The Real Reason Hitler Never Used Nerve Gas

By 1945, Nazi Germany had produced more than 12,000 metric tons of tabun, the first nerve agent ever discovered, at a plant on the Oder River staffed by concentration camp prisoners. Gerhard Schrader had stumbled onto the compound in an IG Farben insecticide lab in December 1936. Within six years it was loaded into artillery shells and aerial bombs, and Germany was the only country on earth that knew how to make it. Goebbels wanted it used against the Red Army. So did Bormann, and so did senior officers in the Wehrmacht. Hitler refused every time, and he was still refusing in April 1945 with Soviet tanks in the suburbs of Berlin. The explanation most people have heard, that he had been gassed himself at Ypres in 1918, does not survive contact with the record. This is the real reason those shells never left their crates.