IG Farben Trial - Indictment

Indictment

1. Planning, preparation, initiation, and waging of wars of aggression and invasions of other countries.
2. War crimes and crimes against humanity through the plundering and spoliation of occupied territories, and the seizure of plants in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, France, and Russia.
3. War crimes and crimes against humanity through participation in the enslavement and deportation to slave labor on a gigantic scale of concentration camp inmates and civilians in occupied countries, and of prisoners of war, and the mistreatment, terrorization, torture, and murder of enslaved persons.
4. Membership in a criminal organization, the SS.
5. Acting as leaders in a conspiracy to commit the crimes mentioned under counts 1, 2, and 3.

All defendants were indicted on counts 1, 2, 3, and 5. Only Schneider, Bütefisch, and von der Heyde were charged on count 4, "Membership in the SS". The SS had been declared a criminal organization previously by the IMT.

Despite the extensive evidence presented by the prosecution that showed that the company had been deeply involved in Germany's rearmament after World War I from the onset, the tribunal rejected the charges for preparing an aggressive war and for conspiration to that end. On count three ("slave labor"), the judgement "allowed the defendants the benefit of the defense of 'necessity'" (Telford Taylor, "The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials"; International Conciliation, No. 450, April 1949). Only in the case of Auschwitz, where IG Farben had constructed a plant next to the concentration camp with the clear intent to use inmates as slave workers, did the tribunal consider the evidence sufficient to prove that IG Farben acted on its own initiative. The tribunal concluded that the defendants could be held responsible only for this one case.

Judge Hebert filed a dissenting opinion, in which he argued that the defense of "necessity" did not apply and that all defendants should have been found guilty on count 3 of the indictment. He stated that:

"...the record shows that Farben willingly cooperated and gladly utilized each new source of manpower as it developed. Disregard of basic human rights did not deter these defendants." —

"Willing cooperation with the slave labor utilization of the Third Reich was a matter of corporate policy that permeated the whole Farben organization... For this reason, criminal responsibility goes beyond the actual immediate participants at Auschwitz. It includes other Farben Vorstand plant-managers and embraces all who knowingly participated in the shaping of the corporate policy." —,

Judge Hebert filed his statement on December 28, 1948, nearly 5 months after the judgment.