SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Walter Schieber had been a dedicated and loyal member of the Nazi Party since 1931. He had also been frequently photographed alongside Hitler, Himmler, Bormann, and Speer as part of the inner circle. A number of these photographs survived the war, which made public dealings with Schieber impossible. U.S. Army transactions with him were classified Top Secret. As head of the Reich Ministry of Armaments Supply Office (Rüstungslieferungsamt), first under Fritz Todt when the ministry was called the Munitions Ministry, or Organisation Todt, and then under Albert Speer, Schieber was an engineer and a chemist and handled business in both areas for the Third Reich. As an engineer, he oversaw many of the Reich’s underground engineering projects. “Designs for concentration camp armaments factories remained almost the exclusive work of Schieber,” writes Michael Thad Allen, an expert on the SS and slave labor.
Schieber also wore his chemist’s hat for at least one concentration camp experiment. In an attempt to save the SS money and address the growing problem of food shortages among slave laborers, Schieber designed a “nourishment” program called Eastern Nutrition (?stliche Kostform). It was tested at the Mauthausen concentration camp. For a period of six months, starting in December 1943, a group of one hundred and fifty slave laborers were denied the watery broth they usually received and instead were fed an artificial paste designed by Schieber and made up of cellulose remnants, or pieces of used clothing. One hundred and sixteen of the one hundred and fifty test subjects died. After the war, there was a judicial inquiry into Schieber’s Eastern Nutrition program. The West German courts determined that the resulting deaths could not necessarily be “attributed to nutrition” because there were so many other causes of death in the concentration camp.
Walter Schieber was further linked to the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of slave laborers through the various chemical weapons programs that were carried out at Farben’s multiple production plants. Schieber was not tried at Nuremberg but was used as a witness for the prosecution instead. During the war, with his expertise as a chemist, SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Walter Schieber was the Speer ministry’s liaison to IG Farben and he oversaw the industrial production of tabun and sarin gas. According to his intelligence file, one of his titles was “confidential clerk of IG Farben AG.” Dr. Walter Schieber and Dr. Otto Ambros worked together at the Dyhernfurth nerve agent production facility.
By the late summer of 1948, Otto Ambros had been tried and convicted at Nuremberg and was serving an eight-year sentence at Landsberg Prison for mass murder and slavery. Schieber had been released from his obligations as a witness for the tribunal and was a free man. Now, here he was on the telephone, requesting to speak with Brigadier General Loucks. Schieber was looking for work with the U.S. Army Chemical Corps.
“I’m free now,” Schieber told Loucks’s lieutenant during the call. “They have nothing against me.”
It was, of course, more complicated than that.
Four months prior, in February 1948, former SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schieber had signed a Top Secret Operation Paperclip contract with the JIOA. He had been recruited by Colonel Putt at Wright Field, now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Putt wanted to make use of Schieber’s underground engineering skills—just as Georg Rickhey’s skills had been used before Rickhey was returned to Germany to stand trial for war crimes. Hiring a top Nazi like Walter Schieber was risky, and the potential problems facing the U.S. Air Force for doing so were candidly discussed in an exchange of memorandums. A JIOA case officer wrote to military headquarters in Frankfurt summarizing how things were progressing. “Subject is Dr. Walter Schieber… requested priority shipment to Wright Field. Schieber’s ability is outstanding and his potentialities believed invaluable to the United States.” For the past three months, the case officer explained, Schieber had been working on “the underground factory project,” a massive undertaking, at U.S. military headquarters in Germany. The project was spearheaded by Franz Dorsch, and Schieber had been working as Dorsch’s first assistant. In Germany, Schieber and Dorsch had supervised “150 scientists and technicians” who had built underground factories for the Reich. The result was a thousand-page monograph for U.S. Air Force. Schieber, the report explained, “has been especially cooperative and is agreeable to going to [the] United States. He is well known to the Soviets and is desired by them. His exploitation in the United States is therefore believed highly desirable.”