War of Nerves

by Jonathan Tucker

  DURING WORLD WAR II, the budget of the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service had risen from $2 million in 1940 to $60 million in 1941 and $1 billion in 1942. The CWS had acquired a vast production capacity for mustard, phosgene, and other toxic agents by building thirteen manufacturing facilities, including Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas and Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Colorado. But the fact that poison gas had never been used in battle meant that the chemical troops had been relegated to manning flamethrowers and laying down smoke screens. Now, however, the remarkable properties of the German nerve agents revived the lagging military interest in chemical warfare.

  Major General William N. Porter, the chief of the Chemical Warfare Service, ordered the CWS Development Laboratory, located on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to investigate methods for detecting the German nerve agents as well as the effectiveness of standard gas masks in protecting against them. The CWS Development Laboratory had been established in December 1941 under the direction of Captain Jack H. Rothschild and was housed in a new building that had recently been completed for MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering. With the rapid expansion of wartime chemical research, MIT had agreed to construct the laboratory on an accelerated schedule so that the Army could use it for the duration of the war. Staffed with hand-picked scientists from the main CWS research and development center at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, the MIT facility conducted cutting-edge research on gas mask filters and other areas of chemical defense.

  On May 15, 1945, two chemists at the CWS Development Laboratory, Captain Robert D. Coombs III and First Lieutenant Charles W. Sauer, began a study of Tabun, which was completed three and a half months later. The two men purified and analyzed the German nerve agent and found that standard Allied respirators provided complete protection against it. They also assessed the ability of existing U.S., British, and German indicator papers and detector tubes to recognize the new agent. Although mustard gas detectors worked for liquid Tabun, they could not reliably detect the cloud of fine droplets and vapor released by the explosion of a chemical shell. Thus, until an automatic vapor detector could be developed, U.S. troops would have to don gas masks at the beginning of a heavy artillery bombardment and wear them for long periods, impairing their fighting ability.

  On May 29, General Porter requested the immediate shipment to the United States “by air, under highest priority,” of five German 250-kilogram bombs so that their Tabun filling could be used to charge chemical mortar shells for field testing. The chief of the CWS also asked the Army Air Forces and the chief of ordnance to determine the combat usability of the captured German munitions. After VE-Day, some 530 tons of German chemical munitions, including 3,000 bombs and 5,000 artillery shells, were shipped to the United States to provide adequate stocks of Tabun for large-scale testing.

  IN PARALLEL WITH the Americans, the British conducted their own scientific investigations of the German nerve agents. On May 23–24, 1945, a few weeks after the German surrender, the British General Staff sent to Raubkammer a team of fifty chemical weapons experts from the Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment at Porton Down. Known as the “No. 1 Porton Group,” this team was to assist the SHAEF authorities in uncovering stocks of German chemical weapons, interrogating key personnel, and confiscating documentary records. Civilian scientists from Porton were granted temporary Army commissions and wore beige uniforms, although they could be distinguished from the regular officers by the absence of badges on their berets.

  Some of the German scientists who had worked at the proving ground were willing to assist the British investigators. They revealed the location of a large buried cache of microfilmed research documents, which was recovered and sent back to England for analysis. German chemical engineers also helped to reactivate the Tabun and Sarin pilot plants at Raubkammer and explained the production process, which was documented in manuals. The pilot plants were later disassembled and shipped to Porton Down.

  A key task for the Porton scientists was to determine how effective the German nerve agents would have been, had they actually been used on the battlefield. Although a few Tabun-filled bombs were sent back to England for examination, it was more convenient to carry out the field trials at Raubkammer, which had a large testing range that was better suited to the German weapons. Accordingly, the Porton team spent four months there, beginning in June 1945. In addition to static weapons testing, British Typhoon fighter-bombers practiced dropping Tabun-filled bombs and using spray tanks to contaminate large swaths of terrain from the air. Visiting parties from Porton Down arrived every week to tour the experimental station and observe the field trials.

  AT THE SAME time that the British and the Americans were carrying out Operation Dustbin, the Soviets also made the hunt for Nazi military secrets a top priority. The Red Army’s Sixteenth and Eighteenth Chemical Brigades had captured the nerve agent factory at Dyhernfurth nearly intact, along with substantial quantities of raw materials, and the partially completed Sarin plant at Falkenhagen had also fallen into Soviet hands. Although most key items of production equipment at Falkenhagen had been removed, Soviet military chemists derived valuable information by analyzing the stocks of raw materials and interrogating captured German personnel.

  In late May 1945, Professor S. I. Volfkovich, an expert on inorganic phosphorus compounds at the Academy of Chemical Defense in Moscow, traveled to the Soviet occupation zone in eastern Germany. Among the sites he visited was the factory at Piesteritz that produced elemental phosphorus, a key ingredient in the manufacture of nerve agents. Another Soviet chemist from the Academy of Chemical Defense, Professor V. A. Kargin, also visited eastern Germany at the end of the war. In a mine shaft at Rüdersdorf, east of Berlin, he discovered a hidden cache of laboratory notebooks and other documents describing Richard Kuhn’s synthesis of Soman, the deadliest of the German nerve agents. Kargin arranged for these files to be sent back to Moscow for analysis.

  IN JUNE 1945, the British Chiefs of Staff decided to dispose of all confiscated stocks of German mustard, phosgene, and other standard chemical weapons, with the sole exception of Tabun-filled aerial bombs. Large quantities of chemical bombs and shells were buried or burned in open pits. British sailors also loaded thousands of tons of German chemical munitions onto twenty aging merchant ships, which were towed into the Baltic Sea. Near the coast of Norway, the sailors donned gas masks, wired the ships with explosives, and sent them to the ocean floor. Similarly, from June 1946 to August 1948, the United States conducted Operation Davey Jones’ Locker, in which captured German ships and submarines were filled with more than 30,000 tons of chemical weapons and scuttled in the North Sea and the Skaggerak Strait between Norway and the Jutland Peninsula of Denmark. In all, thirty-eight ships containing a total of 168,000 tons of chemical weapons were sunk in the Skaggerak, most containing mustard but also some Tabun.

  The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff were interested primarily in Sarin, which they considered of greater military value than Tabun because of its superior potency, volatility, and stability. Thus, although the United States retained a small stockpile of Tabun-filled bombs for research purposes and as an operational reserve, the British were allowed to claim the lion’s share of the German weapons. The British Chiefs of Staff decided to ship 71,000 Tabunfilled aerial bombs to Britain to serve as a contingency stockpile for possible retaliatory use in the Pacific Theater, where the war still raged. In the view of the British military, the German munitions represented a “considerable technical and productive effort” that “could not be reproduced in this country until after the end of the Japanese war.”

  The British Ministry of Defence decided to store the Tabun weapons at a Royal Air Force (RAF) base at Llandwrog in northwest Wales. Although this base had been used for training during the war, it was now inactive, and its remote location, far from populated areas, offered both safety and security. RAF Llandwrog was also situated directly on the Welsh coast, where the prevailing winds w
ould blow any toxic fumes from leaking weapons harmlessly out to sea.

  The secret transfer of the German Tabun bombs to Britain, code-named Operation Dismal, began in October 1946. A ship transported the weapons from the port of Hamburg to Newport Docks in South Wales, where they were loaded under tight security onto railway cars, five hundred bombs per trainload. The trains traveled at night, when the rail network was quiet, to the town of Llanberis, where the cars were unloaded and the weapons transferred to trucks for the final run to Llandwrog. The last consignment of German weapons arrived at the RAF base on July 13, 1947. Still in their original wooden crates, the Tabun bombs were stacked on three runways in the open air. To ensure safe storage and reduce the risk of leaks, ordnance experts removed the fuses from the bombs and dipped them in lanolin, a wax-based sealant. A few years later, shelters were built on the runway to shield the weapons from the elements.

  ON JULY 13, 1945, SHAEF was disbanded and the technical intelligence work performed by CIOS was taken over by a new organization called the “Field Information Agency Technical,” or FIAT, which was based in the headquarters of the Hoechst Company (part of IG Farben), just outside of Frankfurt. After the Potsdam Treaty of August 2, 1945, divided Germany into four Allied occupation zones (American, British, French, and Soviet), FIAT coordinated technical intelligence collection in the British and American zones. Technical exploitation teams collected hundreds of tons of files, documents, photographs, and equipment, which were shipped to London and Washington for analysis. Drawing from meticulous German records, FIAT compiled a comprehensive list of thousands of German scientists, technologists, and industrialists.

  Investigators from FIAT’s Enemy Personnel Exploitation Section regularly visited the Dustbin internment camp to interrogate German chemists and physiologists who had worked on chemical weapons. With the exceptions of Schrader and Kuhn, the Allied investigators were not overly impressed by the quality of the German research effort. According to a British intelligence report, “One gets the idea that if the IG [Farben] had not been fortunate enough to stumble on Tabun, in the course of other work, the German C.W. research picture would have seemed not to be very advanced, but of course this may not be fair, since the very promise of Tabun may have discouraged the expenditure of effort in other fields.”

  FIAT investigators also looked into the persistent rumors of human experimentation with nerve agents. Of the German physiologists interned at Dustbin, including Ferdinand Flury, Wirth, Hörlein, and Gross, none admitted to having any involvement with human experimentation. Because these individuals were often evasive during interrogation, however, suspicions remained. As a BIOS team observed, “It does seem to be a matter for serious doubt whether the higher [Nazi] Party organizations would have agreed to the diversion of considerable effort, in difficult circumstances, to the production of a chemical warfare agent which had not been shown unequivocally to be capable of killing men.” During an interrogation at Dustbin, Jürgen von Klenck revealed that Karl Brandt had once told him and Ambros that he had witnessed one of Professor Wirth’s tests involving Sarin and that the results had been “very impressive.” Although Brandt had spoken of “guinea pigs,” Klenck said that he had inferred by the manner in which Brandt described the results that the experimental subjects had actually been humans and not laboratory animals.

  Finally, in August 1945, FIAT investigators interrogated Fritz ter Meer, a member of the IG Farben board of directors, who eventually admitted that Tabun and Sarin had been tested on concentration-camp inmates in the 100-cubic-meter gas chamber at IG Elberfeld to determine the lethal dosages in man. Such experiments had been conducted initially with monkeys and apes, and later with human beings. According to the interrogation report, “KZ [concentration camp] inmates who had been condemned to death were selected and were allowed to volunteer for the experiments with the provision that in case of survival they would be pardoned.” Ter Meer argued with cold-blooded logic that “no harm had been done to the KZ inmates as they would have been killed anyway and were thus offered a chance of survival.” He also claimed that the tests had a humanitarian purpose because the goal was to develop an improved antidote for nerve agents, which would have saved countless German lives.

  Further investigation revealed that Dr. Karl Wimmer, a physician in the Luftwaffe Health Directorate, and Professor August Hirt, of the University of Strasbourg, had used inmates at the Natzweiler Concentration Camp to test the effects of nerve agents and the effectiveness of various antidotes. After suffering excruciating deaths, the human subjects had been autopsied and their organs examined. During the Nuremberg war-crimes trials, Dr. Wimmer handed over to prosecutors detailed pathology reports on the human experiments.

  NUMEROUS INTERROGATIONS OF German scientists suggested that Otto Ambros was the IG Farben official who was most knowledgeable about chemical weapons production, making him a person of keen interest to FIAT. In July 1945, the Control Branch of FIAT issued fresh orders for the transfer of Ambros and several of his associates to Dustbin for interrogation. Lieutenant Colonel Tarr agreed to deliver Ambros to the internment camp, and the two men set off from Gendorf by car. En route to Frankfurt, Tarr suddenly diverted to Heidelberg and obtained permission from FIAT to hold Ambros for another forty-eight hours of questioning. After two days had passed, however, the men did not proceed to Dustbin as planned. Instead, while Ambros remained behind in Heidelberg, Tarr flew to Paris and London, at first requesting and then demanding the release into his custody of Ambros and the other German chemical warfare experts held at the internment camp. When FIAT and the British authorities refused, an angry confrontation ensued.

  Tarr sent a telegram from Paris in the name of Colonel J.T.M. Childs of the British Ministry of Supply (the agency responsible for chemical warfare matters) ordering the release into U.S. custody of all German chemical weapons experts held at Dustbin. When informed of this message, Colonel Childs immediately repudiated it and accused Tarr of having perpetrated a forgery. By now it was clear to the British government that Tarr had no intention of turning Ambros over to FIAT. In the confusion, Ambros disappeared, surfacing a few days later at Villa Kohlhof, the IG Farben guesthouse near Heidelberg.

  Dr. Wilhelm Hirschkind, a chemist on leave from the Dow Chemical Company, was conducting a study of the German chemical industry for the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service. He had spent most of May and June 1945 visiting IG Farben plants in northern Germany and had returned to London to write his report. In July he received orders to travel immediately to Heidelberg and investigate the large IG Farben plant in nearby Ludwigshafen, which was then under American control but would soon become part of the French occupation zone in southwest Germany. When Hirschkind reached Heidelberg, the U.S. Army commander gave him a letter of introduction to Colonel Weiss, the French commander at Ludwigshafen, requesting assistance in the conduct of his mission. Weiss promptly referred Hirschkind to Ambros as the IG Farben official best qualified to provide the desired information. Ambros had lived for several years in Ludwigshafen, forty kilometers from the French border, and had many French friends.

  Hirschkind found Ambros and his aide Klenck extremely cooperative. On July 28, 1945, the two IG Farben executives summoned several company scientists and engineers who had been involved in the development and production of nerve agents for meetings at Villa Kohlhof with Hirschkind, Tarr, and other CWS intelligence officers. The meetings extended over a few days, during which the men discussed in detail the chemistry of the nerve agents and their manufacturing processes. Several years later, in a letter to Ambros, Hirschkind warmly recalled these conversations. “In addition to . . . specific Chemical Warfare items, we discussed many chemical developments,” he wrote, “and it was only natural for me to tell you in parting that I would look forward after conclusion of the peace treaty in continuing our relations as a representative of Dow.”

  Meanwhile, FIAT continued to demand the internment of Ambros. On August 16, 1945, a British intelligence officer,
Major P. M. Wilson, arrived in Ludwigshafen with an arrest team and discovered to his shock that the French military government had installed Ambros as director of the IG Farben plant and refused to hand him over. The German was allowed to move freely within the French and American occupation zones, and Wilson suspected that Lieutenant Colonel Tarr had “taken steps to assist him to evade arrest.” The British officer reported to London his outrage at “the friendly treatment being given to this man who is suspected of war criminality.”

  Over the next several months, Ambros continued to enjoy the protection of the French government, and FIAT officials made several trips to Heidelberg and Ludwigshafen to arrest him, without success. The IG Farben executive even had the impudence to thumb his nose at his pursuers, writing to FIAT that he was “regretfully unable to meet in Heidelberg because I have to attend important meetings with high-ranking French gentlemen.”

  IN CONTRAST TO AMBROS, Gerhard Schrader agreed voluntarily to be interned at Dustbin, hoping to work out a deal with the Allied authorities. During an interrogation with FIAT officials on August 30, he said that his research on nerve agents was still incomplete and offered to work for the British. When FIAT asked him to draw up a comprehensive list of nerve agents, Schrader explained that it would take him a while to compile the information because he had prepared sixty compounds in the Tabun group and eighty in the Sarin group. On September 2, 1945, Schrader proposed that the British hire him to develop a new insecticide to combat the Colorado beetle, a major insect pest in Europe. FIAT finally gave Schrader complete access to his files at IG Elberfeld so that he could write a lengthy monograph describing his discovery of the organophosphate insecticides and nerve agents. This report was later published in two versions: an unclassified version, covering only the development of insecticides, and a “Secret” version that included the detailed syntheses of Tabun and Sarin.