Passions ran high in some quarters to hold the Nazi leaders to account for their barbarous behavior. In anticipation of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt had agreed at Yalta in February 1945 that Axis leaders should be prosecuted after the war, and shortly before he died, in April of that year, President Roosevelt appointed Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson of the U.S. Supreme Court to serve as chief U.S. counsel for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. Jackson and his counterparts met to discuss ground rules for the tribunals, and the victorious nations later signed a formal agreement establishing the basis for the proceedings. After the judges and lawyers were selected and indictments were issued against the major figures, the International Military Tribunal opened its trials at Nuremberg on November 20, 1945. “Not only are they in peril of the death sentence,” wrote Rebecca West in The New Yorker, “but there is constant talk about millions of dead and arguments whether they died because of these men or not, and there now emanates from them a sense of corruption hardly less tangible than the smell which, as one walks through the old town of Nuremberg, sometimes rises from the rubble where one of the thirty thousand missing Nurembergers has not fully reacted to time and the disinfectant spray.”54
On October 1, 1946, people around the world were riveted as verdicts were handed down at Nuremberg, resulting in death sentences for eleven of the twenty-one major defendants. Announcements of “Tode durch den Strang!” (Death by the rope!) reverberated in the courtroom. And yet, although more trials continued through April 1949, resulting in additional sentences for Nazi doctors, military and government officials, and Nazi party leaders, the American public seemed far less concerned about the outcome of the trials than the Europeans were.
One of the Nuremberg trials prosecuted the least energetically was the IG Farben case, conducted from August 27, 1947, to July 30, 1948.55 One of the charges outlined in the complicated case was that DEGESCH, in which Farben had a 42.5 percent interest, had supplied Zyklon-B for the extermination of enslaved persons in concentration camps throughout Europe.
According to the prosecutors, the proprietary rights to Zyklon-B belonged to DEGUSSA, which had developed the process by which Zyklon-B was manufactured using absorbent pellets. DEGUSSA had for a long time sold Zyklon-B through DEGESCH, which it and Farben controlled. DEGESCH did not physically produce Zyklon-B itself, but because it owned the patent and the manufacturing license, it was therefore considered the producer of the substance.
Dessauer Werke für Zucker und Chemische Werke (located about fifty kilometers north of Leipzig) manufactured the lethal product. Dessauer had acquired the stabilizer from IG Farben, the warning agent from Schering AG, and the Prussic acid from Dessauer Schlempe, and then assembled them into the final Zyklon-B. Starting in 1943 it was manufactured with the warning agent, so that it could better serve its purpose as an execution gas. Once it produced Zyklon-B, DEGESCH sold the product to DEGUSSA. To cut costs, DEGUSSA sold the marketing rights of the gas to two intermediaries: Heerdt-Lingler (Heli) and Tesch und Stabenow (Testa), who split their territory along the Elbe River, with Heli handling the clients to the west and Testa handling those in the east. According to the prosecutors, Testa supplied most of the Zyklon-B to Auschwitz, and Testa’s owner, Dr. Tesch, personally conducted experiments on the feasibility of using Zyklon-B not only as a pesticide but also as a means of mass murder.56
The owner of DEGESCH, the German chemist Dr. Gerhard Peters, was fully aware of everything the Nazis had done with his product, although he denied responsibility. With the support of IG Farben, Peters and Tesch had initiated research that had circumvented many of the problems associated with hydrogen cyanide’s use as a fumigating agent in order to adapt it for use in the gas chambers. Some of this had involved adding an irritant tear gas to the odorless hydrogen cyanide that would warn anyone of the lethal gas’s presence. They had also added a chemical stabilizer that was soaked into some porous, highly absorbent material in order to produce a mixture that was not a liquid, but solid, free-flowing granules that were different from the discoids.
As the patent holder for Zyklon-B and the leading authority on its uses for fumigation, Peters had also closely followed its use in the United States and often publicized how U.S. immigration officials and others employed it to remove pests. In the 1930s and ’40s Peters produced articles, advertisements, and at least one film to extol the virtues of Zyklon-B.
DEGUSSA’s business manager, Dr. Walter Heerdt, the individual credited as the inventor of Zyklon-B, was among those who testified at Nuremberg. Twenty-four Farben executives were charged with plunder and spoliation of private property in German-occupied territories and other war crimes, and thirteen were convicted and sentenced to prison. But given what they had done, they got off lightly.
At Nuremberg the victors amassed voluminous reports and shocking testimony about the Germans’ atrocities: their “waging of aggressive war”; their war crimes (violations of the laws or customs of war), such as the murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity; and “crimes against humanity”—namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, as well as persecution based on racial, religious, or political grounds. But although the Nazis’ use of the gas chamber against the Jews figured prominently in the war crimes trials, it was not the main focus. When the war criminal defendants attempted to argue that some of the acts they were accused of perpetrating were not so different from acts their accusers may have committed, the court’s president, Lord Justice Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, simply responded, “We are not interested in what the Allies may have done.”57
In addition to the Nuremberg tribunal, numerous trials of Nazi war criminals were held in the British, French, American, and Soviet sectors of Germany, in Austria, at Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, and in many other places where the crimes took place. Most of the later proceedings involved physicians, SS-Einsatzgruppen officers, or camp guards.58 The British Military Tribunal in Hamburg tried three executives of the firm that had the exclusive agency for the supply of Zyklon-B gas east of the River Elbe.59 The defendants included Tesch; Tesch’s prokurist, or second-in-command, Karl Weinbacher; and Dr. Joachim Drosihn, a zoologist who was employed as the firm’s first gassing technician. All three were accused of having supplied poison gas used for killing Allied nationals in concentration camps, knowing how it was to be used. Tesch and Stabenow had also supplied heating elements to vaporize Zyklon-B gas, as well as pipes for the gas-chamber circulation system, which they claimed had been standard issue for fumigation chambers. The defendants claimed they had no knowledge about the gas being used for anything other than fumigation purposes.60
Prosecutors contended that from 1941 to 1945 the company accepted orders for vast quantities of Zyklon-B (two tons per month to Auschwitz-Birkenau alone), knowing that it was being used to exterminate human beings. They also presented testimony to support their charges. The judge advocate agreed that “among those unfortunate creatures [who were gassed to death in the camps,] undoubtedly there were many Allied nationals.” Tesch and Weinbacher were convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged, although Drosihn was acquitted. Known as the “Zyklon-B Case,” it included no references to America’s invention and use of the gas chamber, American Cyanamid’s and DuPont’s manufacture with IG Farben of Zyklon-B, or the collaboration of American and German officials and executives in gas-chamber technology.61