IG Farben Trial

The United States of America vs. Carl Krauch, et al., also known as the IG Farben Trial, was the sixth of the twelve trials for war crimes the U.S. authorities held in their occupation zone in Germany after the end of World War II. IG Farben was the private German chemicals company allied with the Nazis that manufactured the Zyklon B gas used in the genocide of millions of European Jews, Roma, homosexuals, socialists and other innocent civilians in the Holocaust.

The twelve trials were all held before U.S. military courts, not the International Military Tribunal, but took place in the same rooms at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg. The twelve U.S. trials are collectively known as the "Subsequent Nuremberg Trials" or, more formally, as the "Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals" (NMT). The IG Farben Trial was the second of three trials of leading industrialists of Nazi Germany for their conduct during the Nazi regime, the other two being the Flick Trial and the Krupp Trial.)

The defendants in this case had all been directors of IG Farben, a large German conglomerate of chemical firms. The company had been a major factor already in World War I, when their development of the Haber–Bosch process for nitrogen fixation compensated for Germany's being cut off from the Chilean nitrate trade and allowed IG Farben to produce synthetic nitrate and extract and process nitrogen for use in agricultural fertilizer. Nitrate is also an important component for the fabrication of explosives such as gunpowder, dynamite or TNT. In World War II, Degesch (42.5 per cent owned by IG Farben) was the trademark holder of Zyklon B, the poison gas used at some Nazi extermination camps. IG Farben also developed processes for synthesizing gasoline and rubber from coal, thereby contributing much to Germany's ability to wage a war despite having been cut off from all major oil fields. The charges consequently centered on preparing to wage an aggressive war, but also on the use of slave labor and plundering.

The judges in the case, heard before Military Tribunal VI, were Curtis Grover Shake, former Chief Judge of the Indiana Supreme Court, as presiding judge; James Morris of the North Dakota Supreme Court; Paul M. Hebert, dean of Louisiana State University Law School; and Clarence F. Merrell, a lawyer from Indiana and friend of Judge Shake, as an alternate judge.