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Ulf Schmidt, Justice at Nuremberg: Leo Alexander and the Nazi doctors' trial, Basingstoke. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. xiv. 386. £60.00 (hardback 0-333-92147-X).
My first acquaintance with Leo Alexander was in my own research on the 1946-47 trial of Nazi doctors in Germany. The doctors' trial was the first of twelve trials of Nazis from various sectors of the Third Reich, which American Military Tribunals prosecuted at Nuremberg. It involved twenty-three prominent physicians and scientists accused of torture and murder in the conduct of medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. For me. Leo (as he liked to be called) emerged as a powerful figure, self-proclaimed author of the Code (the first authoritative statement of informed consent), a tireless investigator of Nazi medical crimes, a valued medical expert and a formidable advisor to the American prosecution of Nazi doctors. I read Justice at Nuremberg, subtitled Leo Alexander and the Nazi doctors' trial, with great expectation. I wanted to know more about Leo. the American neuro-psychiatrisl. bom in Vienna, and a Jew who had played such a remarkable role in the prosecution of Nazi physicians.
Ulf Schmidt, a German medical historian at the University of Kent, explains that his book has a dual focus: to write a personal history of Alexander's life and "to link it with the social and political history that shaped the responses to the legacy of the Third Reich" (p. 8). He emphasizes that "this is therefore not a biography...