Slave labor

Southern Louisiana became a one-crop region during Rillieux s youth. Sugar cane was expensive to grow, and its refining consumed enormous amounts of firewood and slave labor. Each plantation needed an animal-powered mill to crush the heavy canes and release their juices and a sugar-house to evaporate the syrup. 

That is the question we shall have to answer for the court. I know it s complex. But the simplest thing we should be able to prove — their slave-labor activities —is troublesome, too. Let me show you something. This brief came to me this morning, as proof."... 

By the time Fritz Sauckel took office in March 1942 to direct the Reich s slave-labor program, he was surprised to discover that I.G. Farben had already been "wildly recruiting foreign labor." As late as 1943 the Reich s Minister of Economics wrote to the... 

But we believed we had established every single crime recited in the indictment, although not as conclusively against some defendants as others. The record held hundreds of documents proving that the defendants part in Germany s war was highly responsible and vast in its scope. Their plunderings were shown in extraordinary detail. Their slave-labor activities were so widespread that even a brief discussion of all our proof would take volumes. 

We must wait two more months before the judgment would be rendered. Duke Minskoff and I took a long holiday through Italy, Belgium, Holland, France, and Luxemburg. He was carefree, convinced that all the directors would be found guilty on the slave-labor charge. I didn t reflect much on the case until we got back and met a nervous Sprecher. 

Friedrich Hermann ter Meer Guilty on slave-labor and plundering... 

Otto Ambros Guilty on slave-labor count only Sentenced to eight years... 

Utilization of slave labor in Farben was approved as a matter of corporate policy. To permit the corporate instrumentality to be used as a cloak to insulate the principal corporate officers who authorized this course of action is, in my opinion, without any sound precedent under the most elementary concepts of criminal law. 

The majority fully accepts the defense contention that the utilization of slave labor (except as to five defendants) was the result of compulsory production quotas and other governmental regulations. This asserted defense of "necessity" is held to have been sustained because of the reign of terror within the Reich and because of possible dire consequences to the defendants had they pursued any other policy. 

The so-called arsenic of the Greeks and Romans consisted of the poisonous sulfides, orpiment and sandarac, mined with heavy loss of life by slave labor (2). Both Pliny the Elder and Dioscorides were familiar with orpiment and realgar (sandarac) (70). The latter mentioned that Arsenicum and Sandaracha occur in the same mines, that sandarac has a brimstone-like odor, and that these two ores are roasted in the same manner (71). 

Enforcement of a political-economic model antagonistic to general human progress, and containing targeted populations within non-creative, manual slave-labor projects (e.g., pyramid-building). 

Illustration 3 The photo reproduced in the American magazine Life of May 21, 1945, showing the "bodies of almost 3,000 slave laborers in Nordhausen . 

As these prisoners were being processedfor slave labor, many of their friends andfamilies were being gassed and burned in the ovens in the crematoria. The smoke can be seen in the backgrounds... 

Auschwitz and Majdanek. The claim is made that these two camps were used as both work camps and extermination camps. Jews unable to work are said to have been exploited for slave labor, while those unable to work were purportedly killed. 

After Virginia s farmers lost interest in raising hemp due to the drop in prices, Americans in other parts of the country decided to move into the hemp market. Foremost among these new hemp producers were the farmers of Kentucky. And like their neighbours in Virginia, Kentuckians found that the only profitable way to raise hemp was through slave labor. 

This method has obvious advantages for industrial-scale production because it is faster and simpler. For this reason, it was adopted by the Nazis in the closing days of W W II to make methyl nitrate. Before rushing off and following their lead, keep in mind that life was cheap in Nazi Germany, especially the lives of industrial slave laborers. Even in skilled hands, the distillation of this material is not to be taken lightly. 

Within the chemical industry, the publicity campaign against the accusations of crimes reached its pinnacle long before slave labor lawsuits, which are again so much in the news today. In the fall of 1948, Alexander Menne, the chairman of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Chemische Industrie, delivered to a gathering of industrialists, lawyers, journalists, and judges a statement... 

For six years during World War II, Nazi Germany used a network of twenty-five synthetic fuel plants, manned mostly by slave labor, that, at peak production, converted coal into the 124,000 barrels of oil per day that Germany used to power most of its war machine before the U.S. Army Air Force closed those I. G. Farhen plants in 1944. 

Hydroelectric power plants have had a significant impact on industry through the ages. Originally a simple replacement for slave labor, the use of hydroelectric power peaked before the widespread use of fossil fuels as power sources. It is possible for a dedicated waterwheel to power a simple manufacturing process such as milling, on a small scale. 

Cover of Dr. Radium Man of Science 1 (Slave Labor Graphics, October 1992). Beginning in the 1990s, a number of smaller comic book companies began to introduce nuclear-themed titles. Most of these do not have any authentic nuclear links, such as Dr. Radium Man of Science, which contains only an odd nuclear allegory. 

See Wiater and Bissette, Comic Book Rebels. It s Science... with Dr. Radium 2 (January 1987) (Slave Labor Graphics). Dr. Schnuke s Atomic Water Story (n.d.) (Waffle Comics). Corporate Crime Comics 1 (1977) (Kitchen Sink). 

Cover of Dr. Radium Man of Science 1 (Slave Labor Graphics,... 

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