General Loucks asked to meet with Dr. Schieber again, this time to ask Schieber if he could assist with a “problem” the U.S. Army was having producing sarin gas. Schieber was happy to help. He told Loucks that during the war it was the Farben chemists who had produced sarin gas and that he knew all these chemists very well. They were his friends. “They worked with me during the war,” Schieber explained.
“We wouldn’t expect you to do this for free,” Loucks told Schieber, meaning provide the U.S. Chemical Corps with secrets. The two men arranged to meet again in the following weeks.
On October 28, 1948, Loucks and his wife, Pearl, hosted a dinner party in their home. Again, Schieber was a guest. Loucks had by now taken an extraordinary liking to Dr. Schieber and wrote his impressions of the man in his diary that night. “Schieber is interesting—an independent thinking, intelligent and very competent man. He related much of his experience with the Russians. A prisoner of war after the 1st World War for a year. He was an honorary (?) Brigade Fuehrer of SS this last war. In confinement in Nuremberg for seven months. Quartered next to Goering until the latter killed himself. Was an admirer of Todt, later worked for Speer, was directed to report to Hitler frequently. He has many anecdotes and is a loyal German. Is willing to do anything for the future of the world and Germany.” Why was General Loucks so willing to overlook SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Walter Schieber’s criminal past and his central role inside the Third Reich? A story that Charles Loucks told an army historian decades later sheds light on this question.
At the end of World War II, after the Japanese surrendered, Colonel Loucks went to Tokyo, where he served as the chief chemical officer for the U.S. Army. Sometimes Loucks took day trips into the countryside. In the last five months of war in Japan, American bombers conducted a massive incendiary bombing campaign against sixty-seven Japanese cities that killed nearly a million citizens, most of whom burned to death. Still, the Japanese refused to surrender, and it took two atomic bombs to end the war. The incendiary bombs dropped on those sixty-seven cities were produced at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. Colonel Loucks oversaw the production of tens of thousands of them. In Japan, after the fighting was over, and when Loucks took day trips, he often brought his camera along and took photographs of the landscape, the damage, and the dead. When Loucks returned home to America, he compiled these photographs into an album of more than one hundred black-and-white snapshots. One photograph in the album, which is archived at the U.S. Army Heritage Center in Pennsylvania, shows Colonel Loucks standing next to an enormous pile of dead bodies.
Years later Colonel Loucks explained to the army historian what the photograph meant to him. “Driving one day in a Jeep from Yokohama to Tokyo, I stopped along the side of a road. The incendiary attacks had done their work,” Loucks explained. The area “was all burned out; a wasteland all the way through. We dropped tens of thousands of them [incendiary bombs] on the whole area between Yokohama and Tokyo.”
Out there in the Japanese countryside, said Loucks, “I noticed a great stack of incendiary bombs—small ones. I went over to take a look at them. They looked like something that we had made at Rocky Mountain. Sure enough, they were. Here in one place they had a great stack of them. They were burned out but the bodies were still there because they didn’t burn. They stacked them up in this big high pile. I had a picture of me standing beside them, because I had been responsible for the manufacturing of them. That was just one of those incidents that didn’t mean anything, but I just happened to see what had happened to some of our incendiary bombs that were over there.”
In describing the photograph—an enormous pile of dead bodies next to a stack of incendiary bombs—Colonel Loucks expressed a peculiar kind of detachment. To the army historian interviewing him, Loucks made clear that what interested him in the photograph was noting the effectiveness—or in this case ineffectiveness—of the bombs he had been responsible for manufacturing. Similarly, Loucks expressed detachment as far as Dr. Schieber was concerned, as evidenced in his journal entries. It was as if Loucks could not, or would not, see Schieber in the context of the millions of Jews murdered on the direct orders of Schieber’s closest wartime colleagues. What interested Loucks about Schieber was what an effective chemical weapons maker he was.
During the next meeting between General Loucks and Dr. Schieber, Loucks got very specific with Schieber in terms of what he was after. “Could you develop the process and put it on paper with drawings, specifications and tables and safety regulations to make Sarin?” Loucks asked, as noted in his desk diary.