War of Nerves

by Jonathan Tucker

  By late February, the military situation had grown so desperate that the Nazi leadership was more preoccupied with safeguarding its arsenal of nerve agent weapons than with planning for their use. Pressure was building on the eastern front as the Red Army surged forward. General Heinz Guderian, the Army chief of staff, told Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop that the war was lost. Informed by Ribbentrop of Guderian’s remarks, Hitler summoned the Army general and warned him angrily that such statements were tantamount to treason.

  At the end of February, the Red Army was eight kilometers from the unfinished Sarin plant at Falkenhagen when director Klenck ordered a general evacuation. The production line was partially dismantled and corrosion-resistant pieces of apparatus that were silver-lined or made of solid silver were transferred to the Sarin pilot plant at Raubkammer. Beyond the considerable intrinsic value of this equipment, it may have been salvaged with the possible intent of resuming production of nerve agents after the official end of hostilities, perhaps by guerrilla bands such as the Freikorps Adolf Hitler, founded by Ley, or the Werwolf, under Bormann. For Nazi partisans, even small amounts of Sarin produced in a pilot plant could be employed for terrorist attacks against the occupying armies. Due to the bombardment of Berlin, Division 9 and the Army Gas Protection Laboratory also moved to Munster for the remainder of the war.

  One of the last messages to reach Falkenhagen before the plant was evacuated was an order from Ambros to destroy all classified materials. In fact, Klenck did not follow this order completely. He took several thousand pages of secret documents with him when he fled to Heidelberg in March 1945, possibly with the intent of using them as bargaining chips with the Allies. The classified materials in his possession included several laboratory notebooks, five packets of contracts between IG Farben and the Army High Command, information on Dyhernfurth, and production sheets for Tabun and other gases.

  Klenck went to the Villa Kohlhof, the IG Farben guesthouse outside Heidelberg, where he met up with Ambros. On March 26, the two men traveled to the Bavarian town of Gendorf, where Anorgana had built a multipurpose chemical plant that produced mustard agent as well as paints, cleaning powder, and other commercial products. Klenck and Ambros supervised the conversion of the plant from war to peace production, including the removal of specialized equipment for the manufacture of mustard. Meanwhile, without informing Ambros, Klenck placed the secret documents from Falkenhagen in a steel barrel, which he told the chief of the Anorgana-Gendorf fire brigade to bury on an isolated farm six miles outside of town. (The documents were later discovered by Allied intelligence.)

  WITH THE SPECTER of defeat looming, Hitler and Goebbels began to advocate a “scorched earth” policy under which all military, industrial, transportation, and communications facilities throughout the Reich would be destroyed to prevent them from falling intact into enemy hands. Hitler no longer cared about the welfare of the German people, whom he believed had not fought bravely enough and were undeserving of his leadership. Instead, he would transform Germany into a desert to deprive the Allies of the spoils of conquest.

  Speer, who would soon turn forty, faced an acute dilemma. For eleven years, he had grown rich and powerful under Hitler’s wing while exploiting hundreds of thousands of slave laborers in his armament factories. But even he could not fail to grasp the wanton destructiveness of the dictator’s “scorched earth” proposal. Hoping to avoid a further waste of lives and hasten the war’s inevitable end, Speer conceived the idea of using Tabun to assassinate Hitler and the other top Nazi leaders. Whenever Hitler was in Berlin, he routinely held nighttime military conferences in his spacious underground bunker fifty feet beneath the marble halls of the Reich Chancellery building, which Speer had designed. The meetings in the Führerbunker were attended not only by the generals of the Supreme Command but also by the Nazi inner circle, including Göring, Himmler, Goebbels, and Ley.

  Ever since the failed attempt on Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944, no one was allowed to approach the underground entrance of the bunker without being searched for weapons and explosives. To get around this problem, Speer devised a plan to introduce Tabun into the bunker’s external air intake, which projected into the garden of the Chancellery building. During walks in the garden, he found the opening of the ventilation shaft, which was level with the ground, covered by a thin iron grate, and hidden by a small shrub. Speer believed that if a fine mist of nerve agent could be introduced into the external air intake at the time of one of Hitler’s meetings, the lethal vapor would spread rapidly through the bunker’s ventilation system, killing all those inside.

  On February 20, 1945, Berlin experienced a major air raid, and Speer waited out the attack in a starkly furnished concrete bomb shelter together with Dieter Stahl, the head of munitions production in the Ministry of Armament. The two men had recently become close after Stahl had been overheard making a defeatist remark about the impending end of the war and had been interrogated by the Gestapo. Fearing the worst, he had appealed for help to Speer, who had managed to quash the investigation. The two men now held a frank conversation about the folly of Hitler’s policies, which they agreed were leading the nation to disaster. Stahl gripped Speer’s arm and murmured, “It’s going to be frightful, frightful!”

  At this point, Speer inquired discreetly about the poison gas Tabun and whether Stahl might be able to obtain a small supply of it. After a pause, Speer blurted out, “It is the only way to bring the war to an end. I want to try to inject the gas into the Chancellery bunker.” Although Speer was shocked by his own frankness, Stahl seemed unperturbed and promised soberly to investigate ways to obtain the agent. Several days later, in early March, Stahl told Speer that he had consulted with the head of munitions at the Army Ordnance Office, who had told him that any midlevel employee at a weapons depot would have access to Tabun-filled artillery shells. Stahl had learned, however, that Tabun was effective only when vaporized by an explosion. This property made it impractical for Speer’s assassination scheme because the blast would shatter the thin-walled ventilation duct.

  Despite this setback, Speer decided to pursue the plan using a more traditional agent, such as phosgene. He met with Johannes Hentschel, the chief engineer at the Chancellery, and told him that Hitler had complained about the poor air quality in the bunker. At Speer’s request, the air filters were removed for replacement, leaving the bunker temporarily unprotected. A few days later, however, Speer returned to the Chancellery garden and was stunned to discover that a series of new security measures had been put into effect at Hitler’s personal order. Armed SS guards stood on the roofs of the buildings, searchlights had been installed, and the air intake for the underground bunker had been covered by a cylindrical metal chimney more than ten feet high.

  It was now impossible for Speer to inject poison gas into the bunker without being detected by the guards patrolling the garden. Hitler had ordered the installation of the chimney not because he suspected an assassination plot but because he feared that Red Army troops attacking Berlin would fire chemical shells at the Führerbunker. His worst nightmare was that the Soviets had developed a knockout gas that would render him unconscious, allowing him to be captured alive “like a stunned animal in the zoo.” Poison gas, being heavier than air, would not penetrate the ten-foot chimney.

  Speer was actually relieved that the assassination plot had been thwarted. For several weeks he had lived in a state of constant tension, fearing that the plan would be exposed and that he, his wife, and his six children would suffer terrible consequences. Years later, he admitted in his memoirs that his strong personal feelings for Hitler would have prevented him from carrying out the attack. “The whole idea of assassination vanished from my considerations as quickly as it had come,” he wrote. “I no longer considered it my mission to eliminate Hitler but to frustrate his orders for destruction. That, too, relieved me, for all my feelings still existed side by side: attachment, rebellion, loyalty, outrage. Quite aside from all question of fear,
I never could have confronted Hitler pistol in hand. Face to face, his magnetic power over me was too great up to the very last day.”

  On March 15, Speer prepared a memorandum opposing the “scorched earth” plan, which he delivered to the Führer in person on the evening of March 18. Unmoved by Speer’s plea, Hitler said coldly, “If the war is lost, the nation shall also perish.” The next day he issued a directive for the systematic demolition of German towns and factories, dams and bridges, food and clothing stores, railways, ships, and trains. Speer resolved to do everything in his power to countermand Hitler’s orders.

  ON MARCH 28, the British armies, under the command of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, crossed the lower Rhine River and headed northeast toward Bremen, Hamburg, and the Baltic Sea. Montgomery was relieved that the German defenders did not resort to chemical warfare, as it was their last tactical opportunity to do so. Even so, he feared that Hitler might still unleash poison gas in a final act of desperation.

  The next day, Field Marshal Keitel gave the order to remove Germany’s most modern chemical munitions—those filled with nerve agents—from depots threatened by the enemy to more secure locations. Keitel’s order read as follows:

  I. The components of the Armed Forces must ensure that as the enemy advances, the “special” chemical agents (Sarin and Tabun) . . . , which are presumably not known to the enemy, must under no circumstances fall into his hands, but must be removed from storage facilities before his arrival. Older chemical agents known to the enemy are to be removed only as a secondary effort. When, in exceptional cases, this is not possible, they are to be abandoned as necessary.

  II. Never is chemical agent to be identified as such; any markings to this effect must be removed so as not to call the enemy’s attention to them.

  III. The storage space needed for transportation of the munitions must be made available immediately by the Army Transport Chief and the Army components, as long as it is not required for operational purposes.

  IV. Destruction of chemical agents and munitions should be undertaken in such a way as not to give the enemy an excuse to claim that Germany has initiated chemical warfare.

  V. Chemical production facilities and storage bunkers are to be destroyed when threatened by the enemy. In so doing, it is essential that even after destruction, the enemy is not able to obtain information on the type and composition of the chemical agents and munitions produced and stored there.

  The rapid advance of Allied forces created numerous problems with the evacuation of nerve agent munitions. In addition to the lack of cargo capacity, the bombing of railway lines hampered transportation. Damaged tracks forced the unloading of several trains in the middle of the stretch, and others had to be abandoned on secondary rail lines. Meanwhile, American forces were approaching the industrial Ruhr Valley in a pincer movement, with the Ninth Army to the north and the First Army to the south. On April 1, the two armies converged, trapping twenty-one German divisions in the Ruhr and tearing a 200-mile gap in the German front, through which the Allies advanced toward central Germany. General Eisenhower planned for the American forces to meet up with the Soviets on the Elbe River south of Berlin, cutting Germany in two.

  By April 2, it was clear that Field Marshal Keitel’s order to evacuate all nerve agent munitions to secure depots was no longer practicable. Not only were the necessary means of transport lacking, but Germany no longer controlled weapons depots that were inaccessible to the enemy. Sinking munitions in rivers or lakes had been ruled out because of the risk of contamination or discovery. The only alternative was to move the weapons by barge. At Hitler’s direction, Keitel ordered the evacuation of Tabun-filled bombs and shells stockpiled in Silesia and their loading onto barges on the Elbe and Danube Rivers.

  Despite the desperate military situation, the Wehrmacht managed to organize a major riverine transport operation for the chemical munitions. The chief of the Transport Department requisitioned hundreds of freight barges, while the Reich transport minister and the general inspector for water and energy arranged for suitable anchorages. Officers from the SS, Army, Luftwaffe, and Navy took extraordinary measures to carry out the evacuation order, including the provision of air cover and military police to guard the loaded barges.

  One of the Luftwaffe’s largest munitions depots was near the town of Lossa in the eastern German state of Thuringia. This depot contained several thousand aerial bombs filled with Tabun. On April 5, 1945, shortly after the entry of American forces into Thuringia and their expected advance along the Eisenach-Erfurt-Jena highway, a top secret “flash” telegraph signed by Hitler arrived at Luftwaffe headquarters. The coded message read, “The Führer has ordered the immediate evacuation of K-Muna [chemical munitions depot] Lossa, north of Kolleda, on the Kolleda rail line. All stocks of III-Green aerial bombs are to be removed immediately.” The designation “III-Green” referred to the three green rings painted on the bombs to indicate that they were filled with Tabun.

  A total of eleven trainloads would be needed to evacuate the special chemical munitions from Lossa. According to the plan, two trains per day would transfer the weapons to the outskirts of Torgau, a major transportation hub on the Elbe, where the munitions would be stockpiled in the open air until the requisitioned barges had arrived at the docks. Shortly after receiving Hitler’s order, the general quartermaster of the Luftwaffe, Lieutenant General Dietrich Georg von Crigern, contacted Field Marshal Keitel to express his deep concern about the plan. In view of the acute threat of enemy air raids, he warned, the large-scale transport of chemical munitions posed an unacceptable risk to the civilian population. But over Crigern’s objections, the operation went ahead as planned.

  On April 8, 1945, as Tabun-filled bombs were being loaded into a freight train at Lossa station, a pair of U.S. Thunderbolt fighter-bombers swooped out of the sky and flew low over the town with a deafening roar. The planes strafed the station platform with heavy machine-gun fire and then dropped high-explosive bombs onto the train cars and the exposed crates of munitions, pulling up sharply at the end of the run. Moments later, orange fireballs blossomed over the station with a series of thunderclaps, and the destroyed train burned fiercely. Much to the pilots’ surprise, the munitions did not erupt with large secondary explosions. Instead, liquid Tabun streamed from the ruptured bombs, forming a shallow lake that spread over the train-station landing. Four town residents who were near the station at the time of the attack were overcome by the lethal vapors and died in convulsions within minutes. Thus, in a dark irony, the first combat deaths from Tabun were German civilians.

  The consequences of the Lossa attack were so grave that General Crigern reported the incident immediately to Field Marshal Keitel, despite the fact that hundreds of more important strategic targets were also being hit by Allied bombers. German Army chemical troops wearing gas masks and rubberized suits cordoned off Lossa station and evacuated the entire population from a radius of twenty kilometers. The troops spent the next twenty-four hours decontaminating the area.

  Even in the face of the Lossa disaster, the Nazi leadership was determined to continue loading the Tabun-filled bombs onto river barges. The special munitions were diverted to a train station in the nearby town of Billroda, from which the transport to Torgau continued. One modification was made in the weapons evacuation plan, however. In addition to Torgau, Hamburg harbor had been designated as a hub for loading nerve agent munitions from depots in Lübbecke and Walsrode onto barges on the Elbe. After the Lossa disaster, the Reich defense commissar in Hamburg expressed strong objections to this part of the plan, and Field Marshal Keitel agreed to move the loading zone outside the city limits.

  ON APRIL 9, the Wehrmacht Supreme Command sent a certain Captain Hemmen from the Army quartermaster’s office on a one-week inspection tour of the northern region of Germany, which remained under Nazi control. Hemmen’s mission was to verify that Hitler’s orders for the evacuation of nerve gas weapons were being properly executed. On April 10, when the
captain arrived at the Army Munitions Depot in Walsrode, the facility had been taken over by a German Army group. Logistics officers had arranged for ten railroad cars to transport Tabun-filled munitions to Nordenham and had requisitioned another twenty-nine cars. At Nordenham, the bombs would be off-loaded onto barges, which would be tugged to the mouth of the Weser River and brought into a holding area in the vicinity of the Elbe.

  On April 11, Hemmen reported to Berlin that fighting had disrupted key rail and road links, making the chemical weapons transport operation increasingly chaotic. Breakdown of the telephone network was also impeding the delivery of orders. According to one report, a train loaded with Tabun-filled weapons from the Army depot at Lübbecke in Westphalia had fallen into Allied hands. Some German commanders abandoned their depots while others buried munitions, left transport trains standing in mid-stretch, or sank containers of bulk agent in rivers.

  On April 15, the general quartermaster of the German Army, Major General Alfred Toppe, reported that no more barges were available for the transport of chemical weapons. Instead, the munitions would have to be stored on trains in inconspicuous locations or towed out to sea and dumped to create more space on the existing barges. The next day, Hitler told Field Marshal Keitel that nerve gas weapons must not be disposed of under any circumstances. If the barges could not be towed downstream, they should be moored outside cities and harbors, away from the likely targets of enemy air raids. Once again, this order reflected Hitler’s determination to retain control over the weapons to the bitter end.