Labor Camp Auschwitz-Monowitz

Description

The Auschwitz-Monowitz Camp was the Third Reich’s largest and arguably most infamous forced-labor camp. After the war, it became the focus of one of the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, the IG-Farben Trial. During that trial, the IG-Farben management was accused of having worked their slave-labor work force systematically to death by subjecting them to horrible living conditions in the camp, and unbearable working conditions at the IG-Farben’s chemical plants near Auschwitz. If we follow claims by witnesses and mainstream historians, the death toll of this camp and its numerous satellite camps allegedly amounted to somewhere between 15,000 and 250,000 – an impossibly wide range.

The present study starts with the indictment of the IG-Farben Trial, then analyzes pivotal documents about the Monowitz Camp, such as the camp’s infirmary register, its register of deceased inmates, as well as multiple lists of transfers from the labor camp to the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps a few miles to the west. A detailed analysis of these documents, in conjunction with many more supportive documents, reveals the untenable propaganda nature of “extermination through labor” claims made by the IG-Farben Trial’s prosecution. For instance, the camp’s death records prove that a total of – not 100,000, not 10,000, but merely 1,651 inmates died during the entire existence of the camp.

The largest part of this tome contains excerpts from 129 witness accounts – mostly former civilian employees of IG Farben and its many subcontractors, but also many former camp inmates. They all testified in detail that the living and working conditions were the best among all of the Third Reich’s many camps. Inmates preferred Monowitz over any other camp. This is followed by a description of the Monowitz Camp’s inmate infirmary by two former, highly educated inmates.

The last chapter scrutinizes 14 of the most important witnesses for the prosecution, whose various extermination claims are the sole basis upon which the prosecution’s case rested. A thorough source criticism of these testimonies reveals that these witnesses lied shamelessly and with impunity.

Mainstream narratives of the Monowitz Camp have been dominated for eight decades by absurd witness claims, which fly in the face of documented facts. With the present study, the history of the Monowitz Camp is finally put on a solid documental basis. It rings in the end of the “extermination through labor” paradigm.