First Person: Ernest H. Volwiler Ernest H. Volwiler. CHF
Collections. At the close of World War II, Ernest H. Volwiler
was asked to do something out of the ordinary for an industrial
chemist: visit German chemistry facilities on an intelligence
mission. It was, he explained in his 1986 oral history, “a very
interesting development, because we didn't have a good idea
about the kinds of activities the Germans were involved in and
how intensive they were.” Born in 1893, Volwiler was already an
established organic chemist by the 1940s; after earning his
Ph.D. under Roger Adams at the University of Illinois in 1918,
Volwiler began a lengthy career at Abbott Laboratories. As
skilled, experienced synthetic organic chemists, Volwiler and
Abbott were perfectly suited to understand the types of research
that might be found in Germany. The most unexpected thing they
uncovered on their trip was German research into war gases.
Volwiler recounted: They mentioned agricultural chemicals, and
out of that came the statement th