Dr. Gebhardt had been Major General Dr. Schreiber’s direct subordinate at Ravensbrück. Gebhardt had been one of the twenty-three defendants tried at the doctors’ trial. He was convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged in the courtyard at Landsberg Prison in June, 1948. Dr. Schreiber was working for the U.S. Air Force in Texas.
The same month that Janina Iwanska arrived in the United States, a brief note appeared in a medical journal stating that a doctor from Germany named Walter Schreiber had just joined the staff of the U.S. Air Force School of Aviation Medicine in Texas. As circumstance would have it, Dr. Leopold Alexander was a regular reader of this journal. When he came across Schreiber’s name—familiar as he was with Dr. Schreiber’s testimony at the Nuremberg trial of the major war criminals—Alexander was appalled. He wrote to the director of the Massachusetts Medical Society at once. “I regard it as my duty to inform you that the record shows that Dr. Schreiber is a thoroughly undesirable addition to American Medicine—in fact, an intolerable one,” Alexander explained. “He has been involved as an accessory before and after the fact in the worst of the Medical War Crimes which were carried out by the Nazi Government during the war, and was a key person in perverting the ethical standards of the members of the medical profession in Germany during the war.” Dr. Alexander demanded that Dr. Walter Schreiber be barred from practicing medicine in the United States. When he did not get the response he’d expected, he took the matter to the Boston Globe.
It was shortly after 10:30 p.m. on December 8, 1951, in San Antonio, Texas, when Dr. Walter Schreiber heard the telephone ring. He had been in America for three months, and it was an unusual hour for him to receive a phone call. It was not as if Dr. Schreiber was a hospital physician on call waiting to hear about a sick patient. In his capacity as a research doctor at Randolph Air Force Base, he spent most of his time lecturing about classified matters to a small group of other doctors.
Sometimes, he boasted to other doctors about how his area of expertise was extremely rare. He would tell colleagues that he was particularly valuable to the U.S. military because his knowledge was so esoteric. Dr. Schreiber knew everything there was to know about winter warfare and desert warfare. About hygiene and vaccines and bubonic plague. At the officers’ club at the School of Aviation Medicine, where he gave lectures, he could be loud and boastful, delivering a highly sanitized version of his colorful life. He enjoyed telling long-winded stories about himself: how he had been a prisoner of the Soviets after the fall of Berlin; how he’d spent years in the notorious Lubyanka prison, in Moscow; how he’d doctored Field Marshal Paulus in a Russian safe house when Paulus got sick. But what Dr. Schreiber never discussed with anyone at Randolph Air Force Base was what he did before the fall of Berlin—from 1933 to 1945.
Schreiber answered the telephone and was greeted by a man who identified himself as Mr. Brown.
“I am calling from the Boston Globe,” Brown said.
Mr. Brown did not ask Schreiber his name. Instead, Brown asked if he’d reached “telephone number, 61-210 in San Antonio, Texas.” Dr. Schreiber told Brown the number was correct.
There was a pause. Later, Dr. Schreiber recalled to military intelligence that he’d asked Mr. Brown what it was that he wanted at this time of night.
“Are you the individual who performed experiments on the bodies of live Polish girls who were interned in German concentration camps during World War II?” Brown asked.
Schreiber told Brown he had never been connected in any way with experiments of that nature. “I [have] never worked in a concentration camp,” Schreiber said. “I have never in my entire life conducted, ordered, or condoned experiments on humans of any nationality.”
Brown told Schreiber he assumed he’d passed investigations before being brought to America to conduct secret U.S. Air Force work.
“I [have] been thoroughly investigated,” Schreiber said.
Brown thanked Schreiber. He said he was just checking up on a story that had been relayed to him by a physician in Boston, Dr. Leo Alexander.
Dr. Schreiber hung up the phone. He did not tell anyone that night about the call.