Alsos was very interested in learning about these vaccines. Blome said that Major General Dr. Schreiber was the person to talk to about that. Where could he be found? Blome said Schreiber had last been seen in Berlin. Word was he had surrendered to the Red Army and was their prisoner now.
Blome said something else that alarmed interrogators. During the war, Dr. Kliewe told Blome that it was the Russians who had the single most extensive biological weapons program in the world—a program more advanced even than that of the Japanese. Further, the Russians had managed to capture everything from Dr. Traub’s laboratory on Riems, including Dr. Traub’s Turkish strain of cattle plague. Then, in the winter of 1945, the Russians had captured Blome’s bacteriological institute at Nesselstedt, outside Posen. This meant the Russians now had the Reich’s most advanced biological weapons research and development facility, its steam chambers, incubators, refrigerators, and deep-freeze apparatus. They also had all of the pathogens—viral and bacterial—that Blome had been working with when he had fled west.
Alsos had two key pieces of information now: The Russians had the laboratory from Posen and they had the doctor in charge of vaccines, Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber. They had both the science and the scientist.
CHAPTER TEN
Hired or Hanged
The future of the scientists at Dustbin was obscure. Would they be hired by the U.S. government for future work, or would they be prosecuted by the Allies for war crimes? At Ashcan the future facing the Nazi high command was almost certainly grim, although there was much work to do. War crimes prosecutors faced a monumental task. They had to build criminal cases from scratch, a conundrum described by Nuremberg trials prosecutor General Telford Taylor after the war. “Our task was to prepare to prosecute the leading Nazis on [specific] criminal charges.… The first question a prosecuting attorney asks in such a situation is, ‘Where’s the evidence?’ The blunt fact was that, despite what ‘everybody knew’ about the Nazi leaders, virtually no judicially admissible evidence was at hand.” For evidence, prosecutors like Telford Taylor were relying on interrogators like John Dolibois to glean facts from the Nazis interned at Ashcan.
Frustration was mounting at Ashcan. Prisoners were conspiring to withhold information. “They were whispering rather important secrets to each other,” Ashcan’s commander, Colonel Burton Andrus, recalled, “determined not to help on the question of hidden loot, the whereabouts of people like Martin Bormann, and the guilt for war atrocities.” Colonel Andrus racked his brain for ideas. How to make guilty men talk? “To jog the prisoners’ memories back to the reality of their grave situation we decided to show them atrocity films taken at Buchenwald.”
Colonel Andrus assembled his fifty-two Nazi prisoners in one room. Before the film began, he addressed them with the following words: “You know about these things and I have no doubt many of you participated actively in them. We are showing them to you not to inform you of what you already know, but to impress on you the fact that we know of it, too.”