The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

by Daniel Yergin

Altogether, during the Second World War, synthetic fuels would account for half of Germany’s total oil production.19 It could not have happened without immense effort and all the normal tools and techniques of the Nazi war economy, including slave labor. Hitler had transformed the Viennese streetcorner anti-Semitism of his youth into a monstrous and diabolical ideology, at the center of which was the murder and destruction of the Jews. The concentration camps were the mechanisms for achieving this “Final Solution,” which was decided upon in a mere two hours at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. But, until the “Final Solution” could be completed, those Jews who were fit—along with Slavs and other prisoners—were to be put to work to further the objectives of the Reich that had already pronounced a death sentence upon them. And so a continuing supply of concentration camp prisoners was drafted into I. G. Farben’s hydrogenation plants, as well as into its synthetic rubber plants. The company, in fact, was building synthetic fuel and rubber plants adjacent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Auschwitz was the largest of the Nazi mass murder factories; upwards of two million people, mostly Jews, were put to death there with gas manufactured by an I. G. Farben subsidiary. The I. G. Farben officials described the Auschwitz site, with its ample supplies of coal and labor, as “very favorably located.” The synthetic fuels plant at Auschwitz was under the directorship ...