The Industrialist Trials
The Nuremberg Military Tribunal indicted and tried three leading German industrialists and their company officers and aides for war crimes, including conspiring before the war with military and political officials to wage a war of aggression. Among these was the IG Farben Trial, in which the company’s directors were indicted for crimes which included the manufacture and sale of nitrate (used to manufacture explosives) and the manufacture of Zyklon B. Twenty-four of the directors of IG Farben were tried under a four count indictment, and thirteen were convicted and handed down prison sentences. Ten were acquitted, and one had his case continued due to health reasons.
Friedrich Flick was a leading German industrialist before and during the war, having built a conglomerate of companies and a fortune in coal, steel, and other industries. Flick and five of his most senior directors were brought before the NMT, indicted on several charges, including in some cases membership in organizations which were declared criminal by the International Military Tribunal. Flick was also charged for his financial support of the SS and Heinrich Himmler personally, with it being found that he had donated more than one million Reichmarks to the Nazis and Himmler annually. Flick was convicted and sentenced to seven years, two of his directors also received prison sentences. The rest were acquitted.
The third trial of German industrialists was the Krupp Trial, in which Alfred Krupp and eleven former directors of the Krupp Companies were accused of supporting the rearmament of Germany and conspiring with leading Nazis and other industrialists to prepare for and wage a war of aggression (Krupp’s father Gustav had been a defendant in the first Nuremberg trial, but charges were dropped due to his failing mental health). The seven month trial resulted in all but one defendant being found guilty and sentenced to prison, and Alfred Krupp was ordered to sell all of his holding and personal possessions. He avoided doing so by claiming no buyer could be found.
In all of the industrialists’ trials, a leading focus of the prosecution was the use of slave labor, which the defendants argued was forced upon them by the Nazi regime, and in some cases was supposedly unknown to the businesses. IG Farben was found to have built a production facility near the Auschwitz complex for the expressed purpose of availing itself of the slave labor there. Both IG Farben and Krupp’s employed slave labor, including prisoners of war, in their factories. Both industries prospered during the pre-war years and during the early years of combat. In the case of IG Farben it was found that, “Disregard of basic human rights did not deter these defendants.”
Krupp’s used more than 100,000 slave laborers in its plants and warehouses, and an additional 20,000 prisoners of war, mostly Poles, French, and Russians. All of the industrialists sentenced to prison terms were released early when their sentences were commuted as post-war West Germany recovered. Friedrich Flick was by the 1950s one of the wealthiest individuals in West Germany and the largest shareholder of Daimler-Benz stock in the world. In 1952 Alfred Krupp was pardoned after serving three years of a twelve year sentence and the following year he regained control of the Krupp companies.