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History’s Deadliest Woman and Other Lesser Known Killers

If This Is A Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women - Ravensbrück concentration camp

Dr. Walter Schreiber. Operation Paperclip

15. Dr. Schreiber Evaded Accountability For His Medical Atrocities

Doctor Walter Schreiber was produced at the Nuremberg Trials to testify against Herman Goering, who had been in charge of Germany’s biological weapons development. Goering was convicted and sentenced to death, but Schreiber himself was never made to account for his atrocities. He slipped his handlers in 1948 and fled 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.

In 1951, Schreiber arrived in the US as part of Operation Paperclip, which recruited German scientists, engineers, and technicians, and sent them to America to work for the government. He began work at the Air Force School of Medicine in Texas, but the publication of newspaper articles soon thereafter about his medical atrocities led to a public outcry. So his intelligence handlers relocated him and his family to Argentina in 1952. There, he worked as an epidemiologist in a research laboratory, until his death from a heart attack in 1970.

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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.

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