friday, February 15, 1980 15
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Nazi Slave Industries Continue to Do Well
By ROBERT ST. JOHN
(Copyright 1980. JTA, Inc.)
By now, thanks to books,
television programs and
documentary films, the
world at large is fully aware
of the excessive sinfulness
of Adolf Hitler.
But until now there have
been only sketchy accounts
of a subsidiary crime: the
use of several million men
and women as slave labor-
era in the German muni-
tions plants.
Who were the guilty?
Some of the names (like
Krupp and I.G. Farben)
were as well known in
Europe as Ford, DuPont
and Chrysler are in
America. But there were
several hundred others
who were anonymous.
"Less Than Slaves,"
(Harvard University Press)
by American Jewish lawyer
Benjamin S. Ferencz, tells
us that these German fac-
tory owners were guilty of a
double crime: they violated
all the rules of war and
moral codes of civilized
people, but, almost as bad,
after the war, when Ferencz
and his colleagues tried to
collect some retroactive
compensation for the small
percentage of slave laborers
who had survived, the Ger-
man industrialists unanim-
ously insisted that their
consciences were clear, that
they had done nothing
wrong, that the war is over.
Ferencz, who was an
American prosecutor at
Nuremberg, devoted 30
years in legal struggling to
get the German indus-
trialists to change their
minds. During those years
the forced labor survivors
became fewer and fewer,
and their former employers
became more and more
adamant.
Ferencz's final accom-
plishment was in getting
the five largest companies
to pay an average of $872 to
each of the 14,878 surviving
Jewish slave laborers,
which in some cases figured
out to just a few pennies an
hour for the time they had
spent as helpless victims of
monstrous cruelty.
everything from toilet
paper to dynamite; he con-
trolled more than 300 corn-
including
panies,
Daimler-Benz, which pro-
duced the luxurious Mer-
cedes.
Flick was a personal
friend of all the Nazi lead-
ers, loyal to the party. He
was tried at Nuremberg for
war crimes and crimes
against humanity, includ-
ing the enslavement and
abuse of concentration
camp inmates. He was re-
presented by 14 German
lawyers.
The trial, which lasted
eight months, ended with a
verdict of guilty and a sen-
tence — not of death on the
gallows, not life imprison-
ment — of a mere seven
years of incarceration. He
was given much time off for
"good behavior" and after
several years he was al-
ready a free man when U.S.
High Commissioner
McCloy released all the im-
prisoned German indus-
trialists. (You figure out
why.)
ments producer for the
Third Reich; Ten years
after the end of World
War H it was back in op-
eration in the Ruhr with
half of its production de-
voted to armaments.
The attempt to get some
compensation for the sur-
vivors of the Rheinmetall
slave laborers began in
1957. In 1964, the Pentagon
let it be known that the old-
est weapon company in the
U.S., at Springfield, Mass.,
would have to shut down for
lack of orders, but at the
same time the Pentagon
placed an order with
Rheinmetall for $150 mil-
lion worth of guns.
Tohandle its public rela-
tions it hired a past com-
mander of the Jewish War
Veterans, who had prev-
iously handled publicity for
I.G. Farben. About this time
a secret intelligence report
disclosed that the German
army had phased out the
gun the Pentagon was going
to buy from Rheinmetall be-
cause it considered it defec-
tive and unusable.
Several Congressmen
Flick's principal com- protested giving a contract
pany, Dynamit Nobel Ak- for a defective weapon to a
tiengesellschaft (how firm that had used slave
ironic that it bears the labor and now refused to ac-
name of the inventor of knowledge that in so doing
dynamite after whom the it had done any wrong.
Nobel Peace Prize is Philip Klutznick, now Sec-
named!) by 1963 was re- retary of Commerce, was
porting munitions sales one of those who objected to
of close to one million DM the Pentagon doing busi-
and Flick was being ness with an unrepentant
called "the most impor- Nazi firm, and he became
tant industrialist of his deeply involved in the case.
time." And so Ferencz So did Bnai Brith.
and his colleagues ap-
proached him with the
suggestion that he might
be interested in paying
some compensation to
the forced laborers who
had once helped him, al-
beit contrary to their will.
Eventually Rhein-
metall very reluctantly
paid the slave labor sur-
vivors an average of $425
apiece. And of course,
Rheinmetall got the Pen-
tagon contract.
Two footnotes:
At one point during the
In December 1967, the
protracted negotiations, U.S. army cancelled the last
when Flick's lawyers were half of its $150 million
insisting he could not pay a Rheinmetall contract. It
single dollar or Mark in
compensation because he
was "short of money," he
gave his 16-year-old
granddaughter a cash gift
in excess of the amount
being asked by all 3,500
survivors, many of them in
Ferencz tells the story dire need.
In 1972, Flick, in his 90th
unemotionally, in the
cold little words most year, died in his luxurious
lawyers use when they home at Lake Constance.
speak or write. He lets his One of the obituaries said
facts and his figures do that in recent years his
the accusing. He even wealth had been increasing
goes so far as to say that at the rate of more than
"cruelty is not restricted one-third of a million dol-
to any one people, or to lars per day. He died the
any one time, or to a richest man in Germany
single location," and he and the fifth richest man in
urges each reader to the world, leaving more
"find his own way to than $1 billion to a playboy
understand the worst in son. And yet not one cent of
human behavior and Flick's money was ever paid
understand what feeds to a Jewish slave laborer.
Ferencz asks us to under-
and sustains it."
This is a difficult assign- stand "the worst in human
ment, for the villains in his behavior, what feeds and
story have no redeeming sustains it." What else can
qualities and there seems to it be in the case like that of
be no excuse of any sort for - Frederich Flick but greed?
their behavior. Take the — plain, unvarnished, ugly,
case of Frederich Flick, vicious, self-consuming
whose manipulations of greed.
stock and ruthless acquisi-
Even more sinister is
tions made him the sole
the story Ferencz tells of
owner of one of the largest
the Rheinmetall Co., the
conglomorates in the world.
His concern manufactured second largest arma-
had been necessary to make
80 modifications to convert
the German gun into a usa-
ble weapon.
Second footnote: Ferencz
ends his chapter_ ith this
sentence: "In 1978, the
press announced that the
U.S. army was prepared to
spend $4.5 billion for tanks
whose 120-mm cannons
were to be manufactured,
not by the American or
British bidders, but by the
German firm of Rhein-
metall."
I wonder why? Maybe
Ferencz is right. "Each of us
must find his own way to
understand the worst in
human behavior — and
understand what feeds and
sustains it."
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