Tilley asked the Farben CEO a series of banal questions, all the while tapping on the walls of Schmitz’s study. Slowly, Tilley made his way around the room this way, listening for any inconsistencies in the way the walls were built. Schmitz grew increasingly uncomfortable. Finally he began to cry. Tilley had found what he was looking for: a secret safe buried in Schmitz’s office wall.
Hermann Schmitz was one of the wealthiest bankers in Germany and one of the most important players in the economics of the Third Reich. What secret was contained in his safe? Major Tilley instructed Schmitz to open it. Inside, lying flat, was a photo album. “The photographs were in a wooden inlaid cover dedicated to Hermann Schmitz on his twenty-fifth jubilee, possibly as a Farben director,” Tilley explained in a CIOS intelligence report. Tilley lifted out the photo album from its hiding place, flipped open the cover, and began reviewing the pictures. On here of the scrapbook, the word “Auschwitz” was written. Tilley’s eyes scanned over a picture of a street in a Polish village. Next to the photograph was a cartoonish drawing “depicting individuals who had once been part of the Jewish population who lived there, portrayed in a manner that was not flattering to them,” Tilley explained. The caption underneath the cartoon read: “The Old Auschwitz. As it Was. Auschwitz in 1940.”
At this point, Tilley wrote in his CIOS report, he was surprised at how “highly emotional” Schmitz became. What Tilley did not yet know was that he was looking at Schmitz’s secret photo album that chronicled the building history of Farben’s labor concentration camp, IG Auschwitz, from the very start. In May of 1945, almost no one, including Major Tilley, had any idea what really had happened at Auschwitz—that at least 1.1 million people had been exterminated there. The facts about the camp had not yet come to light. On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz, and Red Army photographers took film footage and photographs of the atrocities they discovered there. But that information had not yet been shared openly with the rest of the world. A short report about the extermination camp had appeared in Stalinskoe Znamya, the Red Army’s newspaper, on January 28, 1945. Stalin was waiting to release the bulk of information until after Germany surrendered. What was clear to Major Tilley was that this photo album was important to Schmitz, and that he wanted it to remain hidden. Why, exactly, Major Tilley had no idea.
As CIOS team leader, Major Tilley was on a hunt for Farben chemists who had developed nerve gas. Hermann Schmitz, while important to Farben in the bigger picture, was not a chemist. He claimed to have no idea where the Farben chemists had gone. The scrapbook was taken into evidence, and Tilley moved on in his search. Meanwhile, in southern Germany, in an Austrian border town called Gendorf, the man Major Tilley was really looking for—Dr. Otto Ambros—had just been located by U.S. Army soldiers. The soldiers had no idea who Ambros really was.
When American soldiers rolled into the town of Gendorf, about sixty miles southeast of Munich, they noticed one man in particular because he stood out like a sore thumb. This first encounter with Ambros, later recounted at the Nuremberg trials, stuck out in soldiers’ minds because Ambros had been dressed in a fancy suit to greet the victors. The man hardly looked like he’d been through a war. The soldiers asked the man his rank and serial number.
“My name is Otto Ambros,” he said, smiling. He added that he was not a military man but “a plain chemist.”
Was he German, the soldiers asked?
“Yes, I am German,” Ambros replied, and made a joke. He said that he had so many French friends he could almost be considered a Frenchman. In fact, his true home was in Ludwigshafen, on the border with France. He told the soldiers that the reason he was here in southern Bavaria was because he was the director of a large business concern called IG Farben. The company had a detergent factory here in Gendorf, Ambros explained. As a Farben board member he’d been asked to oversee production. German society might be experiencing a collapse, he told the soldiers, but everyone needed to stay clean.
The soldiers asked to be taken to the detergent factory. Inside, they inspected huge vats of soap and other cleaning products. Work at the factory appeared to have been uninterrupted by the war. Ambros took the soldiers to his office, where someone had taped a rainbow of color spectrum cards to the wall. In addition to cleaning products, the facility made lacquers, Ambros explained. The soldiers looked around, thanked Ambros for the tour, and asked him not to leave town.
I have “no reason to flee,” said Ambros. The soldiers noted how much he smiled.