by Therese Down
Von Galen had investigated. Catholic parishioners throughout Munster were asked to tell their priests if they had had any exposure, direct or otherwise, to strange occurrences in hospitals. Had they had children taken away from them? Did they know people whose children had been registered as genetically defective and then “required” to reside in special paediatric units? The response was overwhelming – and convincing.
When Cardinal Orsenigo admitted to Cardinal von Preysing that Muller had come to the nunciature and tried to see him – had left him a similarly explicit letter – von Preysing conducted his own enquiries. The bishop’s palace was an administrative headquarters for financial and official church business throughout the region of Brandenburg and Berlin. There were many lay staff who could discreetly liaise with records offices in Berlin, especially where Catholics were employed in administrative roles. It eventually transpired that Karl Muller was born in Leipzig to Catholic parents. Discreet connections with the parish priest, Father Friedmann at St Mary’s, Leipzig, confirmed the parents still attended Mass. Von Preysing visited Father Friedmann.
Father Friedmann confided to the Bishop of Berlin that Karl Muller seemed to have got into some “official trouble”. The priest very much feared that Karl had fallen foul of the law or had taken his own life. He had written a letter, which Karl’s father had shown him. The letter read like a suicide note. His family in Leipzig, including his wife, were very distressed by his disappearance. Karl was not responding to any attempts to contact him, and the SS met all enquiries with vague statements about his being “unavailable”.
When von Preysing pressured Orsenigo to use his official contacts to discover the fate of Karl Muller, the nuncio reluctantly complied. He was, though, he made it clear, most uncomfortable about this foray into Reich business. A few days later, over an excellent dinner, at which the nuncio’s esteemed SS guests drank far too much Riesling, the cardinal remarked “casually” that some young SS chap had turned up on unstated business some weeks past – “name of… let’s see –” he had paused, agreed the Riesling was excellent – “Muller? Kurt, no Karl, Muller?” The name elicited an unguarded guffaw from one of the Reichsministers present. Orsenigo added pragmatically that he had, of course been far too busy to see Muller. The cardinal sighed, lowered his eyes and unfolded his pristine napkin, spread it over his upper thighs.
The Reichsminister who had laughed was refilling his crystal wine glass, but with his left hand he simultaneously made a slit throat gesture. If it had been a certain Officer Karl Muller, SS, who had come to see the nuncio, he remarked, then he wouldn’t be bothered by any more such house calls. The cardinal raised a quizzical eyebrow, cocking his head a little to the left in an attitude of polite interest. Apparently, the statesman continued, pausing mid sentence to gulp his wine, Himmler himself had decreed Muller’s death by beheading following several weeks of interrogation in Tegel prison.
The nuncio said “Ah!” and nodded, as though the puzzle were solved. “Oh, Celeste,” he had exclaimed, “these beans look so fresh and appetizing!” Cardinal Orsenigo smiled warmly at his housekeeper as she deposited the bowl of steaming vegetables on the table, genuinely pleased to change the subject.
And so it came to be that Cardinal von Preysing, Bishop of Berlin, discovered that Karl Muller had been executed as a traitor to the Reich, without even recourse to a People’s Court. The bishop wrote a brief note to that effect to Cardinal von Galen, the Bishop of Munster, expressing his heartfelt regret at the fate of this good man.
On the day Karl Muller should have arrived at Mauthausen to meet Himmler, Ernst Schroeder was also there. It was a strange day for Ernst. He had arrived at the new extermination camp by chauffeured car, having received a request by telephone from Himmler himself to be present at the gassing trials. It had been Himmler’s intention to establish Schroeder’s unequivocal loyalty to T4 in the light of Gunther’s revelations that his wife, Schroeder’s daughter, had confided in her father her distress that a T4 doctor had ordained her child’s death, with her husband’s concurrence. Himmler had intended to arrest and incarcerate Muller while Schroeder watched, just to make it absolutely clear to everyone involved that treachery would be discovered and ruthlessly punished.
It had been most vexing for Himmler that his experiment was thwarted; that Gunther was dead and then Muller failed to show. Vexing and boring. Himmler had to spend hours watching a sweating and irascible Professor Schroeder train clumsy SS personnel to mix prussic acid with potassium cyanide in increasingly precise and lethal quantities. And then there was a series of tedious trials, in which seemingly endless droves of stinking and bedraggled prisoners were dispatched at intervals.
The Mauthausen experiment was eventually pronounced a success, though. By the time the third gassing had finished, and over 300 prisoners were piled in long lines of three bodies deep in a large space masquerading as a shower room, it was confirmed that this method of killing people using cyanide was more effective than the carbon monoxide methods applied previously. Modifications to the chamber, to equip it with pipes for conducting cyanide gas or, better still in Schroeder’s estimation, Zyklon B canisters, would be an improvement. Karl Muller’s assignment to design more chambers that allowed for both methods of mass murder would be given to another engineer at T4, with an operational date of three months from the day’s trials.
And, it was fair to say, the day had not been entirely devoid of amusement. Himmler had been able to announce to Ernst, over coffee, that his son-in-law was dead. Oh yes, Himmler confirmed gravely. Dead. Shot at home – possibly by Schroeder’s own daughter. It seemed she had discovered her daughter was to be euthanized.
Himmler avoided looking at Ernst straight away, put sugar cubes in his coffee and stirred it carefully. “Oh, yes!” he added, as if he had forgotten something important. “Apparently – according to Gunther, anyway – it was Karl Muller who revealed Agnette’s fate to Frau Gunther. Karl Muller! Can you believe it?”
As Himmler lifted his cup to his mouth, he contemplated Ernst with an assumed neutrality of expression that the latter could not return. The professor was visibly trembling. His jaw was working furiously.
“So sorry, Schroeder,” exclaimed Himmler, as though apologizing for some minor breach of manners; “this must be a shock.” He sipped his coffee again, looking away as if sensitive to Ernst’s battle with tears.
At last the scientist was able to speak, though his voice was barely audible. “Does Hedda know of my… involvement with T4?” There was a long pause while Himmler savoured the question, put down his cup carefully on its saucer and sat back. He folded his hands in his lap and his mouth twisted as if he were weighing the possibility. Ernst began to doubt Himmler had heard him. He sat forward in his chair and spoke again. “That I knew about Agnette? Does Hedda know?”
“Now there’s a thing,” said Himmler at last. “I don’t know, Professor. Walter is dead. I should imagine the exchange before the trigger was pulled was pretty… heated. People say such indiscreet things under those circumstances, don’t they?” For the interrogative, Himmler looked directly at Ernst. The professor was unable to respond or return the gaze. He frowned deeply and closed his eyes, as though in pain. Himmler leaned forward to retrieve his coffee cup as a tear escaped the corner of Ernst’s left eye. Himmler watched it run beneath the heavy brown frame of his spectacles and disappear into his moustache.
For around three hours that day, Ernst watched prisoners die from cyanide poisoning at Mauthausen. Finally, the whole process took what he had gauged theoretically would become the standard ten minutes or so. Some of the men cried loudly before the gas was released into the chamber. Some cried quietly and some simply hung their heads. All were naked, humiliated, already half dead from labour and starvation. Ernst watched them retch and vomit, convulse, defecate and finally asphyxiate. He watched the camp guards shoot the ones who wouldn’t die. His hands shook increasingly violently as he recorded the details of the experiments. B
y the time it was all over, he could barely sign the test papers to authenticate them.
Himmler watched Ernst and smirked. He had few doubts that the good professor of chemistry and director of IG Farben would be a very loyal Reich employee from now on.
All the way back to Berlin that night – he could not contemplate remaining in Mauthausen – Ernst sobbed quietly in the welcome darkness and solitude of the chauffeured car. That he had been unable or unwilling before to confront the reality of what he now did for a living seemed to him stupid beyond comprehension. And then he thought of Agnette; how she would have died from starvation or drug overdoses deliberately administered while she lay helplessly staring at the sky through a hospital window. And now – now Hedda knew about him and his part in all this… horror. He had no doubt of it. He knew how Walter loved to goad and provoke. His son-in-law would have taken great delight in denouncing Ernst to Hedda. It may even have been the reason she pulled the trigger. If Hedda had done that! His lovely, innocent daughter who had so recently declared her love for him, now caught up in a mire of deceit, betrayal, murder – certainly doomed to execution.
He relived again and again the moment he had so tenderly lifted Agnette from her hospital gurney to her own bed the day she had been brought home from Brandenburg hospital. How happy that day had been. How happy he had made Hedda on that day.
Ernst asked the chauffeur to drop him off at his office in Berlin. He needed to get something, he said. No, the driver needn’t wait. Relieved to be dismissed, the chauffeur had driven home at once. It was two a.m.
At his desk, Ernst appeared composed once more. He leaned on the desk and joined his hands, staring ahead as if he were trying to think his way through some difficult calculation. At last, with a sigh, he bent to his left and opened a drawer in his desk. Taking from it a bunch of keys, he arose and crossed the office to a large metal cabinet, then fumbled with the keys to isolate a small silver one, with which he unlocked a drawer and pulled it open. It revealed perfectly arranged white boxes in rows. He removed a box, examined it for a moment, took it to his desk and once more sat down. Then without further hesitation, Ernst opened the box, took out a cyanide capsule, put it in his mouth and bit down hard.
A HISTORICAL EPILOGUE FOR THE READER
No consideration of the horrors that debauched Germany in the decade 1935 to 1945 is complete or accurate without deference and gratitude to those Germans who never accepted what was happening and who fought Hitler on a front where he could never hope to defeat them: the spiritual. Often, they paid with their earthly lives, but we cannot know this side of the grave what armies they joined and led in eventual, resounding victory.
Kurt Gerstein, on whose experiences and troubled life the character of Karl Muller is loosely based, was a Christian. He was beaten up and arrested repeatedly in the mid to late 1930s for speaking out against Nazism. He was expelled from the Nazi party. However, inexplicably for some, he joined the SS in 1941 and became SS Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein. Many think his decision was prompted by the T4 euthanizing of his mentally ill sister-in-law. It seems Kurt may have wanted to influence things from the inside. Indeed, Christopher R. Browning, a historian, claims Gerstein was “a covert anti-Nazi who infiltrated the SS…”, and in a letter to his wife, Gerstein wrote: “I joined the SS… acting as an agent of the Confessing Church.”
But Gerstein’s work inevitably required him to do things wholly in conflict with his faith and political motivation. Because he was an engineering graduate who began to study medicine (his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of war), Gerstein was appointed Head of Technical Disinfection Services for T4. He witnessed terrible atrocities in the course of his job and also, inevitably, contributed significantly to them – for example, by supplying Zyklon B to Auschwitz.
Gerstein wrote many letters and reports on the atrocities committed by Hitler’s government throughout the war, and he tried to alert the Vatican and representatives of the Catholic church, as well as several foreign officials, to what was happening in the death camps and hospitals throughout Germany, Poland and Austria. But his missives and appeals had little or no effect. He died a war crimes prisoner in 1945 – an alleged suicide, but he may have been murdered by other SS prisoners. His death, as his life, remains problematic and mysterious.
Albert Goering, Hermann Goering’s brother, was a fierce opponent of Nazism, using his connections and influence to save many Jews and Resistance prisoners from execution. He often persuaded his brother – and even on one occasion, it is alleged, the brutal and terrifying SS general Reinhard Heydrich – to release prisoners from concentration camps. He is known to have forged passports and release documents, and to have set up bank accounts that he used to deliver people from certain death or incarceration. Albert is credited with many heroic acts of bravery and kindness, fiercely protecting his workers in the Pilsen factory where he was Export Director from the cruelties and censure of the SS.
It is even reported by eyewitness survivors that Albert once took off his jacket and got down on his knees to assist a street-cleaning detail of Jews who had been ordered to scrub a pavement with toothbrushes for no other reason than that this would be humiliating.
Cardinal von Galen’s three famous “Road of Pain” sermons, delivered in 1941, were secretly copied throughout Germany and caused outrage for good and bad reasons, but Hitler dared not touch him, for fear of the public outcry that would ensue, for von Galen was much loved by the tens of thousands of Catholics in Munster. Von Galen’s fierce and fearless condemnation of Hitler’s Reich’s atrocities earned him the epithet “the Lion of Munster”.
On Sunday the 3rd August 1941, in St Lambert’s Church, Munster, the Bishop Clemens August Count von Galen delivered a sermon that included these words:
Dearly beloved Christians! The joint pastoral letter of the German bishops, which was read in all Catholic churches in Germany on 26 June 1941, includes the following words. “It is true that in Catholic ethics there are certain positive commandments which cease to be obligatory if their observance would be attended by unduly great difficulties; but there are also sacred obligations of conscience from which no one can release us; which we must carry out even if it should cost us our life. Never, under any circumstances, may a man, save in war or in legitimate self-defence, kill an innocent person.”
I had occasion on 6th July to add the following comments on this passage in the joint pastoral letter:
For some months we have been hearing reports that inmates of establishments for the care of the mentally ill who have been ill for a long period and perhaps appear incurable have been forcibly removed from these establishments on orders from Berlin. Regularly the relatives receive soon afterwards an intimation that the patient is dead, that the patient’s body has been cremated and that they can collect the ashes. There is a general suspicion, verging on certainty, that these numerous unexpected deaths of the mentally ill do not occur naturally but are intentionally brought about in accordance with the doctrine that it is legitimate to destroy a so-called “worthless life” – in other words to kill innocent men and women, if it is thought that their lives are of no further value to the people and the state. A terrible doctrine which seeks to justify the murder of innocent people, which legitimizes the violent killing of disabled persons who are no longer capable of work, of cripples, the incurably ill and the aged and infirm!
… Article 211 of the German Penal Code is still in force, in these terms: “Whoever kills a man of deliberate intent is guilty of murder and punishable with death.” No doubt in order to protect those who kill with intent these poor men and women, members of our families, from this punishment laid down by law, the patients who have been selected for killing are removed from their home area to some distant place. Some illness or other is then given as the cause of death. Since the body is immediately cremated, the relatives and the criminal police are unable to establish whether the patient had in fact been ill or what the cause of death actually was
. I have been assured, however, that in the Ministry of the Interior and the office of the Chief Medical Officer, Dr Conti, no secret is made of the fact that indeed a large number of mentally ill persons in Germany have already been killed with intent and that this will continue.
Article 139 of the Penal Code provides that “anyone who has knowledge of an intention to commit a crime against the life of any person… and fails to inform the authorities or the person whose life is threatened in due time… commits a punishable offence”. When I learned of the intention to remove patients from Marienthal I reported the matter on 28th July to the State Prosecutor of Münster Provincial Court and to the Münster chief of police by registered letter, in the following terms:
“According to information I have received it is planned in the course of this week (the date has been mentioned as 31st July) to move a large number of inmates of the provincial hospital at Marienthal, classified as ‘unproductive members of the national community’, to the mental hospital at Eichberg, where, as is generally believed to have happened in the case of patients removed from other establishments, they are to be killed with intent. Since such action is not only contrary to the divine and the natural moral law but under Article 211 of the German Penal Code ranks as murder and attracts the death penalty, I hereby report the matter in accordance with my obligation under Article 139 of the Penal Code and request that steps should at once be taken to protect the patients concerned by proceedings against the authorities planning their removal and murder, and that I may be informed of the action taken.”
I have received no information of any action by the State Prosecutor or the police.
I had already written on 26th July to the Westphalian provincial authorities, who are responsible for the running of the mental hospital and for the patients entrusted to them for care and for cure, protesting in the strongest terms. It had no effect. The first transport of the innocent victims under sentence of death has left Marienthal. And I am now told that 800 patients have already been removed from the hospital at Warstein.