Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Holocaust Almanac - I.G. Farben Compensation Sought
Summary: 
Reply-To: kmcvay@nizkor.org
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Nizkor Project, Vancouver Island, CANADA
Keywords: Farben

Archive/File: pub/orgs/german/farben.ig farben.010
Last-Modified: 1995/06/21

 Wartime slave workers seek cash from German firms

    BONN, April 11 (Reuter) - A group supporting wartime slave
 labourers urged Germany's three biggest chemical firms on
 Tuesday to pay compensation for survivors of work camps run by
 the IG Farben conglomerate.

    They said BASF, Bayer and Hoechst were successors to IG
 Farben, which made poison gas for the Nazis, and called on them
 to admit their responsiblity for the thousands of deaths of
 workers in forced-labour plants.

    ``No other branch of industry was so closely linked with the
 Nazi regime as the chemical industry,'' said Philipp Mimkes, who
 initiated the campaign for companies to pay for upkeep of
 concentration camp memorials.

    A BASF spokesman said his company denied responsiblity and
 had no intention of paying compensation.

    ``BASF is not the legal successor to IG Farben, so there is
 no reason (to pay),'' said spokesman Erdwig Meyer, adding the
 issue would be discussed at a shareholders' meeting next month.

    In a letter to shareholders last week, BASF said IG Farben
 had paid 30 million marks in compensation to the Conference on
 Jewish Material Claims in 1957 for Jews and non-Jews who had
 worked for IG Farben in Auschwitz.

    Bayer and Hoechst were not immediately available for
 comment.

    Mimkes said he and other campaigners planned to address
 shareholders at the companies' annual general meetings.

    He did not know how many people had died working for IG
 Farben but said about 10,000 survivors were still alive and
 entitled to compensation.

    IG Farben, formed in 1925 by the merger of BASF, Bayer,
 Hoechst and Cassella, flourished under the Hitler regime and was
 the world's fourth largest company until 1945.

    It built a chemicals plant next to Auschwitz concentration
 camp and used inmates as slave workers and human guinea-pigs for
 laboratory experiments and to test the effects of viruses,
 Mimkes told journalists.

    Later it built its own concentration camp nearby called
 Monowitz, where 370,000 people were murdered, he said.

    IG Farben was broken up by World War Two Allies in 1945 but
 still exists as a company under liquidation.

    Zyklon B gas, used for mass extermination in the death camp
 gas chambers, was produced by IG Farben, Mimkes said.

    ``The chemicals (sector) placed itself unconditionally at
 the service of inhumanity,'' he said.
 

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