Once, Auschwitz was a regular town. “Ordinary people lived there, and tourists visited to see the castle, the churches, the large medieval market square, and the synagogue,” write historians Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt. In the 1930s, visitors sent postcards from the area that read “Greetings from Auschwitz.” When, in the fall of 1940, Otto Ambros pored over maps of this region, called Upper Silesia, in search of a Buna factory site, he found what he was looking for. The production of synthetic rubber required four things: water, flat land, good railway connections, and an abundance of laborers. Auschwitz had all four. Three rivers met in Auschwitz, the Sola, the Vistula, and the Przemsza, with a water flow of 525,000 cubic feet per hour. The land was flat and sixty-five feet above the waterline, making it safe from floodwaters. The railway connections were sound. But most important was the labor issue. The concentration camp next door could provide an endless labor supply because the men were cheap and could be worked to death.
For Farben, the use of slave labor could take the company to levels of economic prowess previously unexplored. First, a financial deal had to be made with the SS. Ambros was instrumental in this act. For months, before the building of the Buna factory got the go-ahead, the SS and Farben haggled over deal points. Some of the paperwork survived the war. On November 8, 1940, the Reich’s minister of economics wrote to Farben’s board of directors, requesting that they hurry up and “settle the question regarding the site.” Otto Ambros lobbied hard for Auschwitz, and in December, IG Farben sent a busload of its rubber experts and construction workers to survey the work site. A Farben employee named Erich Santo was assigned to serve as Otto Ambros’s construction foreman.
“The concentration camp already existing with approximately 7000 prisoners is to be expanded,” Santo noted in his official company report. For Ambros, Farben’s arrangement with the SS regarding slave laborers remained vague; Ambros sought clarity. “It is therefore necessary to open negotiations with the Reich Leader SS [Himmler] as soon as possible in order to discuss necessary measures with him,” Ambros wrote in his official company report. The two men had a decades-old relationship; Heinrich Himmler and Otto Ambros had known one another since grade school. Ambros could make Himmler see eye-to-eye with him on the benefits that Auschwitz offered to both Farben and the SS.
In fact, the SS and IG Farben needed one another. Himmler wanted Farben’s resources at Auschwitz and was eager to make the deal to supply the slaves, so SS officers hosted a dinner party for Farben’s rubber and construction experts at the Auschwitz concentration camp, inside an SS banquet hall there. During the festivities, the remaining issues were finally agreed upon. Farben would pay the SS three reichsmarks a day for each laborer they supplied, which would go into the SS treasury, not to the slaves. “On the occasion of a dinner party given for us by the management of the concentration camp, we furthermore determined all the arrangements relating to the involvement of the really excellent concentration-camp operation in support of the Buna plants,” Ambros wrote to his boss, Fritz Ter Meer, on April 12, 1941. “Our new friendship with the SS is proving very profitable,” Ambros explained.
The SS agreed to provide Farben with one thousand slave workers immediately. That number, promised Himmler, could quickly rise to thirty thousand with demand. The relationship between Farben and the SS at Auschwitz was now cemented. Otto Ambros was the key to making the Buna factory a success. With his knowledge of synthetic rubber and his managerial experience—he also ran Farben’s secret nerve gas production facilities—there was no better man than Otto Ambros for the Auschwitz job.
Major Tilley waited at Dustbin for the return of Tarr and Ambros. It was now clear to him that there was no single individual more important to Hitler’s chemical weapons program than Otto Ambros had been. Ambros was in charge of chemical weapons at Gendorf and Dyhernfurth, and he was the manager of the Buna factory at Auschwitz. From interviewing various Farben chemists held at Dustbin, Tilley had also learned that the gas used to murder millions of people at Auschwitz and other concentration camps, Zyklon B, was a Farben product. Farben owned the patent on Zyklon B, and it was sold to the Reich by an IG Farben company. In one of these interviews, Tilley asked IG Farben board member Baron Georg von Schnitzler if Otto Ambros knew that Farben chemicals were being used to murder people.
“You said yesterday that a [Farben employee] ‘alluded’ to you that the poisonous gasses [sic] and the chemicals manufactured by IG Farben were being used for the murder of human beings held in concentration camps,” Major Tilley reminded von Schnitzler in their interview.
“So I understood him,” von Schnitzler replied.
“Didn’t you question those employees of yours further in regard to the use of these gases?”
“They said they knew it was being used for this purpose,” von Schnitzler said.
“What did you do when he told you that IG chemicals were being used to kill, to murder people held in concentration camps?” Major Tilley asked.
“I was horrified,” said von Schnitzler.
“Did you do anything about it?”
“I kept it for [sic] me because it was too terrible,” von Schnitzler confessed. “I asked [the Farben employee] is it known to you and Ambros and other directors in Auschwitz that the gases and chemicals are being used to murder people?”
“What did he say?” asked Major Tilley.
“Yes; it is known to all the IG directors in Auschwitz,” von Schnitzler said.
For Lieutenant Colonel Philip R. Tarr, there was a mission at hand. Enemy Equipment Intelligence Service Team Number One, which he served on, needed information that only Dr. Otto Ambros had. Specifically, the team needed blueprints for equipment necessary for producing tabun nerve gas.
When Tarr and Ambros arrived in Heidelberg, the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service had another IG Farben chemist in custody whom they wanted Ambros to work with on a classified job. The man is referred to in documents only as Herr Stumpfi. Ambros and Stumpfi were told to drive to a special metals firm located in Hanau, where they were to locate “30 or 40 drawings of silver-lined equipment.” The Chemical Warfare Service trusted Ambros to such a degree that they sent him and Stumpfi on this mission without an escort.
Manufacturing tabun gas was a precise and clandestine process. The United States desperately wanted to reproduce it, but attempting to do so without Farben’s proprietary formula and its secret equipment was a potential death sentence for any chemists involved. Farben had spent millions of reichsmarks on research and development. Hundreds of concentration camp workers had died in this trial-and-error process. When the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service learned that the silver-lined equipment used to manufacture tabun gas on a large scale had been outsourced from a special metals firm called Heraus, they coveted those blueprints and plans. Dr. Ambros and Herr Stumpfi were to go to this engineering firm to locate these drawings and blueprints and bring them back to Heidelberg. The Chemical Warfare Service agents could not conduct this mission on their own because they had no idea what equipment to look for.
The two Farben chemists, Ambros and Stumpfi, set off on their secret assignment. “When they arrived at the factory in Hanau, personnel of a [U.S.] CIC [Counter Intelligence Corps] group with headquarters at that time in Hanau, arrested them,” read a secret report. “When they explained their mission the CIC personnel concerned confirmed the German engineers’ statement by communication with Heidelberg and the two Germans were released.” Ambros and Stumpfi drove away. “The CIC personnel, concerned [after] having learned of the drawings through the two German engineers, then seized the drawings and took them to their own headquarters,” read a classified Army report. The Chemical Warfare Service never obtained the drawings they were looking for. But at least Tarr had Dr. Ambros under his control, or so he believed.
Instead, somewhere between Ambros’s release from the Heraus engineering firm in Hanau and his return to Heidelberg, he was able to communicate to his “network of spies and informants i
n Gendorf.” From those sources, Ambros learned that soldiers with the U.S. Sixth Army had an order to arrest him. So instead of returning to Tarr’s custody, Ambros drove to a fancy guesthouse that IG Farben maintained outside Heidelberg called Villa Kohlhof, where a staff of Farben employees tended to his every need.
CIOS and FIAT officials from Dustbin finally made contact with Tarr and ordered him to return with Ambros to the interrogation facility immediately. But Tarr was no longer in control of Ambros. Major Tilley went looking for Ambros himself and found Hitler’s chemist residing at Villa Kohlhof. Ambros told Major Tilley that he would agree to continue cooperating with the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service and the various Allied agencies that sought information from him, but only on one condition: that Tilley “secure the release of all chemical warfare personnel already detained at Dustbin.” This was a preposterous request.
Tilley’s superior, Major P. M. Wilson of FIAT’s Enemy Personnel Exploitation Section, attempted to take control of the situation, ordering Ambros brought to Dustbin immediately. This was not a matter of cooperation, Wilson said. There were orders to arrest the man. Lieutenant Colonel Tarr intervened on Ambros’s behalf. He lobbied the British Ministry of Supply (the agency responsible for British chemical warfare issues) for help getting Ambros’s Dustbin colleagues released. To Tarr, extracting Ambros’s esoteric knowledge outweighed the need to hold him accountable for his crimes. But the British also flatly refused to help Tarr. The matter stalled.
Lieutenant Colonel Tarr flew to Paris. That night, a telegram arrived at Dustbin, sent from Paris and purporting to be from the British Ministry of Supply. The telegram ordered the release of all Farben chemical warfare scientists at Dustbin, and was signed by a British Ministry of Supply colonel named J. T. M. Childs. Officers at Dustbin suspected that something was amiss and contacted Colonel Childs about his outrageous request. Colonel Childs swore he had neither written the memo nor signed it and accused Lieutenant Colonel Tarr of forgery.
FIAT enhanced their efforts to have Dr. Ambros arrested in Heidelberg. The efforts failed. Ambros was able to evade capture by fleeing into the safety of the French zone. Double-crossing Lieutenant Colonel Tarr, Otto Ambros struck a deal with French chemical weapons experts. In exchange for information, he was given a job as plant manager at Farben’s chemical factory in Ludwigshafen.
When FIAT officers at Dustbin learned what had happened, they were outraged. Ambros’s escape had been entirely preventable. “It is evident that he was not kept in custody or under house arrest,” noted Captain R. E. F. Edelsten, a British officer with the Ministry of Supply. Major P. M. Wilson saw the situation in much darker terms. Lieutenant Colonel Tarr had “taken steps to assist [Ambros] to evade arrest,” he wrote in a scathing report. Wilson was appalled by “the friendly treatment being given to this man who is suspected of war criminality.” But these were just words. Ambros was now a free man, living and working in the French zone.
The relationship among Tarr, Ambros, and the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service was far from over. It was only a matter of time before an American chemical company would learn of the army’s interest in a whole new field of chemical weapons. An American chemist, Dr. Wilhelm Hirschkind, was in Germany at this same time. Dr. Hirschkind was conducting a survey of the German chemical industry for the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service while on temporary leave from the Dow Chemical Company. Dr. Hirschkind had spent several months inspecting IG Farben plants in the U.S. and British zones and now he was in Heidelberg, hoping to meet Ambros. Lieutenant Colonel Tarr reached out to Colonel Weiss, the French commander in charge of IG Farben’s chemical plant in Ludwigshafen, and a meeting was arranged.
On July 28, 1945, Dr. Hirschkind met with Dr. Ambros and Lieutenant Colonel Tarr in Heidelberg. Ambros brought his wartime deputy with him to the meeting, the Farben chemist Jürgen von Klenck. It was von Klenck who, in the final months of the war, had helped Ambros destroy evidence, hide documents, and disguise the Farben factory in Gendorf so that it appeared to produce soap, not chemical weapons. Jürgen von Klenck was initially detained at Dustbin but later released. The Heidelberg meetings lasted several days. When Dr. Wilhelm Hirschkind left, he had these words for Ambros: “I would look forward after the conclusion of the peace treaty [to] continuing our relations [in my position] as a representative of Dow.”
Only later did FIAT interrogators learn about this meeting. Major Tilley’s suspicions were now confirmed. A group inside the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service, including his former partner, Lieutenant Colonel Tarr, did indeed have an ulterior motive that ran counter to the motives of CIOS, FIAT, and the United Nations War Crimes Commission. Tilley’s superior at Dustbin, Major Wilson, confirmed this dark and disturbing truth in a classified military intelligence report on the Ambros affair. “It is believed that the conflict between FIAT… and Lt-Col Tarr was due to the latter’s wish to use Ambros for industrial chemical purposes” back in the United States.
All documents regarding the Ambros affair would remain classified for the next forty years, until August of 1985. That an officer of the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service, Lieutenant Colonel Tarr, had sheltered a wanted war criminal from capture in the aftermath of the German surrender was damning. That this officer was also participating in meetings with the fugitive and a representative from the Dow Chemical Company was scandalous.
In 1945, the Chemical Warfare Service was also in charge of the U.S. biological weapons program, the existence of which remained secret from the American public. The program was robust; if the atomic bomb failed to end the war in Japan, there were plans in motion to wage biological warfare against Japanese crops. After the fall of the Reich, the staff of the Chemical Warfare Service began interrogating Hitler’s biological weapons makers, many of whom were interned at Dustbin. The Chemical Warfare Service saw enormous potential in making the Nazis’ biological weapons program its own and sought any scientific intelligence it could get. The man most wanted in this effort was Hitler’s top biological weapons expert, Dr. Kurt Blome.
On June 29, 1945, Blome was sent to Dustbin. The officers assigned to interrogate him were Bill Cromartie and J. M. Barnes of Operation Alsos. Each man was uniquely familiar with Blome’s background. Cromartie had been in Dr. Eugen Haagen’s apartment in Strasbourg in November 1944 when he and Alsos scientific director Samuel Goudsmit made the awful discovery that the Reich had been experimenting on people during the war (Blome was named in the Haagen files). And it was Cromartie and Barnes who led the investigation of the Geraberg facility, the abandoned, curious-looking research outpost hidden in the Thuringian Forest. Both Cromartie and Barnes had concluded that Geraberg had been a laboratory for Reich biological weapons research and that Dr. Blome was in charge.
During his initial interview at Dustbin, Blome refused to cooperate. “When he was first interrogated, he was very evasive,” Cromartie and Barnes wrote. But a few days later, when interrogated in more detail, Blome’s “attitude changed completely and he seemed anxious to give a full account not only [of] what he actually did but what he had in mind for future work.” Cromartie and Barnes were unsure if they should be enthused by Blome’s seeming change of heart or suspicious of it. Blome had been observed in the Dustbin eating hall conversing at length with Dr. Heinrich Kliewe, the Reich’s counterintelligence agent for bacterial warfare concerns. Perhaps the two men were concocting a misinformation scheme.
During the war, Dr. Kliewe’s job had been to monitor bioweapons progress being made by Germany’s enemies, most notably Russia. “Kliewe claims that he himself did all the evaluating of the reports received and determined what course of action his department should thenceforth follow,” investigators wrote in Kliewe’s Dustbin dossier. Kliewe told Blome that he would likely be taken to Heidelberg for a lengthy interrogation with Alsos agents, as Kliewe had been.
If Cromartie and Barnes were surprised by Blome’s sudden willingness to talk, they were also aware that most of what he told them could not be independently verified
. “It is quite impossible to check many of his statements and what follows is an account of what he related,” read a note in Blome’s Dustbin dossier. What Blome recounted was a dark tale of plans for biological warfare spearheaded by Heinrich Himmler.
Himmler had a layman’s fascination with biological warfare. A former chicken farmer, the Reichsführer-SS had studied agriculture in school. According to Blome, it was Himmler who was the primary motivator behind the Reich’s bioweapons program. Hitler, Blome said, did not approve of biological warfare and was kept in the dark as to specific plans. Himmler’s area of greatest fascination, said Blome, was bubonic plague.
On April 30, 1943, Göring had created the cancer research post that was to be held by Blome. Over the next nineteen months, Blome explained, he met with Himmler five times.
At their first meeting, which occurred in the summer of 1943—Blome recalled it as being July or August—Himmler ordered Blome to study various dissemination methods of plague bacteria for offensive warfare. According to Blome, he shared with Himmler his fears regarding the dangerous boomerang effect a plague bomb would most likely have on Germany. Himmler told Blome that in that case, he should get to work immediately to produce a vaccine to prevent such a thing. To expedite vaccine research, Blome said, Himmler ordered him “to use human beings.”
Himmler offered Blome a medical block at a concentration camp like Dachau where he could complete this work. Blome said he told Himmler he was aware of “strong objections in certain circles” to using humans in experimental vaccine trials. Himmler told Blome that experimenting on humans was necessary in the war effort. To refuse was “the equivalent of treason.”