Prologue

Abstract

On or around 12 July 1947, at the height of the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, shortly before the rendering of judgement, a mysterious stranger, barely visible, broke into the office in the Palace of Justice of Major Leo Alexander, Consultant to the Secretary of War of the United States and medical expert of the Chief of Counsel for War Crimes. The stranger left a series of notes that were invisible in ordinary daylight. Alexander’s enquiry revealed that the stranger had been a gremlin who ‘claimed to have had a fleeting acquaintance with Archie the Cockroach and Mehitabel the Cat, but did not otherwise wish to identify himself’.¹ After having studied and tran-scribed the notes ‘in a setting of infrared illumination provided by high hydro-carbon compound during the late hours of the night’, Alexander decided that the nature of the document required it to be ‘classified as secret’. Its distribution was to be strictly limited to ‘those members of the inside circle of OCCWC [Office of Chief of Counsel for War Crimes] who have had direct dealings with the Medical Case’.² What had happened? Had the medical expert for the prosecution finally gone mad or was he suffering from some undiagnosed hallucinations? Why was this document in any way relevant, and why must it be sent to the ‘inner circle’ of the US prosecution team under the leadership of Brigadier General Telford Taylor?