The CROWCASS list came out of the immediate aftermath of the German surrender, when public pressure to prosecute Nazis accused of war crimes had reached fever pitch. On May 7, 1945, Life magazine published a story on the liberation of Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and other death camps, complete with graphic photographs. This was some of the first documentary evidence presented to the public. When confronted by these ghastly images, people all over the world expressed their outrage at the scale of atrocity that had been committed by the Nazis. Death camps, slave labor camps, the systematic extermination of entire groups of people—this defied the rules of war. The idea of having a war crimes trial appealed to the general public as a means of holding individual Nazis accountable for the wickedness of their crimes.
The group responsible for investigating war crimes was the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), located in London and founded by the Allies in 1942 (it was originally called the United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes). The War Crimes Commission was not responsible for hunting down the criminals; that job was delegated to SHAEF. The War Crimes Commission had three committees: Committee I dealt with lists, Committee II coordinated enforcement issues with SHAEF, and Committee III gave advice on legal points. The commission and its committees worked in concert with CROWCASS, also located in Paris, which was responsible for gathering and maintaining information about suspected war criminals.
After the fighting stopped, SHAEF sent war crimes investigators into the field to locate German doctors with the purpose of interrogating them. One of these investigators was Major Leopold Alexander, a Boston-based psychiatrist and neurologist and a physician with the U.S. Army. Dr. Alexander had been tending to wounded war veterans at a military hospital in England when he learned about his new assignment, just two weeks after the end of the war. With this undertaking, his whole life would change, as would his understanding of what it meant to be a doctor and what it meant to be an American.
Dr. Alexander would unwittingly become one of the most important figures in the Nuremberg doctors’ trial. And he would inadvertently become a central player in one of the most dramatic events in the history of Operation Paperclip. That would take another seven years. For now, at war’s end, Dr. Alexander accepted his orders from SHAEF, boarded a military transport airplane in England, and headed for Germany to begin war crimes investigative work. His first stop was the Dachau concentration camp. Dr. Alexander did not yet know that it was inside Dachau, in the secret barracks called Experimental Cell Block Five, that Luftwaffe doctors had conducted some of the most barbaric and criminal medical experiments of the war.
On May 23, 1945, Dr. Alexander, 39, was seated inside an American military transport airplane flying into Munich when, approximately fifteen miles north of the airport, his plane circled low and he saw the liberated Dachau concentration camp for the first time. “Surviving inmates were waving and cheering at the plane and you could see that two American field hospitals were set up on the camp grounds,” Alexander wrote in his journal late at night. American aircraft brought fresh corned beef, potato salad, and real coffee by the ton to the newly liberated prisoners, many of whom were still too weak to leave the camp. The airplanes also brought doctors and nurses with the American Red Cross and the U.S. Army Typhus Commission and also, on occasion, a medical war crimes investigator like Dr. Alexander. The Dachau concentration camp was the first stop on a long list of Reich medical facilities and institutions that Dr. Alexander was scheduled to visit, locations where medical crimes were suspected of having taken place. With him, Dr. Alexander carried SHAEF instructions that granted him “full powers to investigate everything of interest” and also gave him the authority to “remove documents, equipment, or personnel as deemed necessary.”