I was Hitler's Slave. Rudy Kennedy and the fight for compensation for slaves of I.G.Farben & others.

'I Was a Slave Labourer’ (1999). For over five decades, German government and industry resisted demands to pay compensation to the millions who worked as slave labourers under the Third Reich. This film follows retired businessman Rudy Kennedy - who survived slave labour as a teenager - as he tries to force German firms to acknowledge their links with Nazi atrocities. (BBC)
"I was Hitler's slave" portrays Silesian-born Rudi Karmeinski, who was kidnapped at the age of 13 years with his father by the Nazis and forced to work in the IG Farben factory Auschwitz-Monowitz. His father was killed there. Karmeinski survived, emigrated to England and changed its name to Rudy Kennedy. The documentary follows Kennedy's five year fight for the compensation of forced laborers. (IMDb)
The films starts with Kennedy meeting Hans Deichmann, an I.G.Farben employee in the Nazi era.(http://www.wollheim-memorial.de/en/hans_deichmann_19072004)

Part of Rudy Kennedy's obituary in The Times:
Rudy Kennedy led the important but largely unsuccessful battle for compensation fought for five years in the 1990s by British survivors of the Nazi policy of “extermination through labour”. The primary objective, he insisted, was not money but “to uncover and spread the truth”. He was shocked by the distortions and denials by the German Government, by the companies that had employed slave labour willingly during the Second World War, and by many historians.

Rudy Karmeinsky was born in 1927 in Roseberg near Breslau (now the Polish city of Wroclaw but then in German Silesia). By the time he went to school, Hitler was in power and he was the only Jew in his class. He was expelled after he resisted the bullying by other schoolchildren.

For his bar mitzvah he was given an electric train set. It was to save his life and shape his career. In March 1943, when he, aged 15, was sent with his parents and younger sister to Auschwitz, he was able to obtain work as an electrician in the Buna factory operated by IG Farben within the Auschwitz complex. By avoiding the normal backbreaking toil, and by working indoors, he was able to survive for nearly two years.

In January 1945, as the Russian advance neared Auschwitz, Kennedy was marched in harrowing winter conditions to Dora-Mittelbau, an underground camp where V1 and V2 rockets were manufactured under Werner von Braun. From Dora he was moved to Belsen, where, severely emaciated, he was liberated by British troops.

He was permitted to go to London in 1946 because an aunt was living there. He took the name of the British officer who had informed his aunt about his survival. Stricken by the loss of the rest of her family, she committed suicide soon afterwards. Kennedy survived tuberculosis, went to college and once again used his electrical skills to work for English Electric on rocket guidance systems.
After the company was visited by a group of US rocket scientists that included some of his German slave-masters from Dora-Mittelbau, reinstated as scientists working for the US rocket programme, he left English Electric and joined Rolf Schild, who had come to Britain as a child refugee from Nazi Germany, and Peter Epstein, in a venture in rocketry and then in medical engineering. The company was later to develop into the £200 million Huntleigh Electronics. In the 1970s Kennedy formed his own company, Digital Electronics, and, after selling it, joined the board of Roche Pharmaceuticals.

With homes in London and the South of France, Kennedy seemed well set for a comfortable retirement when he visited Auschwitz in 1995. Like many Holocaust survivors he had repressed the terrible memories of his youth and had not been active in organisations of Jewish refugees. Now, he finally discovered the fate of his father, whom he had last seen in a state of exhaustion and suffering from dysentery after two months at Buna-Auschwitz. His father’s last act had been to secure his son the electrician’s job that had saved his life. Kennedy discovered in the camp records that Ewald Karmeinsky had been murdered by an injection of prussic acid.

He then devoted his considerable resources to a campaign to force the German companies that had co-operated in the Nazi “Extermination through Labour” programme to face up to their past. IG Farben had been broken up after the war into successor firms such as Hoechst and Bayer. Not only did these companies and many like them deny all legal responsibility, but also the academic accounts that were emerging (often financed by the companies themselves) were distorted. A historian of IG Farben admitted that he had spent a decade on a work about the company without interviewing a former slave labourer.

Rudy Kennedy, Holocaust survivor, scientist and campaigner, was born on October 27, 1927. He died on November 10, 2008, aged 81

Видео I was Hitler's Slave. Rudy Kennedy and the fight for compensation for slaves of I.G.Farben & others. канала Major Esterhazy