IG Farben, owner of gas makers for Nazis, files for bankruptcy

[BushCutters]

FRANKFURT - IG Farben, the former German chemical giant that used thousands of slave laborers at Auschwitz and part-owned the producer of poison gas for the Nazi death camps, announced Monday that it will file for bankruptcy.

CUT

Jews in Western Europe who were forced to work at IG Farben plants by the Nazis received compensation in the 1950s. But the company refused to contribute to a 10 billion-mark ($5.9 billion) national compensation fund that began compensating former slave laborers in 2001.

IG Farben's successor companies in Germany - BASF, Bayer and Hoechst - were all founder members of that fund, but IG Farben instead set up its own 500,000-mark ($295,000) fund in July of that year.


http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasen/spages/359105.html

[ze_dscherman]

1. Not an operating company

From: http://www.expatica.com/germany.asp?pad=190,205,&item_id=35609


"The successor IG Farben company was established to manage a few remaining assets and deal with compensation claims from former slave labourers forced to work in the chemical factories during the war.

Pollehn, whose title is that of liquidator - the rough equivalent of an insolvency administrator - said that an IG Farben foundation still had assets of some DM500,000 (about EUR250,000). It had been hoped to boost the assets through the sale of the real estate.

For several years the company, whose assets have all been liquidated except for its remaining real estate holdings, had been hoping to wrap up its operations and go into final liquidation.

But this was held up by legal challenges in the courts and by unresolved claims made on assets in eastern Germany and Switzerland."