At war’s end, the staff of the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service had their sights set on bringing Hitler’s chemists to the United States. The service saw unbridled potential in making the Nazis’ nerve agent program its own and was willing to go to great lengths to obtain its secrets. Less than one month after British tanks rolled into the Robbers’ Lair and found the enormous cache of tabun-filled bombs in the forests of Münster-Nord, the Chemical Warfare Service had obtained a sample of the nerve agent and was analyzing its properties in its Development Laboratory in the United States. Work began on May 15, 1945, and took two weeks to complete. The analysis revealed that tabun was a revolutionary killer that could decimate enemy armies. General William N. Porter, chief of the Chemical Warfare Service, requested that five 260-kg tabun-filled bombs be shipped from the Robbers’ Lair to the United States “by air under highest priority” for field tests. Separately, General Porter asked the U.S. Army Air Forces and U.S. Army Ordnance to conduct their own feasibility studies to determine if tabun bombs could be used in combat by U.S. troops.
Most people looked upon chemical warfare as abhorrent. In a June 1943 speech, President Roosevelt himself had said that using chemicals to kill people was immoral and inhumane. The president had denied Chemical Warfare Service officials their request to change the service’s name to the Chemical Corps because of the permanence the name change suggested. And yet here was the interesting news for the Chemical Service. When German nerve gas entered into the world of chemical warfare, it brought with it the assurance of a U.S. chemical warfare program in peacetime. According to chemical weapons expert Jonathan B. Tucker, “In 1945, in the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service decided to focus its research and development efforts on the German nerve agents, the technological challenges of which promised to ensure the organization’s survival through the period of postwar demobilization and declining military budgets.” Within several months of the German surrender, 530 tons of tabun nerve agent were shipped to the United States and used in Top Secret field tests.
Requests to bring German chemists to the United States for weapons work quickly followed. But, as had been the case with the V-2 rocket scientists, the notion of issuing visas to Hitler’s chemists was met with hostility inside the State Department. When the chief of the State Department’s Passport Division, Howard K. Travers, learned about this idea, he sent his colleagues an internal memo stating, “We should do everything we consistently can to prevent German chemists and others from entering this country.”
In Germany, Alsos scientific director Samuel Goudsmit had been tracking Hitler’s chemists ever since the Allies crossed the Rhine. Likewise, the CIOS chemical weapons team, led by Lieutenant Colonel Philip R. Tarr of the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service and his British counterpart Major Edmund Tilley, were continuing their relentless pursuit. When Alsos located the chemist Richard Kuhn at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, they paid him a visit. Kuhn had once been an internationally revered organic chemist, but rumor had it that he had become an ardent Nazi during the war. Kuhn won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1938 but turned down accepting the award at the request of Hitler, who called it a Jewish prize. Here now to interview Richard Kuhn, Samuel Goudsmit had with him two American chemists, Louis Fieser of Harvard and Carl Baumann of the University of Wisconsin. Both men had actually worked with Kuhn in his laboratory before the war. After a cordial exchange of greetings, the interrogation began. Alsos sought information regarding the Third Reich’s nerve agent program. What did Herr Kuhn know?
Kuhn, with his mop of straight reddish-brown hair, cunning smile, and schoolboy looks, swore that he had no connection whatsoever with Reich military research. He told his former colleagues that he was a pure scientist, an academic who spent the war working on the chemistry of modern drugs. Samuel Goudsmit had his doubts. “Richard Kuhn’s record did not seem too clean to me,” Goudsmit recalled after the war. “As president of the German Chemical Society he had followed the Nazi cult and rites quite faithfully. He never failed to give the Hitler salute when starting his classes and to shout ‘Siegheil’ like a true Nazi leader,” Goudsmit recalled. But the Alsos leader did not have enough evidence to have Kuhn arrested, so he put him under surveillance instead.