The second munitions depot was marked as belonging to the Luftwaffe. Here, 175 bunkers were filled with bombs that were unidentifiable to the Allies. Each bomb had been marked with three green rings painted around its sides. Montgomery’s soldiers sent an urgent memo to SHAEF asking for a team of chemical weapons experts to come investigate the munitions in the forest.
The scientists from CIOS and Porton Down were nervous about what might be inside the mysteriously marked bombs. They decided that it was best to try to locate German scientists in the area who might be familiar with the contents of the bombs before they opened the casings themselves—so they began knocking on the doors of the nicer houses in the vicinity of Robbers’ Lair. As they had suspected they would, CIOS officers located a number of individuals who confessed to being German army scientists and having worked at Raubkammer. While each scientist claimed to have no idea what kind of weapons testing had been going on at the military facility, CIOS officers were able to persuade several of the German scientists to assist them in extracting the liquid substance from the center of the bombs.
By this time, chemists with the U.S. Army’s Forty-fifth Chemical Laboratory Company had arrived, bringing with them a mobile laboratory unit and cages filled with rabbits. The original thought was that the substance marked by three green rings was some kind of new Nazi blister agent—similar to, but perhaps more powerful than, mustard gas. The chemists were wrong. Extractions were made, and when tested on the rabbits in the mobile laboratory, whatever this liquid substance was killed a warm-blooded rabbit five times faster than anything that British or American scientists had ever seen, or even heard about, before. Even more alarming, the liquid substance did not have to be inhaled to kill. A single drop on the rabbit’s skin killed the animal in just a few minutes. The millions of gas masks England had distributed to city dwellers during the war would have offered no defense against a chemical weapon as potent as whatever this killing agent was.
CIOS field agents wrote up a Top Secret report for their superiors at SHAEF. A menacing new breed of chemical weapons had been discovered. Aerial bombs “found to contain a markedly potent and hitherto unknown organophosphorus nerve agent” had been developed by the Nazis during the war and stashed in two hundred bunkers in the forest nearby. No chemical this lethal to man had ever been developed before. CIOS agents did not know it yet, but this nerve agent was tabun. The three green rings had been painted on the Luftwaffe bombs at Farben’s Dyhernfurth facility in Poland.
Allied chemical weapons experts were suddenly in possession of one of the most dangerous wonder weapons—and one of the best-kept secrets—of the Third Reich. That these weapons were never used was astonishing.
Who were the scientists who had discovered this nerve agent, and where were they now?
Underground in the center of Berlin, in a makeshift hospital set up in a subway tunnel beneath the Reich Chancellery, Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber performed emergency surgeries on wounded Wehrmacht soldiers. He gave blood transfusions, performed amputations—whatever it was that needed to be done. As surgeon general of the Third Reich, Schreiber was not a hospital doctor accustomed to dealing with triage. But, as he would later testify at Nuremberg, all of his physician-colleagues had fled Berlin; this was not necessarily the truth. Schreiber was a short, squat man, five foot six, with blond hair, blue eyes, and a nose that ended in a fleshy point. A man of great willpower and stamina, he prided himself as setting his mind to a task and getting it done.
Today was the Führer’s fifty-sixth birthday, April 20, 1945. And because it was Hitler’s birthday, this Berlin morning began with Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’s Happy Birthday broadcast, calling on all Germans to trust Hitler and to follow him faithfully to the bitter end. While Major General Dr. Schreiber performed surgeries in his makeshift underground hospital, a group of his Nazi Party colleagues had gathered for a party almost directly above where he was located, in the half-destroyed Reich Chancellery building. Around noon, Hitler’s inner circle made its way into a cavernous room with polished marble walls and floor-to-ceiling doors: Speer, G?ring, Himmler, SA-Obergruppenführer and police and Waffen-SS general Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Nazi Party foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Grand Admiral Karl D?nitz of the navy, Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, military commander Alfred Jodl, and SS-Brigadeführer Hans Krebs. The men gathered around an enormous table covered with bottles of champagne and a spread of food. Hitler said a few words and promised that the Russians would soon suffer their most crushing defeat yet.