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 Holzl?hner 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.
Dr. Hans Laternser was given an opportunity to cross-examine the witness. Laternser asked Schreiber if his testimony for the Russian assistant prosecutor was prepared. Schreiber said no.
“Was any advantage promised to you for making this report?” Laternser asked.
“No, nothing was promised me. I would refuse to allow anybody to hold out advantages to me,” Schreiber said.
“Well, let us assume that such a devilish idea as actually to use bacteria did exist. Would that not have involved your troops in serious danger?” Laternser asked.
“Not only our troops, but the whole German people; for the refugees were moving from East to West. The plague would have spread very swiftly to Germany.”
“I have one more question, Witness. Did you ever write down your objections to this bacteriological warfare?” Dr. Laternser asked.
Schreiber said, “Yes, in the memorandum which I mentioned before.”
Dr. Laternser asked, “When did you submit that memorandum?”
“In 1942; may I now—”
“That is enough,” Laternser interrupted. He’d caught Schreiber in a lie. “The conference took place in July 1943!”
Laternser had no further questions. The tribunal adjourned. Perhaps embarrassed by the fact that their star witness had been caught in a lie, the Russians did not call Schreiber back to the stand. Dr. Alexander made yet another attempt to interview him, again without success. The Russians said they were sorry, but Dr. Schreiber had already been transported back to Moscow. It was a curious event, but something did result from Schreiber’s bizarre testimony. Two days later, a military vehicle pulled into the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Service Center at Darmstadt, where Blome had been employed by the army as a post doctor. Dr. Blome was arrested and taken to the prison complex at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice. A “confidential change of status report” now listed him as a prisoner in the custody of the 6850 Internal Security Detachment, Nuremberg, where Colonel Burton Andrus served as prison commandant.
Circumstance had altered Blome’s future. He was off the Paperclip list and instead placed on a list of defendants who would face prosecution at the upcoming Nuremberg doctors’ trial.
One hundred and fifty miles from Nuremberg, at the Army Air Forces classified research facility in Heidelberg, the massive undertaking forged ahead. For an entire year now, day in and day out, fifty-eight German physicians in white lab coats had been working on an array of research projects in state-of-the-art laboratories studying human endurance, night vision, blood dynamics, exposure to bomb blast, acoustic physiology, and more. They all reported to Dr. Strughold, who reported to the facility’s commanding officer, Colonel Robert J. Benford. High-ranking military officers regularly visited the facility, including its two founders, General Malcolm Grow and Colonel Harry Armstrong. Grow was working in Washington, D.C., as the air surgeon (soon to be the first surgeon general of the U.S. Air Force). Harry Armstrong had returned to Texas where he was now commandant at the School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Randolph Field.