After being interrogated by army intelligence in Germany, Hoffmann was found “fit for exploitation for the Office of the Military Government, United States.” He was sent to the Army Chemical Center in Berlin, where he started working for the Chemical Warfare Service until his Operation Paperclip contract was finalized.
When Friedrich Hoffmann arrived at Edgewood Arsenal in February 1947, America’s premier chemical weapons research and development facility had been producing war gases for thirty years. The three-thousand-acre peninsula, thick with field and forest, was located twenty miles northeast of Baltimore, Maryland, on the Chesapeake Bay. Because Fritz Hoffmann was the first German at Edgewood thus far, he was quartered inside a barracks with American soldiers. The Top Secret research and development division he had been assigned to was called the Technical Command, and it was there that he began work “synthesizing new insecticides, rodenticides and miticides,” which meant tabun.
Colonel Loucks had been ordered by the Chemical Corps to determine how to produce tabun on an industrial scale under a classified program codenamed AI.13. Army intelligence believed the Soviets’ chemical weapons program to be considerably ahead of its own, and the Chemical Corps was under pressure to catch up. The Soviets had captured the entire IG Farben laboratory at Dyhernfurth and had since reassembled it outside Stalingrad, in the town of Beketovka, under the codename Chemical Works No. 91. In addition to having the laboratory and the science, the Soviets had also captured some of the Farben chemists who had worked at Dyhernfurth. Through their own version of Operation Paperclip, a parallel exploitation program called Operation Osoaviakhim, the Soviets captured German chemist Dr. von Bock and members of his team. The group was taken to Chemical Works No. 91, where von Bock, an expert in air filtration systems, decontamination systems, and hermetically sealed production compartments, was put to work. Von Bock’s esoteric knowledge gave the Soviets access to critical technical aspects of producing tabun. The hope was that Fritz Hoffmann could bring the Americans up to speed at Edgewood.
Indeed, Fritz Hoffmann proved to be a great asset for the classified program. Within months of his arrival at Edgewood he was delivering “work of a high order” and had “shown considerable ingenuity and excellent knowledge,” according to a declassified internal review of his performance. Tabun work progressed. When military intelligence learned that the Soviets’ Chemical Works No. 91 was also producing sarin, Edgewood was told to continue working on tabun but also to redouble efforts in sarin production, with a plan to start producing it on an industrial scale as soon as possible. Project AI.13 was given even higher priority and a new code name, Project AI.13-2.1. In Germany, Nazi scientists with knowledge of tabun and sarin were now being even more aggressively sought for recruitment into Operation Paperclip.
Declassified documents reveal that the Chemical Corps wanted to employ Otto Ambros, but he was not available. Ambros was incarcerated inside the prison complex at Nuremberg, awaiting a war crimes trial. Imprisoned alongside Ambros were fellow Farben board members Fritz Ter Meer and Karl Krauch as well as Hermann Schmitz, Farben’s powerful CEO and the man who kept the Auschwitz scrapbook hidden in a secret wall safe. SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Walter Schieber, Ambros’s liaison to the Speer ministry and the man who oversaw the work at Dyhernfurth, was also high on the Paperclip target list, but recruitment of Schieber would have to wait. Schieber was also being held at Nuremberg. The IG Farben trial, officially called United States of America v. Carl Krauch et al., was scheduled to begin in a few months, in the summer of 1947. Time would tell who, if any, of Hitler’s chemists would become available.