A disturbing and little-known aspect of the Nazi slave labor system was the involvement of big business.
Many of the most respected German corporations had no scruples about using concentration camp labor. A company’s decision to use slave labor was voluntary. By the end of 1944, one half a million ghetto and concentration camp inmates were chained to hundreds of corporations. The greatest offenders were either state-owned enterprises – such as BRABAG, the Herman Goring Works, and Volkswagen – or munitions and arms makers, such as Junkers, Messerschmitt, Heinkel, Krupp, Dynamit Nobel, and Rheinmetall-Borsig. By 1943, almost every major private corporation was complicit, including BMW, AEG-Telefunken, Siemens, Daimler-Benz, Schering, and the component firms of IG Farben,
namely Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, and Agfa. German divisions of American firms were equally guilty, such as Ford and General Motors’ Opel.
LinkArchives Suggest Bayer-Nazi Link But now, some 55 years after the fact, Kor thinks she may be about to solve the mystery. Going through a recently published book that chronicles Nazi documents from the Auschwitz archives, she made a startling corporate connection.
In a summary of a letter from a doctor working for the huge German pharmaceutical company Bayer, she read about Bayer experimental drugs to be tested on Auschwitz prisoners. If true, it means that Kor and others were essentially used as laboratory animals.
Bayer is one of the best known and largest pharmaceutical and chemical companies in the world. But what’s turning up in these long-forgotten archives puts the company in a much different light.
For example: One of the SS doctors at Auschwitz, Dr. Helmut Vetter, a longtime Bayer employee, was involved in the testing of Bayer experimental vaccines and medicines on inmates. He was later executed for giving inmates fatal injections.