American lawyer, Belle Zeck, was one of the few women to serve as a prosecutor during the Nuremberg trials. Belle was part of the legal team that prosecuted the German chemical company, I.G. Farben, for war crimes in 1947-48. In her USC Shoah Foundation testimony, Belle explains how her investigation into I.G. Farben’s external assets developed the prosecution’s case against the company.

“Without I.G. Farben and its tremendous resources – particularly, U.S. dollars, foreign exchange – Hitler simply couldn’t have waged war. They manufactured over 90 percent of the explosives in Germany. […] Every bomb had their signature on it.”

I.G. Farben was one of the largest wartime government contractors for Nazi Germany. The company manufactured synthetic rubber and oil for the war effort, and owned a large stake in a subsidiary that produced Zyklon-B, the gas used to kill Jews en masse via the gas chambers at Auschwitz and other death camps.

Of the 23 men charged at I.G. Farben during the Nuremberg Trials, 13 were found guilty of a range of war crimes that included plundering and spoliation of occupied territories, and large-scale slave labor at concentration camps and elsewhere. Their prison sentences ranged from one-and-a-half to eight years.

March is Women’s History Month in the United States.

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USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education develops
empathy, understanding and respect through testimony, using its Visual History Archive of more than 55,000 video testimonies, academic programs and partnerships across USC and 170 universities, and award-winning IWitness education program. USC Shoah Foundation’s interactive programming, research and materials are accessed in museums and universities, cited by government leaders and NGOs, and taught in classrooms around the world. Now in its third decade, USC Shoah Foundation reaches millions of people on six continents from its home at the University of Southern California.

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