In France, Samuel Goudsmit and his team of Operation Alsos scientists had been waiting patiently since November to launch their next scientific intelligence mission. It had been four months since the team hit intelligence gold, inside the Strasbourg apartment of the Reich’s virologist Dr. Eugen Haagen. Now, in the last week of March 1945, Goudsmit and his military commander, Colonel Boris Pash, were finally getting ready to seize their next targets: IG Farben factories over the border in Germany, believed to be the locus of the Nazis’ chemical weapons program.
Since November, Haagen’s apartment in Strasbourg had been serving as Alsos headquarters. There had been long delays. In December, Hitler’s counteroffensive in the Ardennes Forest meant that Alsos scientists could not conduct frontline missions as planned. But as serendipity would have it, the entire first floor below Haagen’s Strasbourg apartment belonged to IG Farben, the primary chemical weapons supplier of the Third Reich, and Alsos seized a considerable cache of documents Farben kept there. Alsos knew Farben was involved in weapons-related vaccine research and suspected they were involved in medical experiments on prisoners. The two Farben factories they had in their sights were located only about eighty miles away, in the German cities of Ludwigshafen and Mannheim. For this, Operation Alsos had put together their largest task force to date: ten civilian scientists, six military scientists, and eighteen security operators. But venturing into German-held territory on their own was considered too dangerous for the American scientists. They had been waiting for Allied forces to cross over the Rhine River into Germany, at which point they, too, would be allowed in. Now, in the third week of March 1945, this long-awaited crossing appeared imminent.
On March 23, 1945, British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery began a colossal troop offensive across the Rhine River, code-named Operation Plunder. Adding to the namesake’s subtext of seizure and pillage were Montgomery’s famous words: “Over the Rhine, then, let us go. And good hunting to you all on the other side.” Sacking a vanquished country at the end of a war was as old as war itself, but the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 prohibited looting beyond token items claimed as “trophies of war.” What, exactly, did Montgomery mean? On a tactical level, the Rhine River crossing meant that the Allies would smash open more than five hundred miles along the western front. From an intelligence collection standpoint, it truly meant plunder.
As soldiers pushed forward into Germany, accompanying them were more than three thousand scientific and technical experts with the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee, or CIOS, the joint British-American program that had been established in London the summer before. CIOS teams reported to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces, or SHAEF, located in Versailles and staffed by experts: scientists, engineers, doctors, and technicians accompanied by linguists and scholars to translate and interpret the documents that were seized. Representing the United States from CIOS were men from the War Department General Staff, the navy, the Army Air Forces, the State Department, the Foreign Economic Administration, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and the Office of Scientific Research and Development. The British sent experts from the Foreign Office, the Admiralty, the Air Ministry, and the Ministries of Supply, Aircraft Production, Economic Warfare, Fuel and Power. All CIOS staff worked from a list of targets, similar to those used by Alsos, which became known as Black Lists. Frontline requests for specific CIOS teams were relayed to SHAEF from the combat zone. An appropriate CIOS team would be dispatched into the field.
Assisting CIOS teams were security forces called T-Forces, identifiable by helmets with a bright red T painted on the front. These small squadrons of elite soldiers operated at the army group level but worked independently of traditional combat units. Their job was to recognize potentially valuable scientific targets and then secure them until personnel from CIOS arrived.