Paul G. Schreiber was born in Berlin Germany in 1934, the son of Major General Walter P. Schreiber M.D., who was appointed Chief Medical Officer of Fortress Berlin in 1944 by Wehrmacht Supreme Command. Imprisoned in Moscow’s Lubyanka after the surrender, General Schreiber testified before the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal in 1947. Paul writes from an age-commensurate perspective as an eyewitness to many of the world-shaking events that characterized the first half of the 20^th century as he travels through a war ravaged Europe. His extraordinary adventures include a first person account of the fall of Berlin to the Russian Army, the beginning of the Cold War at a place that becomes famous as “Checkpoint Charlie”, facing starvation on the streets of Stalin’s Berlin, outwitting the Soviet NKVD as a young boy in a daring rescue (brokered by the CIA and elements within the Catholic church) of his father from Soviet captivity. He leaves home to live a young man’s romantic adventure as a Gaucho herder on Argentina’s Pampas and Patagonia in the 1950s — experiences that serve to strengthen his long-held plans of immigration to the United States in 1954, when a Peronista sabotage and mutiny nearly sinks the ship on which he works his way to his adopted country and almost derails his plans!

Woven throughout American by Choice are subtly telling comparisons between the totalitarian methods of political manipulation that characterized Paul’s experiences under Nazi, Soviet, and Argentinean dictatorships, and the methods that increasingly characterize our own political life – including attacks on gun ownership, civil rights, family structure, faith based education, and political correctness. Most significantly, American by Choice is the story of a young boy’s conversion from a state controlled totalitarian mindset to one that embraces the constitutional principles of free choice and self-determination, a conversion initiated by the subtle counters provided by his family and eight British prisoners of war whom he befriended as a child. His story culminates in a life-long celebration of America that began in 1945 with the entry into Berlin of the U.S. Army’s Second Armored Division, Hell on Wheels, to whose soldiers he dedicates this book.