Copies of the classified report were sent out to thirty-seven or thirty-eight people, says CIA historian Larry A. Valero, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was not known if President Truman received a copy of JCS 1696, as he was not on the distribution list.
One of the scientists on the JIOA list of one thousand was Dr. Kurt Blome. The Allies were unsure what to do with Hitler’s biological weapons maker. Clearly, no discreet paperclip attached to Blome’s file would be able to whitewash the reality of his inner-circle role as deputy surgeon general of the Third Reich. But if the United States were to go to war with the Soviet Union it would mean “total war” and, according to JCS 1696, would likely include biological warfare. America needed to “envisage” such a scenario and to plan for it, with both sword and shield. Dr. Blome had spent months at the Dustbin interrogation facility, Castle Kransberg, but had recently been transferred to the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Service Center at Darmstadt, located eighteen miles south of Frankfurt. In the summer of 1946, Dr. Blome was employed there by the U.S. Army “in the capacity of a doctor.”
Dr. Kurt Blome’s expertise was in great demand, but his future was as yet undecided. In his Posen laboratory, Blome had made considerable progress with live plague pathogens, including bubonic and pneumonic plague. How far that research progressed remained vague, likely because it would put an unwanted spotlight on human experiments many believed had taken place there. Blome repeatedly told investigators that he had intended to conduct human trials but never actually did.
Blome’s American counterpart in wartime plague-weapon research was a left-leaning bacteriologist named Dr. Theodor Rosebury. During the war, the biological weapons work Rosebury conducted was so highly classified that it was considered as secret as atomic research. He had worked at a research facility outside Washington, D.C., called Camp Detrick. It was like Posen, only bigger. Detrick had 2,273 personnel working on Top Secret biological warfare programs. Like Blome, Rosebury worked on bubonic plague. Rosebury’s colleagues worked on 199 other germ bomb projects, including anthrax spore production, plant and animal diseases, and insect research, in an effort to determine which bugs were the most effective carriers of certain diseases.
Almost no one in America had any idea that the U.S. Army had been developing biological weapons until January 3, 1946, when the War Department released a slim, sanitized government monograph called the Merck Report. That is when the American public learned for the first time that the government’s Top Secret program had been “cloaked in the deepest wartime secrecy, matched only by the Manhattan Project for developing the Atomic Bomb.” The rationale behind developing these kinds of weapons, the public was told, was the same as it had been with America’s wartime chemical weapons program. If the Nazis had used biological agents to kill Allied soldiers, the U.S. military would have been prepared to retaliate in kind. Yes, the war was over, Americans were now told, but unfortunately there was a new and emerging threat out there, the Merck Report warned, an invisible and insidious evil capable of killing millions on a vast, unknowable scale. America’s bioweapons program needed to continue, the Merck Report made clear. America may have won the war with the mighty atomic bomb, but biological weapons were the poor man’s nuclear weapon. Biological weapons could be made by just about any country “without vast expenditures of money or the construction of huge production facilities.” A bioweapon could be hidden “under the guise of legitimate medical or bacteriological research,” the report said.
The Merck Report was written by George W. Merck, a forty-eight-year-old chemist and the owner of Merck & Co., a pharmaceutical manufacturer in New Jersey. Merck had served Presidents Roosevelt and Truman as civilian head of the U.S. biological warfare effort during the war. Merck & Co. made and sold vaccines, notably the first commercial U.S. smallpox vaccine, in 1898, and, in 1942, it manufactured penicillin G, among the first general antibiotics. During World War II, U.S. soldiers received smallpox vaccines. The man diagnosing the bioweapons threat, George Merck, was also the man whose company might sell the government the solution to combat the threat. In 1946 this was not looked upon with the same kind of scrutiny as it might have been decades later, because America’s military-industrial complex had yet to be broadly revealed.
The Merck Report did not specify what kind of germ warfare had been researched and developed by the United States, only that it took place at a Top Secret facility “in Maryland.” Camp Detrick was a 154-acre land parcel surrounded by cow fields about an hour’s drive north of Washington, and under the jurisdiction of the former Chemical Warfare Service, then the Chemical Corps. After the release of the Merck Report, and coupled with the ominous “total war” prospects as outlined in the Clifford Report and the JCS 1696, Congress would grant vast sums of money to the Chemical Corps for biological weapons research and Detrick would expand exponentially.
Dr. Kurt Blome had information that was coveted by the bacteriologists at Camp Detrick, and plans were being drawn up to interview him. And then, in the summer of 1946, a totally unexpected event occurred inside the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg that would render hiring Dr. Kurt Blome for Operation Paperclip an impossibility, at least for now. In the tenth month of the trial, the Soviets presented a surprise witness, putting an unforeseen and unwelcomed focus on Dr. Kurt Blome. The witness was Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber—the shield to Blome’s sword.
On August 12, 1946, prosecutors for the Soviet Union stunned the tribunal by announcing that a missing Nazi general and the former surgeon general of the Third Reich, Major General Walter P. Schreiber, was going to testify against his colleagues at Nuremberg.
Schreiber was brought forth as a witness to show that, after the Nazis’ crushing defeat at Stalingrad, the Third Reich was planning to retaliate by conducting a major biological warfare offensive against Soviet troops. This was the first time information about biological warfare was being presented at the trial. The Allies were not informed that Schreiber was going to be a witness. U.S. prosecutors asked to interview him in advance of his testimony, but the Soviets denied the request. The medical war crimes investigator, Dr. Leopold Alexander, appealed to speak with Schreiber himself, to no avail.
During the war, Schreiber held the position of wartime chief of medical services, Supreme Command, Wehrmacht. He was the Third Reich’s highest-ranking major general who was also a physician, and he held the title Commanding Officer of the Scientific Section of the Military Medical Academy in Berlin. Most important, he was the physician in charge of vaccines. Schreiber had been in Soviet custody for sixteen months, since April 30, 1945, when he was captured by the Red Army in Berlin. According to Schreiber, he had opened a large military hospital in a subway tunnel around the corner from the Führerbunker and had been tending to “several hundred wounded” soldiers when the Soviets captured him. After being taken by train to the Soviet Union, he was moved around various interrogation facilities, he said, until he ended up in Lubyanka Prison, the notorious penitentiary located inside KGB headquarters in Moscow. Nuremberg was Schreiber’s first public appearance since war’s end. No one, including his family members, had any idea where he had been.
That the former surgeon general for the Third Reich was now going to help Russian prosecutors send his former Nazi colleagues to the gallows for their crimes was as ironic as it was outrageous. Dr. Schreiber was on the U.S. Army’s Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects list. Along with many of those colleagues, and since war’s end, Major General Walter Schreiber had been sought by the Allied forces for possible war crimes. If the Americans had located him and had a chance to interrogate him, he might well have been in the dock at Nuremberg facing the hangman’s noose alongside his colleagues. Instead, here he was, testifying against them.
It was Monday morning, August 26, 1946, when Dr. Schreiber took the stand: Day 211 of the trial. Colonel Y. V. Pokrovsky, deputy chief prosecutor of the Soviet Union, presented Schreiber to the court as a witness. German defense lawyer Dr
. Hans Laternser, counsel for the General Staff and Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres, or OKH), objected, on the grounds that the evidence was submitted too late. “The Tribunal is not inclined to admit any evidence so late as this, or to reopen questions which have been gone into fully before the Tribunal,” said the tribunal’s president, Lord Justice Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, “but, on the other hand, in view of the importance of the statement of Major General Schreiber and its particular relevance, not only to the case of certain of the individual defendants but also, to the case of the High Command, the Tribunal will allow Major General Schreiber to be heard as a witness.” In other words, Schreiber was a high-ranking Nazi general and the judges wanted to hear what he had to say. With that, Schreiber was brought to the witness stand.
He stood five foot six and weighed 156 pounds. A long-sleeve shirt covered the saber scars on his right forearm. At fifty-three years old, Schreiber had been an active military doctor since 1921. He was an expert in bacteriology and epidemiology and had traveled the globe studying infectious diseases, from a plague outbreak in West Africa to a malaria epidemic in Tunisia. He claimed to understand medical aspects of desert warfare and winter warfare better than anyone else in the Third Reich. He was also an expert in biological and chemical weapons, in typhus and malaria epidemics, and in the causes and conditions of jaundice and gangrene. When war came Schreiber, an affable and ambitious son of a postal worker, was catapulted to the top of the Wehrmacht’s medical chain of command. This was in part due to the Reich’s zealously germ-phobic core. Schreiber’s vast knowledge of and experience with hygiene-related epidemics made his expertise highly valuable to the Nazi Party. He was put in charge of the research to fight infectious disease, and also in remedial means to defend against outbreaks. In this way, he became privy to Reich medical policy from the top down. In 1942, Hermann Göring also put General Schreiber in charge of protection against gas and bacteriological warfare, which is how he came to be in charge of the Reich’s program to produce vaccines.
“I swear by God the Almighty and Omniscient that I will speak the pure truth and will withhold and add nothing,” Schreiber promised when taking the oath. Major General G. A. Alexandrov, the Russian assistant prosecutor, asked Schreiber what event had compelled him to testify at Nuremberg.
“In the second World War things occurred on the German side which were against the unchangeable laws of medical ethics,” Schreiber said from the stand. “In the interests of the German people, of medical science in Germany, and the training of the younger generation of physicians in the future, I consider it necessary that these things should be thoroughly cleared up. The matters in question are the preparations for bacteriological warfare, and they give rise to epidemics and experiments on human beings.” Schreiber was saying that the Reich had been preparing for offensive biological warfare and had used the Untermenschen—the subhumans—as guinea pigs.
General Alexandrov asked General Schreiber why he had waited so long to come forth—if he had been coerced into making statements or if he had taken the initiative himself.
“I myself took the initiative,” Schreiber declared. “When I heard the report of Dr. Kramer and Professor Holzlehner [Holzlöhner] here in Nuremberg I was deeply shocked at the obviously perverted conceptions of some of the German doctors,” he said. Holzlöhner and Schreiber had been close friends and colleagues. After Schreiber learned about Holzlöhner’s murderous freezing experiments—at the Nuremberg conference of 1942, “Medical Problems of Sea Distress and Winter Distress”—he invited Holzlöhner to come give the same lecture at the Military Medical Academy in Berlin.
But how had Dr. Schreiber heard these revelatory reports if he was in prison in the Soviet Union? Alexandrov asked. This had to have been a question on many people’s minds.
“In the prison camp German newspapers were available in the club room,” Schreiber claimed, making the notorious Lubyanka Prison sound like an aristocratic men’s club as opposed to the draconian penal institution that it was. “I had to wait and see whether this Court itself might not raise the question of bacteriological warfare,” Schreiber said. “When I saw that it did not raise this question I decided in April to make this statement.”
“Witness,” said General Alexandrov, “will you kindly tell us what you know about the preparations by the German High Command for bacteriological warfare?”
“In July 1943, the High Command of the Wehrmacht called a secret conference, in which I took part as representative of the Army Medical Inspectorate,” said Schreiber. “A bacteriological warfare group was formed at this meeting. As a result of the war situation the High Command authorities now had to take a different view of the question of the use of bacteria as a weapon in warfare from the one held up till now by the Army Medical Inspectorate,” Schreiber testified. “Consequently, the Führer, Adolf Hitler, had charged Reich Marshal Hermann Goering to direct the carrying out of all preparations for bacteriological warfare, and had given him the necessary powers,” Schreiber said. In this statement, Schreiber was contradicting the generally accepted notion that Hitler had never authorized his generals to use chemical or biological weapons against Allied troops. In fact, no chemical or biological weapons were ever used in World War II, which made it strange that Schreiber had been brought all the way to Nuremberg to testify to something that was ultimately irrelevant to the war crimes trial. Why, then, was Schreiber really there?
“At [this] secret conference it was decided that an institute should be created for the production of bacterial cultures on a large scale,” Schreiber said, “and the carrying out of scientific experiments to examine the possibilities of using bacteria [in warfare]. The institute was also to be used for experimenting with pests which could be used against domestic animals and crops, and which were to be made available if they were found practicable.”
“And what was done after that?” Major General Alexandrov asked rather pointedly.
“A few days later, I learned… that Reich Marshal Goering had appointed the Deputy Chief of the Reich Physicians’ League, [Dr. Kurt] Blome, to carry out the work, and had told him to found the institute as quickly as possible in or near Posen.”
“And what do you know about the experiments which were being carried out for the purpose of bacteriological warfare?” General Alexandrov asked.
“Experiments were carried out at the institute in Posen,” Schreiber said ominously, referring to Blome’s institute for plague research. “I do not know any details about them. I only know that aircraft were used for spraying tests with bacteria emulsion, and that insects harmful to plants, such as beetles, were experimented with, but I cannot give any details. I did not make experiments myself.”
Alexandrov asked if the army high command knew about these experiments; Schreiber replied, “I assume so.”
“Will you kindly tell us precisely what the reason was for the decision of the OKW to prepare for bacteriological warfare?” Alexandrov asked.
“The defeat at Stalingrad,” Schreiber said, “led to a reassessment of the situation, and consequently to new decisions. It was no doubt considered whether new weapons could be used which might still turn the tide of war in our favor.”
“So why didn’t the Reich use biological weapons?” Alexandrov asked.
Instead of answering the question, General Schreiber went into minute detail regarding a meeting in March 1945 with Dr. Blome. “In March 1945, Professor Blome visited me at my office at the Military Medical Academy,” Schreiber recalled. “He had come from Posen and was very excited. He asked me whether I could accommodate him and his men in the laboratories at Sachsenburg so that they could continue their work there; he had been forced out of his institute at Posen by the advance of the Red Army. He had had to flee from the institute and he had not even been able to blow it up. He was very worried at the fact that the installations for experiments on human beings at this institute, the purpose of which was obvious, might be easily recognized by the Russians for what
they were. He had tried to have the institute destroyed by a Stuka bomb but that, too, was not possible. Therefore, he asked me to see to it that he be permitted to continue work at Sachsenburg on his plague cultures, which he had saved,” Schreiber said.
Dr. Blome wasn’t on trial. Why was Schreiber spending so much of his testimony talking about Dr. Blome? “During his visit Blome told me that he could continue his work at an alternative laboratory in [Geraberg,] Thuringia,” Schreiber said, “but that this was not yet completed. It would take a few days or even a few weeks to complete it, and that he had to have accommodation until then. He added that if the plague bacteria were to be used when the military operations were so near to the borders of Germany, when units of the Red Army were already on German soil, it would, of course, be necessary to provide special protection for the troops and the civilian population. A serum had to be produced. Here again time had been lost, and as a result of all these delays it had never been possible to put the idea into effect.”
Was Schreiber’s testimony focused against Dr. Kurt Blome out of some kind of personal rivalry or vendetta? On the witness stand, Schreiber also fingered a number of other Reich medical doctors, none of whom was on trial. In addition to naming Kramer and Holzlöhner as organizers of the freezing experiments, Schreiber said that a man called Dr. Ding “had artificially infected [KZ prisoners] with typhus using typhus-infected lice” and that the “talented surgeon” Dr. Karl Gebhardt had “carried out cranium operations on Russian prisoners of war and had killed the prisoners at certain intervals in order to observe the pathological changes.” Schreiber testified that the “Defendant Goering had ordered these experiments,” and that the “Reichsführer-SS Himmler had kindly made available the subjects for the experiments.” But in a disproportionate amount of his testimony Schreiber circled back to Dr. Blome’s plague research for the Reich.
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