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.