This is the documented historical record the satire is built from — the father’s-side inheritance behind the framed 1943 labor requisition Sterling Varice keeps on his office wall. Nothing in it is invented (with one flagged exception, noted at the end: the grandfather himself, the heteronym’s fictional forebear placed inside the real structure). The firm, the camp, the pricing schedule, the policy, the trial, and the postwar continuity are all real and checkable. Sterling reads it as a price list and a precedent; the reader is meant to read it as an indictment. That gap is the point.
The firm — IG Farben
Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG (“IG Farben”) was formed on 2 December 1925 from the merger of six chemical firms — BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, Agfa, Cassella, and Kalle. By the late 1930s it was the largest chemical company in the world and the largest corporation in Europe, with roughly 200,000 employees at its peak. It made synthetic dyes, nitrogen and fertilizer, synthetic rubber (Buna), synthetic fuel, pharmaceuticals, and photographic film — and its synthetic rubber and fuel made the Reich less vulnerable to blockade, which placed the firm at the chemical center of rearmament and autarky.
The cyanide pesticide Zyklon B, used in the gas chambers, was manufactured by Degesch, in which IG Farben held a controlling 42.5% stake; two IG Farben representatives sat on the Degesch supervisory board, and the agents Tesch & Stabenow (Testa) and Heli handled distribution. The firm profited both from the agent of the killing and from the labor of the killed.
Monowitz — Auschwitz III — the private concentration camp
In 1941 IG Farben chose Auschwitz as the site for a new synthetic-rubber and fuel plant, the Buna-Werke. Board member Otto Ambros and the board cited the adjacent SS camp’s inexhaustible supply of forced labor as a site advantage. The firm sank on the order of 700–900 million Reichsmarks into the complex — its single largest capital project — which never produced significant usable synthetic rubber before liberation.
IG Farben then built and operated its own concentration camp: Monowitz-Buna, opened in October 1942 and redesignated Auschwitz III in November 1943 — the first concentration camp built and financed by private industry, sited away from the main camp and run for a company’s own production. Roughly 12,000 prisoners were held there at a given time; tens of thousands passed through. Life expectancy at the Buna works is estimated at three to four months. Prisoners worked until they could no longer meet output; the SS then conducted selections, and those judged no longer productive were trucked back to Auschwitz II–Birkenau and gassed, with a replacement drawn for the line. Estimates of those who died at Monowitz or were sent from it to be killed run to roughly 25,000–30,000. Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel were both prisoners at Monowitz-Buna; the literary record of the camp is, in large part, the record of an IG Farben labor force.
The SS labor-pricing schedule — the numbers
The SS rented prisoner labor to IG Farben at a per-head, per-day rate, paid to the SS, with the prisoner receiving nothing but a sub-subsistence ration:
- Unskilled adult prisoner: 3 Reichsmarks per day.
- Skilled prisoner: 4 Reichsmarks per day.
- Children: 1.5 Reichsmarks per day — half the unskilled adult rate.
The camp paperwork tracked the prisoners as a procurement line, by headcount, against output. The 1.5-Reichsmark child rate is the figure Sterling cites by hand: “My grandfather leased children at one and a half Reichsmarks per day. He has been condemned for it. I consider that condemnation evidence of what I have been arguing all along.”
Destruction through labor
Vernichtung durch Arbeit — “extermination through labor” — was a documented Nazi policy term, used in administrative correspondence including the Thierack–Himmler agreement of September 1942, which transferred categories of prisoners to the SS “for extermination through labor.” The mechanism, stated plainly: labor was not an alternative to killing but a method of killing that extracted value on the way. Because the supply was treated as infinite and free, the cost of working a body to death fell to zero, and the only “rational” management was to extract maximum throughput before disposal. This is the limit case of the arithmetic the whole dossier turns on — the point where the curve actually reaches the asymptote.
Nuremberg — the IG Farben trial
In United States v. Carl Krauch, et al. (the IG Farben Trial, Nuremberg Military Tribunal VI), 24 IG Farben directors and senior managers were tried; judgment came on 29–30 July 1948. The charges included planning aggressive war, plunder, and slavery and mass murder. The outcome was a scandal of leniency: 13 were convicted and 10 acquitted, with sentences ranging from 1.5 to 8 years, generally with credit for time served. Otto Ambros (the synthetic-rubber chief) and works manager Walter Dürrfeld drew the heaviest sentences — 8 years — for the slave-labor program; chairman Carl Krauch got 6 years for plunder; board member Fritz ter Meer got 7.
Then, under the 1951 clemency of U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy, the sentences were commuted and the men released early. Most returned to German industry within a few years. Fritz ter Meer — convicted for the Buna slave-labor program — became chairman of the supervisory board of Bayer AG from 1956 to 1964. The court reached the board; the logistics tier that made the board’s decisions operational was never in the dock.
Postwar continuity — the firms that still exist
The most important fact of this record: the inheritance is not buried. Under Allied decartelization (1950–1952), IG Farben was not abolished but broken back up into its principal predecessor firms — BASF, Bayer, Hoechst (later folded into Sanofi), and Agfa — each today a giant of European chemistry. The “IG Farben in Liquidation” shell persisted to manage claims and finally filed for insolvency only in 2003. The German industry survivor-compensation fund (the “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” Foundation, roughly DM 10 billion) was not created until 2000 — more than half a century after the labor was extracted — and capped per-survivor payments at modest sums.
The breadth was systemic, not one rogue firm. Major companies that used concentration-camp, POW, or forced foreign labor and still exist include Krupp (now thyssenkrupp), Siemens, Daimler-Benz (now Mercedes-Benz Group), BMW, Volkswagen, and Ford-Werke and Opel’s German operations. Alfried Krupp — sole owner of the steel-and-armaments dynasty — was convicted of slave labor and plunder in 1948, sentenced to 12 years with forfeiture of his entire property, released after serving about three years under McCloy’s clemency, had his property and fortune restored, and died in 1967 worth an estimated $1.3 billion.
The arithmetic, laid out — why this is the engine
Each link in the chain is real:
- If the labor supply is unlimited and free, replacement cost approaches zero.
- Therefore any expenditure on a worker’s survival — food above the ration, medical care, rest, safety — is maintenance cost with no offsetting replacement saving: pure waste.
- Therefore the throughput-maximizing policy is to extract until the body fails and replace it.
- The pricing made it literal: 3 Reichsmarks a day for an adult, 1.5 for a child, paid to the renter of the bodies.
- The firms that ran the camps were not destroyed; they are BASF, Bayer, Mercedes, BMW, Siemens, Volkswagen, thyssenkrupp. The dynast convicted of slavery died a near-billionaire, his wealth restored.
The one line that holds the whole record is the principle Sterling claims to have inherited: “When replacement cost approaches zero, maintenance cost is pure waste.” Everything he says about a Bangladeshi stairwell, a Dharavi e-waste boy, a gig worker’s quit price, or an old-worker cull is that sentence, re-aimed at a jurisdiction where the supply is almost free instead of entirely free. His one claimed “improvement” on the model is that he keeps the worker alive at the taxpayer’s expense — Medicaid, food stamps, the wage subsidy — and captures the yield: “All of the yield. None of the maintenance obligation.”
A note on what is real and what is character
Everything above is documented history. The one constructed figure is the grandfather — the heteronym’s invented forebear, a mid-level logistics functionary placed inside the real structure (the firm, the camp, the rates, the policy, and the genuine non-prosecution of that administrative tier are all real, which is what makes the placement plausible). He is named here as character, not citable biography, so the column never asserts a false specific person as historical record. The structure is real; the man is Sterling’s inheritance.