The local Superior Court today postponed indefinitely its decision on the appeal of the IG Farben chemical empire against an important precedent-setting verdict, in which a lower court awarded back pay and damages to Jewish leader Norbert Wollheim for work performed and injuries suffered while he was a slave laborer in the synthetic rubber plant maintained by IG Farben at Buna-Monowitz.
Judge Johannes Mueller announced that the court would ask experts named by the West German Chamber of Commerce at Bonn to investigate whether IG Farben could have treated its Monowitz slave laborers better than it did. Under these circumstances the proceedings, already adjourned half a dozen times, are bound to drag on before the Superior Court for many more months.
The losing side is sure to appeal to the German Supreme Court in Karlsruhe, which is not likely to pass on the issue before 1957 or 1958. The Supreme Court, in turn, may then refer the case back to Frankfurt for retrial. The present Wollhein suit is of great significance because its final adjudication has been accepted by the IG Farben trust as binding for some 2,200 similar claims. The lower court awarded the plaintiff $2,400 largely because IG Farben had established its plant near the Auschwitz extermination camp for the very reason that the SS administration of the latter was glad to supply a bottomless pool of cheap inmate labor.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
