The Gallery of Miracles and Madness

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The Gallery of Miracles and Madness Page 21

by Charlie English


  The assessor returned the paperwork with his decisions one to two weeks later, and these were forwarded to a “senior reviewer,” initially Herbert Linden of the Interior Ministry, for a final verdict in which a question mark was no longer an option. Next, the forms marked “+” were given to the Gekrat transportation organization, who compiled lists of patients to be moved on particular dates. These lists were then passed to the regional interior ministries, who sent them out to the asylums with instructions that the named inmates should be prepared for transfer in the next few days. Medical staff were not told where they were to be taken, or why.

  Bühler’s form was marked with a red “+”.

  18.

  CHOKING ANGEL

  Around noon on Tuesday, March 5, 1940, two slow-moving, long-snouted buses of the Reichspost approached Emmendingen in convoy, led by a jeep-like staff car known as a Personenkraftwagen, or PKW. These vehicles would soon be painted camouflage gray, and the bus windows whitewashed so the public couldn’t see inside, but in these early days of Aktion T4 they still wore the red livery of the national mail service. The transport leader stepped out of the PKW with his list, three photocopied sheets of neatly typed paper bearing the names of fifty-four Emmendingen patients, in no apparent order, with their dates and places of birth. The first name was that of Erich Schmutzler, born at Meerane; the last belonged to Philipp Wahl, from Weissenau. The youngest on the list was Magdalena Schlatterer, who was just twenty-three. The oldest, at seventy-five, was Franz Karl Bühler.

  Dr. Mathes had been surprised to receive the first transport list from the Karlsruhe regional office of the Ministry of the Interior. He was still in the dark about what the “planned economic measures,” as they were called, really meant. All he and his staff had been told was that the patients were to be taken to a different, unspecified institution. One theory held that the authorities were preemptively relocating inmates who would be difficult to move quickly in the event of an emergency: Since their medical files were to be sent with them, Mathes guessed that some sort of detailed examination was to take place at the new location. The only real certainty, given the Nazis’ track record to date, was that the fate of the transportees would not be good, and Mathes had gone through the list, removing names where he could. They were mostly older patients, he observed, and only four were female. He had put a line through three women’s names—scrawling fleißige Arbeiterin (industrious female worker) next to one—and similarly crossed off nine men. Schlatterer, Schmutzler, Wahl, and Bühler all remained.

  The escort staff—SS men in civvies, and Nazi nurses known as “brown sisters”—would reveal nothing about their destination and instead exuded rudeness and contempt, even to the doctors. There were four employees to each bus: a driver and attendant, who both sat in the cab, and two large female nurses, who were “brutal and energetic in tone,” as an eyewitness recalled. On a separate occasion, Emmendingen’s priest, Pastor Oswald Haug, walked past the Gekrat crew while patients were being gathered, and saw them picnicking on the grass, chatting over sandwiches and cigarettes, unconcerned by the murders they were about to facilitate.

  The state government in Karlsruhe had sent instructions along with the list telling Mathes how to prepare the inmates. “Restless” individuals were to be sedated for a journey that could last several hours. Patients were to be handed over with their own linen and clothes, but if they didn’t own these, the institution should provide them on loan, and the Gekrat would see they were returned. Each transportee could take up to twenty-two pounds of luggage; any other personal effects should remain in the asylum. The patients must also have their name and transport number marked on their body, either written on their flesh—“like pigs,” as one account put it—or on strips of plaster stuck to the back of their neck. The entire operation was to be conducted in the strictest secrecy: In particular, relatives were not to be told about the transfers.

  The patients shuffled out, led and pushed by the nurses and by the white-coated men entrusted with their care. Some of the transportees were cheerful, looking forward to a rare drive in the countryside. Haug remembered a group of teenage girls cheering and exulting as they waited to be loaded: “Pastor,” they said, “we are allowed to go in a vehicle today!” Others reacted with suspicion and fear, shouting and resisting as they were forced aboard. One twenty-seven-year-old woman, a skillful embroiderer, knelt on the ground in front of Haug, hugging his knees, and imploring him: “The death vehicle is just outside the door! Help me, I do not want to die. Do whatever you want with me, but get me out!” It is impossible to know Bühler’s state of mind as the old man was ushered up the vehicle steps, but Emmendingen had been his home for four decades, and the idea of leaving it for an unknown destination must have alarmed him. There was no escape. Those who resisted were shot up with drugs and carried onto the buses half asleep. Some were tied to their seats with leather restraints that had been fitted for the purpose, and the bus crews carried handcuffs to be used when fighting broke out, as it sometimes did. In one case, patients smashed the windows; another time, a driver was punched in the eye.

  When the Gekrat team had finished lunch, the convoy carrying Bühler set off on the half-day drive to the Swabian Jura. The artist could have looked out through the clear glass at the mountains of the Black Forest, lit by the pale winter sun, as the bus followed the winding road, engine roaring, gears whining. The air would have grown colder as they climbed. The drivers liked to pull over for a break along the way, sometimes at the Marbach stud farm: An employee remembered that it was “unpleasant” to see the loaded buses parked there. Once a Gekrat vehicle suffered a punctured tire, and one of the patients offered to repair it, presumably unaware that he was shortening his life.

  From Marbach, the passengers could make out Grafeneck castle high in the distance, lowering over the woods and fields and the stream from its promontory at the end of the valley. As they approached, they could see the fence of reinforced barbed wire that guarded the lower fields, and a sign that read: “Entry forbidden due to danger of epidemic.” The loaded buses were too heavy to take the short, steep track that led directly up to the castle from the road, and instead the drivers turned in at the southern gate. There was a checkpoint here, staffed around the clock, with a guardhouse and a telephone so the sentries could call ahead to warn the reception team. Once inside the grounds, where armed SS men patrolled with dogs, the buses bumped across the railway line, then climbed the gently sloping gravel road.

  At the top of the hill stood a second checkpoint. Here, with night descending, the vehicles’ headlamps would have picked out a flat, straight drive, lined with horse chestnut, ash, and sycamore trees. The buses advanced two hundred yards along this avenue before coming to a halt among a cluster of low-rise buildings. To the right was the bus garage, a roofless barn with two chimneys, a circular stable, and the old coach house. To the left was a barracks, two hundred feet long. In the distance, at the end of the drive, loomed the boxy outline of the castle.

  As soon as the buses stopped, Grafeneck’s SS nurses began to unload the patients, leading them into the barracks and into a giant dormitory with a hundred made-up beds in which no one ever slept. They were told to undress. They were measured, weighed, and photographed. Those with gold teeth were marked with an “X” on their backs. Then each naked patient was sent to a small room to be looked over by a doctor; at the time of Bühler’s arrival, this was either Horst Schumann or his deputy, Günther Hennecke. The examination rarely lasted more than a minute: its only purpose was to establish a plausible cause of death and to rule out, for instance, appendicitis in an individual whose appendix had been removed. A very few patients—war veterans or good workers—were reprieved at this stage and told to dress and await transport to a different institution. Despite the pretense that this was some kind of hospital, anxiety in the dormitory was high. Some prayed, asking that they might come to their God. One man said he wanted to
disappear in a puff of smoke, to which Schumann responded that his wish would soon be granted.

  The staff now told the patients they were to be bathed. Doctors again jabbed restless individuals with a shot of morphine; even so, some had to be dragged to the next stage by force. The SS orderlies hung an old military coat about each victim’s shoulders, then pushed Bühler and his fellow Emmendingers out into the freezing night, toward the old coach house. This single-story agricultural building contained three empty wagon bays, each thirteen feet by twenty, and a small room at the southern end. Workmen had fitted the southernmost bay with a heavy iron door and made it look like a communal washroom, with showerheads on the ceiling, wooden benches, and an extractor fan on the back wall. A pipe drilled with holes ran around the room at midriff height, and a small observation window had been fitted on the south side, allowing staff to see in from the small room next door.

  The T4 nurses ushered the patients inside, took their greatcoats, and counted them again. Then they closed the door, as the doctor on duty—Schumann or his deputy—observed them through the window. For political purposes, Hitler had ordered that only a doctor could control the gas, to maintain the fiction that the killing was a medical procedure. When he was ready, the doctor turned a handwheel that opened a valve and allowed carbon monoxide to rush from the high-pressure steel bottles, along the pipe, and out through the holes. The carbon monoxide quickly filled the room.

  As they heard the hissing noise, the patients thought the shower was about to start, but when no water emerged they began to panic. They screamed and tried to fight their way out. Then the gas began to take effect. They struggled to suck in air, collapsed, vomited, and defecated, staining the walls and floor with excrement. One horrified observer, Maximilian Friedrich Lindner, would tell a Frankfurt courtroom what he saw looking through the spy window of a similar death chamber at Hadamar in Hesse:

  Did I ever watch a gassing? Dear God, unfortunately, yes…In the chamber there were patients, naked people, some semi-collapsed, others with their mouths terribly wide open, their chests heaving…A few were lying on the ground. The spines of all the naked people protruded. Some sat on the bench with their mouth wide open, their eyes wide open, and breathing with difficulty.

  Lindner turned away and hurried out before vomiting up everything in his stomach. He had never seen anything so gruesome, he said, and he could not believe that the victims died without pain. The T4 employees at Grafeneck were not so squeamish. Most would take their turn to gawk at the dying patients. Schumann was known for his sarcastic running commentary. “They’re already dropping,” he would say.

  After twenty minutes, when the doctor could no longer detect any movement in the chamber, he turned off the gas and switched on the ventilator fan to clear the carbon monoxide. Thirty to forty minutes later, the doors were opened and the “burners”—or “disinfectors,” as they preferred to be called—moved in. These SS men were tasked with untangling the limbs of the corpses and loading them into the furnaces. It was a “very difficult and nerve-wracking job,” a T4 “burner” named Nohel recalled, but they were given extra rations of schnapps to compensate. The bodies were first dragged to the “dead room” in the stable next door, where those marked with a cross had their gold teeth wrenched out. This wasn’t easy, either: Nohel was once castigated for losing a tooth down a victim’s throat. The extracted nuggets were taken to an office in the castle, where they were logged—as “bridge with three teeth,” “single tooth,” and so on—and dropped in a jar of formaldehyde, though this didn’t prevent their rotting odor from distracting the secretaries as they typed. The precious metal was later sent off to be melted down into fine gold bars: The KdF could collect 60 pounds of it in a single month, and all T4 staff were entitled to cheap dental work using gold harvested from their victims.

  From the “dead room,” Bühler’s corpse was dragged to the outbuilding with the chimneys, where it was placed in one of two mobile ovens made by J. A. Topf & Sons, who would later supply crematoria for the extermination camps in Poland. The Topf ovens had been designed with a large pan that made it easier to load corpses, and each could fit two or three bodies at a time. It took between sixty and ninety minutes to burn one load: An overweight body burned more quickly than a lean one, the “burners” observed, thanks to its high fat content. The ovens had to work day and night to get through all the corpses, so Grafeneck produced foul smoke almost continuously. At some stage, the roof of the cremation building was removed to allow the soot and fumes to escape, and the surrounding trees grew black with the residue. Even people who lived several miles away complained about the smell and the soot that clung to their houses.

  After the burning, the charred remains were shoveled out of the grate and any surviving pieces of bone were smashed up with a hammer or ground in a mill. The ash was dumped in a heap in another of the outbuildings.

  With Bühler murdered and his body disposed of, all that remained for his killers to do was tie up the administrative loose ends. A “Condolence Department” at Grafeneck was responsible for notifying next of kin. In the absence of close family, Bühler’s “consolation letter” was sent to his new guardian in Offenburg, Josef Schulz, on April 6, 1940. The sender’s address was given as “Grafeneck Regional Nursing Home,” and the letter was signed with an illegible scrawl.

  Dear Mr. Schulz!

  We hereby inform you that Mr. Karl Bühler, whose guardian you are listed as being in our medical records, had to be transferred to our institution on March 5, 1940, according to ministerial order of the Reich Defense Commissioner, and died here on April 4, 1940, due to myocardial weakness.

  On the instructions of the local police authority, the deceased had to be incinerated immediately in consideration of potential epidemic. We ask you to inform us to which cemetery the local police authority should send the urn containing the deceased’s mortal remains. If we have not received any notification from you within 14 days, the urn will be buried elsewhere free of charge.

  We enclose two death certificates for any presentation to the authorities.

  Heil Hitler!

  Almost every piece of information in this document was false. “Myocardial weakness” had been picked from a list of false but plausible causes of death drawn up by the doctors. The date of Bühler’s demise was put forward a month, so that Grafeneck could claim his living expenses from the local authority. (This fraud, repeated tens of thousands of times, provided valuable funding for Aktion T4.) Mention of an epidemic and the police aimed to dissuade the bereaved from asking awkward questions, such as why their relative’s body had been cremated without their knowledge or consent. The narrow window in which to request the remains was designed to minimize the administrators’ workload and postage costs.

  Large numbers of relatives demanded urns nevertheless. Each of these was filled with a regulation seven pounds of ash from the heap—it didn’t matter whose remains they were—and stamped with the death number that had been written on the victim when they were picked up by the Gekrat. The urns were driven to Stuttgart, Ulm, and other cities nearby to be dispatched, as the volume of shipments would have attracted attention at the local mail office. Even so, people were suspicious, particularly when death notices in local newspapers showed several patients from one area dying at the same time and place. To get around this problem, Berlin ordered the creation of a “Stakeout Department” in the castle, which mapped the birthplaces and hometowns of the victims with colored pins on wall charts, and alerted staff to potential clusters. If a particular village or suburb was due to receive several letters from the Condolence Department, the dates and locations on the death certificates were adjusted accordingly.

  The SS men who lived and worked at Grafeneck performed their duties with enthusiasm and few apparent qualms. On the day Bühler was killed, a personal letter from the Grafeneck administrator Hans-Heinz Schütt was winging its way to his young s
tepbrother, Jürgen, who was about to be confirmed as a Christian. Without revealing Grafeneck’s purpose, Schütt took the opportunity to explain his happiness and pride at working for the secret “special commando” unit, and how this work aligned with his religious faith and his belief in the Führer:

  You have the great good fortune, dear Jürgen, to grow up in a time that no German has ever experienced before….We are going into a great, new Germany with God’s blessing, but without the prayers of the clergy. One does not build a house with prayers, but by courage and, if necessary, by the sword.

  There would only be one victor from the fortuitous conflict in which Germany was now engaged, Schütt wrote to his little brother. That victor would determine the future shape of Europe, indeed of the whole world. His name, of course, was “Adolf Hitler!”

  19.

  YOU WILL RIDE ON THE GRAY BUS

  In Bühler’s masterpiece Der Würgengel, the artist portrayed a choking man struggling on the ground, unable to breathe, as a blank-faced angel of death prepares to finish him with a luminous sword. It can be read as a portrait of the way he felt treated by the deity and by life, and as an uncanny premonition of his death, which came as he fought for breath on the floor of Hitler’s prototype killing plant, a doctor’s hand on the gas tap. The government’s propaganda stated that he and his fellow victims were killed for economic reasons, because Germany could no longer afford to keep them. In truth this brilliant artist, this “master of the first rank,” as Alfred Kubin described him, was murdered in the service of another sort of art project: Hitler’s Gesamtkunstwerk, his great and terrible design to refashion the Germans in accordance with his artistic vision, a stew of degeneracy theory, Wagnerian myth, late-period Romanticism, and his own furious psychopathology. The artist-dictator had set aside his pencils and paints to work with humanity, and at the time of Bühler’s death, this work was just beginning.

 

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