The Gallery of Miracles and Madness

by Charlie English

  Details of the shipment of Prinzhorn works to Berlin are contained in a letter of January 22 from Wilhelm Niederste-Ostholt, chairman of the Advisory Council of the Institute for German Cultural and Economic Propaganda, and also director of the Reich Propaganda Directorate in Munich (see Brand-Claussen, “Häßlich, falsch, krank”). The source for which works were sent comes from analysis of the so-called Leipzig list, an inventory of seventy to eighty works sent back to Heidelberg at the end of the Leipzig Entartete Kunst show, which is in the Prinzhorn archive. Numerous other works were not returned; one or two can be seen in press photographs of the subsequent exhibitions.

  Goebbels and Hitler visited the depot filled with “degenerate” art on January 14; Goebbels wrote it up in his Tagebücher the following day. The propaganda minister’s activities on February 26 are recorded in his diaries. He evidently had full control of the Berlin show—Pistauer stated that he had been to see it several times—despite not being there at the opening.

  Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reported on the opening in its February 27 edition.

  Fritz Kaiser’s full exhibition guidebook to Entartete Kunst is reprinted in Barron’s “Degenerate Art,” with English translations. It was closely coordinated with the physical show, which followed the same layout as the guide at Berlin and subsequent stations.

  The responses of the government-controlled press to Berlin and later legs of the show are cited in Zuschlag, Entartete Kunst, as are the reactions of Emil Stupp. Felix Hartlaub’s letter to his father is in Felix Hartlaub in seinen Briefen.

  Entartete Kunst opened on Friday, May 13, 1938, in Leipzig. Subsequent venues and dates were: Düsseldorf (June 18–August 7, 1938), Salzburg (September 4–October 2, 1938), Hamburg (November 11–December 30, 1938), Stettin (January 11–February 5, 1939), Weimar (March 23–April 24, 1939), Vienna (May 6–June 18, 1939), Frankfurt (June 30–July 30, 1939), and Chemnitz (August 11–September 10, 1939). On its later tour it is known to have been shown at Waldenburg (now Walbrzych, in Poland), from January 18 to February 2, 1941, and at Halle an der Salle from April 5 to April 20, 1941.

  The only known complete copy of the inventory of the more than 16,000 “degenerate” artworks that were confiscated by the Nazis is held by the V&A Museum in London. It can be read online at https://www.vam.ac.uk/​articles/​explore-entartete-kunst-the-nazis-inventory-of-degenerate-art#?c=&m=&s=&cv=&xywh=-1924%2C-303%2C7927%2C6044. Two other copies of an earlier version of Volume 1 (A–G) are known to have survived the war, and these are now held by the German Federal Archives in Berlin (R55/20744, R55/20745) (https://www.bundesarchiv.de/​EN/​Navigation/​Home/​home.html).

  The atmosphere at the sale in the Grand Hotel National in Lucerne was “stifling,” according to the French journal Beaux Arts, cited in Nicholas, The Rape of Europa. For Alfred Hentzen, it represented a moment when the German government had reached a degree of shamelessness and cultural decay unparalleled in the history of art. For further details of the auction, see Zuschlag; Rave, Kunstdiktatur im Dritten Reich; Grosshans, Hitler and the Artists; and Nicholas, The Rape of Europa.

  Franz Hofmann’s letters urging the burning of the rest of the material, and Goebbels’s responses, are cited in Zuschlag. The “final report” on the exploitation of “degenerate” art was submitted in the summer of 1941, though this was not the end of the affair: There remained around five thousand works, and there was no clarity about what to do with them. Some were destroyed, some were stolen by the likes of Hermann Göring, and some were given to art dealers to sell on the black market or added to personal collections that would come to light decades later. In February 2012, German prosecutors found the collection of the Nazi art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt in the Schwabing apartment of Gurlitt’s son, Cornelius: There were 1,406 artworks worth approximately $1.3 billion. During Goebbels’s whole action, according to Olaf Peters (“Genesis, Conception and Consequences,” in Peters [ed.], Degenerate Art), nearly 22,000 works were confiscated, of which around a quarter were destroyed, representing “a terrible loss and destruction of German culture that in some cases has yet to be compensated today.”

  I have estimated the value of the degenerate art program to the German war effort as being roughly equivalent to “the cost of two Panzer tanks” from various online sources, including Lawrence H. Officer, “Exchange Rates Between the United States Dollar and Forty-one Currencies,” http://www.measuringworth.com. Zuschlag, in Entartete Kunst, cites evidence that some of this money went to the Ministry of Education to compensate individual museums.

  PART FOUR: EUTHANASIE

  17. FOXES WITH WHITE COATS

  Gerhard Kretschmar’s name was first published by Ulf Schmidt in his 2007 biography, Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor. In older sources, such as Klee and Burleigh, the family is called “Knauer” or is anonymized, but the tragic details of his life and death are largely the same.

  Brandt revealed how familiar Hitler’s inner circle were with his ideas about euthanasia at the doctors’ trial at Nuremberg. After the end of the Polish campaign, Brandt was called to a meeting with Hitler at Obersalzburg, where he was told that “insane persons” who were in such a condition that they could no longer take any conscious part in life were about to be given “relief through death.” But this was far from the first inkling of Hitler’s desire to kill psychiatric patients, Brandt continued, since “in his book, Mein Kampf, Hitler had already referred to it in certain chapters, and the [sterilization] is a proof that Hitler had definitely concerned himself with such problems earlier” (IWM, Medical Trial, Case 1, in Burleigh, Death and Deliverance; Nuremberg trial documents at https://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu). Hitler’s 1933 musings over whether or not to murder psychiatric patients was recalled by Hans Heinrich Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery. Brack’s statement that Hitler intended to “eradicate those people who were kept in insane asylums” was also made at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial, cited in Thomas Stöckle and Eberhard Zacher, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat.

  A copy of the August 18 memo requiring midwives to notify them of babies born with certain conditions can be found in Klee, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat. Their fee, 2 RM, was worth approximately $100 in 2020.

  According to Burleigh, Hitler’s meeting with high-ranking officials, in which he told them Conti was to lead the killing program, was held before July 1939. Lammers’s account of the meeting is from the Nuremberg doctors’ trial, cited in Burleigh. The fallacy of the economic justification is in Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide.

  Among the eminent team of would-be referees invited to Berlin in July were Maximilian de Crinis of Berlin; Carl Schneider; Berthold Kihn of Jena; and Werner Heyde of Würzburg. The core group included Catel, Heinze, Wentzler, and the asylum directors Pfannmüller of Eglfing-Haar, Paul Nitsche of Sonnenstein near Pirna, and Wilhelm Bender of Berlin-Buch. Heyde’s recollection of what Bouhler said is in Klee, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat.

  Widmann recalled his interview with Arthur Nebe under interrogation in 1960 (Burleigh, Death and Deliverance). IG Farben, the company that supplied the killing carbon monoxide, was a conglomerate of six chemical companies, some of which have long since become household names: BASF, Bayer, and Agfa.

  The first trial killings by gas took place in Brandenburg in January 1940. Independently of the “euthanasia measures” beginning in the Reich, mass killings of mentally ill persons were already taking place from September 1939 until the beginning of 1940 in occupied and then incorporated Poland (Danzig–West Prussia, Wartheland), and also of patients from Pomeranian and East Prussian institutions.

  After the sterilization-stop order of September 1, 1939, the practice continued in an unofficial manner, albeit at a lower rate, until 1945, according to Klee, who estimates the total number sterilized at between 200,000 and 350,000. Many people were sterilized for political reasons, as whoever was against Hitler was judged to be feebleminded.
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  The creeping murder rate inside German asylums was bolstered by official instructions in certain regions, such as Saxony, where all psychiatric institutions were told to eliminate restless patients with overdoses even before the war (Klee). The murderous antics of Dr. Theato at Emmendingen were recalled by Mathes in “Die sogenannten ‘planwirtschaftlichen Maßnahmen’ aus Sicht des Ärztlichen Direktors.”

  The horrified account of a visit to Eglfing-Haar by Ludwig Lehner is cited in Burleigh, Death and Deliverance.

  Brandt and Bouhler’s killing operation moved into the Tiergartenstraße 4 villa that later gave it its name in April 1940. Before that, from December 1, 1939, the KdF leased three or four rooms in an office building, the Columbushaus, on Potsdamer Platz.

  For more about the “Meldebogen 1” reporting form, see notes to the Prologue. Mathes stated later, in “Die sogenannten ‘planwirtschaftlichen Maßnahmen,’ ” that his medical board thought the questionnaire “would be used either for scientific statistical purposes or for the preparation of a proper accommodation for the sick in the case of evacuation.” It wasn’t until the following spring that they learned about the program in more detail, he stated, and even then it wasn’t clear. He was surprised that only one institution was ever named in the transfers, which led him to believe it must be some sort of processing center. He discovered his patients’ real fate via their bereaved relatives.

  18. CHOKING ANGEL

  Much of my reconstruction of Aktion T4’s operation in Baden and Württemberg is derived from a conversation with Thomas Stöckle, the historian who has worked for many years at the killing station memorial; from Stöckle’s book with Eberhard Zacher, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat; and from Gabriel Richter, formerly a doctor at Emmendingen, editor of Die Fahrt ins Graue(n). Dr. Richter also gave me a copy of the transport list bearing Bühler’s name; other primary sources are published in Robert Poitrot, Die Ermordeten waren schuldig? Poitrot was the head neurologist of the French occupation zone in 1945.

  Mathes, in “Die sogenannten ‘planwirtschaftlichen Maßnahmen,’ ” recalled that the removal of patients “started surprisingly and overwhelmingly for us.” The rudeness and brutality of the Gekrat staff is attested to by various eyewitnesses in Klee, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat. Oswald Haug’s recollections are published in “Nazizeit—Verfolgung der Kirche” in Richter (ed.), Die Fahrt ins Graue(n): In them, he recalls a visit from a woman who asked if he knew what was happening to the transportees. Her husband had been at a government meeting in Berlin, she explained, where it was openly stated that the patients were to go to Grafeneck to be gassed. An official had explained that the country need have no fear about the procurement of raw materials during the war, since, for every “unworthy life” that was extinguished, the Reich could gain a lot of fat to make floor wax, while glue could be extracted from their bones.

  “Like pigs” is taken from Alfred Döblin’s account of the murders, written as early as 1946, “Fahrt ins Blauen,” which is republished in Richter (ed.), Die Fahrt ins Graue(n). The driver who reported being punched was named Mayrhuber and worked at Hartheim; the “unpleasant” experience of seeing the buses was recalled by Wilhelm Traub of the Marbach stud farm; the puncture-repairing patient was recalled by Hartheim driver Franz Hödl. All are cited in Klee, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat. Descriptions of Grafeneck’s geography are from my own visit, in April 2018.

  Stöckle notes that Dr. Baumhard arrived at Grafeneck in April 1940, meaning that Dr. Schumann or Dr. Hennecke would have examined and murdered Bühler in March. At the examination, around 2 percent of transported individuals were reprieved, commonly war veterans, foreign nationals, or particularly good workers.

  The coach house that held the gas chamber has since been demolished, but there are a handful of photographs of it. Stöckle describes the aftermath of the gassing thus: “The bodies of the dead and the ground were stained with stools, menstrual blood and vomit, some corpses were clawed together and had to be separated by force.”

  Maximilian Friedrich Lindner’s testimony of what he saw through the Hadamar spy window was given in a Frankfurt courtroom in 1947. It is cited in Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide.

  There is no testimony from a “burner” at Grafeneck, as none stood trial after the war; Nohel worked at Hartheim.

  The entitlement of all T4 staff to cheap dental work is from Burleigh, Death and Deliverance.

  A copy of Bühler’s “consolation letter” is in the Prinzhorn archive. According to Stöckle, the Stakeout Department was created at Grafeneck in the spring of 1940, on the orders of Berlin. Hans-Heinz Schütt’s letter expressing pride in his work is cited in Burleigh, Death and Deliverance.

  19. YOU WILL RIDE ON THE GRAY BUS

  Thomas Mann’s lament that Hitler no longer used pencils and paints but humanity as his canvas is from Arieli-Horowitz, Romanticism of Steel, citing “Bruder Hitler.”

  Details of the train shipment unloaded at Marbach are in Klee, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat. According to the T4 nurse Zielke, “The sick were taken from the destination station by bus to Grafeneck and killed on their arrival.” The details of Stähle, Conti, and Brandt watching the murders, and of a growing “gas tourism,” are in Klee, “Euthanasie” im Dritten Reich. It was Otto Mauthe, the senior medical officer in Württemberg, who heard the words “We are all killed!”

  Much of what is known about the lives and deaths of the Prinzhorn artists killed in the “euthanasia” programs has been published in Brand-Claussen, Röske, and Rotzoll (eds.), Todesursache: Euthanasie, the catalogue for a Prinzhorn collection show of the same name, which includes a large number of their artworks. For Werner, whose works came later to the collection, see Werner, Wilhelm Werner.

  The story of the expansion of the T4 program across the Reich is in the main drawn from Klee, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat; Friedlander; and Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, as well as Stöckle, who dates the last killing to December 13, 1940, three days after Baumhard invited Martha Fauser to his “camaraderie evening.”

  In “ ‘Euthanasie’ im Nationalsozialismus,” Gerrit Hohendorf summarizes the population’s response as follows: “Despite all the secrecy measures, there was considerable concern among the population about the murders. However, there was no general rejection of the killing of patients in the population. Apart from personal protests, there were also individuals who approved, and agreed with the idea that it was a release.”

  Richter, in an interview with the author, explained that all asylum directors were given some leeway: In later months, there were typically ninety patients on each transport list, of whom seventy-five would be taken, so the medical staff could “save” around fifteen. It was a way of making them complicit. In Richter’s view, Mathes’s actions went beyond that.

  In 1940, by a strange coincidence, Mathes bumped into the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, co-author of Die Freigabe der Vernichtung des lebensunwerten Lebens, in a streetcar in Baden-Baden. The T4 transports were still in progress, and Hoche had recently received the ashes of a relative who had been killed in the program. He told Mathes he “strongly disapproved” of the measures being taken, and supported the Emmendingen director’s attempts to sabotage it.

  The account of the resistance of Lothar Kreyssig is based on Klee, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat. The extract from Bishop von Galen’s sermon is in Burleigh, Death and Deliverance. Hitler’s threat to Galen is recorded in Hitler’s Table Talk.

  Statistics for the numbers of people taken from Emmendingen to be killed are in Richter, “Chronik der Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Emmendingen (1913–1949),” in Richter (ed.), Die Fahrt ins Graue(n). These were not all inpatients at the asylum; some seem to have been brought to Emmendingen for pickup.

  Hitler evidently thought it had been a mistake to give written orders for the euthanasia program, and he refused to put his signature on a piece of paper authorizing th
e killing of the Jews. However, it is inconceivable, according to Friedlander, that such a radical move would have been made without consulting him.

  Carl Schneider’s activities, including having children killed to order, are documented in Maike Rotzoll and Gerrit Hohendorf, “Murdering the Sick in the Name of Progress?”

  The last showings of the degenerate art exhibition are from Zuschlag, Entartete Kunst. The Neues Tageblatt review appeared in the edition of January 31, 1941. As to the fate of the Prinzhorn works that were with the show until the end, they may have been deemed not to have any value, unlike the professional works (which were returned), and therefore simply been discarded, though some suspect they have survived in private hands and will surface again.

  Zuschlag, in “An Educational Exhibition,” states that the show was seen by “more than 3.2 million people,” according to official figures.

  Olaf Peters, in “Genesis, Conception and Consequences” (in Peters [ed.], Degenerate Art) documents a “brutal, scorning return to the theme of ‘degenerate art’ during the war,” in which it was used to support the policy of extermination. This is the source of the details surrounding Der Untermensch’s publication. Der Untermensch is available online at https://archive.org/​details/​SS-Hauptamt-Der-Untermensch. Details of Freundlich’s fate are from Wikipedia.

  20. IN THE MADHOUSE

  The quote from Michael, “Geniuses consume people,” is cited in Goebbels, by Peter Longerich et al. My portrait of Hitler’s disastrous leadership from 1942 is partly drawn from Fest, Hitler; Kershaw, Nemesis; Speer, Inside the Third Reich; and from Hitler’s Table Talk. His obsession with art toward the end has been documented by Spotts in Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, and by Schwarz in Geniewahn. Schwarz does a remarkable job of establishing which artworks hung in which rooms in the Führerbunker and of analyzing the significance of the portrait of “Old Fritz” and the Linz model.