Ambros, Hitler’s favorite chemist, had been incarcerated for roughly one year of an eight-year prison sentence. On July 30, 1948, Ambros had been convicted of mass murder and slavery in Case No. VI of the subsequent Nuremberg proceedings, the IG Farben trial, and sent to Landsberg Prison, also called War Criminal Prison No. 1. Located thirty-eight miles west of Munich, Landsberg was home to 1,526 convicted Nazi war criminals. The men were housed in a central prison barracks inside individual cells, but the facility itself was situated on a boarding school–like campus, with nineteenth-century buildings, leafy parks, and a grand, wood-paneled Catholic church. Adolf Hitler had been a prisoner here for eight months in 1924. Landsberg Prison was where Hitler wrote Mein Kampf.
In prison Ambros taught “chemical technology” to other inmates as part of a prisoner education program. He penned letters to his mother expressing how unfair it all was. “Politic[s] is a bitter disease and it is grotesque that I, as a non-political person, should suffer for something I have not done,” he wrote. “But one day, all this suffering will cease and then it will not be long before I have forgotten all this bitterness.” Ambros’s nineteen-year-old son, Dieter Ambros, wrote clemency appeals on his father’s behalf. “My father is innocent as you know,” began one letter to Bishop Theophil Wurm, a Protestant leader who regularly advocated for the war criminals’ release. “Thank you for supporting our efforts… my father is [being] illegally held.” Ambros was a model prisoner. Only once was he written up for disciplinary action: “Inmate Ambros, Otto, WCPL No. 1442 was standing and looking out the window at the women’s exercise yard [and] this is against the prison regulations,” reads a note in his prison file.
Otto Ambros had many lawyers working for him to secure an early release. He also wrote petitions himself, requesting small items. In 1948, he asked the prison board for an extra pillow, softer than the one provided. In 1949, he requested permission to keep his accordion in his cell. Each year, Ambros saw the Landsberg Prison doctor for a checkup. Convicted Nazi war criminal Dr. Oskar Schr?der, former chief of the Medical Corps Services of the Luftwaffe, checked Ambros’s vitals and wrote up his annual health report. Schr?der had been employed by the U.S. Army Air Forces at the Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg before the doctors’ trial and was now serving a life term at Landsberg. Also in the prison were Hermann Becker-Freyseng and Wilhelm Beiglb?ck, serving twenty and fifteen year sentences, respectively.
The twelve subsequent war crimes trials at Nuremberg had ended just a few months prior to John J. McCloy’s becoming high commissioner of Germany. Most Americans had long since lost interest in following any of the trials. The majority of Germans disagreed with the whole war crimes trial premise, and many saw those convicted as having been singled out by American and British victors and given “victors’ justice” as punishment. At war’s end, U.S. occupation authorities had determined that 3.6 million Nazis in the American zone alone were “indictable” for political or war crimes. This enormous number was eventually whittled down to a more manageable 930,000 individuals, who were then processed through 169,282 denazification trials. More than 50,000 Germans had been convicted of various Nazi-era crimes, most in the Spruchkammern courts but also in Allied military tribunals. The majority of those convicted served some time in postwar detention camps or paid nominal fines. When McCloy took office, 806 Nazis had been sentenced to death and sent to Landsberg Prison, with 486 executions carried out to date. By the fall of 1949, the German press had begun referring to the convicted criminals held at Landsberg as the “so-called prisoners of war.” This was just one of the sensitive issues that Commissioner McCloy was faced with when he arrived. Another was Operation Paperclip.