Elsewhere in Germany, CIOS chemical weapons investigators Colonel Tarr and Major Tilley had been rounding up German chemists and sending them to prisoner-of-war facilities near where the individual arrests had taken place. Starting on June 1, 1945, these chemists would now be sent to a single location—a Top Secret interrogation facility outside Frankfurt. SHAEF was moving its headquarters from Versailles to Frankfurt and was to be dissolved in mid-July. The new organization in charge of all affairs, including scientific exploitation, was the Office of Military Government for Germany (OMGUS), whose commander was Eisenhower’s deputy General Lucius D. Clay. The Allies were also reorganizing the way in which scientific intelligence was going to be collected moving forward. CIOS was transitioning into American and British components: FIAT (Field Information Agency, Technical) and BIOS (British Intelligence Objectives Sub-committee). CIOS teams would remain active while they completed open investigations.
The structure that housed this new interrogation center was none other than Schloss Kransberg, or Kransberg Castle, Hermann G?ring’s former Luftwaffe headquarters and the place where Albert Speer and his aide spent the night the last New Year’s Eve of the war. The Allies gave it the code-name Dustbin. This medieval structure built high in the Taunus Mountains had grand rooms, hardwood floors, beautiful stone fireplaces, and shiny chandeliers. These were hardly gulag-type quarters. In terms of security classification, Dustbin was top-tier. The facility was the second-most classified interrogation center after Ashcan. Dustbin was self-contained inside its centuries-old stone walls, and, as it went at Ashcan, the prisoners here were free to roam the grounds and chat among themselves. Karl Brandt, Hitler’s doctor, organized morning gymnastics classes in the garden. Others played chess. Industrialists held lectures in the large banquet hall that G?ring had once used as a casino. Speer took walks in the castle’s apple orchard, almost always alone by choice. Whereas Ashcan housed the Nazi high command, Dustbin had many Nazi scientists, doctors, and industrialists under guard. This included more than twenty chemists with IG Farben and at least six members of its board.
Throughout the early summer of 1945, several key players in Farben’s tabun gas program were still at large. For Major Tilley, the chronology regarding how Farben first began producing nerve gas and how it transformed into wide-scale production remained a mystery until a Farben chemist named Dr. Gerhard Schrader was captured and brought to Dustbin. Schrader was the man who created the nerve agent that had been found at Raubkammer, the Robbers’ Lair. The information Schrader had was among the most sought-after classified military intelligence in the world. Tilley prepared for intense stonewalling from the Farben chemist. Instead Dr. Schrader spoke freely, offering up everything he knew, beginning with tabun’s startling discovery in the fall of 1936.
Dr. Schrader had been working at an insecticide lab for IG Farben in Leverkusen, north of Cologne, for several years. By the fall of 1936, he had an important job on his hands. Weevils and leaf lice were destroying grain across Germany, and Schrader was tasked with creating a synthetic pesticide that could eradicate these tiny pests. The government had been spending thirty million reichsmarks a year on pesticides made by Farben as well as other companies. IG Farben wanted to develop an insect killer that could save money for the Reich and earn the company a monopoly on pesticides.
Synthesizing organic, carbon-based compounds was trial-and-error work, Dr. Schrader told Major Tilley. It was labor-intensive and dangerous. Schrader, a family man, took excellent precautions against exposure, always working under a fume hood. Even trace amounts of the chemicals he was using had cumulative, potentially lethal effects. Schrader suffered from frequent headaches and sometimes felt short of breath. One night, while driving home after working on a new product, Schrader could barely see the road in front of him. When he pulled over to examine his eyes in the mirror, he saw that his pupils had constricted to the size of a pinhead. Over the next several days his vision grew worse. He developed a throbbing pressure in his larynx. Finally, Schrader checked himself into a hospital, where he was monitored for two weeks before being sent home and told to rest.
Eight days after the respite, Schrader returned to work. He had been developing a cyanide-containing fumigant, which he had given the code name Preparation 9/91. Picking up where he’d left off with his work, he prepared a small amount of his new substance, diluting it to 1 in 200,000 units to see if it would kill lice clinging to leaves. He was stunned when his new creation killed 100 percent of the lice. Schrader repeated the experiment for his colleagues. They all agreed that Preparation 9/91 was a hundred times more lethal than anything anyone at the Leverkusen lab had ever worked with before.