After testifying at Nuremberg, Schreiber said he was taken back to the Soviet Union, where he and three generals were set up in a two-story country house in Tomilino, sixteen miles southeast of Moscow. One of the three generals was Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus—the highest-ranking Nazi general to ever have surrendered to the Soviets, which Paulus did during the Battle of Stalingrad. Paulus’s own story, of the events leading up to his capture and his final communication with Hitler, was remarkable. The Soviets had also brought Paulus to testify at Nuremberg.
As William Shirer explained in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the last days of Paulus’s command during the battle for Stalingrad were cataclysmic. “Paulus, torn between his duty to obey the mad Fuehrer and his obligation to save his own surviving troops from annihilation, appealed to Hitler.” Paulus sent an urgent message to the Führer that read, “Troops without ammunition or food… Effective command no longer possible… 18,000 wounded without any supplies or dressings or drugs… Further defense senseless. Collapse inevitable. Army requests immediate permission to surrender in order to save lives of remaining troops.” But Hitler refused to allow Paulus to surrender. “Surrender is forbidden,” Hitler wrote in return, “Sixth Army will hold their positions to the last man and the last round and by their heroic endurance will make an unforgettable contribution toward the establishment of a defensive front and the salvation of the Western world.”
“Heroic endurance” was a euphemism for suicide. Paulus was now supposed to kill himself. Hitler nudged him further in this direction by making Paulus a field marshal in what he hoped would be the last hour of the general’s life. “There is no record in military history of a German Field Marshal being taken prisoner,” Hitler told Alfred Jodl, who was standing next to him at the time. Instead, at 7:45 the following morning, Field Marshal Paulus surrendered. His last message to Hitler: “The Russians are at the door of our bunker. We are destroying our equipment.” He was taken prisoner shortly thereafter. What Paulus left behind was, as described by Shirer, a terrifying scene: “91,000 German soldiers, including twenty-four generals, half-starved, frostbitten, many of them wounded, all of them dazed and broken, were hobbling over the ice and snow, clutching their blood-caked blankets over their heads against the 24-degrees-below-zero cold toward the dreary, frozen prisoner-of-war camps of Siberia.” Of the ninety-one thousand Germans taken prisoner by the Soviets, only five thousand would come out of the prison camps alive. Paulus was one of them.
By 1947, he was living comfortably in this two-story country house with Major General Dr. Schreiber, outside Berlin. Actually, explained Schreiber, there were a total of four former Nazi generals living together under one roof. In addition to Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, there was Lieutenant General Vincenz Müller, captured outside Minsk in 1944, and General Erich Buschenhagen, captured in eastern Romania in August 1944. For what purpose? Wallach asked. “Subject [Schreiber] is convinced Lt. Gen Vincenz Mueller was ordered by the Soviets to indoctrinate Professor Dr. Schreiber with communistic ideas.” Whatever the real reason, Schreiber said he and his fellow generals lived a relatively enjoyable life full of Soviet perks. At one point General Schreiber and General Buschenhagen were taken to live “in Moscow in a nicely furnished private house.” Their Soviet handler, with them constantly, “acted as a guide and took them to the museum, opera and to play-houses stressing the fact that Soviet Russia has a highly developed culture.” For Schreiber, the motive was clear. “This, too, was of course part of the planned indoctrination program,” he told Special Agent Wallach. All the while, Schreiber feigned that he was a happy Communist.