As winter turned to spring, the KdF ordered Grafeneck to ramp up its activities. The transport squadron would be given an additional bus, which meant it could carry seventy-five people at once, and the gas chamber was enlarged to fit them all. Other victims were shipped in by train. At 8:00 a.m. on Thursday, March 7, a giant rail transport of 457 patients arrived at the little station at Marbach an der Lauter. Deep snow had fallen in the Swabian Jura, and it took the SS eight hours to unload them all. Egon Stähle, Leonardo Conti, and Karl Brandt came to oversee the operation, taking their turns at the gas chamber window, but there were too many to kill in a single day, so 138 women were temporarily housed in the nearby asylum at Zwiefalten. They were brought back at the start of April, when Stähle returned with a new group of dignitaries from Berlin who wanted to see the women die. Memorable on this occasion was a victim who screamed “We are all killed!” as the carbon monoxide began to take effect. Stähle’s guests then observed the ovens, noting with surprise how much smoke was produced. Over the following weeks, a sort of gas tourism grew up in the Swabian Jura. Some visiting physicians were even invited to take part by performing the cursory final examinations.
They murdered 9,839 people at Grafeneck that year, including five Prinzhorn artists. The first of these was Mathäus Lorenz Seitz, an adventurer and French Foreign Legion veteran who had lived for two years with a pasha in Hyderabad. In 1921, Seitz was diagnosed as suffering from “delusions” and sent to Wiesloch asylum, where he spent the next two decades. He was killed at Grafeneck on or around February 29, 1940. Ernst Bernhardt was a former art teacher who drew an eerie self-portrait with a gallows over his head while at the Heidelberg clinic. After living for much of the 1930s in the asylum at Rastatt, he was taken to Grafeneck and killed in April 1940. Konstantin Klees loved to depict his full, well-groomed beard in yellow and green pencil and signed his designs “master baker, confectioner, and grocer.” He was murdered on or after July 24. Grafeneck’s gas chamber took two more artists in October: Johann Faulhaber, a shoemaker whose drawings bore a striking resemblance to work by Picasso and Kubin, and Josef Heinrich Grebing, the former chocolate salesman who had designed the beautiful “Air Ark” ocean liner for the skies.
As Grafeneck scythed through the psychiatric population in southwest Germany, Berlin expanded the “euthanasia” program across the Reich, constructing new industrialized murder facilities based on the Swabian prototype in six strategic locations around Germany and Austria. These new centers were referred to by the letter codes B, Be, C, D, and E. Grafeneck took the letter A.
Killing station B was built in a converted prison in Brandenburg an der Havel, forty miles west of Berlin, and opened within days of Grafeneck, in January 1940. The SS “Death’s Head” unit that staffed this plant was overseen by the ambitious young Austrian psychiatrist Irmfried Eberl, who would later command the Treblinka extermination camp. Nine thousand seven hundred and seventy-two patients would be murdered at Brandenburg, according to the official count, and at times there were so many corpses in the ovens that the flames that leapt from the top of the chimney were sixteen feet long. The operation produced a horrific smell of roasting human flesh that tended to settle over the city, but this problem was solved in the summer, when the cremation units were moved to a shed some miles away, where the corpses were delivered by a Reichspost van every day at 5:00 a.m. The body of the Prinzhorn artist Paul Goesch would have been burned here. A painter of bright watercolors with religious themes, Goesch was gassed at Brandenburg in August 1940, although killing-center staff wrote on his death certificate that he died in Austria in September, both to throw his relatives off and to fraudulently claim extra money for his upkeep.
In November, Eberl moved on to Bernburg, near Halle an der Saale, to establish killing center Be. Bernburg was unusual in that it was built in the wing of a functioning regional asylum whose staff had to be sworn to silence about the murders that were taking place on the premises. The hundred or so T4 employees who worked at Bernburg did little to ingratiate themselves with the deaconesses who ran the asylum, partying so late and so hard that the killing center was internally known as the Nuttenstall, or “whorehouse.” Almost nine thousand patients would be killed at Bernburg, including the Prinzhorn artist Karl Ahrendt, who drew intricate, psychedelic patterns and brightly colored symbols. Ahrendt had once been a coachman and was committed in 1907 after marching around Berlin’s Alexanderplatz in a general’s uniform. He was in his late eighties when he was murdered, on or after March 18, 1941.
Killing center C was at Hartheim, a medieval castle outside Hitler’s hometown of Linz, where operations began in January 1940. Of the six murder facilities, Hartheim killed by far the largest number, at 18,269. The victims included Alois Dallmayr, who liked to draw androgynous figures with lots of curly hair, and was gassed here in August or September 1940, and Anton Fuchs, a woodcarver who probably died in February 1941.
In April 1940, Grafeneck’s expert gas doctor, Horst Schumann, was recalled to Berlin, and his role at the castle was taken over by Ernst Baumhard, a newly graduated medic and enthusiastic party member. Schumann was sent to Pirna-Sonnenstein, near Dresden, where he opened killing center D. Among the 13,720 victims of this former fortress were a half dozen Prinzhorn artists, including four women. Gertrud Fleck and Johanna Melitta Arnold had both lived in the Pirna-Sonnenstein asylum for more than three decades. Fleck was an amiable patient who had a canary and loved to paint large, brightly colored flowers. She was transferred out of Pirna in November 1939 while the T4 men installed their equipment, and brought back a year later to be murdered. Arnold, a creator of rich, energetic pastel drawings, lived at Pirna until 1934; she returned to Pirna to die on July 18, 1941. Auguste Opel and Anna Margarete Kuskop, meanwhile, are represented in the Prinzhorn collection by a single drawing each: Opel by a ghostly, almost imperceptible townscape, Kuskop by a pastel portrait in which the subject’s head is tilted slightly, eyes closed, as if absorbed in an inner retreat. This may be a likeness of a friend she met in the asylum system, Miss Alice, to whom Kuskop once wrote: “Above all, I ask you not to forget me.” Opel was transported to Pirna on December 6, 1940; Kuskop on May 8, 1941. They were both gassed.
Wilhelm Werner, the artist who drew cartoonish pictures of his own sterilization, also died at Pirna-Sonnenstein. In theory, the procedure should have protected him from “euthanasia” since he was already unable to pass on his allegedly defective genes, but his care givers at Werneck were keen to be rid of him, noting on his T4 registration form that he was a “weak-minded chatterbox” with “a very primitive imagination.” He was taken to Pirna on October 6, 1940.
By the end of that year, T4 had killed thirty-five thousand psychiatric patients and disabled children, and the decision was taken to close Grafeneck, which had far outstripped its initial target of killing 20 percent of psychiatric inpatients in southwest Germany. At the start of December, young Dr. Baumhard invited his counterpart from Zwiefalten, Dr. Martha Fauser, to a “camaraderie evening” at Grafeneck to celebrate his unit’s departure: The evening included an invitation to watch the gassing of a transport of women. The facility was shut down soon afterward and Baumhard went on vacation with his staff—or most of them, anyway: He had killed his chief nurse by shutting her in the gas chamber by accident.
In the new year, the Grafeneck team moved en masse to Hadamar, a village conveniently placed for the Wiesbaden-Limburg-Cologne motorway, to open station E. The gas chamber at Hadamar would kill ten thousand people in its eight months of operation. One of these was the Prinzhorn artist Peter Zeiher, a convicted murderer who protested his innocence and drew elaborate reconstructions of the crime scene to try to prove it. Another was Gustav Sievers, the artist who had inspired Max Ernst, and who liked to draw humorous, bosomy women riding to and fro on bicycles, or dancing with overpowered men.
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It was claimed later that the population
at large knew almost nothing about the covert action to exterminate German psychiatric patients. In reality, the vast killing enterprise was impossible to hide, and the perpetrators couldn’t always be bothered to keep their activities secret. The awful truth is that, while some members of the public expressed grave concern, there was no widespread rejection of the policy for at least a year and a half, and many people supported it, or even benefited from it.
During the period of the killing factory’s operation, Grafeneck provided a significant economic boost to its remote corner of the Swabian Jura. Garages in nearby villages were employed to service and repair the vehicles used by the Gekrat transport squadron, and T4 employees kept the castle farm working throughout, which meant regular business for the local butcher, among others, despite the signs warning of an epidemic. There was a close and symbiotic relationship, in fact, between the castle and the local people. Hans-Heinz Schütt ran daily errands to the nearby village of Münsingen, delivering milk and post and procuring food and supplies. Schütt knew Münsingen well: His routine was to place orders he had been given by his SS colleagues with the grocer, the baker, the butcher, the bookstore, the garage, the plumber, the pharmacy, the greengrocer, and the hardware store, then breakfast at a local inn, before returning to pick up the goods. Schütt wasn’t the only Grafeneck employee to enjoy close relations with the locals. Others picked up local women, and drank heavily in the inn at Marbach, where they were inclined to boast about their day jobs to the regulars. Sexual licentiousness seems to have gone hand in hand with mass murder: Even Viktor Brack, the KdF department head, was accused of taking part in orgies with his secretaries.
Given these indiscretions, it wasn’t difficult to draw a connection between the comings and goings of the buses—filled with patients when they arrived, empty as they left—and the foul-smelling black smoke that emanated from the chimneys. The stench at Hartheim was so nauseating, one villager recalled, that when the workers returned home from the fields every evening they couldn’t eat their food. The local people’s disquiet eventually reached Christian Wirth, Hartheim’s brutal personnel manager, who ordered them to a meeting in a bar, where, after telling them the smell was caused by the distillation of old and waste oils, he threatened to send anyone who spread rumors about human burnings to a concentration camp. Such threats did not stop the gossip. Schoolchildren who saw the buses roaring around Hadamar would whisper, “Here comes the Mordkiste [murder box] again,” and insult each other with “You’re so dumb, you’re going to bake in the Hadamar oven!” Popular admonishments in Swabia included, “You too will go up the chimney!” and “You will ride on the gray bus!”
Even so, for twenty long months no branch of civil society—not the medical profession, not the legal system, not even the churches—tried in a concerted way to stop Aktion T4. This was partly a testament to Hitler’s grip on the country, and partly thanks to the approval of a swathe of the German establishment: It was, after all, two senior members of the legal and psychiatric professions, in the form of Binding and Hoche, who had made the case for the annihilation of “life unworthy of life” in the first place. By the time National Socialist bullying and propaganda had done its work, many non-Nazis were at least resigned to the program, if not openly supportive. What little resistance there was came from brave individuals acting alone, and this was easily quashed.
Emmendingen’s director, Dr. Mathes, is a case study of a psychiatrist who opposed the policy. He said later that he only learned what was happening in the summer of 1940, a surprisingly late date given that hundreds of his charges had already been killed, and that Egon Stähle had explained the whole plan to a group of Württemberg asylum directors in mid-February. Mathes was horrified by his discovery, and subverted the operation as much as he could by asking relatives to remove vulnerable patients from the asylum, or at least take them out on the day their transfer was scheduled. He also took as many names off the transport lists as he could, although the T4 planners had built an element of doctor-led selection into the process, probably to implicate them in the killing. Mathes’s behavior eventually earned him a rebuke from the senior medical officer in Baden, Ludwig Sprauer, who first threatened him—“You may be sent to Grafeneck yourself!”—and then put together a special transport of the patients he had tried to save. This seems to have broken Mathes. He took sick leave in November 1942 and later was granted retirement on the grounds that his behavior had been “unacceptable to the party.” Like others who resisted, he was replaced by a willing member of the NSDAP.
Lothar Kreyssig, a conscientious district judge in Brandenburg, offered more effective resistance. When Kreyssig learned in the summer of 1940 that patients under his guardianship were being murdered, he sent an urgent report to the Reich minister of justice, Franz Gürtner, and forbade institutions in his jurisdiction to transport any more of their charges. Kreyssig was shown Hitler’s authorization letter, but he argued correctly that such an order had no legal standing in the Reich, no matter who had signed it. (T4 officials knew this: A group of them, including Schneider at Heidelberg, had drawn up a law that would legitimate the action, but Hitler consistently refused to pass it on the grounds that he would then have to defend his policy publicly.) At length, Gürtner told Kreyssig: “If you cannot recognize the Führer’s will as a legal basis, then you cannot remain a judge.” Kreyssig was put on leave three months later and retired in 1942. Thereafter, the German judiciary ignored the murders.
Opposition from the churches was what Hitler feared most, but considering that half of T4’s victims were taken from ecclesiastical or private care homes, their resistance was surpisingly slow and ineffectual. Once again, the significant interventions came from a few brave individuals, notably Emmendingen’s pastor, Oswald Haug, who served a stint in Dachau for his criticisms, and the bishop of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen. On July 28, 1941, not long after Aktion T4 began operations in Westphalia, Galen lodged a complaint with the police, and when they did nothing, he took the matter to the pulpit of the Lambertikirche in Münster. There, on August 3, he delivered a fire-and-brimstone sermon attacking the murder program:
If you establish and apply the principle that you can kill “unproductive” human beings, then woe betide us all when we become old and frail! If one is allowed to kill unproductive people, then woe betide the invalids who have used up, sacrificed, and lost their health and strength in the productive process. If one is allowed forcibly to remove one’s unproductive fellow human beings, then woe betide loyal soldiers who return to the homeland seriously disabled, as cripples, as invalids….Woe to mankind, woe to our German nation, if God’s holy commandment “Thou shalt not kill!”…is not only broken, but if this transgression is actually tolerated, and permitted to go unpunished.
Galen’s sermon was widely disseminated: The Royal Air Force even dropped copies of it over Germany in a leafleting raid. At last, the open secret was a matter of public debate. The Nazis responded with alarm and repression. Those ordinary people found disseminating Galen’s message were fired, sent to concentration camps, or even executed, while some in the regime called for Galen to be hanged. Warned by Goebbels that this could destroy support for the National Socialists in Westphalia, Hitler put off the confrontation, contenting himself with mob-style threats which he delivered to his entourage:
I am quite sure that a man like the Bishop von Galen knows that after the war I shall extract retribution down to the last farthing. And that if he does not succeed in the meanwhile in getting himself transferred to the Collegium Germanicum in Rome, he may rest assured that in the balancing of our accounts no “t” will remain uncrossed, no “i” left undotted.
Nothing ever happened to the bishop, and three weeks after the sermon, on August 24, Hitler ordered Brandt to halt the program. Galen’s intervention, combined with growing signs of popular dissent, may have influenced this decision, but it was not the victory against the regime’s
mass murder program that it appeared, since by this time Aktion T4 had met the target set by the Reich Working Party for Mental Asylums of killing 70,000 people. In regions where the program had begun early, such as Baden, the planners had even secretly increased their goal, and had killed more than half of the psychiatric patients in state institutions. There had been 1,245 inmates at Emmendingen at the end of 1939: Between March 1940 and June 1941, 1,002 patients were picked up from the asylum in nineteen transports and taken to the killing centers.
Neither did Hitler’s “euthanasia-stop” order end the killing; it simply signaled a change of tactics. Asylum directors would be asked to continue the program covertly, within their own walls, by starvation, overdoses, or neglect, in a period known as “decentralized” or “wild” euthanasia. Though murder in such cases is harder to establish, this phase is estimated to have killed a further 130,000 people, including several Prinzhorn artists. Joseph Schneller, the “schizophrenic master” whose work had inspired Dalí, died of complications associated with starvation in July 1943. Eva Bouterwek, a gifted painter of self-portraits, died in Ueckermünde, a notorious killing institution during “wild euthanasia,” in April 1944. Karl Moser, who drew dark, heavy pencil works punctured with small holes, was killed in Kaufbeuren, in Bavaria, by an infection typically related to lack of food. He died on May 2, 1945, six days before the Allies declared victory in Europe.
The Gallery of Miracles and Madness Page 22