Dr. Alexander had been on German soil for two weeks, and the deviance of Nazi science overwhelmed him. In a letter to his wife, Phyllis, he described what had become of German science under Nazi rule. “German science presents a grim spectacle,” he wrote. “Grim for many reasons. First it became incompetent and then it was drawn into the maelstrom of depravity of which this country reeks—the smell of the concentration camps, the smell of violent death, torture and suffering.” German doctors were not practicing science, Alexander said, but “really depraved pseudoscientific criminality.”
