Gremany: More than 80,000 former Nazi forced labourers may never receive compensation after the German company IG Farben filed for bankruptcy yesterday.
The company, once the largest chemicals concern in the world, was synonymous with the Nazi regime for manufacturing Zyklon B poison gas for concentration camps.
The company was stripped of its assets by the Allies after the war and went into liquidation in 1952, but its shares continued to be traded on the German stock market.
However, the company was put into liquidation yesterday and will vanish forever next year after a former sister company defaulted on payments.
Liquidators said yesterday that property worth €34 million will be sold to pay back debts of about €28 million, but it is doubtful that former labourers will receive anything from the carve-up.
"There won't be very much left over," admitted Mr Otto Bernhardt, one of the two liquidators and a conservative MP.
He criticised the "wheeling and dealing" with the company's assets over the last decades that saw over €67 million of the company's €80 million worth creamed off in recent years.
Members of the association representing former labourers picketed the press conference yesterday. They criticised the bankruptcy filing and called for action to prevent "the creditor banks taking over the last millions because the remaining property belongs morally to the surviving slave labourers of the former Nazi company".
IG Farben refused to join a foundation formed by German industry to deal with compensation claims. Its own compensate fund is believed to contain about €500,000.
IG Farben was founded in 1925 through the partial fusion of the chemical companies Bayer, BASF and Hoechst.
Company revenues rocketed during the second World War producing explosives and other chemicals for the Nazi war machine.
The company operated a rubber plant at Auschwitz, run by 30,000 camp inmates who worked until they were sent to the gas chambers.
A subsidiary company, Degesch, produced and delivered Zyklon B pesticide to concentration camps in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek for use in gas chambers to murder millions of inmates.
In the three years to 1945, Degesch is believed to have delivered about 19 tonnes of Zyklon B to Auschwitz-Birkenau alone.
At the end of the 1950s, IG Farben paid over DM13.5 million to Jewish forced labourers in western Europe, but remaining labourers fear that their claims will vanish with the IG Farben name next year.