisted in December 1938 and that
it continues today.”
Although the central files of the DAG at
Troisdorf, Germany, had been destroyed before the Allied occupation of Germany,
voluminous contemporaneous documents on Farben and DAG were pieced together
from various other files, and a number of them are reproduced below. The
arrangement of the materials reproduced in the present subsection is as
follows: two affidavits and extracts from the testimony of Dr. Struss, Chief of
the Office of Farben's Technical Committee (2 below) testimony of the de-
[…fendant] |
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. 
