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Evil Doctors and Scientists From World War II

Khalid Elhassan January 15, 2021 33 min

Second Battle of Champagne - Second Battle of Ypres — French soldiers wearing gas masks in WWI trenches, waiting for an order to launch an attack. Flickr

9. A Sadistic Monster Who Escaped Accountability

After testifying against Herman Goering in the Nuremberg Trials, Dr. Walter Schreiber was shielded from accountability for his medical atrocities because the victors found him useful. He ended up getting hired by the CIA and the US military, who saw to it that he escaped punishment. In 1948, he evaded his Soviet handlers and made it to the West, where he was hired by the US military and the CIA to work as chief medical doctor in Camp King, a clandestine POW interrogation site in Germany.

Dr. Schreiber was sent to the US in 1951 as part of Operation Paperclip, and was put to work at the Air Force School of Medicine in Texas. However, the publication of newspaper articles soon thereafter about his medical atrocities on behalf of the Nazis led to a public outcry. So his intelligence handlers relocated him and his family to Argentina in 1952. There, Dr. Schreiber worked as an epidemiologist in a research laboratory, until his death from a heart attack in 1970.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.