The Language of Evil

While the horrors are detailed, the boring transactions are hidden

This is a part 2 to our original article The Economy of Evil.

When people stumble upon evil, they must be able to recognize it. Unfortunately, the language of evil is hidden from us. Examining the Nuremberg IG Farben case, the daily business of Auschwitz is visible but it is disguised in the language of evil. One has to look deeper to see it. That is precisely why so many claim “we did not know” when asked about the horrors. While the language of evil doesn’t make for good Hollywood movies¹, we still need to understand it. Instead of seeing the Nazis as rational actors advancing their own class interests, people imagine comic-book villains who “were evil” to simply “be evil.”

One of the many factories at Auschwitz

We learn about the horrors of the gas chambers, the cruelty and the sadism of individuals. But we never learn about the system that could allow for such cruelty. While we know about Auschwitz, we are kept ignorant about the biggest profiteer of Auschwitz:IG Farben. Their monopoly was so extensive that Albert Speer² described the Third Reich as a branch of the IG Farben industry.

Despite the glaring paradox, Republicans are allowed to debate about whether or not Nazis are socialists. No mainstream journalist has smacked them down for essentially denying a fundamental nature of the holocaust: the drive for profits at any cost (capitalism).

When we don’t understand evil, we can’t fight it. People debate about “bad apples” instead of realizing that the tree is poisonous. Today, we will learn how to translate the “language of evil” into the “language of humanity.” The truth is in front of our eyes, but we can’t see it if it is written in a foreign language that we don’t speak.

IG Farben was given monopolies on too many chemicals and pharmaceuticals to list. They built both the concentration camps and the adjoining factories to maximize their profits. They looked at the water supply, fuel requirements and optimized the logistics. The memorandum detailing the construction at Auschwitz³ states:

Even an astute reader can be forgiven for mistaking this memorandum for any ordinary building construction contract. However, Prisoner Ludwik Rajewski translated it to his reality:

In the language of evil, we learn about “cost-optimization:”

Auschwitz survivor Stanislaw Glowa recounts his memory in the language of humanity:

Within a few days, there were just a few of us left. 14 hours of work on a section of road to Babice, a few kilometers long, finished people off. In the evening we would return to camp dragging the bodies of our colleagues or carrying them on stretchers made from tree branches, while the next day, when leaving the camp, we did not know which of us would survive, or whether we would be dragged back dead.

The cruelty industrialized:

At the time the Germans brought a roller, which weighed a few tons, to the camp. It was operated manually by the priests and the Jews. There was an incident when a prisoner was crushed by the roller, and his blood was used as the binder for the sand and gravel mix.

Josef Pawel, an inmate forced to work as a bookkeeper, verified:

The private companies paid 3 Reichsmarks for a non-professional, 4 Reichsmarks for a professional.

IG Farben’s profits soared⁴:

But people starved and died. We still do not know how many people died in the concentration camps. The lowest estimate is at approximately 20+ million. The internal communications merely describe the genocide as “labor shortages:”

Michał Mysiński, translated what exactly the “labor shortages” looked like:

Ten percent of the prisoners died, every day, in the ordinary course of business. IG Farben knew and wrote it in “evil”⁵.

In case, there was doubt, Josef Pawel translated “statistics” into the language of humanity:

We also had a numbers book, which only contained numbers and two columns: one to put a cross in, or a letter ü (the cross meant the prisoner is dead, a letter ü meant they had been transferred to another camp). The second column denoted professional groups with a Roman numeral….They included the number of prisoners on a given day, the total number of prisoners, then how many of those were capable of work, how many were incapable, how many were employed, then which kommando employed them, what were their professions, how many worked on that day and what other professionals were available. 

While the profits piled up, IG Farben executives described “incentives” to meet their “quotas.” In order to incentivize the prisoners to work harder, they were given “clothing coupons” for new clothes:

Edward Liszka translated “clothing coupon” into the language of humanity:

I wanted to trade this pullover for soup, since I preferred to freeze than to starve.

IG Farben’s press releases described all the benefits that were given to the “workers.” The German public never learned that in reality that prisoners exchanged sweaters for a bowl of cabbage soup.

In the end, the Red Army’s footage shows emaciated, starving people who could barely stand⁶

Thank to the US Government’s decision to use Nazi War criminals in the cold war, IG Farben was re-constituted in West Germany. The executives reinstated. No one was punished. Their children are billionaires. The ordinary evil has been all but forgotten.

Today, their offshoots, Bayer-Monsanto is continuing with the same evil, albeit much quieter. Unfortunately, IG Farben is not the only company that is tainted with evil. In fact, BMW is almost entirely owned by Josef Goebel’s step-grandchildren and they don’t even have the decency to be quiet about it.

1. Hollywood has recently taken up a bad habit of whitewashing Nazis: Klaus Von Stauffenberg was a bad person. Oskar Schindler was a traitor.

2. Nl-582I PROSECUTION EXHIBIT 482 

3. NI-1237 PROSECUTION EXHIBIT 457 

4. NI-5196 PROSECUTION EXHIBIT 40 

5. NI-820 PROSECUTION EXHIBIT 463 

6. This film goes in chronological order from 1944 and it has multiple parts. I merely linked part 1.