Corporations and War Crimes

The ongoing occupation of Iraq provides us with stark evidence that Western governments are increasingly involving for-profit corporations in combat support, and private military and security companies are playing a key role in military operations.

War crimes are often conceptualized in two ways: as violations of jus ad bellum (the legality of the war in the first place) and as violations of jus ad bello (how the war is conducted). In the context of corporate war crimes, the former category may include the direct role that for-profit organizations play in the planning and execution of illegal wars. Were the 2003 invasion of Iraq to be considered an illegal war (as many international lawyers have claimed), then several U.S. and UK corporations could be implicated in the logistics and planning of the war. The latter category would include the treatment of civilians and enemy combatants in the course of the war. Private companies implicated in the torture of detainees in Abu Ghraib would fall into this category.

The sharp rise in the use of private military companies and mercenary soldiers by governments has also rapidly increased the likelihood of military corporations being involved in both criminal wars and crimes committed in the course of wars. In addition to war crimes, international criminal law has evolved three broad categories of crime that may also implicate corporations in some circumstances: crimes against humanity (systematic crimes against civilians); genocides (crimes aimed at destroying population groups, e.g., ethnic or religious groups); and terrorism (crimes aimed at spreading terror in civilian populations).

At the Nuremberg War Criminal Tribunal, twenty-four IG Farben board members and executives were charged with mass murder, slavery, and other crimes against humanity connected to Hitler’s Nazi regime. One accusation was that, during the planning of the invasion of Poland and Czechoslovakia, IG Farben had cooperated closely with Nazi officials in structuring industry to cope with the industrial demands of the Wehrmacht. There was also evidence that IG Farben built a factory for producing synthetic oil and rubber from coal in Auschwitz. This factory is said to have made use of 83,000 slave laborers at the peak of its production in 1944. IG Farben held the patent on the pesticide Zyklon B, the poison used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz for mass murder. Zyklon B was, moreover, manufactured by Degesch, an IG Farben subsidiary. In 1951, the company was split up into the original constituent companies. The four largest quickly bought the smaller ones, and today only Agfa, BASF, and Bayer remain. By 1951, all of the IG Farben war criminals had been released from prison.