Echoes from Nuernberg

Dr. Walter Paul Emil Schreiber used to be a Wehrmacht major general, and when he rose to make a speech at the Randolph Field (Texas) Officers' Club last fall, it was clear that he still saw himself as something of a hero. The U.S. Air Force School of Aviation Medicine, which was employing him, apparently saw Dr. Schreiber much as he saw himself. Its officers applauded heartily after Schreiber had finished describing his capture by the Russians (in Berlin, 1945), his four months of third degree in Moscow's Lubianka Prison, his two years of Soviet indoctrination and his escape to the U.S. zone of Berlin.

Dr. Schreiber, it developed, had been brought to the U.S. in a Defense Department scoop-up of German technical men known as "Operation Paperclip." His job: consultant to the Air Force in a division with the grandiloquent title "Global Preventive Medicine." He was living comfortably in San Antonio with his wife and his son Paul, 17, a student at Alamo Heights High School.

Russian Witness. But Dr. Schreiber's self-praise, and the praise bestowed on him by the flight surgeons, grated on the ears of a few U.S. physicians and lawyers who remembered the record of the Nuernberg war-crimes trials. Dr. Schreiber was one of 200 German physicians sought by U.S. prosecutors for questioning and possible trial on charges of having performed or abetted inhuman experiments on human subjects. Schreiber was out of reach until the Russians produced him to testify against Hermann Goering. Then, when U.S. officials tried to get their hands on him, the Russians spirited Schreiber off to the east again.

Schreiber, an army doctor since World War I, had been in charge of the scientific side of the Wehrmacht medical academy in Berlin. That much was clear. So was the fact that he had worked closely with men who were later hanged or imprisoned for war crimes. According to testimony at Nuernberg, he had attended meetings where grisly experiments on human subjects were discussed. But most of the direct charges against him came from human experimenters who were trying to save their own necks.

Back to Paperclip. Confronted with this background, and asked what Consultant Schreiber was doing to advance Global Preventive Medicine, the Air Force stammered out some seemingly contradictory statements: 1) he was working merely on unclassified matters, 2) the project was classified confidential and could not be discussed. The Air Force said it knew nothing of these echoes of Nuernberg when it engaged Schreiber, and had no good way of sifting them now.

One thing the Air Force was sure of: Schreiber's six-month contract as a consultant expired last week and it will not be renewed. The Air Force bucked Schreiber back to Operation Paperclip, which had no way of pronouncing him guilty or innocent either, but which might send him home.

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