Monowitz held around 12,000 prisoners, the great majority of whom were Jews, in addition to non-Jewish criminals and political prisoners. The IG Farben factory was also in this camp. The company was involved in medical experiments on inmates at both Auschwitz and the Mauthausen concentration camp. One of its subsidiaries supplied the poison gas, Zyklon B, that killed over one million people in gas chambers during the Holocaust
The history of the founding of the camp is connected with the initiative by the German chemical concern IG Farbenindustrie A.G. to build its third large plant for synthetic rubber and liquid fuels. The new camp was to be located in Silesia, beyond the range of Allied bombers at the time. Among the several sites proposed in December 1940/January 1941, the final choice fell on the flat land between the eastern part of Oświęcim and the villages of Dwory and Monowice. The decision was justified by the favorable geological conditions, access to railroad lines, water supply (the Vistula), and the availability of raw materials: coal (the mines in Libiąż, Jawiszowice, and Jaworzno), lime (Krzeszowice), and salt (Wieliczka). Furthermore, the belief that it would be possible for the firm to employ prisoners from the nearby Auschwitz concentration camp was by no means a trivial consideration, and may in fact have been decisive in the choice of the project.
IG Farben put the pieces of the deal in place between February and April 1941. The company bought the land from the treasury for a knock-down price, after it had been seized from its Polish owners without compensation; their houses were vacated and demolished. At the same time, the German authorities expelled the Jews from Oświęcim (resettling them in Sosnowiec and Chrzanów), confiscated their homes, and sold them to IG Farben as housing for company employees brought in from Germany. Some local Polish residents were dispossessed in the same way. Finally, IG Farben officials reached an agreement with the concentration camp commandant on hiring prisoners at a preferential rate of 3 to 4 marks per day for the labor of auxiliary and skilled construction workers. In a letter to his colleagues about the negotiations, IG Farben director Otto Ambros wrote that “our new friendship with the SS is very fruitful.”
After repeated memos and complaints, SS-Obersturmbannführer Gerhard Maurer, who was responsible for the employment of concentration camp prisoners, traveled to Oświęcim on February 10, 1943. He promised IG Farben the prompt supply of another thousand prisoners, and the systematic “exchanging” of those no longer capable of hard labor at the factory. More than 10 thousand prisoners fell victim to selection during the period that the camp was in operation. They were taken to the hospital in the main camp, where most of them were killed by lethal injection of phenol to the heart, or to Birkenau, where some were liquidated after so-called “re-selection” in the BIIf prison hospital or—in the majority of cases—murdered immediately in the gas chambers. More than 1,600 prisoners other prisoners died in the hospital in Monowice, and several dozen were shot at the construction site or hanged in the camp. Summing up these figures and adding several hundred known victims in the Buna labor detail, a total of about 10 thousand Auschwitz concentration camp prisoners thus lost their lives as a result of working for IG Farben.
