The Dyhernfurth factory included a slave labor concentration camp with about 3000 prisoners who were used for the most hard and dangerous work at the plant, and as human test subjects in nerve gas experiments.

This was an important project because the war cut off Germany from raw materials for natural rubber, and in June 1944 Ambros was awarded a prize of one million marks by Adolf Hitler in recognition of this work.

In 1941 Ambros selected the site for the Monowitz concentration camp and the Buna Werke factory, which produced Buna rubber using slave labor from the Auschwitz camp, and he then spent the rest of the war serving as plant manager of Buna-Werk IV and managing director of the synthetic fuel production facility at IG Auschwitz.

[3] He was found guilty on the slave-labor count only, for his role overseeing the IG Buna Werke rubber plant at Monowitz, and sentenced to eight years' confinement.

Monowitz was built as an Arbeitslager (workcamp); it also contained an "Arbeitsausbildungslager" (Labor Education Camp) for non-Jewish prisoners perceived not up to par with German work standards.

By 1942 the new labour camp complex for IG Farben prisoners occupied about half of its projected area, and the expansion was for the most part finished in the summer of 1943.

Because the factory management insisted on removing sick and exhausted prisoners from Monowitz, people incapable of continuing their work were murdered at the death camp at Birkenau nearby.