Von Klenck’s hidden barrel produced hard evidence, including a letter from Ambros stating that he had been in charge of document destruction—and why. “All papers which prove our cooperation with Tabun and Sarin in the low-works, the DL-plant in the upper-work, must of course be destroyed or placed in security,” read one letter inside the drum, signed by Otto Ambros. It was attached to a stack of nerve agent contracts between Farben and Speer’s ministry, papers that von Klenck had been ordered to destroy. These contracts chronicled “full details of TABUN production and other details of DYHERNFURTH (now in Russian hands), including a detailed plan of all buildings and much or most of the apparatus… photographs and drawings… and many other valuable data, covering the period from 1938 or earlier until March 1945.” Now Major Tilley had two key pieces of evidence he had not had before.
There was more damning information pertaining specifically to Otto Ambros that had been hidden in the steel drum. One document, written by Albert Speer, described two meetings with himself, Ambros, and Hitler in June 1944 which not only confirmed the high position that Ambros held but that he was a war profiteer. “I (SPEER) reported to the Führer that Dr. AMBROS of I.G. FARBEN had developed a new process by which Buna of the same quality as natural rubber can be produced. Some time in the future no further imports of natural rubber will be required… the Führer has ordered a donation of one million marks” to Ambros, Speer wrote. A final piece of evidence shined a light on Farben’s long-term plans for its business venture at Auschwitz. In addition to its Buna factory, IG Farben planned to produce chemical weapons at the death camp. The company had “plans for further construction of CW plant at AUSCHWITZ… in February 1945,” Tilley wrote in his FIAT report.
Tilley returned to Dustbin with the steel drum and the documents. Von Klenck appeared shocked when Tilley told him that the steel drum had been located. “There are indications that he did not expect them to be found,” read Tilley’s intelligence report. FIAT now had documentary evidence that Ambros was “guilty of contravening American Military Government laws by concealing documents connected with German military preparations.” There were hundreds of documents, including “full data on Dyhernfurth, production sheets for Tabun and other war gases,” as well as “many other matters which [Ambros] claimed to have burned in the furnaces at Gendorf in April 1945. It may well be that these papers, added to the formulas, production methods, and the secret CW contracts between IG and the Reich from 1935 to 1945, which were discovered in a Gendorf safe on that same day, may give us a more complete picture of German CW preparations than of most other fields of German armament and general war production.” Major Tilley had pulled off a scientific intelligence coup d’état.
Tilley took the information to a colleague, a veteran intelligence officer, who reminded him that there was an alternative theory to be considered regarding von Klenck. “Basing oneself on experience with enemy agents who confess plots freely, one may come to the conclusion that a lesser secret has been admitted to deflect the investigation from a more important secret,” the officer explained. Efforts to capture Ambros were redoubled. Two days after the steel drum find, on October 29, 1945, the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-committee issued a warrant for the “Arrest of Dr. Ambros.” Now there were two out of three Allied nations lobbying for the immediate arrest of Hitler’s favorite chemist.
Otto Ambros was “dangerous” and “undesirable” and should not be “left at liberty,” read the arrest report. FIAT knew Ambros could remain protected as long as he stayed in the French zone. “He is wily and he will remain there as he knows the hunt for him is on in the U.S. Zone,” the report explained. There was little to do but wait. But patience again paid off.
It took three months for Otto Ambros’s hubris to get the better of him. On January 17, 1946, Ambros traveled outside the French zone and was arrested. He was sent to Dustbin, where Major Tilley was waiting to interrogate him. After FIAT squeezed him for information, Ambros was turned over to Colonel Burton Andrus, now commandant of the Nuremberg jail. Sometime in the foreseeable future Ambros would face judgment at Nuremberg.
Any suggestion that Otto Ambros would one day have a prominent and prosperous place in civilized society, and that the American government would be just one of the governments to employ him, would have seemed pure fantasy. Then again, the Cold War was coming.
PART III
“The past is a foreign country.”
—L. P. Hartley
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Ticking Clock