Fate and circumstance had prepared him for the job. Like Samuel Goudsmit, the scientific director of Operation Alsos, Dr. Alexander had a unique background that qualified him to investigate German doctors and had also made things personal. A Jew, he had once been a rising star among Germany’s medical elite. In 1933, Germany’s race laws forbade the twenty-eight-year-old physician from practicing medicine any longer. Devastated, he left the country and wound up in America. Now, thirteen years later, he was back on German soil. His former existence here seemed like a lifetime ago.
From as far back as he could remember, Leopold Alexander longed to be a doctor, like his father, Gustav. “One of the strongest unconscious motives for becoming a physician was the strong bond of identification with my father,” he once said, explaining the pull toward medicine. Gustav Alexander was an ear, nose, and throat doctor in turn-of-the-century Vienna, a distinguished scholar who published more than eighty scientific papers before Leopold was born. His mother, Gisela, was the first woman awarded a PhD in philosophy from the University of Vienna, the oldest university in the German-speaking world. From a young age Leopold led a charmed life. The Alexanders were sophisticated, wealthy professionals who lived in intellectual-bohemian splendor in a huge house with live peacocks on the lawns. Sigmund Freud was a frequent guest, as was the composer Gustav Mahler. By the time Leopold was fifteen, he was allowed to accompany his father on weekend hospital rounds. The father-son bond grew deep. On weekends they would walk through Vienna’s parks or museums, always engaged in lively conversation about history, anthropology, and medicine, as Dr. Alexander later recalled.
In 1929, Leopold Alexander graduated from the University of Vienna Medical School and became a doctor, specializing in the evolution and pathology of the brain. For almost every aspiring physician in Europe at the time, the goal was to study medicine in Germany, and in 1932 Dr. Alexander was invited to enroll at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin. There he first rubbed elbows with Germany’s leading medical doctors, including Karl Kleist, the distinguished professor of brain pathology who would become his mentor. Alexander focused his studies on brain disorders and began fieldwork on patients with schizophrenia. Life was full of promise.
Tragedy struck in two cruel blows. In 1932, Gustav Alexander was killed by a former mental patient—murdered in cold blood on the streets of Vienna by a man who, ten years earlier, had been hospitalized and declared insane. The second tragedy occurred in January of 1933, when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. National Socialism was on the rise. For every Jew in Germany, life was about to change inexorably. Fortune blessed Dr. Alexander. On January 20, 1933, just days before Hitler took power, the ambitious physician prepared to decamp to rural China to study mental illness. “I have accepted an invitation to go for half a year to Beijing Union Medical College in Beijing (China) as an honorary lecturer in neurology and psychiatry,” Dr. Alexander wrote to his professors at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, promising to return to Germany by October 1, 1933. It was a promise he was never to fulfill.
Within two months of Hitler’s taking power, the Nazis initiated a nationwide boycott of Jewish doctors, lawyers, and business professionals. This was followed, in April 1933, by the Reich’s Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. It was now illegal for non-Aryans to work as civil servants, a ban that included every university teaching position throughout Germany. In Frankfurt, where Dr. Alexander had lived, sixty-nine Jewish professors were fired. The news of Germany’s radical transformation reached Dr. Alexander in China. The Alexander family lawyer, Maximilian Friedmann, wrote him a letter warning against return. “The prospects in Germany are most unfavorable,” Friedmann said. An uncle, Robert Alexander, was even more candid about what was happening in Nazi Germany when he wrote to Dr. Alexander to say that the nation had “succumbed to the swastika.” A Jewish colleague and friend, a neurologist named Arnold Merzbach, also penned a letter to Dr. Alexander in despair, telling him that all of their Jewish colleagues in Frankfurt had been dismissed from their university posts. “Our very existences are falling apart,” Merzbach wrote. “We are all without hope.”