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mine, and which actually only brought it to my attention for the
first time. There was not one single soul who, due to anything I did, lost life
or health, and I do not know of any single case where I might have acted
differently, or how, I might have acted differently.
Obviously the
controlling and critical visitors did not know that either, because nobody told
me about it. There were many hundreds of prominent visitors in the plant,
superior IG officials, executive engineers, technical commissions, the
Commission of leading Construction Engineers, the Transport Commission,
executives of the Social Welfare Department, many works chiefs of other IG
plants; furthermore, the works were visited by hundreds of chiefs of large
industrial enterprises, by research men, and scientists. There were military
men and officials there, generals and Ministers and an innumerable amount of
supervisory government authorities representatives. Further there were
prominent members of many European states; there were Frenchmen and Belgians,
Italians and Croats, Czechs and Swiss; there were private and official
delegations; there were members of legations and of the Geneva Red Cross.
Your Honors, there were many who grieved over the fate of the
prisoners, but there was not any single one of these hundreds of intelligent
and critical visitors who ever raised any criticism or any reproaches or even
only any misgivings as far as our work was concerned and our social welfare
attitude, what we heard was thanks and appreciation. Should all of these people
actually have been blind?
I have before me Your Honors, the book of a
former inmate of the Monowitz camp, our camp IV, entitled “Devil and
Damned,” that was published last year in Switzerland. The name of the
author is “Kausky.” He was a political persecutee, being a Social
Democrat. I do not know him myself, but I esteem him for the sake of this book,
not by any chance on account of the fact that throughout the entire book, which
deals with camp IV and with the IG, not one single serious charge or complaint
is raised against I. G. Farben, because there is not the name of any single
member of IG named in this book, or pilloried in this book, although he does
deal with many SS people, but I esteem him because it offers a psychological
analysis of the deep tragedy of the life of an inmate. It is most depressing,
for example, to read the following statement on page 175: |
| |
“In his specific job, each
one pursues his own interests without consideration to anyone else. The camp
became the high school of egotism. The more intelligent people saw much and
learned much in the camp. They became more intelligent, they became more
clever, but nobody became a better man for that. Life in the camp was far too
hard, and we unexpectedly were faced by a situation in which there was a
collision between our own and alien interests. There will be very few people
who are capable of saying of them- [...selves] |
1078 |
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