IG Farben Building - Text of Memorial Plaque

Text of Memorial Plaque

Translated inscription from the plaque placed in front of the IG Farben Building main entrance on October 26, 2001:

This building was designed by the architect Hans Poelzig and erected between 1928 to 1931 as the headquarters of IG Farben Industries.

Between 1933 and 1945, as one of the largest chemical concerns in the world, the company increasingly put its scientific knowledge and production technologies into the service of war preparations and the National Socialist regime of terror. From 1942 to 1945, IG Farben, together with the SS, maintained the concentration camp at Buna-Monowitz adjacent to the IG Farben factory at Auschwitz.

Of the ten thousand prisoners made to work for the company there, most were murdered.

In the Nazi extermination camps many hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Jews, were killed by Zyklon B gas, which was sold by an IG Farben company.

From 1945 the building was the seat of the American military government and the High Commissioner for Germany. On the 19 September 1945 the State of Hesse was proclaimed here. From 1952 to 1995 the building was the headquarters of the 5th Corps of US Army.

Aware of the history of the building, the State of Hesse acquired it in 1996 for the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University. In the future it will be used for teaching and research.

"Nobody can withdraw from the history of one's people.

One should know that the past must not be based on forgetting

Else it returns and becomes the present."

—Jean Améry, 1975