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 G?ring 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 [Holzl?hner] here in Nuremberg I was deeply shocked at the obviously perverted conceptions of some of the German doctors,” he said. Holzl?hner and Schreiber had been close friends and colleagues. After Schreiber learned about Holzl?hner’s murderous freezing experiments—at the Nuremberg conference of 1942, “Medical Problems of Sea Distress and Winter Distress”—he invited Holzl?hner 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.”