Leo Alexander

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On December 20, 1946, during the Nuremberg medical trial, Leo Alexander explained some of the pseudo- medical experiments on people to Maria Broel Plater , who was a prisoner in the Ravensbrück concentration camp .

Leo Alexander (born October 11, 1905 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; died July 20, 1985 in Weston , Massachusetts ) was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst .

Life

Leo Alexander's father practiced as an ENT doctor in Vienna. Alexander studied medicine at the University of Vienna , received his doctorate in 1927 from the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University in Berlin and switched to Karl Kleist at the University Clinic in Frankfurt am Main , where he specialized in psychiatry . With a Rockefeller scholarship he went to Beijing in early 1933 and, since he had since been dismissed as a Jew in Frankfurt for racist reasons , emigrated to the United States at the end of 1933 , where he quickly established himself. In 1938 he acquired US citizenship and was employed at Harvard Medical School before the outbreak of World War II and from 1941 as Associate Professor of Neuropsychiatry at Duke University . He was interested in the treatment of sexual deviations and hypnotherapy , and later also compared it to transcendental meditation .

During World War II he was a major doctor in the US 8th Air Fleet in England. After the end of the war he was commissioned by the US Forces, European Theater (USFET) to evaluate the medical findings of German medical research from the time of National Socialism , which dragged on until July 1947 and led to various reports, including about the crimes of doctors. He became an advisor to the US chief prosecutor Telford Taylor during the Nuremberg Trials . The French auxiliary prosecutor M. Pierre Mounier quoted the testimony of the doctor Julius Hallervorden from the Dillenburg branch of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute about the procurement of the brains of the mentally ill who were killed in the euthanasia operation during the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals .

At the Nuremberg Doctors Trial in April 1947, Alexander formulated the Nuremberg Codex for Medical Experiments . About the brain researcher Hallervorden he said again in 1953 to a participant at the 5th International Neurology Congress in Lisbon that Hallervorden had missed any signs of regret or remorse in his false statements about the procurement of brains from euthanasia victims. In the United States, Alexander organized the treatment of 40 surviving Poles who had been victims of human experiments by concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele , and treated some of them himself psychiatric.

After returning from Nuremberg, he was a researcher and university professor at Tufts University Medical School for thirty years. As an advisor to the Boston Police, he was also involved in solving the serial murders of Albert Henry DeSalvo . He also researched multiple sclerosis .

Alexander last lived in Newton, Massachusetts and died in a Weston nursing home.

Fonts

  • The prognosis of essential hypertension in women . Diss. Med. Friedrich Wilhelms University , Berlin 1927
  • Deaths from poisoning: incidence in Massachusetts . 1940
  • The fundamental types of histopathologic changes encountered in cases of athetosis and paralysis agitans . Assoc. for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease, New York, NY 1941.
  • Neuropathology and neurophysiology, including electroencephalography, in wartime Germany , Sl: Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee, 1945
  • Was crimes. Their social-psychological aspects. American Journal of Psychiatry, 105, N ° 3, Washington, DC , 1948 (Sept-Oct)
  • Medical Science under Dictatorship . In: New England Journal of Medicine . 241, No. 2, 1949, pp. 39-47. doi : 10.1056 / NEJM194907142410201 . PMID 18153643 .
    • again: Medical science under dictatorship. Bibliographic Press, Flushing, NY 1996
  • Objective approaches to treatment in psychiatry . Thomas, Springfield, Ill. 1958
  • L. Alexander, et al. : Multiple sclerosis, prognosis and treatment; a nosometric approach - Thomas, Springfield, Ill. 1961.
  • The molding personality under dictatorship. Journal of criminal law and criminology of Northwestern University , 40, N ° 1, 1949 (May-June)
  • War crimes and their motivation. Journal of criminal law and criminology of Northwestern University, 39, n ° 3, 1948 (Sept.-Oct.)
  • Destructive and self-destructive trends in criminalized society. Journal of criminal law and criminology of Northwestern University, 39, n ° 5, 1949 (Jan. – Feb.)
  • Neuropathology in l'Allemagne en guerre. in: Publ. du gouvernement américain: La structure socio-politique du SS . Report psychiatrique des procès du Nuremberg pour crimes de guerre. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 1948 (May). In French

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Uwe Henrik Peters : Psychiatry in Exile: The Emigration of Dynamic Psychiatry from Germany 1933–1939 , Kupka, Düsseldorf 1992. There, short biography pp. 162–163.
  2. ↑ Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals, February 7, 1946 at Zeno's . Document L-170.
  3. ↑ Hallervordens reactions to the allegations made ( memento from July 19, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) at: geschichte-erforschen.de
personal data
SURNAME Alexander, Leo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-American psychoanalyst
DATE OF BIRTH October 11, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH July 20, 1985
Place of death Weston , Middlesex County, Massachusetts