Walter Paul Emil Schreiber (21 March 1893 – 5 September 1970) was a medical officer with the German Army in World War I and a brigadier-general (Generalarzt) of the Wehrmacht Medical Service during World War II. He would later serve as a key witness against Hermann Göring during the Nuremberg Trials.
Early life
Walter Schreiber was born in Berlin to Paul Schreiber (a postal inspector) and his wife Gertrud Kettlitz. After completing gymnasium in Berlin, he studied medicine at the universities of Berlin, Tübingen, and Greifswald. In 1914, he enlisted voluntarily for military service and served with the 42nd Infantry Regiment in France. He was injured at the First Battle of the Marne. After his recovery, he continued with his studies and served as a provisional doctor on the Western Front until the end of the war in 1918, at which time he was decorated for valor and humanitarian service by three different countries, Finland, Switzerland and Germany. In 1920, he graduated Dr. med. from the University of Greifswald and began his field studies in epidemiology in Africa. After World War I, the United States sought to assess the feasibility of using biological warfare agents in future military conflicts. As a professor of Bacteriology and Hygiene at the University of Berlin and one of the foremost experts in epidemiology, Schreiber was invited to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, then known as Walter Reed General Hospital, in a scientific exchange between Germany and the United States. During this time, he reported on his studies of sleeping sickness in Africa and exchanged strategies with U.S. military medical personnel and researchers on how to prevent biological warfare.
Nazi Germany
As a member of the medical branch of the German Army, and a representative of the Army Medical Inspectorate, he was charged with preventing the spread of infectious disease and developing vaccines, in particular, to guard against potential biological warfare agents. In 1942, he wrote a memorandum expressing his objections to the Third Reich's development of such weapons, stating during his witness testimony at the Nuremberg Trials, "I personally made a report to Generaloberstabsarzt Handloser... It was an extremely serious matter for us physicians, for if there really should be a plague epidemic it was clear that it would not stop at the fronts, but would come over to us too. We had to bear a very grave responsibility." Schreiber repeatedly reported to his supervising officers objections regarding experimentation being done at SS controlled facilities. In October 1942, Schreiber reported what he heard at a conference where the results of human experiments at Dachau concentration camp were presented.
In May 1943, he headed the third session of the advisory specialists of the Armed Forces. This led to a confrontation in which Schreiber spoke out against human experimentation in general, but especially with biological agents such as plague and typhus, testifying later at the Nuremberg Trials that he "pointed out that bacteria were an unreliable and dangerous weapon" but that he was "confronted with a fait accompli", the decision had already been made, "the Führer had given the Reichsmarschall (Hermann Göring) full powers, and so forth, for carrying out all the preparations." In September 1943, Schreiber accepted the position of the commander of the Training Division C of the Military Medical Academy under the authority of which he denied Kurt Blome, the head of the Posen research institute, permission to conduct his plague research in Sachsenburg. This was later overruled by Himmler. At a medical conference May 16 to 18, 1944, Schreiber learned of research into gas gangrene experiments conducted by Dr. Karl Gebhardt at Hohenlychen Sanatorium. (Nuremberg document 619) In 1944, Schreiber, who had grown increasingly aware of Göring's antagonism toward him, conferred with Dr. Karl Brandt, the attorney for the health care scientific advisory board about what to do. At the beginning of April, 1945, he was stripped of his administrative duties except that of medical officer in charge of the military and civilian sector of Berlin.