On January 21, a memorandum from Berlin ordered all Farben employees to leave. The last train for Germans leaving Auschwitz, transporting mostly IG Farben’s female staff from the camp, left that same afternoon. Yet Otto Ambros stayed behind. Ambros’s official title was plant manager of Buna-Werk IV and managing director of the fuel production facility at IG Auschwitz. He had been involved in the facility since January 1941, back when Farben’s original plans were being drawn. Ambros had chosen the site location and sketched out the original blueprints for the plant. He was also the man who invented synthetic rubber for the Reich. Tanks, trucks, and airplanes all require rubber for tires and treads, and during wartime this feat was considered so important to the Reich’s ability to wage war that Ambros had been awarded 1 million reichsmarks by the Führer.
Finally, on January 23, 1945, Ambros left the concentration camp. Only random prisoners remained. Inmates like Primo Levi who were too weak to march and had not been killed by the SS lay in the infectious diseases ward. When Levi’s fever finally broke and he ventured outside, he found groups of prisoners roaming around the camp looking for food. Levi found a silo filled with frozen potatoes. He made a fire and cooked his first food in days. On January 27, he was dragging a dead friend’s corpse to a large grave dug in a distant field when he spotted four men on horseback approaching the camp from far away. They were wearing white camouflage clothing, but as they got closer he could see that at the center of the soldiers’ caps there was a bright red star. The Red Army had arrived. Auschwitz was liberated.
Otto Ambros was already on the way to Falkenhagen, Germany, to destroy evidence in another Farben factory there. Speer headed back to Berlin. Neither man dared travel north inside Poland, where a second armaments factory the two men were jointly involved in was also in jeopardy of being captured by the Soviets. At this facility, called Dyhernfurth after the small riverside village in which it was located, IG Farben produced chemical weapons—deadly nerve agents—on an industrial scale. On January 24, 1945, the day after Ambros fled Auschwitz, Farben had given the word to evacuate Dyhernfurth and destroy whatever evidence remained there. All munitions were loaded onto railcars and trucks and sent to depots in the west.
The destruction of evidence was now becoming standard operating procedure at laboratories, research facilities, and armaments factories across the Reich. And while Nazi Germany faced imminent collapse, its scientists, engineers, and businessmen had their futures to think about.
All across Nazi-occupied Poland, German forces were retreating en masse as the Red Army continued to shred the eastern front. On February 5, 1945, one hundred and seventy miles northwest of Auschwitz, the Soviets captured the village of Dyhernfurth. Soviet soldiers took over the town’s castle, built during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and drank up its wine cellar. The castle, with its fairy-tale-like conical spires, quickly transformed into a scene of wild debauchery, with inebriated Russian soldiers singing rowdy victory songs. The situation got so out of control that Russian commanders suspended fighting until order could be restored. This made for a perfect opportunity for a team of Nazi commandos hiding in the forest to launch a daring and unprecedented raid.
Less than half a mile away, one of the Reich’s most prized wonder weapons facilities lay hidden underground. Camouflaged in a forest of pine trees, inside a large complex of underground bombproof bunkers, a workforce of 560 white-collar Germans and 3,000 slave laborers had been mass-producing, since 1942, liquid tabun—a deadly nerve agent the very existence of which was unknown to the outside world.
Tabun was one of Hitler’s most jealously guarded secrets, a true wonder weapon of the most diabolical kind. Similar to a pesticide, the organophosphate tabun was one of the most deadly substances in the world. A tiny drop to the skin could kill an individual in minutes or sometimes seconds. Exposure meant the glands and muscles would hyperstimulate and the respiratory system would fail. Paralysis would set in and breathing would cease. At Dyhernfurth, where accidents had happened, a human’s death by tabun gas resembled the frenetic last moments of an ant sprayed with insecticide.
Like the synthetic rubber and fuel factory at Auschwitz, the nerve agent production facility at Dyhernfurth was owned and operated by IG Farben, and here the Speer ministry worked with Farben to fill aerial bombs with tabun that could eventually be deployed from Luftwaffe planes. No one in the inner circle knew for sure when, or if, Hitler would finally concede to many of his ministers’ wishes and allow for a chemical weapons attack against the Allies. But as evidenced at Dyhernfurth, the opportunity was real. Enough poison gas had been produced here to decimate the population of London or Paris on any given day.