Not only was the process punitively complex, but it was administered by bureaucrats who had served in the Reich - the people who had sent them to the camps were in charge of deciding whether they were due compensation.

This is part of a wider pattern. The business-leaders who abetted the Reich through their firms - Siemens, BMW, Hugo Boss, IG Farben, Volkswagon - were largely spared any punishment for their role in the the Holocaust.

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Many got to keep the riches they acquired through their part on an act of genocide.

Meanwhile, historians grappling with the war through the "#Historikerstreit" drew invidious comparisons between communism and fascism, equating the two ideologies and tacitly excusing the torture and killing of political prisoners (this tale is still told today - in America! My kid's AP history course made this exact point last year).

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The refusal to consider that extreme wealth, inequality, and the lust for profits - not blood - provided the Nazis with the budget, materiel and backing they needed to seize control in Germany is of a piece with the decision not to hold Germany's Nazi-enabling plutocrats to account.

The impunity for business leaders who collaborated with the Nazis on exploiting slave labor is hard to believe.

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Take #IGFarben, a company still doing a merry business today. Farben ran a rubber factory on Auschwitz slave labor, but its executives were frustrated by the delays occasioned by the daily 4.5m forced march from the death-camp to its factory:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

So Farben built #Monowitz, its own, private-sector concentration camp. IG Farben purchased 25,000 slaves from the Reich, among them as many children as possible (the Reich charged less for child slaves).

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Even by the standards of Nazi death camps, Monowitz was a charnel house. Monowitz's inmates were worked to death in just *three months*. The conditions were so brutal that *the SS guards sent official complaints to Berlin*. Among their complaints: Farben refused to fund extra hospital beds for the slaves who were beaten so badly they required immediate medical attention.

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Instead, the slaves of Monowitz became disposable, and the bloodless logic of profit maximization dictated that more work could be attained at lower prices by working them to death over twelve short weeks.

Few of us know about Monowitz today, but in the last years of the war, it shocked the world.

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#JosephBorkin - a US antitrust lawyer who was sent to Germany after the war as part of the legal team overseeing the denazification program - wrote a seminal history of IG Farben, "The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben":

https://www.scribd.com/document/517797736/The-Crime-and-Punishment-of-I-G-Farben

Borkin's book was a bestseller, which enraged America's business lobby.

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The book made the connection between Farben's commercial strategies and the rise of the Reich (Farben helped manipulate global commodity prices in the runup to the war, which let the Reich fund its war preparations). He argued that big business constituted a danger to democracy and human rights, because its leaders would always sideline both in service to profits.

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US companies like #StandardOil and #DowChemicals poured resources into discrediting the book and smearing Borkin, forcing him into retirement and obscurity in 1945, the same year his publisher withdrew his book from stores.

When we speak of Germany's denazification effort, it's as a German program, but of course that's not right. Denazification was initiated, designed and overseen by the war's winners - in West Germany, that was the USA.

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Those US prosecutors and bureaucrats wanted justice, but not *too much* of it. For them, denazification had to be balanced against #anticommunism, and the imperatives of American business. Nazi war criminals must go on trial - but not if they were rocket scientists, especially not if the USSR might make use of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun

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