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Alexandru Birkle, also known as Alexandru Bircle (* 1896; † 1986 in New York) was a forensic pathologist.
He was a member of two international medical commissions whose members, in 1943, at the invitation of the German occupiers, performed autopsies on the victims of the Katyn massacre and the Vinnytsia massacre, and was therefore later persecuted by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD.
From 1919 to 1925, he studied medicine in Bucharest, specializing in forensic medicine. After his first job in Brașov, he was appointed to the Forensic Medicine Institute in Bucharest.
In April 1943, the Ministry of Justice assigned him to the Katyn Commission, which, at the invitation of the Reich Health Leader Leonardo Conti, investigated the mass graves of more than 4,000 shot Polish officers and cadets in the forest of Katyn massacre.Andrzej Przewoźnik/Jolanta Adamska: Katyń. Zbrodnia prawda pamięć. Warsaw 2010, p. 290. He signed the final report, edited by the Hungarian medical professor Ferenc Orsós, which dated the mass executions to the spring of 1940, indirectly attributing the crime to the Soviet secret police NKVD.Claudia Weber: War of the Perpetrators. The Mass Shootings of Katyn. Hamburg 2015, p. 215.
Besides Orsós, Birkle was the only member of the Katyn Commission who participated in the examinations of mass graves with Ukrainian victims in Vinnytsia in July 1943. The international experts also concluded that this was a crime of the NKVD, with the mass executions having taken place during the Great Purge of 1937/38.
Due to his involvement in both commissions, Birkle was sought by the NKVD after the Red Army entered Bucharest at the end of August 1944. He hid for several months with friends. The Romanian secret police Securitate detained his wife and daughter for a month, but they did not reveal his hiding place.
In early 1952, he testified anonymously behind a screen before the Madden Committee, the investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives regarding the Katyn massacre.Tomasz Wolsza: "To co wiedziałem przekracza swoją grozą najśmielsze fantazje". Wojenne i powojenne losy Polaków wizytujących Katyń w 1943 roku. Warsaw 2015, p. 71. However, the Romanian authorities learned of it; a court in Bucharest sentenced his wife and daughter to five years of forced labor each for "collaboration with the enemy of the state." After the death of Joseph Stalin on March 5, 1953, their sentence was halved.
In the summer of 1952, Birkle was seriously injured in a traffic accident in the United States, the cause of which could not be clarified. After recovering, he stayed in the United States and worked as a psychiatrist. He died in 1986 in New York without ever seeing his family again.
After his death, a Securitate agent, posing as his daughter, claimed his inheritance in the United States. The real daughter only learned of this after the fall of the communist regime in Romania, when she accessed her Securitate files. She and her mother were rehabilitated by the Romanian authorities in 1992.Ion Constantin: The Role of Forensic Doctor Alexandru Birkle in Defending and Supporting the Truth about the Katyn Massacres, in: Polska i Rumunia: od historycznego sąsiedztwa do europejskiego partnerstwa; materiały z sympozjum. Suceava 2009, p. 262.
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