Each week that passed brought more focus to the subject. The public was growing increasingly outraged with the notion that an ex-Nazi general and alleged war criminal was still living in the United States, and that his employment by the United States Air Force was still up in the air.
The Physicians Forum, a group of doctors representing thirty-six states, wrote to the Senate. “Had Dr. Schreiber been found and apprehended at the time of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal,” the doctors wrote, “it is virtually certain that he would have been brought to trial along with his associates many of whom were sentenced to life imprisonment or hanged for their crimes. Instead this individual is now in the United States working for our Air Force.” The physicians unanimously recommended “[i]mmediate expulsion of Dr. Schreiber from the United States [and] a thorough investigation of the circumstances leading to Dr. Schreiber’s entry into this country and his assignment to the Air Force.”
The final demand was far more threatening to the air force than the Physicians Forum doctors could have known. Were the Senate to hold hearings to investigate “similar appointments of German physicians formerly in important positions in the German armed forces during World War II,” the whole Paperclip program could be revealed. Heads would roll. Schreiber’s story could travel all the way up to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the scandal all the way to the president of the United States.
With an astonishing degree of hubris, Dr. Schreiber gave one media interview after the next, professing innocence and calling all the charges against him “lies.”
“I am not fighting for a renewal of my contract,” Schreiber told the Washington Post, “I am fighting for justice, and I will continue to do so as long as I live.” He issued an egregiously false statement, declaring, “I never was a member of the staff of the supreme command of the Wehrmacht.” In another interview, he said, “I never worked in a concentration camp.” Later in the interview he clarified that he had actually “visited” a camp once, in eastern Pomerania, without knowing it was a concentration camp. His very brief job there was to inspect “a report for the delousing treatment,” for a group of girls whose “linen was disinfected with DDT,” Schreiber said. “After I arrived there, four days later, the girls were found clean and free of lice,” Schreiber said.
Dr. Schreiber had the air force and the Joint Chiefs of Staff over a barrel, and he likely knew it. If any one of these high-ranking U.S. government officials was forced to admit what was really known about Schreiber—what had been known all along—it would be a scandal of the first degree. Instead, the lie was allowed to expand. “Until we come up with some basic facts,” JIOA director Colonel Benjamin W. Heckemeyer told Time magazine, in an exclusive sit-down interview with a reporter named Miss Moran, “a man should be given the all-American treatment here and not be given the bum’s rush.”
Behind the scenes, Harry Armstrong, surgeon general of the air force, had been spearheading Schreiber’s removal. But in statements to the press, he maintained a fa?ade of support. There is “no evidence he’s guilty other than serving his country during war same as I did mine,” General Armstrong told the Associated Press. Legendary newspaper columnist Drew Pearson did not see things in the same light. He pulled transcripts from the Nuremberg doctors’ trial and quoted from them in “Washington Merry-Go-Round.” “Here are the facts regarding the Nazi doctor who escaped the Nuremberg war crimes trials and is now working for the Air Force at Randolph Field, Texas,” Pearson wrote, “kicking, screaming young Polish girls were held down by SS troops and forcibly operated on.… Nuremberg document No. 619 also shows that Schreiber was second on a list of prominent medical officers detached to the SS for two days.… Human victims were also used in typhus experiments at Buchenwald and Natzweiler concentration camps. Deadly virus was transferred from men to mice and back in an attempt to produce live vaccine.” Schreiber responded by saying, “The Nuremberg Military Tribunal has prosecuted and held those responsible for the crimes.”