Despite the overwhelming onslaught of Red Army troops to this region in February of 1945, Hitler remained determined to keep the secrets of tabun out of enemy hands. On the morning of February 5, 1945, Major General Max Sachsenheimer of the Reich’s Seventeenth Field Replacement Battalion and his troops were hiding in the forest along the banks of the Oder River. Sachsenheimer’s commando force was made up of several hundred soldiers, but he also had a unique secondary contingent of men, namely, eighty-two scientists and technicians. Some were army scientists but most were IG Farben employees and chemical weapons experts. Sachsenheimer’s mission was to protect the scientists while they scrubbed Farben’s facility of any and all traces of tabun.
The Dyhernfurth complex was a sprawling, state-of-the-art production plant. Speer’s Armaments and War Production Ministry had paid Farben nearly 200 million reichsmarks to build and operate it. The facility had been secretly and skillfully designed and managed by Otto Ambros. As he had done with IG Auschwitz, Ambros had overseen every element of this chemical weapons factory dating from the winter of 1941, when the thick forest here was first cleared of pine trees by 120 concentration camp slaves.
As Nazi Germany blended industry, war making, and genocide, few corporations were as central a player as IG Farben. The chemical concern was the largest corporation in Europe and the fourth largest corporation in the world. IG Farben owned the patent on Zyklon B. And perhaps no single person at Farben was as central a figure in this equation as Otto Ambros had been. For his work as chairman of Committee-C, the chemical weapons committee inside the Speer Ministry, Ambros was given the prestigious title of military economy leader (Wehrwirtschaftsführer). He was awarded the War Merit Cross, 1st and 2nd Class, and the Knight’s Cross of the War Merit Cross, which was similar to the award bestowed on Dornberger and von Braun.
There was a second scientist who played an important role in chemical weapons—a man who, like Otto Ambros, would be targeted for Operation Paperclip. This was SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Walter Schieber, a chemist by training, Speer’s deputy and director of the Armaments Supply Office. Schieber was a hard-core Nazi ideologue and a member of Reichsführer-SS Himmler’s personal staff. Unusually corpulent for an SS officer, his official car and airplane required retrofitting to accommodate his 275-pound frame. With Hitler’s physician, Karl Brandt, Schieber was in charge of gas mask production, a requisite for troop defense if chemical warfare was to be waged. As with biological weapons, the sword needs a shield, and by January of 1945 Schieber had overseen the production of 46.1 million gas masks. Their reliability had been tested at Dyhernfurth on concentration camp prisoners. The stories that would emerge during the Nuremberg trials about such tests were ghoulish, including locking prisoners in glass rooms and spraying them with nerve agent. War crimes investigators would later debate whether or not these actions were pilot programs for the gas chambers. The full story of how, and to what extent, Dr. Walter Schieber worked for the U.S. military after the war—and also for the CIA—has never been fully explained until this book.
Only weeks before the Red Army took Dyhernfurth, overran its castle, and drank all its wine, thousands of concentration camp slave laborers had been toiling away at Farben’s secret chemical weapons plant performing the deadliest of jobs. Wearing double-layer rubber suits and bubble-shaped helmets, prisoners filled artillery shells and bomb casings with nerve agent, marking each munition in a secret code indicating tabun nerve agent: three green rings of paint. The prisoners’ suits worked similar to deep-sea diving suits. Attached to the back of each helmet was a tube delivering breathable air. But the air tube was short and gave workers very little room to move. If a man accidentally detached from the air source, he would be exposed to the lethal vapors through the breathing tube and die.