The Road to Nuremberg

Abstract

On 26 June 1945, after weeks of silence, Alexander wrote a long and impassioned letter to his wife in which he outlined his views on Nazi medicine and policy. Written the day before he was leaving for Paris to brief the American prosecution about medical war crimes, the letter conveys a sense of finite condemnation about the state of affairs of German medical research and practice:

German medical science presented a grim spectacle. Grim for many reasons. First, because it remained essentially static and became comparatively incompetent, and second, because it was drawn into the maelstrom of depravity of which this country reeks — the smell of the concentration camps, the smell of violent death, torture and sufferings of muted victims will not rot of one’s nostrils. Their really depraved pseudoscientific curiosity went so far as to carry out vivisection and similar experiments involving extreme suffering, mutilation and death in human beings, large numbers of human beings, in concentration camps. The evidence is clear cut and admitted; and although one suspected the worst, the reality, as revealed, still surpasses the worst expectations.¹