At Dustbin, Major Tilley continued to interrogate Ambros’s colleagues. In late August 1945, Tilley got a very lucky lead from Ambros’s former deputy, the Farben chemist Jürgen von Klenck. Von Klenck was back at Dustbin now, and under intense scrutiny after having been in attendance alongside Ambros at the meeting with Tarr and the representative from Dow Chemical, Wilhelm Hirschkind. Jürgen von Klenck had amassed a sizable Dustbin dossier of his own. A Nazi ideologue, von Klenck had been a loyal party member since 1933 and an officer with the SS since 1936. One interrogator described him as “wily,” “untrustworthy,” and “not employable.” Von Klenck was also an elitist and had made more than a few enemies because of this. Speaking in confidence with Major Tilley, fellow chemist and Dustbin internee Wilhelm Horn candidly expressed his thought about Jürgen von Klenck. Von Klenck had a “magnetic presence, a brilliant mind, [was] handsome, polished and a wonderful talker, but lack[ed] the essential characteristics that would make him a truly great man,” said Horn. This was because von Klenck was “an egoist… very proud of the nobility implied in his name, and an opportunist who knew how to make the best of his chances.” Horn confirmed that von Klenck was a long-standing and avowed Nazi but that “it had always grated von Klenck’s pride that such common people as Hitler and his minions were in the highest places,” said Horn.
Tilley asked Horn how high up von Klenck was in the production of war gases. Horn revealed that von Klenck had been deputy chief of the ultra-secret Committee-C for chemical weapons. In other words, Jürgen von Klenck was Otto Ambros’s right-hand man. Armed with this information, Major Tilley presented von Klenck with a piece of paper to sign. It was a declaration, “stating that he knew none of which had been concealed by others.” Von Klenck refused to sign. Tilley explained that withholding information was a crime. Threatened with arrest, von Klenck admitted that there were a few things he hadn’t been entirely truthful about.
He told Major Tilley that in the late fall of 1944, Ambros had instructed him to destroy all paperwork regarding war gases, particularly the contracts between Farben and the Wehrmacht. Instead von Klenck had “carefully selected” a cache of important documents and secreted them away in a large steel drum. He had hired someone to bury the steel drum on a remote farm outside Gendorf. Where, exactly, von Klenck said he wasn’t sure. He told Tilley that he had “deliberately refused to learn where the [documents] were buried in order to be able to deny that he knew of any documents concealed anywhere.” He gave Major Tilley a list of possible hiding places.
For two months Major Tilley searched the countryside around Gendorf for the steel drum, interviewing locals and patiently waiting for a solid lead. Finally, on October 27, 1945, he found what he’d been looking for. During an interrogation with Gendorf’s fire chief, a man called Brandmeister Keller, the location was revealed. There was more. Brandmeister Keller had also hidden documents for Otto Ambros. “At first, Keller denied that he had secreted any documents,” read the FIAT report. “When he was told that his arrest order was in Major Tilley’s pocket he remembered four boxes Ambros had asked him to fetch in 1945.… Ambros gave him various barrels and boxes to hide with various farmers in Gendorf.” But the most important barrel, the large steel drum from von Klenck, had been “buried at the lonely farm of Lorenz Moser, near Burghausen.”