Hitler planned to leave Berlin on April 20, 1945, his fifty-sixth birthday, and travel to the Berghof, his mountain retreat on the Obersalzberg above the town of Berchtesgaden, in the southeast corner of Bavaria. Long convoys of trucks loaded with state papers and anxious officials had already fled south, and Hitler had sent most of his household staff to the Berghof to await his arrival. During the early years of Nazi rule, the area around Hitler’s villa had been transformed into a highly secure zone called the Leader’s Territory (Führergebiet), which contained summer homes for members of the Nazi inner circle, administration buildings, SS guard barracks, a hotel for visiting dignitaries, worker housing, and tunnel and bunker complexes. In addition, a small concrete and granite building known as the Kehlsteinhaus (“Eagle’s Nest”) perched atop a nearby peak. It was widely believed that the Nazi regime would make its last stand in this “Alpine Redoubt.” Rumors were rife that thousands of trained German troops, Werwolf partisans from the Hitler Youth, weapons stockpiles, and even armaments factories had been hidden in the mountains of southern Germany and Austria to defend the Führer. Goebbels also warned that the Nazi last stand would involve the use of a “wonder weapon.”
As the planned April 20 departure date approached, however, Goebbels urged the Führer to remain in Berlin. Hitler agreed, believing against all evidence that the Soviets would suffer a bloody defeat. His generals were under no such illusions, however, and during the regular military conference in the Führerbunker after Hitler’s birthday party, they urged him to leave Berlin immediately for the south, warning that the Red Army would cut off the last escape route within days. Although Himmler and Göring decided belatedly to flee, Hitler hesitated, unwilling to admit that the capital of the Thousand-Year Reich was about to fall. His one concession was to establish separate northern and southern military commands in case the Allies cut Germany in half.
Meanwhile, thousands of nerve agent weapons stacked on barges were traveling down the Danube to Passau in southeastern Bavaria, from whence they were towed down the Inn River and the Alz River to Lake Chiemsee, west of Salzburg. In one incident during the final days of the war, American artillery units began to shell four barges on the Danube and were stunned when the German officers on board quickly raised the white flag of surrender. After being taken prisoner, the Germans explained that the barges held chemical agents that might be released by the shelling, with disastrous consequences for the surrounding area. In this way, the cargo of Tabun-filled bombs fell into American hands.
The final destination of the chemical transports was a large munitions depot outside the village of Sankt Georgen, about ten kilometers east of Lake Chiemsee and close to Hitler’s retreat in the Bavarian Alps. This depot comprised hundreds of sod-covered bunkers camouflaged to blend in with the adjacent pines and filled with orderly stacks of chemical bombs and shells.
On the afternoon of April 25, 1945, the American and Soviet armies met at the Elbe, trapping the remaining Nazi leaders in Berlin. Five days later, determined not to be captured alive, Hitler shot himself in the Reich Chancellery bunker at 3:30 p.m. His suicide precluded a Nazi last stand at the “Alpine Redoubt” that might have involved the use of chemical weapons, including Tabun, causing thousands of additional deaths. In the words of the historian William L. Shirer, the German dictator had planned a Wagnerian finale in which he would go down “like Wotan at Valhalla, in a holocaust of blood—not only the enemy’s but that of his own people.”
Whether this scenario was realistic or an elaborate bluff remains a matter of historical debate. The Führergebiet on the Obersalzberg was not a well-prepared defensive complex, and toward the end of the war, German resistance was crumbling so rapidly that it is doubtful that a last-ditch use of nerve gas would have posed a major threat to the Allied armies and later to the occupation troops. In the last days of the Third Reich, Hitler was living in a fantasy world, directing from his bunker a series of phantom divisions that had already been decimated in the Soviet drive to Berlin.
At midnight on May 8, 1945, the guns finally fell silent. During the five years and eight months since Hitler had ordered the invasion of Poland, tens of millions of soldiers and civilians had been slaughtered. Yet even as the victorious Allies celebrated the end of the long, bloody conflict, they began to compete among themselves for Germany’s precious trove of military secrets—including those of the nerve agents.
CHAPTER FIVE
FIGHT FOR THE SPOILS
AS THE ALLIED forces advanced into German-occupied France after the June 1944 landings on the Normandy beaches, British and American technical intelligence teams followed close behind them, scouring the newly liberated areas for arms caches, military laboratories, and information on German breakthroughs in various fields of science, industry, and weapons development. U.S. technical experts were attached to military intelligence units called “T Forces” and assigned targets for collection. The Army Counter-Intelligence Corps, for example, deployed thirty-five mobile microfilm teams to photograph captured German documents. Another U.S. technical intelligence unit called the ALSOS Mission had the special task of investigating Germany’s unconventional weapons programs: nuclear, chemical, and biological.
Working in parallel with the Americans, British experts collected technical intelligence under the auspices of a separate organization, the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee (BIOS). The poor coordination between the U.S. and British collection efforts often resulted in confusion and redundancy. In an attempt to address this problem, on August 21, 1944, SHAEF established the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS), which was based in London and staffed jointly by American and British officers. Extending through the various Army groups and combat elements of SHAEF, the CIOS administrative organization compiled the latest information on potential intelligence targets and dispatched field teams and investigators to capture and interrogate German scientists, discover and microfilm important technical documents, and confiscate useful equipment from German laboratories and factories. As its peak, CIOS coordinated the work of more than 10,000 U.S. and British intelligence personnel scattered over France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Nazi Germany. Although CIOS existed for only eleven months, it investigated thirty-three different industrial fields and compiled and published more than 1,200 reports.
On August 27, 1944, two days after the U.S. Army liberated Paris, the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) technical exploitation team arrived at the French capital to begin its work. During the weeks leading up to D-Day, CWS intelligence officers had been dispatched to London, where they were joined by technical specialists from the Navy and the Army Air Forces and civilians from the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor of the CIA). Heading the group of fifty chemical weapons specialists was Lieutenant Colonel Paul R. Tarr, the head of the CWS Intelligence Division for Europe. Attached to the Seventh Army, the CWS intelligence team had orders to search for German chemical warfare scientists, weapons stocks, and production facilities. Tarr and his colleagues traveled across liberated France in armored personnel carriers, following closely on the heels of the advancing U.S. combat troops. They drove through bomb-damaged towns and villages, over pontoon bridges, and past endless columns of refugees, finally crossing the Rhine at the end of March 1945, only hours before the final collapse of the German defenses.
Tarr’s top priority was to arrest and interrogate German military scientists and officials who had participated in the chemical weapons program. The team inspected the IG Farben factories at Elberfeld and Leverkusen and then traveled south to the plant at Ludwigshafen, which had suffered heavy bomb damage. At each site, Tarr and Edmund Tilley, an Army Air Forces investigator who spoke fluent German, ordered cowed IG Farben officials to tell them where the company’s top scientists were hiding. Anyone who refused to cooperate was arrested and jailed.
ON APRIL 16, 1945, British soldiers from Field Marshal Montgomery’s 21st Army Group occupied the chemical warfare experimental
station at Raubkammer, which the Germans had abandoned nearly intact. There the British found a wealth of information. One month earlier, files and equipment from the German Army’s Gas Protection Laboratory at Spandau Citadel in Berlin, including a pilot plant with silver-lined reactors and pipes, had been transferred to Raubkammer to avoid capture by the Red Army.
About four kilometers from Raubkammer, British troops discovered the German Army Munitions Depot at Munster-East. This installation consisted of dozens of wooden buildings and concrete bunkers filled with more than 100,000 chemical-filled artillery and mortar shells. Fuses and other components had been carefully packed into boxes, crates, and wicker baskets with leather straps and handles. About the same distance from Raubkammer in another direction was the Luftwaffe Munitions Depot at Oerrel, comprising 175 concrete bunkers concealed in a pine forest that held aerial bombs containing toxic agents. The bunkers were so well protected that only a direct hit with a 1,000-pound bomb would have done much damage. Many of the weapons stored at Munster-East and Oerrel had been painted with a single yellow ring, the standard marking for munitions filled with mustard agent. But there were also stacks of 105 mm shells and 250-kilogram bombs that were painted with three green rings—a novel marking that mystified the British chemical officers.
On April 23, a CIOS chemical weapons intelligence team consisting of ten British and nine American and Canadian specialists, led by Commander A. K. Mills of the British Ministry of Aircraft Production, examined the unidentified German munitions. With the cooperation of German chemists from Raubkammer who had been taken into custody, British experts from the Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment at Porton Down analyzed the contents of one of the German 250-kilogram bombs. The munition was 64.5 inches long and had a set of three green rings painted on the nose, and another set around the middle. Stenciled on the body of the bomb was the code number KC 250 III Gr. The central burster tube contained fourteen pellets of TNT, but the impact fuse was missing; the fuse hole, covered by a Bakelite disk, was filled with cardboard and paper packing.
The Porton chemists opened the charging hole on the side of the bomb and carefully extracted a sample of the chemical fill, a dark brown liquid containing 20 percent chlorobenzene. Initially the British experts suspected that the substance, which they designated “T-2104,” was a new blister agent similar to mustard gas. Working despite pinpoint pupils caused by accidental exposure to the agent vapor, they analyzed the compound and tested it in laboratory rabbits, watching in stunned fascination as the animals convulsed and died. According to the scientists’ laconic report, “The shells were found to contain a markedly potent and hitherto unknown organophosphorus nerve agent.” Chemists with the U.S. Army’s 45th Chemical Laboratory Company also analyzed Tabun in their mobile laboratory and came to the same conclusion.
The realization that the Germans had secretly developed and produced a new chemical warfare agent of unprecedented power came as a terrible shock to the Allies. Although a few intelligence reports from 1943 and 1944 could be interpreted in retrospect as having referred to a German nerve agent, they had contained no firm evidence or tangible clues about its composition. The U.S. and British Chemical Warfare Services and the U.S. National Defense Research Committee had prepared and investigated approximately 150 organophosphate compounds during the war, but none had approached the lethality of the new German agent. Tabun was at least five times as toxic as DFP, the most effective nerve agent developed by the British.
Had Germany employed Tabun on the battlefield or for strategic attacks against British cities, there was little doubt that the initial effects would have been devastating. According to a 1951 report to the British War Office by Lieutenant Colonel D.J.C. Wiseman, “Although the respirator gives complete protection from [Tabun] vapour to the eyes and lungs, the difficulty of recognition would have been considerable, and the danger from the liquid remained. Only battle experience would have shown the degree of effectiveness of these gases, but from laboratory experiment and extrapolation from animal results they obviously possess great potentialities for the future.”
AT THE BEGINNING of May 1945, the U.S. and British governments began to implement a top secret joint operation to arrest and interrogate the elite of German military science and industry. Known as Operation Dustbin, this long-standing plan involved the establishment of a special holding and interrogation center at Kransberg Castle, a medieval fortress in the Taunus region, north of Frankfurt, that had formerly served as Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring’s headquarters.
Over the next several weeks, the Americans and British took numerous German military scientists into custody. At the end of June, the first group of scientists arrived at Kransberg Castle, which had been code-named “Dustbin.” The internees lived in relative comfort: they were housed in the former servants’ wing, were allowed to move freely about the castle area, consumed adequate amounts of American army rations, and even organized scientific lectures and a weekly cabaret show.
In addition to luminaries such as Albert Speer, Fritz Thyssen, and Wernher von Braun, the list of German scientists at Dustbin included a large number of chemical weapons specialists, among them Wilhelm Kleinhans, Gerhard Ehlers, Heinrich Hörlein, Walter Hirsch, SS Brigadier General Walther Schieber, and most of the chemists and technicians from the Anorgana factory at Dyhernfurth. Numerous American and British intelligence teams visited the internment camp and interrogated individuals of particular interest, often repeating the same questions. Meanwhile, the Allies continued to search intensively for the remaining German chemical warfare specialists who remained at large, including Gerhard Schrader, Otto Ambros, and Albert Palm, the director of Dyhernfurth.
On a sunny Sunday morning in early summer, the British arrested Schrader at his home outside Leverkusen and took him to Dustbin. Always a practical man, he decided that it was now in his interest to cooperate with Germany’s new rulers. Under interrogation, he emphasized his scientific motivation for working with the organophosphate compounds, deflected responsibility to Gross and Hörlein for the military applications of Tabun and Sarin, and emphasized his lack of influence over the German Army’s decision to mass-produce them. Schrader also shared with CIOS investigators the secret chemical formulas of the nerve agents, described the Tabun production facility at Dyhernfurth, and conveyed the disturbing news that it had fallen into Soviet hands. CIOS published a special report based on the interrogation of Schrader and Gross titled “A New Group of War Gases,” which provided a detailed account of the discovery of the nerve agents.
THE FIRST VANGUARD of American troops that rolled into Gendorf, Bavaria, in the spring of 1945 discovered a carefully camouflaged IG Farben chemical plant on the outskirts of the town. On reaching the factory, the lead tank smashed unceremoniously through the plant’s entrance, knocking over one of the brick gateposts and trailing yards of wire fence behind it. As the GIs secured and inspected the administration building, they encountered a well-dressed German in his midforties who greeted them in remarkably fluent English. Sporting a neatly groomed mustache, he said that his name was Otto Ambros and that he had no rank or serial number—he was just a “plain chemist” who worked for the IG Farben company. The American officers who met with Ambros found him to be witty, intelligent, and charming.
A few days later, an advance detail of General George Patton’s army arrived in Gendorf, and the commanding officer ordered Ambros held for questioning. During the interrogation, the German said that he was the manager of the chemical factory, which produced soap, cleaning powder, paint, and other commercial products. Ambros showed the Americans spectrum cards displaying the many-hued paints manufactured at the plant. Although one part of the factory (the area that had produced mustard) was underground, Ambros denied that it had a military role and noted that if it did, the Allies would have bombed it. He also tried to win over the American troops by handing out bars of soap, cans of cleaning powder, and paint for their vehicles.
It soon became known
that Ambros was a person of considerable interest to Allied intelligence, and on May 29, the special Army intelligence unit (G-2) at SHAEF ordered him sent to Dustbin for interrogation. The transfer was delayed, however, while the internment camp was being organized at Kransberg Castle. During this period, Ambros remained under house arrest in Gendorf. Every few weeks, senior U.S. commanders passing through the town had the genial German chemist brought in for questioning. On learning that Ambros was in Gendorf, Lieutenant Colonel Tarr traveled to Bavaria to meet with him.
By this time the dark side of Ambros’s personality had become known, including his alleged exploitation of concentration-camp inmates. He had overseen IG Farben’s synthetic rubber plant at Auschwitz, where some 30,000 forced laborers had worked until they died or were deemed unfit and sent to the gas chambers. Nevertheless, Tarr’s only interest in Ambros was to extract his valuable scientific knowledge, and the two men developed a friendly rapport. The German chemist responded at length to the American officer’s technically informed questions, providing a wealth of information about the organization, structure, and capabilities of the German chemical weapons program.
Another American technical intelligence team from the ALSOS Mission interviewed the organic chemist Richard Kuhn, the inventor of Soman. The two investigators, Professor Louis Fieser of Harvard University and Carl Baumann of the University of Wisconsin, were chemists who had worked in Kuhn’s laboratory before the war. When they arrived at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Kuhn greeted them warmly as former colleagues. During the interrogation, the German Nobel laureate claimed that he had not been involved in military research and had spent the war years working on the chemistry of modern drugs. But given Kuhn’s close ties with senior Nazi officials and his chairmanship of the German Chemical Society, other ALSOS investigators did not find his denials credible and ordered him kept under surveillance.
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