Although the rainy weather on June 6 was far from optimal for chemical warfare, the effects would still have been disastrous. German use of mustard or Tabun against the Normandy beachhead might have repelled the Allied invasion of France and delayed another attempt for six months, possibly necessitating landings at a new location. In the event, however, the threat of massive retaliatory strikes successfully deterred any German use of chemical weapons on D-Day. Because the Allies had achieved air superiority, cities and factories throughout the Reich were now exposed to aerial attack. According to a report written after the war by General Ochsner, chief of the German Chemical Troops, “the initiation of gas warfare by us might have had incalculable consequences for our homeland if the enemy had decided to bomb our factories and communications facilities with gas, thus compelling us to carry out extensive decontamination work, not to mention the detrimental effect gas would have had on the morale of the population of big cities already severely stricken.” Furthermore, the Wehrmacht faced logistical constraints on its ability to launch chemical attacks. Ochsner wrote, “It also had to be taken into account that supply transportation for the Atlantic front, which already was not functioning too well on account of enemy air superiority, would not have been able to cope with the additional load of material for chemical warfare.”
Despite Hitler’s forbearance at Normandy, British civil defense authorities believed that he would eventually resort to poison gas attacks against London and other cities in southeast England. Although the Germans no longer had enough aircraft to deliver chemical weapons across the English Channel, they had developed long-range “vengeance” weapons with which to terrorize the British capital. On June 13, 1944, one week after the Normandy landings, the Germans began to launch hundreds of V-1 flying “buzz bombs” at London and southeast England; those attacks were supplemented on September 6 with V-2 ballistic missiles, which were impossible to shoot down. The British authorities feared the potential use of the V-1 and V-2 to deliver chemical agents, creating a formidable weapon of terror. Responding to this threat, they distributed 30 million gas masks to civilians of all ages.
German scientists had indeed developed a proximity fuse for the V missiles that could detonate chemical warheads a few hundred feet above the ground, creating drifting clouds of lethal vapor. But although Wehrmacht planners considered delivering Tabun with the V-1 or V-2, they calculated that because of the missiles’ limited payload, high-explosive warheads would cause more casualties than chemical ones. A liquid-filled warhead would also adversely affect the V-2’s ballistics.
ON JULY 20, 1944, a group of disgruntled German military officers led by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg tried to assassinate Hitler with a time bomb as he met with his senior advisers in an aboveground conference room at “Wolf’s Lair” in East Prussia. The explosive device was concealed inside a briefcase that, at the last minute, was moved by an aide behind a heavy support for the map table, deflecting the blast. Four people died in the explosion but Hitler was relatively unscathed, although it left him with two ruptured eardrums and persistent dizzy spells. Stauffenberg and the other ringleaders were arrested and summarily executed by firing squad in the courtyard of the Army headquarters in Berlin.
Although Hitler had survived the attempt on his life, the military situation was becoming increasingly dire. Half a million German soldiers on the western front had been killed, injured, or taken prisoner, and the remaining units had lost most of their armored vehicles and artillery. In the east, the German Army was also in retreat. On August 24, the Army General Staff proposed to the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht that poison gas be used to halt the advance of the Red Army, with an emphasis on “those chemical agents that are based on entirely new German developments and hence are probably unknown to the enemy.”
In September 1944, Robert Ley, a chemist by profession, tried to persuade Speer that the large-scale use of chemical weapons could stave off defeat and strike a decisive blow against the Soviet enemy. His proposal was to create a cordon sanitaire along the 750-kilometer German-Soviet front by contaminating the terrain with persistent mustard and Tabun, blocking the Red Army’s advance into central Europe. A notorious drunk, Ley raised his idea over glasses of strong wine. “His increased stammering betrayed his agitation,” Speer later wrote in his memoir. “ ‘You know we have this poison gas. I’ve heard about it. The Führer must do it. He must use it. Now he has to do it! When else? This is the last moment. You, too, must make him realize that it’s time.’ ”
Appalled by Ley’s drunken tirade, Speer remained silent. But Ley made a similar appeal to Goebbels, who in turn persuaded Hitler to hold a high-level conclave to discuss the possible use of poison gas. Despite his vacillations about chemical weapons, the grave military setbacks forced the Führer to reconsider their use. During the meeting, he speculated that because the British and the Americans had an interest in slowing the Soviet advance toward Berlin, the Western powers might tolerate German chemical attacks against the Red Army. Militating against this course of action, however, was the risk of Allied retaliatory strikes and the fact that limited stocks of Tabun were available. Production of the nerve agent had been considerably lower than expected because of severe shortages of raw materials, such as phosphorus and sodium cyanide. Furthermore, construction of the Sarin plant at Dyhernfurth was only about 70 percent complete. The manufacturing units involved in Steps I and II were operational, but Steps III through V were not. As a stop-gap measure, the Step II product was shipped in lead-lined iron tanks to Spandau, where the remaining steps were performed on a small scale. As a result, less than ten metric tons of Sarin were produced during the war.
The second Sarin production facility at Falkenhagen, which had been slated to go on line in mid-1945, was also far behind schedule. One reason for the delay was a conflict between the Anorgana officials who managed the Sarin plant and the Technical Office of the SS over an adjacent facility for the production of “N-Stoff” (chlorine trifluoride), an incendiary chemical. Although all three branches of the Wehrmacht had rejected N-Stoff as a useless weapon, Hitler had ordered the SS to reassess the chemical’s utility as a filling for antiaircraft shells. The SS had reached a favorable verdict, and Luranil had proceeded to build an N-Stoff plant at Falkenhagen with a capacity of fifty tons per month. In August 1944, SS chief Heinrich Himmler told his officers to seize control of the N-Stoff plant, leading to a confrontation with Anorgana. Ambros complained to Speer, who ordered that the plant be returned. The SS then retaliated by interfering repeatedly with the construction of the Sarin plant.
Meanwhile, the push by Ley and Goebbels to unleash Tabun against the Red Army encountered strong opposition from Speer. Once again, Hitler asked his armaments minister if he thought the Allies possessed stocks of nerve agents. Speer checked with Ambros, who said that his earlier assessment remained unchanged. The Wehrmacht General Staff also opposed any resort to chemical warfare. From the start of the conflict, the German military had resisted assimilating chemical arms into its doctrine, training, and logistics, creating major impediments to the use of such weapons on the battlefield. No Luftwaffe personnel, for example, had been trained to handle or deliver Tabun-filled bombs. According to Speer’s testimony at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, “In military circles, there was certainly no one in favor of gas warfare. All sensible Army people turned gas warfare down as being utterly insane since, in view of [Allied] superiority in the air, it would not be long before it would bring the most terrible catastrophe upon German cities, which were completely unprotected.” Even if gas masks had been distributed widely, they would have provided limited protection against skin-penetrating agents such as mustard.
Determined to end the debate over chemical warfare once and for all, Speer decided to take matters into his own hands. He had no intention of devoting scarce materials and skilled labor to the production of weapons whose use was uncertain and probably undesirable. On October 11, 1944, he drafted a message to Field Marshal
Keitel describing the adverse effects of Allied bombing on German armaments production. “Due to the extraordinarily effective enemy attacks on our raw materials industry,” Speer wrote, “a situation has arisen that, taking account of the current demands from the fronts, requires sharply cutting production of the most important chemical agents—Tabun and mustard—to the benefit of powder and explosives.” He directed that Tabun production be cut back to 100 tons in October and halted entirely on November 1 unless an improvement in the supply of cyanide was achieved.
On November 2, SS Brigadier General Walther Schieber, the head of the Armaments Supply Office in the Speer Ministry, convened a meeting with Dr. Karl Brandt and other senior Nazi officials to discuss the Speer directive. Brandt was strongly opposed to halting production of nerve agents and noted the standing order from Hitler that the manufacture of poison gas was not to be compromised under any circumstances. “We have in Tabun a new type of chemical agent that alone is capable, in the event of a massive enemy use of chemical agents, to provide an effective countermeasure that possibly could compel the adversary to halt his use of poison gas,” Brandt said. “This applies in even greater measure to the more effective agent Sarin, whose more rapid production could help decide the outcome of the war and must be promoted with all available means. With respect to raw materials, Sarin is preferable to Tabun, because Sarin avoids the current constraints on the availability of cyanide.”
With Brandt’s encouragement, Schieber decided to resist the Speer directive. A few days later, however, Speer fired Schieber and replaced him with a more compliant bureaucrat who went on to halt the production of chemical intermediates for nerve agents. By the end of 1944, the Tabun plant at Dyhernfurth had ceased operation, and all artillery shells and bombs were henceforth filled with conventional explosives.
At the same time, the Nazi regime launched a systematic effort to cover up the nerve agent development and production program. Thousands of secret research documents and testing protocols were shredded, starting with those at the highest security classification, and scientists were ordered to burn their laboratory notebooks. All sensitive items were removed from Spandau Citadel, and the Tabun and Sarin pilot plants there were disassembled and shipped west to Raubkammer. IG Farben also undertook the massive shredding and burning of files, totaling some 15 tons of paper.
ON NOVEMBER 20, 1944, as the Red Army advanced on a broad front toward the eastern German provinces of East Prussia and Silesia, Hitler left his Wolf’s Lair headquarters and returned to Berlin. In a desperate move, the Nazi regime had drafted all able-bodied men between the ages of sixteen and sixty who did not already serve in the armed forces into a homeland defense force called the People’s Army (Volkssturm), but the poorly trained and equipped militia was little more than cannon fodder. By early January 1945, Soviet forces were approaching the Oder River, putting Dyhernfurth at risk. In two and a half years of operation, the factory had produced nearly 12,000 metric tons of Tabun, of which 10,000 tons had been loaded into 250-kilogram aerial bombs for the Luftwaffe and 2,000 tons into artillery shells for the Army.
In late January, the approach of Soviet troops triggered frenetic activity at Dyhernfurth, as if an ant colony had been breached. All remaining Tabun-filled munitions were loaded onto trucks and freight trains and shipped west to depots deep inside the Reich. Most of the bulk Tabun remaining in two underground storage tanks was pumped into the Oder River, and stocks of Product 39, the main intermediate used in Tabun production, were also destroyed. The entire factory was then prepared for demolition: a Pioneer commando brought in dozens of explosive charges that were laid at key points and wired to detonators. At the last minute, however, an urgent message arrived from the Army High Command in Berlin rescinding the demolition order. Hitler had changed his mind, apparently believing that German forces could recapture the factory intact and resume nerve agent production at a later date.
On January 24, shortly before the first vanguard of Soviet troops reached the Oder River, the Dyhernfurth director, Dr. Albert Palm, gave the order to evacuate all staff members and the 3,000 inmates of the two satellite labor camps. Over the previous two years, hundreds of forced laborers at the Tabun factory had died of exhaustion, malnutrition, disease, and toxic exposure. Now the survivors, in dirty striped uniforms, were compelled to march from the Dyhernfurth subcamp to the main concentration camp at Gross-Rosen. Emaciated to the point of resembling “walking corpses,” they were driven and beaten by the SS guards, and those who collapsed by the side of the road were summarily shot.
As the ragged column passed through the town of Neumarkt, the sight of thousands of skeletal, foul-smelling prisoners, coatless in the bitter cold, aroused disgust and pity in the town’s citizens. The physician Hildegard Staar and her husband asked one of the SS guards if they could give the inmates food, clothes, and medicine, but they were harshly rebuffed. Two residents of Neumarkt who defied the SS order not to provide assistance were arrested and later executed by local Nazi officials. By the time the forced laborers reached the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, two thirds of the original 3,000 had died or been killed. On February 11, the SS transferred the survivors from Gross-Rosen to Mauthausen concentration camp. The weak, ill-clothed prisoners were transported in open vegetable wagons in the subfreezing weather, causing scores to succumb to pneumonia. Because the Nazis wanted to eliminate all outside witnesses of nerve gas production at Dyhernfurth, the Gestapo tracked down the survivors at Mauthausen and murdered them.
IN EARLY FEBRUARY 1945, the Red Army occupied the village of Dyhernfurth and the nearby castle but halted for a few days on the banks of the Oder River because of overextended supply lines, indiscipline and drunkenness, and threats to their flanks. The Russians were unaware of the great prize that lay only a few kilometers from their garrison. At the abandoned Tabun factory, the manufacturing and filling lines were still intact, along with stocks of such raw materials as white phosphorus. Moreover, several gallons of Tabun remained in the production kettles and the two underground storage tanks.
Fearing that the Soviets would discover the factory, take samples of Tabun away for analysis, and thereby learn the secret of the nerve agents, the Nazi leadership decided to send in a special raiding party to clean and decontaminate the kettles and storage tanks before the Red Army arrived. To lead this sensitive mission, the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht selected one of Germany’s youngest general officers, Major General Max Sachsenheimer, thirty-two, the commander of the 17th Infantry Division. Under his control were several hundred infantry, supply troops, and a light Pioneer assault boat company with eighty-one motorized boats and three antiaircraft batteries.
The operation began in the morning darkness of February 5, 1945. Although the railroad bridge over the Oder had been partially destroyed by bombing, enough of the superstructure remained to be usable by the raiding party. After crossing the bridge, Sachsenheimer’s troops followed the railroad tracks to the Tabun plant, a kilometer inland from the river. They were accompanied by two army chemists who had worked at the factory and were familiar with its layout, as well as eighty former plant technicians from Anorgana. After a tense 65 minutes, the commandos reached the Tabun factory and secured it. Then the Anorgana technicians, wearing gas masks and protective rubber suits, pumped the remaining Tabun into the Oder and scrubbed the storage tanks and kettles to remove any telltale residues of nerve agent.
Meanwhile, the rest of Sachsenheimer’s troops went into action. A half hour after the first group of commandos had crossed the railroad bridge, the Pioneer company launched its assault boats across the Oder 2.5 kilometers downstream and seized the village of Dyhernfurth. This attack was a diversionary maneuver designed to draw the approaching Soviet forces away from the factory site. German infantry armed with panzerfaust antitank weapons then held off a series of uncoordinated Soviet counterattacks, including one at about 1:00 p.m. involving eighteen tanks.
By late afternoon, the decontamination work at the Tab
un plant had been completed, and the raiding team withdrew. A few days later, the Red Army occupied the area. Although the Luftwaffe later tried to bomb the factory from the air, they were unsuccessful and the Soviets captured both the full-scale Tabun plant and the pilot Sarin plant intact.
UNABLE TO HALT the advance of the American and British forces in the west and the Soviets in the east, the Nazi leadership faced the dilemma of what to do with the thousands of tons of superlethal poisons it had manufactured and stockpiled. On February 2, 1945, Hitler ordered that “chemical agents and chemical munitions must not fall into enemy hands.” Destruction of chemical weapons was permitted only when it could be carried out in an inconspicuous manner because of the risk that the Allies might perceive it as a deliberate attack.
Two days later, at Hitler’s direction, Field Marshal Keitel issued an order to the general quartermasters of the armed forces stating that all chemical munitions stored at nine depots near Berlin, in the direct path of the Red Army, should immediately be transported west into the state of Lower Saxony. Priority was to be given to nerve agents, which “under no circumstances” were to be captured by the enemy. To accomplish this task, a massive transport operation was put into motion. Although trucks and fuel were in extremely short supply, both were made freely available for this purpose.
As the transfer of chemical weapons was getting under way, a final debate took place within the Nazi inner circle over whether to initiate their use. After the horrific firebombing of Dresden by British and American bombers on February 13–14, 1945, an outraged Goebbels, supported by Ley and Bormann, demanded that the Luftwaffe retaliate by drenching British cities with Tabun. On February 19 and 20, Hitler convened meetings with his generals to discuss whether Germany should respond to the burning of Dresden by formally withdrawing from the 1925 Geneva Protocol. This action would remove any legal constraints on the first use of chemical weapons and “demonstrate to the enemy that we are determined to use all means to fight for our existence.” But the Navy’s commander in chief, Karl Dönitz, and other senior officers warned that the risks of this action would outweigh the benefits and that resorting to chemical warfare would not significantly delay the end of the war. Once again, Hitler put off making a final decision.
War of Nerves Page 9
