LogFAQs > #974936175

Farben broke the historical orthodoxy about slavery: until Monowitz, historians widely believed that enslavers would at the very least seek to maintain the health of their slaves, simply as a matter of economic efficiency. But the Reich's rock-bottom rates for fresh slaves liberated Farben from the need to preserve their slaves' ability to work. Instead, the slaves of Monowitz became disposable, and the bloodless logic of profit maximization dictated that more work could be attained at lower prices by working them to death over twelve short weeks.

Few of us know about Monowitz today, but in the last years of the war, it shocked the world. Joseph Borkin a US antitrust lawyer who was sent to Germany after the war as part of the legal team overseeing the denazification program wrote a seminal history of IG Farben, "The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben":
https://www.scribd.com/document/517797736/The-Crime-and-Punishment-of-I-G-Farben

Borkin's book was a bestseller, which enraged America's business lobby. The book made the connection between Farben's commercial strategies and the rise of the Reich (Farben helped manipulate global commodity prices in the runup to the war, which let the Reich fund its war preparations). He argued that big business constituted a danger to democracy and human rights, because its leaders would always sideline both in service to profits.

US companies like Standard Oil and Dow Chemicals poured resources into discrediting the book and smearing Borkin, forcing him into retirement and obscurity in 1945, the same year his publisher withdrew his book from stores.
When we speak of Germany's denazification effort, it's as a German program, but of course that's not right. Denazification was initiated, designed and overseen by the war's winners in West Germany, that was the USA.

Those US prosecutors and bureaucrats wanted justice, but not too much of it. For them, denazification had to be balanced against anticommunism, and the imperatives of American business. Nazi war criminals must go on trial but not if they were rocket scientists, especially not if the USSR might make use of them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun

Recall that in the USA, the bizarre epithet "premature antifascist" was used to condemn Americans who opposed Nazism (and fascism elsewhere in Europe) too soon, because these antifascists opposed the authoritarian politics of big business in America, too:
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/premature-antifascist-and-proudly-so/
When 24 Farban executives were tried at Nuremberg for the slaughter at Monowitz, then argued that they had no choice but to pursue slave labor it was their duty to their shareholders. The judges agreed: 19 of those executives walked.