There were twenty-two codefendants in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. With the exception of Richard Baer, the last commandant of Auschwitz, all of the former Auschwitz functionaries had been leading normal lives using their own names. Commandant Baer had been living as a groundskeeper on an estate near Hamburg under the alias Karl Neumann. Auschwitz adjunct Robert Mulka was working as a merchant in Hamburg; at the death camp, Mulka had served as Rudolph H?ss’s right-hand man. Josef Klehr was living in Braunschweig, working at an auto body shop called Büssing & Sons; Klehr had been a medical orderly at Auschwitz and had killed thousands with lethal injections to the heart. Oswald Kaduk was living in Berlin working in a nursing home; at Auschwitz Kaduk beat people to death with his boot. SS pharmacist Dr. Victor Capesius was living in G?ppingen, a wealthy pharmacy and beauty shop owner; at Auschwitz, Capesius had assisted the notorious Dr. Mengele in selecting individuals for medical experiments and had managed the death camp’s supply of Zyklon B. With the actions of all these men under scrutiny at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, Germany faced its past through the lens of its own jurists, not American judges. Many young Germans paid attention and began to wonder how so many war criminals could have gotten away with so many war crimes for so long.
More important to the Operation Paperclip legacy is that when R?gner filed his civil suit, he named another name: Dr. Otto Ambros. Ambros was listed as a criminal in R?gner’s complaint because he had been general manager of IG Farben’s Buna factory at Auschwitz. German prosecutors looked into the Ambros case and saw that Ambros had already been tried and convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg and that he had served two years and five and a half months in Landsberg Prison. They decided not to press charges against him a second time. In December 1963, however, Ambros was called to testify at the trial, which was held in the R?mer, Frankfurt’s town hall. This brought Ambros into the limelight once again.
By 1964, Ambros had been a free man for thirteen years. He was an extremely wealthy, successful businessman. He socialized in Berlin among captains of industry and the professional elite. When the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial started, he was a board member of numerous major corporations in Germany, including AEG (Allgemeine Elekrizitats Gesellschaft), Germany’s General Electric; Hibernia Mining Company; and SKW (Süddeutsche Kalkstickstoff-Werke AG), a chemical company. On the witness stand at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, Ambros gave testimony that contradicted statements he had made during his own trial at Nuremberg in 1947. He also said that the conditions at the Auschwitz Buna factory had been “cozy,” and that the workers had enjoyed “good hospitality,” which many Auschwitz survivors found appalling in its offensiveness. While contradictory statements might have gone unnoticed by Frankfurt’s judges and jurors, there were a number of high-profile Israeli journalists in the courtroom who had become experts on the subject and caught Ambros’s lies. These journalists began at once to investigate Otto Ambros’s post-Nuremberg life. Here was a man who had been convicted of slavery and mass murder and had served very little time, considering the crimes. The Farben slaves at Auschwitz numbered sixty thousand, approximately thirty thousand of whom had been worked to death.
The journalists covering the trial were outraged by what they discovered. Otto Ambros now sat on the board of directors of numerous private corporations, but he was also on the board of directors of five companies that were owned by the Federal Republic of Germany. The exorbitant fees Ambros commanded in these positions were being paid by the German taxpayer. An Israeli female journalist, identified in Bundesarchiv documents only as “Frau Deutschkren,” became so incensed by the arrogance and hubris she saw in Otto Ambros’s postwar life that she wrote a letter to the state minister of finance, Ludger Westrick. That the Federal Republic of Germany was paying a “consulting fee” of 12,000 deutschmarks—about $120,000 in today’s dollars—to a convicted war criminal was shameful, Frau Deutschkren said. She demanded that Finance Minister Ludger Westrick meet with her. He agreed.
Frau Deutschkren could not have known that Otto Ambros and Finance Minister Ludger Westrick were business colleagues and apparently on very friendly terms, as state archive correspondence reveals. After the meeting, Westrick promised to look into the matter. Instead, he told Ambros what was going on. In an effort to hold on to his lucrative and prestigious positions on company boards, Ambros produced a summary of the allegations against himself and his Nuremberg codefendants, written by his attorney, a Mr. Duvall. Ambros asked Finance Minister Westrick to circulate this apologia around the various boards on his behalf. “As a short summary of our case [shows] you will clearly find out we are innocent,” Ambros explained, referring to charges of slavery and genocide that he and his Farben colleagues were convicted of at Nuremberg. “I and my colleagues are the victims of the Third Reich,” Ambros insisted. “The former government utilized the success of synthetic rubber which they used to make a profit. If there had been anything against me, then I would have never been released by the American military.” U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy had granted Ambros clemency under intense political pressure, a fact now being used by Ambros to suggest that he had been wrongly convicted at Nuremberg.