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Crime

Throwing Slaves Overboard to Drown and Other Dark Moments From History

Plateau - Slave ship
Slave ship hold. History Channel

17. A Nazi Monster Saved by the CIA

Operation Paperclip. Amazon

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 was never held accountable 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.

Schreiber arrived in America in 1951 as part of Operation Paperclip, which recruited German scientists, engineers, and technicians, and sent them to the US 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, Schreiber worked as an epidemiologist in a research laboratory, until his death from a heart attack in 1970.

Also Read: Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped Justice Because They Were Useful to the US.

Written by

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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