That statement further incensed Dr. Leo Alexander and Boston attorney Alexander Hardy, the former chief prosecutor at the doctors’ trial. The two men drafted a ten-page letter to President Truman. “He was not a defendant [but] beyond a doubt he is responsible for medical crimes,” Hardy and Alexander explained. “He certainly had full knowledge that concentration camp inmates were being systematically experimented on by doctors of the Medical Service in which he was a General.… Schreiber’s subordinates performed experiments encouraged by Schreiber,” who in turn made “materials and funds available [and] the holding of conferences.”
Hardy and Alexander cited testimony from five of Schreiber’s physician-colleagues who testified at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial that Schreiber had overseen a host of “hygiene”-related Reich medical programs in which countless humans were sacrificed in the name of research. Included were details of yellow fever experiments, epidemic jaundice experiments, sulfanilamide experiments, euthanasia by phenol experiments and the notorious typhus vaccine program “with its 90% death rate.” Alexander Hardy and Dr. Alexander’s letter to President Truman portrayed Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber not only as a war criminal of the worst order but as a sadist and a liar. Parts of the letter were made public. “Truman Is Urged to Expel Physician,” read a headline in the New York Times. Harry Armstrong wrote to the Physicians Forum assuring them that Schreiber would be returned to Germany at once.
JIOA director Colonel Heckemeyer was asked by Time magazine what the air force was going to do if, after completing its investigation, it found Dr. Schreiber guilty of war crimes. “That I will have to get guidance from the Office of the Secretary of Defense on,” Heckemeyer said. Could Schreiber be prosecuted, the Time reporter asked?
“We are not going to make a Nuernberg [sic] trial three years after the trials are closed,” Heckemeyer said. Finally, the secretary of the air force, Thomas Finletter, made a public announcement stating that Dr. Schreiber would be dropped from his contract and put under military custody. He would leave the United States at once.
But Dr. Schreiber refused to leave the United States. Instead, he packed up his family, left Texas, and drove to San Francisco. There, the Schreibers moved in with Dorothea, the couple’s married daughter, and her husband, William Fry, in their home at 35 Ridge Road, in San Anselmo. Just as Dorothea had worked at Camp King when her father was post surgeon there, her new husband, William Fry, had served at Camp King, as an army intelligence investigator. Having moved to America in July 1951, the two had lived in California since.
More than a month passed. The Physicians Forum received new information about Schreiber, which they submitted to President Truman on April 24, 1952, along with a telegram marked “Urgent.” They attached a document that showed that Brigadier General Otis Benson, commanding general at Randolph Field School of Aviation Medicine, “sought continued employment for Dr. Schreiber in the United States, preferably a ‘University Appointment,’ ” after the air force had already promised that Schreiber would soon be leaving the United States.
The outrageous part, said the physicians, was that the U.S. Air Force was colluding to keep Schreiber in the United States. In their letter to President Truman, they quoted General Benson from a letter he’d written to the dean of the Minnesota School of Public Health, seeking a new job for Schreiber in the private sector. “I like and respect the man [but] he is too hot for me to keep here using public funds,” General Benson said of Schreiber. He said that the bad press had been little more than “an organized medical movement against him emanating from Boston by medical men of Jewish ancestry.” The Physicians Forum’s board of directors demanded that President Truman order the attorney general to open an investigation into the case.
A few days later, a lieutenant colonel named G. A. Little, representing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, flew to California to visit with Dr. Schreiber at his daughter’s house, “for the purpose of attempting to persuade Dr. Schreiber to go to Buenos Aires at once, regardless of job opportunities which might or might not be developed through [our] office.” According to Little, the visit went well.