When the weather was clear the Germans played volleyball games outside. Far off in the distance they could make out the Boston skyline and see the tall, shiny buildings on shore. But often the fog rolled in, and the island was soaked in a thick, dense mist for days at a time. To pass the time the scientists stayed indoors and played Monopoly, which they called the “capitalists’ game.” Still, it was impossible to deny that Fort Strong took on a penal colony feel, as Kolm recalled. Soon the Germans started calling their new home Devil’s Island. Finally, on September 29, 1945, Major James P. Hamill, an intelligence officer with the Army Ordnance Corps, was sent to the east coast of the island to escort a group of Germans off. Hamill had been in Nordhausen with Major Staver at war’s end and had personally assisted in the mission to locate enough rocket parts to reconfigure one hundred of them at the White Sands Proving Ground. His presence on Devil’s Island had to have been a welcome one among the rocket scientists. Hamill took six of them—Eberhard Rees, Erich Neubert, Theodor Poppel, August Schulze, Wilhelm Jungert, and Walter Schwidetzky—to Aberdeen Proving Ground, where they began translating, cataloguing, and evaluating the information from the Dörnten mine stash. Hamill’s next mission was to escort Wernher von Braun by train to Fort Bliss, Texas.
The train ride began on October 6, 1945, and was a memorable event. Operation Overcast was a highly classified military matter, and Major Hamill was required to keep watch over von Braun twenty-four hours a day. Drawing any kind of attention to the German scientist was to be avoided at all cost. In St. Louis, Major Hamill and von Braun were assigned to a Pullman car filled with wounded war veterans from the 82nd Division, renowned for parachute assaults into Sicily and Salerno. Also in the train car were wounded war veterans from the 101st Airborne Division, men lauded for action in the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge.
Hamill quickly arranged for himself and von Braun to be moved into a different car. The train moved along to the Texas border. Hamill watched as the man sitting next to von Braun began engaging him in friendly conversation, asking von Braun where he was from and what business he was in. Von Braun, apparently well versed in lying on demand, replied that he was from Switzerland and that he was in “the steel business.”
“Well it turned out that this particular gentleman knew Switzerland like the back of his hand,” Major Hamill later recalled, “and was himself in the steel business.” Von Braun quickly qualified “steel business” to mean “ball bearings.” As it so happened the man was also an expert on ball bearings, Hamill explained. The train whistle blew. The approaching station stop was Texarkana, which was the businessman’s destination. As the man prepared to exit the train he turned back to von Braun and waved good-bye to him.
“If it wasn’t for the help that you Swiss gave us, there is no telling as to whom might have won the war,” the businessman said.
Army Ordnance finally had their scientists on U.S. soil, and work commenced at Fort Bliss without delay. In Germany, the drama between the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service and FIAT over the suspected war criminal Otto Ambros escalated. Despite orders from SHAEF to arrest him, Ambros remained a fugitive in plain sight. He lived and worked with impunity in the French zone. At Dustbin, FIAT officers continued to learn more about who Ambros was and the wartime role that he had played in chemical weapons research and development. In an interrogation with Albert Speer, FIAT learned that no single person had been as critical to the development of Hitler’s vast arsenal of nerve agents and poison gases as Otto Ambros had been. “He is known to have spoken to Hitler at a high-level German conference on Chemical Warfare,” a FIAT report read. Another stated, “Ambros’ importance, from the Intelligence point of view, has been re-emphasized by the recent Chemical Warfare investigation at ‘Dustbin.’ Speer and the German Chemical Warfare experts agree that he is the key man in German Chemical Warfare production.” Major Tilley was outraged by it all, but there was little he could do except put Ambros under surveillance.
Initial attempts to capture Dr. Ambros maintained the fiction of civility. “At the end of August or beginning of September 1945, an attempt was made to induce Ambros to return to the American zone,” Tilley wrote in a FIAT report. In response, “Ambros claimed to be unable to return then as the French authorities would not permit him to leave the French zone.” Major Tilley knew this was a lie. Ambros regularly traveled back and forth between Ludwigshafen, in the French zone, and the IG Farben guesthouse, Villa Kohlhof, outside Heidelberg, in the American zone. This made Tilley furious. “This man is thought to be far too dangerous and undesirable to be left at liberty, let alone be employed by the Allied authorities,” Tilley wrote. FIAT authorized him to set up a sting operation in an attempt to capture and arrest Ambros. Captain Edelsten was assigned the job of tracking Ambros day and night. Through the Counter Intelligence Corps in Heidelberg, Captain Edelsten, working with a Colonel Mumford, set up a network of undercover agents who began to follow Ambros’s every move. “Saw Ambros at LU [Ludwigshafen],” read one report. “Drives his own car, usually alone. Slept in car for two hours one night, on roadside,” another set of field notes revealed. Ambros traveled frequently: to Freiburg, Rheinfelden, and Baden-Baden. He’d even been back to Gendorf—a brazen move, considering the Seventh Army had an outstanding arrest warrant for him there. But Ambros was quicker than the U.S. Army and had a better intelligence network in place as well. Whenever the U.S. Army showed up to arrest him, he was already gone.
Finally, Captain Edelsten reached Ambros on the telephone. “Edelsten told Ambros that Col. Mumford was anxious to see him again,” and asked if a meeting could be arranged for the following Sunday, at the Farben villa. Ambros agreed. FIAT planned its takedown. Plain clothes CIC officers would wait outside Villa Kohlhof, out of eyesight, until after Captain Edelsten placed Ambros under arrest. Then they’d step in and transport the wanted war criminal back to Dustbin. Except Ambros was one step ahead. With his well established “private intelligence center complete with secretaries and errand boys,” he learned the meeting was a ruse to arrest him. When Edelsten arrived at the villa, Ambros’s secretary invited him inside. Smiling broadly, she apologized and said “Dr. Ambros is not able to come.” Edelsten feigned understanding and sat down at a large banquet table elegantly set for eight. The secretary whispered in his ear, “You have been at Gendorf,” as if to taunt him.
Ambros, it turned out, had his own people following the FIAT agents who had been tailing him, a posse of “various deputies [between] Ludwigshafen and Gendorf.” Embarrassed and infuriated by the audacity of it all, Edelsten finished his tea and got up to leave. “Just as Edelsten was leaving, Ambros’s car pulled in (Chevrolet),” and for a fleeting moment Edelsten believed he would capture him after all. Instead, a look-alike “emerged from [the] car and said [Ambros] was unable to come.” Ambros had sent a double; Edelsten had been burned.
FIAT was being made fun of, and there was little they could do. Captain Edelsten left the IG Farben villa red-faced and empty-handed. “Gave CIC description of Ambros’s car,” he noted in his report. “Light blue closed Saloon (Chevrolet).” Edelsten posted his men to watch the bridges around Heidelberg and promised to arrest Ambros if he ever arrived. But of course he never did. Adding insult to injury, the following day Dr. Otto Ambros sent Captain Edelsten a formal note, neatly typed on fancy stationery, with Farben’s wartime address still embossed on the letterhead. “Sorry that I could not make the appointment,” Ambros wrote. He signed his name in thick black ink.
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.”
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
In the late summer of 1945, the Nazi scientist program underwent a significant organizational change. At the behest of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, control over the program was removed from the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department, G-2, and given over to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The newly created Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) would now be in charge of decision making for the rapidly expanding classified program. The JIOA was a subcommittee of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which provided national security information to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. To understand the JIOA’s power, and how it ran the Nazi scientist program so secretively, is to first
understand the nature of the Joint Intelligence Committee. According to national security historian Larry A. Valero, who has written a monograph on the subject for the CIA, the JIC was and remains one of the most enigmatic of all the American intelligence agencies. “The JIC structure was always in motion, always morphing and changing, a flexible, ad-hoc system,” Valero says. “Subcommittees came and went, so did staff officers, but JIC decisions always had to be by consensus and were always reported to the Joint Chiefs.” Little has been written about the inner workings of the JIOA, but the stories of individual Nazi scientists, and the JIOA’s trail of partially declassified papers, help to define this powerful postwar organization.
In the immediate aftermath of the German surrender, the Joint Intelligence Committee was focused on the emerging Soviet threat. Between June 15, 1945, and August 9, 1945, the JIC wrote and delivered sixteen major intelligence reports and twenty-seven policy papers to the Joint Chiefs. “The most important JIC estimates involved the military capabilities and future intentions of the USSR,” says Valero. Those intelligence estimates determined that the Soviets were ideologically hostile to the West and would continue to seek global domination, an attitude they had managed to skillfully conceal during the war. In September 1945, the JIC advised the Joint Chiefs that the Soviet Union would postpone “open conflict” with the West in the immediate future but only so it could rebuild its military arsenal and by 1952 be back at fighting strength. After this date, said the JIC, the Soviets would be ready and able to engage the United States in “total war.”