Philip Morris made cigarettes at Auschwitz in the 1990s

Stanford researchers have found evidence in a massive archive of tobacco industry documents that Philip Morris, the company behind the Marlboro Man, manufactured its deadly products on the site of the World War II death camp Auschwitz at the height of anti-tobacco sentiment in the 1990s.

The researchers—Daniel Akselrad, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S), and Robert N. Proctor, a professor of history in H&S and an expert on the tobacco industry and science under the Nazi regime—recently published an article in the journal Public Culture that they hope will spur greater scrutiny of the global cigarette industry. 

The paper explores how the world’s largest cigarette company avoided public criticism for making cigarettes at Auschwitz, the deadliest camp in the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews and millions of others. The lack of public knowledge about tobacco production at Auschwitz is remarkable given that the 1990s represented a high-water mark for public condemnation of the tobacco industry.

Philip Morris’ previously unnoticed operation at Auschwitz is an example of the tobacco industry’s success at making itself invisible while shifting attention to the individuals who use its products, Akselrad and Proctor argue. 

“There was this pervasive narrative that came out in the late 1990s and early 2000s that there was a war on tobacco, and that public health had won that war,” Proctor said. “In fact, the industry has just become more invisible. In this paper, we’re turning the lens onto the industry to look at what we call ‘the causes of causes’—cigarettes cause cancer, but what causes cigarettes?” 

History of the buildings illuminates ‘co-located’ atrocities

The story of Philip Morris’ tobacco factory at Auschwitz came to light when Akselrad uncovered previously unknown documents in the University of California, San Francisco’s Truth Tobacco Industry Documents archive. 

In the 1990s, growing evidence of the dangers of secondhand smoke and whistleblowers’ release of secret documents spurred class action lawsuits and new restrictions on smoking in the United States. In hopes of finding new users abroad, U.S. tobacco companies sought to purchase the remnants of state-run Eastern Bloc tobacco factories left by the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

In 1996, Philip Morris acquired a controlling share of Poland’s state tobacco company, which owned a factory operating on the original grounds of the notorious Nazi concentration camp. Built in 1918 as barracks for Polish soldiers, the factory buildings were expropriated in 1923 by Poland’s tobacco monopoly before being repurposed by the Nazis, the researchers show. In June 1940, the buildings confined the first 728 prisoners at Auschwitz. The buildings later served as Nazi and SS barracks and offices. 

Philip Morris executives were aware of this history and were concerned about PR risks, the researchers found. At that time, cigarette makers were comparing public health advocates to Nazis, as part of a larger assertion that the right to smoke in bars and restaurants was akin to the right to free speech. In PR materials cited in the article, the industry equated designated smoking areas with Nazi-controlled Jewish ghettos. 

Despite new anti-smoking regulations rolling out in the United States in the 2010s, the tobacco industry has remained profitable, and cigarettes continue to be the world’s largest preventable cause of death, the researchers said.

“The ironies are so deep on this,” Proctor said. “The industry has built so many deceptions that in a sense we’re living in their matrix.”

What ‘we have learned to unsee’

A brush with the press appears to have prompted Philip Morris to try to sell the factory in 1998, according to the documents. A BBC film crew caught the factory on camera in a 1996 report on a controversy surrounding a proposed commercial development that would have put a burger grill across the street from the UNESCO World Heritage Site. The factory buildings sit just beyond the site boundary.

“We have this idea of Auschwitz having a main camp with a well-defined border—but it wasn't like that,” Akselrad said. “This was a teeming industrial complex covering 25 square miles with 40 slave labor camps.”

Akselrad and Proctor call on scholars to consider the memorialization of atrocities in creative new ways so that abuses that are diffuse over time and space—like the tobacco industry’s—are not overlooked. 

The researchers also hope to stimulate public dialogue about whether cultural and academic institutions should distance themselves from tobacco money. Many such institutions have recently removed names commemorating Confederate generals, slave owners, eugenicists, and opioid magnates, but tobacco tycoons’ naming rights have not entered the public debate.

“Why has the Metropolitan Museum of Art scrubbed the Sackler name, of Purdue Pharma opioid infamy, but not the Tisch name, behind Lorillard cigarettes, just down the hall?” Akselrad asked. “Opioids, horrible as they are, don’t even approach the scale of cigarette death.” 

Tobacco factories have also avoided public scrutiny in the United States, the researchers said, citing a massive Philip Morris factory in Richmond, Virginia, as an example.

Visible from Interstate 95, the major throughway along the East Coast, the Richmond Philip Morris factory has attracted little public criticism, though it manufactures 180 billion cigarettes every year, the researchers said. Because cigarettes kill one person per million smoked, this factory has contributed to millions of deaths, they said.

“In many ways, this is a story about what we have learned to unsee,” Akselrad said.