Putt was taking orders from the U.S. Army, European Theater of Operations, Directorate of Intelligence, Exploitation Division, which meant that he had access to stripped-down B-17s and B-24s if he needed them, a means to transport much of this equipment to the United States, which Putt very much wanted to do. He wrote to his boss, Major General Hugh Knerr, deputy commander of U.S. Strategic Air Force in Europe, outlining his proposition and suggesting a second idea: Why not also fly scientists like Adolf Busemann out of Germany, along with the captured Luftwaffe equipment? “If we are not too proud to make use of this German-born information, much benefit can be derived from it and we can advance where Germany left off,” Putt wrote. The German scientists “would be of immense value in our jet engine and airplane development program.” Putt and Knerr both knew that the War Department General Staff was filled with individuals who were wary of Germans in general and totally opposed to making deals of any kind with the very Nazi scientists who had helped to prolong the war. But if anyone could get the War Department to bend, Knerr and Putt believed they could.
Major General Knerr sent a memo to the War Department in Washington, D.C., explaining that using Luftwaffe technology to fight the war in Japan was imperative. He added that the scientists’ Nazi Party membership needed to be overlooked. “Pride and face saving have no place in national insurance,” wrote Knerr.
The War Department General Staff was not so easily convinced—at least not now. Colonel Putt was informed that the equipment could come out of V?lkenrode immediately but that getting German scientists to Wright Field would take some more time. Putt oversaw the massive airlift of German aircraft and rocket parts from V?lkenrode to the United States; five thousand scientific documents were also shipped. Meanwhile, he and his staff rounded up as many Luftwaffe personnel as they could, tracking down leads and making deals with scientists and engineers in their homes. Putt informed the Germans that he could not offer them U.S. Army contracts just yet but that he would most likely be able to do so soon. In the meantime, he arranged for dozens of Luftwaffe scientists and engineers to be quartered in the Hotel Wittelsbacher Hof, in the spa town of Bad Kissingen, and made sure that the men had plenty to eat, drink, and smoke. Wait here, the scientists were told. The U.S. Army contracts are on the way.
Colonel Putt and Major General Knerr would then put their heads together and figure out a way to convince the War Department that their point of view was best for the United States.
Around this time, the single largest cache of chemical weapons discovered to date was found seventy-five miles west of Hannover. On April 16, 1945, British soldiers from Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group pulled up to the entrance of an abandoned German army proving ground called the Robbers’ Lair, or Raubkammer. The place appeared to be abandoned, but Waffen-SS snipers still were known to be hiding in the woods. The soldiers exercised caution as they drove their armored personnel cars through a pair of entrance pillars adorned with Reich eagles and swastikas.
At first glance the facility looked like a standard military proving ground—a place where bombs were exploded and blast measurements recorded. Raubkammer was located in a rural forested area called Münster-Nord, and it extended more than seventy-six square miles. Large craters in open fields suggested that Luftwaffe airplanes had practiced dropping bombs here. There was fancy housing for hundreds of officers. There were large administrative buildings and an officers’ mess hall. Then the soldiers came upon the zoo.
It was a large zoo, capable of housing a vast array of animals of all sizes. There were cages for mice, cats, and dogs, as well as large pens and stables for farm animals like horses, cows, and pigs. There were also monkey cages. But it was the discovery of a massive, round wooden cylinder—most likely an aerosol chamber—that triggered alarm. The structure was sixty-five feet tall and a hundred feet wide, and it was ringed with a network of scaffolding, pipes, and ventilator fans. Between the zoo and the large chamber, the soldiers were now relatively certain that Raubkammer was no ordinary military proving ground. The Robbers’ Lair bore the hallmarks of a field-testing facility that likely involved poison gas. An urgent memo was sent to SHAEF asking for a team of chemical warfare experts to be dispatched to Raubkammer. Two teams descended, one from the British Chemical Defense Experimental Establishment at Porton Down and another from CIOS, including Major Tilley and Colonel Tarr.
At the same time, a second unit of British troops working just a few miles to the southwest of the Robbers’ Lair came upon two bunker clusters totaling almost two hundred structures. The area had been artfully concealed from overhead view by dense forest cover. The first cluster consisted of several dozen small wooden buildings intermittently spaced between similarly sized concrete blockhouses. The soldiers inventoried the contents with caution. Inside one set of bunkers they found thousands of bombs, stacked in neat piles. Each bomb was marked with a single yellow ring painted around the sides of the munition. This was the standard marking to denote mustard gas, the chemical weapon used by both sides in World War I. The British soldiers took inventory and counted one hundred thousand mustard gas shells.