Loucks found Schreiber to be “cooperative in all respects” and hired him to work for the U.S. Chemical Corps “in compiling data concerning the Nazi Chemical Corps.” To oversee the project, General Loucks traveled back and forth from Heidelberg to Camp King. Next, Schreiber was hired to write a monograph for the U.S. Army about his experiences in Russia. When Loucks was finished working with Schreiber, he was asked by Camp King’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Gordon D. Ingraham, if he would testify as to Schreiber’s character for the doctor’s OMGUS security report. Given Schreiber’s position as a general in the Nazi high command, it was going to take serious effort on the part of JIOA to bring Schreiber into the United States. Loucks agreed but was uncharacteristically skeptical of the Nazi general’s motivations. “Loucks stated subject was energetic and a good organizer of work projects.… Schreiber had apparently given accurate information [to Loucks] on all occasions [which has] been checked and confirmed by Technical Research experts in the United States.… However, Loucks stated that Schreiber may also have given this same information ‘to the Russians.’ ” Loucks told Lieutenant Colonel Ingraham that he “believed that Schreiber could be persuaded by any attractive offer.” In other words, Schreiber’s loyalty could be bought.
At Camp King, Dr. Schreiber and his family were moved into a nice home provided by the U.S. Army. Despite General Loucks’s concern about Schreiber’s trustworthiness, in November 1949 Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber was hired by army intelligence to serve as post physician at the clandestine interrogation facility that was Camp King. According to Schreiber’s declassified OMGUS security report, his new job involved “handling all the medical problems at Camp King [and] caring for internees.” This meant Schreiber was in charge of the health and well-being of the Soviet prisoners held here, some of whom were being subjected to “special interrogation methods” by the CIA. Given the army’s obsession with Soviet spies and the possibility of double agents, hiring a Nazi general turned Soviet starshina was an unusual choice when one considered the real possibility that Schreiber had not escaped from the Russians but was working for them. If Schreiber was a Soviet spy, it would have been very easy for him to learn everything that the CIA and military intelligence were doing at Camp King.
On the other hand, if Schreiber really had escaped from the Russians, then there was a lot to be exploited from his Soviet experience. Having been a prisoner of the Russians for the past three and a half years, he was familiar with at least some of the Soviets’ interrogation techniques. He spoke Russian fluently as well. Lieutenant Colonel Ingraham was confident that Dr. Schreiber was a truth-teller. Ingraham kept him on as post doctor until August 1951. Colonel Ingraham also hired Schreiber’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, Dorothea Schreiber, to serve as his personal secretary.
While employed at Camp King, Schreiber told his Army handler that the Russians were trying to capture and kill him and he asked to use the cover name of “Doc Fischer,” to hide his identity. It was a cryptic choice for an alias. “Fisher” had been the name of the Soviet handler from whom Schreiber had allegedly escaped, in Dresden, and it was also the name of an SS doctor who served as one of Schreiber’s wartime subordinates at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Dr. Fritz Fischer had performed medical experiments on Polish women and girls at Ravensbrück, crimes for which he had been tried and convicted of murder at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial. Fritz Fischer was one of the few doctors who had accepted his guilt over the course of the trial. After hearing some particularly shocking witness testimony against him, Dr. Fischer confided in war crimes investigator Dr. Alexander about how he felt. “I would have liked to stand up and say hang me immediately,” Fischer told Alexander.
Looking at the whole scenario—Dr. Schreiber, Doc Fischer, the Soviet Mr. Fisher, and the SS doctor Fritz Fischer—was like seeing a man standing in a hall of mirrors. But then again Operation Paperclip was a world marked by duplicity and deception. It was impossible to know who was telling the truth.
In September 1949, John J. McCloy became U.S. high commissioner of Allied Germany, marking the end of more than four years of military rule of Germany by the Allies. The day also marked the beginning of the end of the time Dr. Otto Ambros would spend in prison for war crimes. Soon he would be placed on the Operation Paperclip target list.