For months, Dr. Alexander lived in denial. He clung to the fantasy that Nazi laws would not apply to him, and he vowed to return once his fellowship ended. In China, Dr. Alexander was in charge of the neurological departments of several field hospitals, where he tended to soldiers with head injuries received on the battlefield. Ignoring the Nazi mandate that now barred Jews from working as doctors or professors, he wrote a letter to Professor Kleist, his mentor in Germany, saying how much he looked forward to returning home. Kleist wrote back to say that his return to Germany was “totally impossible.… You as a Jew [since] you have not served as a soldier in the First World War, can not be state employed.” In closing, Kleist wrote, “Have no false hopes.” The letter may have saved Dr. Alexander’s life.
Untethered in China, Alexander was now a nomad, a man without a home to return to. With remarkable ambition and fortitude, he pressed on. As his father had done before him, he wrote and published scientific papers; his were on mental illness, which made him a viable candidate for a fellowship in America. Fortune again favored him when, in the fall of 1933, he learned that he had been awarded a position at a state mental hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, fifty miles outside Boston. Dr. Alexander boarded an American steamship called President Jackson and set sail for America by way of Japan. Out at sea, a strange event occurred. It happened in the middle of the long journey, when his ship was more than a thousand miles from land. A series of violent storms struck, sending passengers inside for days until finally the weather cleared. On the first clear day, Dr. Alexander ventured outside to play shuffleboard. Gazing out across the wide sea, he spotted an enormous single wave traveling with great speed and force, bearing down on his tiny steamship. There was no escape from what he quickly recognized as a tidal wave. Before Dr. Alexander could run back inside the ship, the President Jackson was lifted up by this great wave. “The ship traveled up the steep slope very slowly, further and further, until we finally reached the top,” he wrote to his brother, Theo. And then, with the ship balancing precariously at the top of the wave, he described the terrifying feeling that followed. “Suddenly there was nothing behind it… nothing but a steep descent.” The ship began to free-fall, “its nose plunged deep into the water.… The impact was harsh, water splashed to all sides, and things fell to this side and that in the kitchen and common rooms.” The ship regained its balance, almost effortlessly, and steamed on. “The whole thing happened so unbelievably fast,” Alexander wrote. “When it was over, I said to myself now I understand the meaning of the saying, ‘the ocean opens up before you and swallows you whole.’ ”
It did not take long for Dr. Alexander to thrive in America. He was a supremely hard worker. On average he slept five hours a night. Working as a doctor at a New England mental institution was endlessly fascinating to him. He once told a reporter that what interested him most was determining what made men tick. Only a few months after his arrival in New England, he was promoted to a full-time position in the neuropsychiatric ward at Boston State Hospital. While performing hospital rounds in 1934, he met a social worker named Phyllis Harrington. They fell in love and married. By 1938 they had two children, a boy and a girl. A prolific writer, Dr. Alexander published fifty scientific papers. By the end of the decade he’d been hired to teach at Harvard Medical School. He was a U.S. citizen now. Journalists wrote newspaper articles about the “doctor from Vienna,” citing his outstanding accomplishments in the field of mental illness. He had a new home; he had been accepted as one of Boston’s medical elite.
In December 1941 America went to war. Dr. Alexander joined the fight and was sent to the Sixty-fifth General Hospital in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and then to an army hospital in England. For the duration of the war, Dr. Alexander helped wounded soldiers recover from shell shock. He also collected data on flight fatigue. After the Germans surrendered, he expected to be sent home. Instead he received his unprecedented order from SHAEF. He was to go to Germany and investigate allegations of Nazi medical crimes. In doing so, he would come face-to-face with former professors, mentors, and fellow students. It was his job to figure out who might be guilty and who was not.
Dr. Alexander’s first trip to Dachau did not produce any significant leads despite rumors that barbaric medical experiments had gone on there. On June 5, 1945, he traveled the twelve miles to Munich to visit the Luftwaffe’s Institute for Aviation Medicine. This research facility was headed by a radiologist named Georg August Weltz, still working despite Germany’s collapse. On paper Weltz was a man of repute. He was gentle-looking, fifty-six years old with a shock of white hair and a wrinkled, sun-tanned face. In their first interview Weltz told Alexander he had worked as a military doctor his entire life, beginning as a Balloon Corps physician in World War I.