Pressed further, Major General Dr. Schreiber reconstructed some of the events in his tale of escape. He’d been in Soviet Russia until the summer, he said. There, he and a group of other former Nazi generals lived together in a villa outside Berlin. In July or August, six of the generals, including Schreiber, were unexpectedly transported to a country house on the German-Polish border, near Frankfurt on the Oder, east of Berlin (not to be confused with Frankfurt on the Main, located in the American zone, southwest of Berlin). With regard to this mysterious journey and its greater purpose, Major General Schreiber said, “We were not asked, but we were told that we were going to join the police.” Only then, Schreiber explained, did he learn he had been “appointed Chief Medical officer for the newly formed [East] German police.” Schreiber said he was offered “food, clothing, housing, furniture… for advantages.”
Four of the Nazi generals agreed to take the job. Schreiber said he objected. He was a scientist, not a policeman, he claimed to have told his Soviet handlers. The group of generals was transported to a home in Saxony, close to the Czechoslovakian border. Finally, “The last day of September, the four [generals] who had agreed were sent to Berlin in order to start their jobs,” Schreiber said. He and another general, who had by this time also voiced objection, remained “guarded by police.” Two days later Schreiber was sent to Dresden, in the Soviet zone. “There we were very well received, and I was offered the chance to become professor at the University of Leipzig,” Schreiber told the press corps. “I demanded the University of Berlin. I had special reason for this demand. That was denied of me. For this reason, I made myself free.”
So that was that. A chorus of West German reporters wanted more details. How does one simply make oneself free of Soviet military police, especially if one is the former surgeon general of the Third Reich? For the Soviets, turning high-ranking Nazi generals into Communist officials was an immense propaganda coup in the early days of the Cold War. One had to assume that Soviet military intelligence (Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, or GRU) was keeping a watchful eye on each of the generals through their transition from Soviet Russia into the East German zone. The GRU’s notorious official emblem featured an omnipotent bat hovering above the globe. The GRU kept radarlike track of people. They had eyes in the night. To allow Dr. Schreiber to get away sounded implausible.
“[I] took off alone, by express train, on the railroad, from Dresden to Berlin—and it was a trip of life and death,” Schreiber said. And that was all he was going to say about it.
Next, Schreiber began to lecture his audience on the Soviet threat. He singled out a former colleague, Vincenz Müller, to blame, not unlike what he had done with Dr. Blome before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Lieutenant General Vincenz Müller was a dangerous man, exclaimed Schreiber. Now that he’d gone over to the Russian side, he was a threat to world peace. Lieutenant General Müller had recently been installed by the Soviet government as the new police leader in Berlin, Schreiber said. “He is a fanatical communist,” promised Schreiber, “completely devoted to the Russians. This is all the more astonishing as Müller comes from a very devout Catholic family.” The Russians had plans to arm Müller’s new Berlin police force with “heavy weapons, tanks, [and] artillery.” The Soviets had only one goal, Schreiber promised, and that was world domination. It was beginning right now with the rearmament of East Berlin.
“Can you give us the names of the four other generals, outside of General Vincenz Müller?” a news reporter asked.
“I don’t think it is necessary in the scope of this press conference to give those names,” said Schreiber.
“Could the Russians be selling you a bill of goods?” asked another reporter.
“The Russians are animated by the idea of world revolution,” Schreiber said. He explained that in Russia, most people believe “the revolution is coming.”
Another news reporter asked, “Were you wearing your [Soviet] uniform” when you escaped? It was a good question. If Schreiber had been wearing his Soviet uniform, then clearly he would have been noticed by border patrol guards, stopped, and questioned as he passed from the Soviet zone to the American zone of occupation. If Schreiber had not been wearing his Soviet uniform, then the obvious next question was, Why not? Schreiber’s answer was convoluted. His Soviet uniform happened to be at the tailors’ shop on the day of his escape, he said, getting new shoulder straps and embroidery on the collar. To emphasize his point, Schreiber even went so far as to re-create a conversation between himself and his Soviet handler—a man named “Fisher”—regarding the missing uniform. “Fisher said [to me], ‘You are going to get [your uniform] later. For the time being, this is not yet possible.’ ”
The explanation seemed implausible to at least one newsman. “Why didn’t you get your uniform tailored [earlier]?” the reporter asked.
Schreiber said that his measurements had been taken for the new uniform, but the tailoring was delayed.
When Schreiber’s American handler moved to change the subject, another reporter asked for more information about the human experiments Dr. Schreiber had spoken of during the Nuremberg trial. “How did the Doctor obtain knowledge of experiments on human beings?” he queried.