McPherson was wrong. Not all the former Nazis in the “professional class” talked among themselves. Dr. Blome was not aware that the reason a job offer as a military post doctor near Frankfurt was available to him was because the previous post doctor, also a former high-ranking Nazi in the Reich’s medical chain of command, had just been shipped to America under Accelerated Paperclip. There was irony in the fact that the shoes Dr. Blome was about to fill had, for the past two years and four months, belonged to Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber, the man who had betrayed Dr. Blome in his testimony during the trial of the major war criminals at Nuremberg. The army post outside Frankfurt where Blome would soon start working was Camp King. McPherson made arrangements with its new commanding officer, Colonel Howard Rupert, to meet the Blomes and arrange for them to have a nice house.
Blome had been to Camp King before. He had worked for the U.S. government there on a “special matter” during the Reinhard Gehlen era. When Dr. Blome’s wife, Bettina, learned more about Camp King, she declined the invitation to live there. She was not interested in having her children live at an American military facility. The couple separated. Dr. Kurt Blome moved to Camp King alone. On November 30, 1951, McPherson reported: “Dr. Blome employed by ECIC effective 3 Dec for 6 months. Contract placed in effect.”
Meanwhile, halfway across the world, in the suburbs of San Antonio, Texas, Camp King’s former post physician, Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber, had arrived in the United States and was working at the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Air Force Base (formerly Randolph Field). In addition to his U.S. government salary, Schreiber had recently received a check from the U.S. government in the amount of $16,000—roughly $150,000 in 2013—as a settlement for the alleged lost contents of his former Berlin home. (Schreiber claimed that the Russians had stolen all his property in retaliation for his working for the Americans.) With the money, Schreiber bought a home in San Antonio and a car, and he enrolled his son in the local high school. Even Schreiber’s eighty-four-year-old mother-in-law had been brought along to live in Texas, courtesy of the United States Air Force. It could be said that Dr. Schreiber was living the American dream. But in the fall of 1951 the dream was unexpectedly interrupted by a former war crimes investigator named Dr. Leopold Alexander, and a concentration camp survivor named Janina Iwanska.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Downfall
In the fall of 1951, Dr. Leopold Alexander’s life in Boston had returned to normal. It had been four years since he had served as an expert consultant to the secretary of war during the Nuremberg doctors’ trial. Since returning home, Dr. Alexander continued to speak out against medical crimes, nonconsenting human experiments, and medicine under totalitarian regimes. He coauthored the Nuremberg Code, the set of research principles that now guided physicians around the world. The first principle of the Nuremberg Code was that informed voluntary consent was required in absolute terms. Dr. Alexander gave lectures, wrote papers, and practiced medicine. The doctors’ trial had affected him deeply, as evidenced in nearly five hundred pages of journal entries. Whenever the occasion arose, he provided pro bono service to victims of the Nazi regime.
One day in the fall of 1951, Dr. Alexander was contacted by an aid group called the International Rescue Office. The group was organizing medical assistance for several concentration camp survivors who had been experimented on by Nazi doctors during the war and asked if Dr. Alexander could help. Dr. Alexander in turn contacted his friend and colleague at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, chief surgeon Dr. Jacob Fine, and the two men helped arrange for the camp survivors to come to Massachusetts for medical treatment. One of the women was twenty-seven-year-old Janina Iwanska, a former prisoner at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. On November 14, 1951, Iwanska arrived at the Port of New York aboard a Greek ocean liner, the SS Neptunia.
At the doctors’ trial, Janina Iwanska had delivered much of her testimony with Dr. Alexander standing beside her, pointing to her injuries and providing the judges with a professional medical analysis of what had been done to her by Nazi doctors during the war. Iwanska’s testimony was generally regarded as among the most powerful evidence presented at the trial. At Ravensbrück she had had her legs broken by Waffen-SS surgeon Dr. Karl Gebhardt and pieces of her shinbones removed. Dr. Gebhardt then ordered that Iwanska’s surgical wounds be deliberately infected with bacteria to cause gangrene, so he could treat them with sulfa drugs to see if the drugs worked. It was nothing short of a miracle that Janina Iwanska survived. Now, nine years later, she continued to suffer great physical pain. She walked with a limp because of the decimation of her shinbones. The purpose of the trip to the United States was to allow Iwanska to undergo surgery, at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, to help alleviate this pain.