“Yes, I could do that,” Schieber said.
Loucks recalled the next conversation the two men had. “He said they had a big works outside of Berlin that was just completed when the war was over and made little token amounts but no production. When [the Reich] announced that the Russians were taking over, those engineers and chemists both came West into the American and British occupied zones.” Schieber was lying to General Loucks. The nerve gas production plant outside Berlin to which Schieber referred was Falkenhagen, and it was run by Otto Ambros’s deputy and the man who had stashed the steel drum outside Gendorf, Jürgen von Klenck. By war’s end, the factory at Falkenhagen had produced more than five hundred tons of sarin gas, hardly “little token amounts,” as Schieber claimed. If Loucks had read von Klenck’s OMGUS security report, or any of the CIOS reports written by Major Edmund Tilley, he would have learned that Schieber was lying to him. Instead, General Loucks asked Schieber if he could locate these chemists who knew so much about sarin production and bring them to Heidelberg. He held out to Schieber the promise of a U.S. Army contract. Further, “We will pay all their [the chemists’] expenses and give them something for their work,” Loucks said.
“Yes, I can do that.” Schieber replied. He said that he knew all of the Farben chemists and could easily get them to tell the Americans everything. He listed their names for Loucks. One of the six Farben chemists on the list was Ambros’s deputy and the man who ran Falkenhagen, Jürgen von Klenck.
On October 29, 1948, Colonel Loucks wrote a memorandum to the chief of the Army Chemical Corps. The best, fastest way to get German technical information on tabun and sarin gas was to hire Dr. Schieber, Colonel Loucks advised. In his diary, Loucks wrote, “Hope the chief will support us. If he does, we’ll be able to get all of the German CW technical ability on our side and promptly. They know on what side they belong. All we need to do is treat them as human beings. They recognize the military defeat and the political and ideological defeat as well and accept it.”
One week later, General Loucks told Schieber that he had been authorized to pay him 1,000 marks a month for consulting work. Schieber gave Loucks the contact information for the six chemists and technicians who would join him in his efforts to explain precisely how to produce sarin gas. On December 11, 1948, Loucks hosted the first roundtable meeting of Hitler’s chemists in his Heidelberg home, secrecy assured. For the next three months, the chemists met every other Saturday at Loucks’s home. There, they created detailed, step-by-step reports on how to produce industrial amounts of sarin gas. They drew charts and graphs and made lists of materials and equipment required. Years later, Loucks reflected, “One of the team [members] was a young engineer who had an excellent command of English which helped greatly and was his major contribution [and that was] Jurgend [sic] von Klenck.”
When the work was finally compiled and sent to Edgewood, the results were the perfect recipe for the deadly nerve agent. According to General Loucks, without Hitler’s chemists, the American program had been a failure. With them, it was a success. “That’s when we built the plant out in Rocky Mountain Arsenal,” Loucks explained. The incendiary bombs that Colonel Loucks oversaw at Rocky Mountain Arsenal during World War II would now be replaced by M34 cluster bombs filled with sarin gas. The Top Secret program was code-named Gibbett-Delivery.
A friendship between two brigadier generals, Loucks and Schieber, had been solidified. The following summer, Schieber sent Loucks a thank-you note and a gift, not identified in the records but described by Schieber as a piece of “equipment… that once stood at the beginning of the same work group.” The unknown item had been used by Schieber during the Nazi era, when sarin gas was first developed for Hitler. Over the next eight years the two brigadier generals exchanged Christmas cards.
In January 1950, General Loucks was called to Washington, D.C., for several meetings at the Pentagon. According to Loucks’s desk diary, during his first meeting there he was reprimanded by a Pentagon official for cultivating friendly relationships with Hitler’s chemists.