But on the morning of February 5, 1945, the facility was empty. Not a chemist or a slave laborer remained. The munitions had been moved, documentary evidence destroyed, and all the IG Farben employees had fled. The prisoners had been evacuated by their SS guards three weeks before. Wearing prisoner pajamas and ill-fitting wooden work shoes, the Dyhernfurth laborers were marched west toward the German interior. Witnesses in nearby villages described a column of three thousand walking corpses. Temperatures in the area reached -18 degrees Fahrenheit. By the time the prisoners reached the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, fifty miles to the southwest, two-thirds of them had died of exposure.
Now, working on Hitler’s orders, a technical team was preparing to return to Farben’s secret facility for a final scrub of tabun residue. In the freezing predawn air, the two chemists, eighty technicians, and a group of German commandos donned double-layered rubber suits, pulled gas masks over their heads, and stole down the banks of the Oder River. They moved quietly across a partially bombed-out railroad bridge, walked slowly down the railroad tracks, and headed to the chemical weapons plant. The protective suits were cumbersome, and it took the technical team sixty-five minutes to travel less than a half a mile. Reaching the plant, the group made its way into the production facility that housed massive silver-lined kettles in which the nerve agent was made. Each kettle sat inside an operating chamber enclosed in double-glass walls encircling a complex ventilation system of double-walled pipes. While one group got to work decontaminating the chambers with ammonia and steam, another group scoured the surfaces of the munitions-filling factory where so many slave laborers had met death. The commandos kept guard.
While the technicians scrubbed, two and a half miles downriver Major General Sachsenheimer’s remaining platoon of soldiers sprang into action. They launched artillery shells at sleeping Russian forces in a diversionary feint. The Red Army reorganized and retaliated, and by lunchtime eighteen Soviet tanks were engaged in fierce fighting with Sachsenheimer’s troops. The battle, a footnote in the annals of the war, lasted just long enough for IG Farben’s technical team to get in, get out, and disappear.
Not for several days did the Red Army finally stumble upon Farben’s chemical weapons facility at Dyhernfurth. By then it was void of people and tabun but otherwise entirely intact. As the Russians examined the facility, scrubbed immaculately clean, it became clear to the commanders that whatever this facility had produced must have been considered of great value to the Reich. The laboratory layout bore signs of chemical weapons production, and the Soviet army called in their own chemical weapons experts from the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Chemical Brigades. The factory was dismantled, crated, and shipped back to the Soviet Union for future use. What had been produced here in the forest remained a mystery to its new owners—the Russians—for a little over a year. By 1946 the entire chemical weapons factory at Dyhernfurth would be reassembled in a little town outside Stalingrad called Beketovka, and the plant given the Russian code name, Chemical Works No. 91. The Soviets themselves then began producing tabun nerve agent on an industrial scale. By 1948, the Soviet Military Chemical Text Book would list tabun as part of the Red Army’s stockpile. But 1948 was so far away. So much would happen with America and Hitler’s chemists between 1945 and 1948, most of it predicated on the emerging Soviet threat.
Back in Berlin, Hitler read the first page of Speer’s report and ordered it filed away. Then Hitler became enraged. His furor was likely exacerbated by a conference taking place on the Crimea Peninsula, at Yalta, beginning February 4, 1945. It was to last for eight days. There, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin were confirming their commitment to demand Germany’s unconditional surrender. There would be no bargaining, the three heads of state declared. No deals made with the Nazis. The end of the war would mean the end of the Third Reich. War criminals would be tried, justice meted out.
The idea of what defined justice varied dramatically from power to power. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wanted Nazis leaders to be treated as “outlaws.” He argued that they should be lined up and shot rather than put on trial. The premier of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, rather unexpectedly argued for “no executions without trial.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted a war crimes trial. What all parties agreed on was that, after the surrender, Germany would be broken up into three zones of occupation. (Soon, France’s involvement would make it four.) When Hitler learned of the Allies’ plan to divvy up the spoils of Germany, he became furious. Then he called on Albert Speer.