State Department Seeking Details on Visa Request by Former Nazi

The State Department has asked the American Consulate General in Stuttgart, West Germany, for details on the reported application for a visa to visit the United States by a convicted Nazi war criminal who managed a rubber factory at Auschwitz. “We don’t know much about this,” a Department source told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We don’t know whether he actually applied for a visa or indicated he did.” The Washington Post reported today that Otto Ambros, 70, had made the request. The paper said he needed special authorization in view of his conviction by a war-crimes tribunal at Nuremberg in 1948 for what the paper said was “misusing slave labor.” The report said Ambros request was supported by the Dow Chemical Company, which has invited him to speak at an “international seminar” at its Midland, Mich., headquarters May 12. The Post quoted Dow spokesman Max Batterson as saying Ambros was “a well-informed authority on the German chemical industry” and was “not coming here because he is a convicted war criminal.”

Jewish leaders were divided on the issue of the visa request by Ambros. Hyman Bookbinder, local representative of the American Jewish Committee, observed that a visit to the U.S. by Ambros would “again remind Americans of the heinous crimes committed by the Nazis generally and by him particularly.” But Bockbinder said that “If Mr. Ambros has legitimate business in the United States he has the right to be here, just as others have the right to comment on what they think of him,” and that the German “must be prepared for manifestations of revulsion” at his crimes. Dr. Isaac Franck, executive vice president of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington, agreed with Bookbinder. But David Brody of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith said he had urged the State Department “not to recommend a waiter of inadmissibility, because to do so would not be in the public interest.” He said several Congressmen had acted similarly. He called Dow “morally and scientifically bankrupt” in its invitation to Ambros. The Jewish Defense League spokesman, Dr. William Perl of College Park, Md., said that “the invitation to the United States and the planned granting of a visa by the State Department to the convicted Auschwitz war criminal Otto Ambros is an insult and a provocation, not only to Jews of America but every person with a sense of justice.”

Ambros was said by the Post to have been sentenced to eight years in prison–the stiffest penalty handed down against any of the 13 I.G. Farben executives convicted after an all-month trial. The prosecution charged that at least 25,000 persons died at the I.G. Farben rubber plant in Auschwitz and at its specially built concentration camp nearby at Monowitz. The court was told that inmates who had never performed any hard physical labor were forced to transport 100-pound cement sacks at double-time, and that when they broke down they were beaten by kapos. They were selected from the prisoners–Jewish and non-Jewish–at Auschwitz on the basis of their being fit for work. They lived for an average of three more months before they died, it was said. The 60 percent of the prisoners not chosen for the I. G. Farben work were dispatched to immediate gassing at Birkenau. Ambros pleaded not guilty. His attorney, the Post said, declared that the Nazi scientist “never failed to give help if he was approached by anyone about a human problem.”