On October 12, 1951, the JIOA and Army Intelligence read the high commissioner’s report. A confidential memo from the Department of the Army in Heidelberg was sent back marked urgent: “Suspend shpmt Dr. Kurt Blome appears inadmissible in view of HICOG [High Commissioner of Germany].”
McPherson would not readily accept this setback. “Blome contract signed and approved Commander in Chief. Subject completing preparations for shipment late November. Has already turned over private practice Dortmund to another doctor. In view of adverse publicity which might ensue and which may destroy entire program this theatre recommend[s] subject be shipped for completion 6 months portion contract,” he wrote. The case was sent to the consulate for an opinion. On October 24, 1951, the consulate in Frankfurt agreed with army intelligence: “Frankfurt Consul states Blome inadmissible.”
Charles McPherson saw Blome’s rejection as calamitous. It interfered with the core mission of the Special Projects Team and jeopardized the success of the entire Accelerated Paperclip program, he believed. “Recommend Blome be shipped and ostensibly occupied on inconsequential activities in the United States for 6 months,” McPherson suggested. But that idea was rejected, too.
McPherson contacted Blome by telephone. They agreed to meet at the Burgtor Hotel in Dortmund. McPherson brought a colleague from the Special Projects Team along with him this time, Philip Park. McPherson’s job was “to explain to [Blome] the reasons why we were unable to send him to the United States at the present time.” Agent Park could back him up if uncomfortable questions arose.
“Professor Blome was alone when we came in. I commenced by saying that I had some bad news to tell him,” McPherson wrote in a memo. “I then stated that due to another change in our security laws we were forced to suspend our shipments to the United States.”
Blome was no fool. This was a man who skillfully argued at Nuremberg that intent was not a crime and was acquitted on these grounds. Now, at the Burgtor Hotel, Blome made clear to McPherson that he did not believe McPherson’s lies. Blome had recently been in communication with his colleague and former professor Pasqual Jordan and was entirely aware that Jordan was actively being prepared for Accelerated Paperclip work. Blome told McPherson that he had recently been in contact with one of his deputies in biological warfare research, the rinderpest expert Professor Erich Traub. Blome told McPherson that he was well aware that Traub had recently gone to America “under the auspices of the Paperclip Project.” Blome was particularly upset because Traub had worked under him during the war.
McPherson tried to placate Dr. Blome. “I then said that we were still ready to put his contract in effect and that we had a position for him at a military post in Frankfurt, probably as a post doctor.” McPherson suggested that Blome come have a look at the facility, that it was a pleasant place and offered a well-paying job. “He and his wife agreed,” McPherson wrote in his report. Still, McPherson saw the situation with Dr. Blome as potentially disastrous. “The undersigned wishes to point out that he did not tell the Blomes that their opportunity to go to the United States is apparently nil and apparently will remain that way, but took the slant that our shipments have been suspended for an indefinite duration. This will leave the way open in the event something can be done.”
McPherson worried that the Blome affair was going to have an unfavorable effect “upon our project not only by the immediate individuals concerned but by the chain reaction produced by one individual telling the other that the Americans have broken their word.” McPherson was actively recruiting other German scientists at the same time. He believed that he had a handle on how the scientists communicated among themselves. “The professional class of Germany is tightly enough knit so that this word will be widely disseminated and the future effectiveness of our program will be greatly curtailed.”
McPherson was wrong. Not all the former Nazis in the “professional class” talked among themselves. Dr. Blome was not aware that the reason a job offer as a military post doctor near Frankfurt was available to him was because the previous post doctor, also a former high-ranking Nazi in the Reich’s medical chain of command, had just been shipped to America under Accelerated Paperclip. There was irony in the fact that the shoes Dr. Blome was about to fill had, for the past two years and four months, belonged to Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber, the man who had betrayed Dr. Blome in his testimony during the trial of the major war criminals at Nuremberg. The army post outside Frankfurt where Blome would soon start working was Camp King. McPherson made arrangements with its new commanding officer, Colonel Howard Rupert, to meet the Blomes and arrange for them to have a nice house.
Blome had been to Camp King before. He had worked for the U.S. government there on a “special matter” during the Reinhard Gehlen era. When Dr. Blome’s wife, Bettina, learned more about Camp King, she declined the invitation to live there. She was not interested in having her children live at an American military facility. The couple separated. Dr. Kurt Blome moved to Camp King alone. On November 30, 1951, McPherson reported: “Dr. Blome employed by ECIC effective 3 Dec for 6 months. Contract placed in effect.”
Meanwhile, halfway across the world, in the suburbs of San Antonio, Texas, Camp King’s former post physician, Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber, had arrived in the United States and was working at the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Air Force Base (formerly Randolph Field). In addition to his U.S. government salary, Schreiber had recently received a check from the U.S. government in the amount of $16,000—roughly $150,000 in 2013—as a settlement for the alleged lost contents of his former Berlin home. (Schreiber claimed that the Russians had stolen all his property in retaliation for his working for the Americans.) With the money, Schreiber bought a home in San Antonio and a car, and he enrolled his son in the local high school. Even Schreiber’s eighty-four-year-old mother-in-law had been brought along to live in Texas, courtesy of the United States Air Force. It could be said that Dr. Schreiber was living the American dream. But in the fall of 1951 the dream was unexpectedly interrupted by a former war crimes investigator named Dr. Leopold Alexander, and a concentration camp survivor named Janina Iwanska.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Downfall
In the fall of 1951, Dr. Leopold Alexander’s life in Boston had returned to normal. It had been four years since he had served as an expert consultant to the secretary of war during the Nuremberg doctors’ trial. Since returning home, Dr. Alexander continued to speak out against medical crimes, nonconsenting human experiments, and medicine under totalitarian regimes. He coauthored the Nuremberg Code, the set of research principles that now guided physicians around the world. The first principle of the Nuremberg Code was that informed voluntary consent was required in absolute terms. Dr. Alexander gave lectures, wrote papers, and practiced medicine. The doctors’ trial had affected him deeply, as evidenced in nearly five hundred pages of journal entries. Whenever the occasion arose, he provided pro bono service to victims of the Nazi regime.
One day in the fall of 1951, Dr. Alexander was contacted by an aid group called the International Rescue Office. The group was organizing medical assistance for several concentration camp survivors who had been experimented on by Nazi doctors during the war and asked if Dr. Alexander could help. Dr. Alexander in turn contacted his friend and colleague at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, chief surgeon Dr. Jacob Fine, and the two men helped arrange for the camp survivors to come to Massachusetts for medical treatment. One of the women was twenty-seven-year-old Janina Iwanska, a former prisoner at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. On November 14, 1951, Iwanska arrived at the Port of New York aboard a Greek ocean liner, the SS Neptunia.
At the doctors’ trial, Janina Iwanska had delivered much of her testimony with Dr. Alexander standing beside her, pointing to her injuries and providing the judges with a professional medical analysis of what had been done to her by Nazi doctors during the war. Iwanska’s testimony was generally regarded as among the most powerful evidence presented at the trial
. At Ravensbrück she had had her legs broken by Waffen-SS surgeon Dr. Karl Gebhardt and pieces of her shinbones removed. Dr. Gebhardt then ordered that Iwanska’s surgical wounds be deliberately infected with bacteria to cause gangrene, so he could treat them with sulfa drugs to see if the drugs worked. It was nothing short of a miracle that Janina Iwanska survived. Now, nine years later, she continued to suffer great physical pain. She walked with a limp because of the decimation of her shinbones. The purpose of the trip to the United States was to allow Iwanska to undergo surgery, at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, to help alleviate this pain.
Dr. Gebhardt had been Major General Dr. Schreiber’s direct subordinate at Ravensbrück. Gebhardt had been one of the twenty-three defendants tried at the doctors’ trial. He was convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged in the courtyard at Landsberg Prison in June, 1948. Dr. Schreiber was working for the U.S. Air Force in Texas.
The same month that Janina Iwanska arrived in the United States, a brief note appeared in a medical journal stating that a doctor from Germany named Walter Schreiber had just joined the staff of the U.S. Air Force School of Aviation Medicine in Texas. As circumstance would have it, Dr. Leopold Alexander was a regular reader of this journal. When he came across Schreiber’s name—familiar as he was with Dr. Schreiber’s testimony at the Nuremberg trial of the major war criminals—Alexander was appalled. He wrote to the director of the Massachusetts Medical Society at once. “I regard it as my duty to inform you that the record shows that Dr. Schreiber is a thoroughly undesirable addition to American Medicine—in fact, an intolerable one,” Alexander explained. “He has been involved as an accessory before and after the fact in the worst of the Medical War Crimes which were carried out by the Nazi Government during the war, and was a key person in perverting the ethical standards of the members of the medical profession in Germany during the war.” Dr. Alexander demanded that Dr. Walter Schreiber be barred from practicing medicine in the United States. When he did not get the response he’d expected, he took the matter to the Boston Globe.
It was shortly after 10:30 p.m. on December 8, 1951, in San Antonio, Texas, when Dr. Walter Schreiber heard the telephone ring. He had been in America for three months, and it was an unusual hour for him to receive a phone call. It was not as if Dr. Schreiber was a hospital physician on call waiting to hear about a sick patient. In his capacity as a research doctor at Randolph Air Force Base, he spent most of his time lecturing about classified matters to a small group of other doctors.
Sometimes, he boasted to other doctors about how his area of expertise was extremely rare. He would tell colleagues that he was particularly valuable to the U.S. military because his knowledge was so esoteric. Dr. Schreiber knew everything there was to know about winter warfare and desert warfare. About hygiene and vaccines and bubonic plague. At the officers’ club at the School of Aviation Medicine, where he gave lectures, he could be loud and boastful, delivering a highly sanitized version of his colorful life. He enjoyed telling long-winded stories about himself: how he had been a prisoner of the Soviets after the fall of Berlin; how he’d spent years in the notorious Lubyanka prison, in Moscow; how he’d doctored Field Marshal Paulus in a Russian safe house when Paulus got sick. But what Dr. Schreiber never discussed with anyone at Randolph Air Force Base was what he did before the fall of Berlin—from 1933 to 1945.
Schreiber answered the telephone and was greeted by a man who identified himself as Mr. Brown.
“I am calling from the Boston Globe,” Brown said.
Mr. Brown did not ask Schreiber his name. Instead, Brown asked if he’d reached “telephone number, 61-210 in San Antonio, Texas.” Dr. Schreiber told Brown the number was correct.
There was a pause. Later, Dr. Schreiber recalled to military intelligence that he’d asked Mr. Brown what it was that he wanted at this time of night.
“Are you the individual who performed experiments on the bodies of live Polish girls who were interned in German concentration camps during World War II?” Brown asked.
Schreiber told Brown he had never been connected in any way with experiments of that nature. “I [have] never worked in a concentration camp,” Schreiber said. “I have never in my entire life conducted, ordered, or condoned experiments on humans of any nationality.”
Brown told Schreiber he assumed he’d passed investigations before being brought to America to conduct secret U.S. Air Force work.
“I [have] been thoroughly investigated,” Schreiber said.
Brown thanked Schreiber. He said he was just checking up on a story that had been relayed to him by a physician in Boston, Dr. Leo Alexander.
Dr. Schreiber hung up the phone. He did not tell anyone that night about the call.
The following morning, the Boston Globe published an explosive story with an eye-catching headline: “Ex-Nazi High Post with United States Air Force, says Medical Man Here.” News reached Texas quickly. Dr. Schreiber was called into the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) at Randolph Air Force Base to provide details of the phone call with Mr. Brown the previous evening. Schreiber confirmed that “during World War II he had held a position in the Wermacht [sic] similar to the Surgeon General of the U.S. Army.” But his story, his struggle, he told the investigating officer, was so much more than that. Schreiber relayed his capture in Berlin, his life as a prisoner of war in Soviet Russia, and how he’d “served as a prosecution witness during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.” Schreiber explained that owing to “feigned compliance” with the Russians he’d been “awarded a high position with the East German Politzei [sic].” Instead of taking that job he’d escaped. Schreiber lied to the Office of Special Investigations and said that he had met Dr. Leo Alexander at Nuremberg. That he had been “given a clean bill of health by [Doctor] Alexander” himself.
Schreiber told the air force investigator he was certain that the Russians were behind all of this. He had recently written a manuscript called “Behind the Iron Curtain,” Schreiber said, and while he hadn’t found a publisher yet, he believed that the Russians had gotten hold of a copy of it. “He was of the opinion that [Soviet Intelligence] is perhaps attempting to slander him by implying that he was engaged in atrocious experiments on human subjects,” the investigating officer wrote in his report. Schreiber’s full statement was forwarded to air force headquarters. The security officers at Randolph Air Force Base did not have the kind of clearance that allowed them access to Dr. Schreiber’s JIOA file or his OMGUS security report. They had no idea who Schreiber really was. They most certainly had not been made aware that he was a Nazi ideologue and the former surgeon general of the Third Reich. All anyone at the School of Aviation Medicine would have known was that he was a German scientist who was part of Operation Paperclip. The facility had already employed thirty-four German scientists.
On December 14, the FBI got involved in the case. Dr. Leopold Alexander, Schreiber’s accuser in Boston, was an internationally renowned authority on medical crimes. His allegations had to be taken seriously. But the air force was unwilling to give up Dr. Schreiber right away. To garner support for him, a memo classified Secret was circulated among those involved, heralding the “Professional and Personal Qualifications of Dr. Walter Schreiber.” The memo stated, “He possesses an analytical mind, critical judgment, objectivity, and a wealth of well detailed, exact information.” Schreiber possessed “know how on preventative health measures, military and civilian, under conditions of total war.” He had “detailed information of medical problems in connection with desert and ‘Arctic’ warfare,” and had “contributed to Zeiss Atlas of Epidemology” [sic]. He’d been “a ‘key’ prisoner of war in Russia for three and a half years [and] he is in a position to provide authoritative information and serve as a consultant on vitally important medical matters in Russia.”
With public outrage brewing over the Globe article, the situation escalated quickly. The Pentagon became involved, and the matter was sent to the office of the surgeon general of the United States Air Forc
e. That position was now held by none other than Harry Armstrong, recently promoted to major general. Armstrong knew the situation could very quickly get out of control. And hardly anyone had more to lose, personally and professionally, than he did. With the assistance of Dr. Hubertus Strughold, Harry Armstrong had personally recruited fifty-eight former Nazi doctors for work at the U.S. Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg, five of whom had been arrested for war crimes, four of whom were tried at Nuremberg, two of whom were convicted at Nuremberg, and one of whom was acquitted and then rehired by the U.S. Air Force to work in America before being revealed as incompetent and fired. That said nothing of the thirty-four doctors who had since been hired to work at the School of Aviation Medicine, many of whom were Nazi ideologues as well as former members of the SS and the SA. The Schreiber scandal could trigger a domino effect, shining an unwanted spotlight on the highly suspicious backgrounds of Dr. Strughold, Dr. Benzinger, Dr. Konrad Schäfer, Dr. Becker-Freyseng, Dr. Schröder, Dr. Ruff, and so many others.
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