The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  The forms, each marked by three junior experts with a red plus sign for death, a blue minus sign for life, or (occasionally) a question mark for further consideration, were sent to one of three senior physicians for confirmation or amendment. Their decision was final. When the completed forms were returned to the T-4 office, the names of the patients selected for killing were sent to the T-4 transport office, which notified the institutions where they were held and sent an official to make the necessary arrangements. Often the lists were so arbitrarily drawn up that they included patients valued by institution directors as good workers, so not infrequently other patients were substituted for them on the spot in order to fill the required quota. Patients who were not German citizens or not of ‘Germanic or related blood’ also had to be reported. This meant in the first place Jewish patients, who were the subject of a special order issued on 15 April 1940: some thousand Jewish patients were taken away and gassed or, later on, taken to occupied Poland and killed there, over the following two and a half years, on the grounds that Aryan staff had been complaining about them and could not be expected to treat them. Directors of psychiatric hospitals, like Hermann Pfannmüller on 20 September 1940, proudly reported at the appropriate moment that their institution was now ‘Jew-free’ after the last Jewish inmate had been killed or taken away.253

  For all categories of patients selected for killing, the procedure was more or less the same. On the appointed day, large grey coaches, of the kind used by the postal service to provide public transport in rural areas, arrived to take the patients away. Although the T-4 doctors and functionaries repeatedly asserted that these patients were insane and incapable of either making decisions for themselves or of knowing what was going on, this was in no sense the case for the great majority of those selected for killing, even if they were supposedly ‘feeble-minded’. Some patients initially welcomed the diversion provided by the coaches’ arrival, believing the assurances of the staff that they were going on an outing. But many realized only too well that they were being taken to their death. Doctors and nurses were not always careful to deceive them, and rumours soon began to course through Germany’s asylums and care institutions. ‘I am again living in a state of fear,’ wrote a woman from an institution in Stettin to her family, ‘because the cars were here again . . . The cars were here again yesterday and eight days ago as well, they took many people away once more, where one would not have thought. We were all so upset that we all cried.’ As a nurse said ‘See you again!’ to a patient in Reichenau as she got on the bus, the patient turned and replied that ‘we wouldn’t be seeing each other again, she knew what lay before her with the Hitler Law’. ‘Here come the murderers!’ one patient in Emmendingen shouted as the bus arrived. Staff often injected anxious patients with heavy sedatives so that they were loaded on to the coaches in a semi-comatose state. But some patients began to refuse injections, fearing they contained poison. Others offered physical resistance when they were being loaded on to the coaches, and the brutal violence meted out to them when they did so only increased the anxieties of the others. Many wept uncontrollably as they were hauled on board.254

  Once they arrived at their destination, the patients were met by staff, led to a reception room and told to undress. They were given an identity check and a perfunctory physical examination aimed mainly at gaining hints for a plausible cause of death to enter in the records; those with valuable gold fillings in their teeth were marked with a cross on the back or shoulder. An identifying number was stamped or stuck on to their body, they were photographed (to demonstrate their supposed physical and mental inferiority) and then, still naked, they were taken into a gas chamber disguised to look like a shower room. Patients still anxious about their situation were injected with tranquillizers. When they were inside the chamber, the doors were locked and staff released the gas. The patients’ death was anything but peaceful or humane. Looking through the peephole, one observer at Hadamar later reported that he had seen

  some 40 to 50 men, who were pressed tightly together in the next room, and now slowly died. Some lay on the ground, others had sunk into themselves, many had their mouths open as if they could not get any more air. The way they died was so full of suffering that one cannot speak of a humane killing, the more so since many of those killed may well have had moments of clarity about what was happening. I watched the procedure for about 2-3 minutes then left, because I could not bear to look any longer and I felt sick.255

  4.Killing Centre of ‘Action T-4’, 1939-45

  The patients were normally killed in groups of fifteen to twenty, though on some occasions many more were crowded into the cramped chambers. After five minutes or so they lost consciousness; after twenty they were dead. The staff waited for an hour or two, then ventilated the chamber with fans. A physician entered to verify death, after which orderlies generally known as ‘stokers’ (Brenner) came in, disentangled the bodies and dragged them out to the ‘death room’. Here selected corpses were dissected, either by junior physicians who needed training in pathology, or by others who had orders to remove various organs and send them to research institutes for study. The stokers took the corpses marked with a cross and broke off the gold teeth, which were parcelled up and sent to the T-4 office in Berlin. Then the bodies were put on to metal pallets and taken to the crematorium room, where the stokers often worked through the night to reduce them to ashes.256

  The families and relatives of the victims were only informed of their transfer to a killing centre after it had taken place.257 A further letter was sent by the receiving institution registering their safe arrival but warning relatives not to visit them until they had safely settled in. Of course, by the time the relatives received the letter, the patient was in fact already dead. Some time later, the families were notified that the patient had died of a heart attack, pneumonia, tuberculosis, or a similar ailment, from a list provided by the T-4 office and augmented by notes made during their examination on arrival. Aware that they were in some sense acting illegally, the physicians used false names when signing the death certificate, as well as, of course, appending a false date, to make it appear that death had occurred days or weeks after arrival, instead of merely an hour or so. Delaying the announcement of death also had the side-effect of enriching the institution, which continued to receive the benefits, pensions and family subventions paid to the victims between the time of their actual death and the time officially recorded on the certificate. Families were offered an urn containing, they were told, the ashes of their unfortunate relative; in fact, the stokers had simply shovelled them in from the ashes that had accumulated in the crematorium after a whole group of victims had been burned. As for the victims’ clothes, they were, the relatives were informed, sent to the National Socialist People’s Welfare organization, although in reality, if they were of any quality, they usually found their way into the wardrobes of the killing staff. The elaborate apparatus of deception included maps on which the staff stuck a coloured pin into the home town of each person killed, so that if too many pins appeared in any one place, the place of death could be ascribed to another institution; the killing centres, indeed, even exchanged lists of names of the dead to try to reduce suspicion. Maximum efforts were made to keep the entire process secret, with staff banned from fraternizing with the local population and sworn not to reveal what was going on to anybody apart from authorized officials. ‘Anyone who does not keep quiet,’ Christian Wirth told a group of new stokers at Hartheim, ‘will go to a concentration camp or be shot.’258

  Within the killing centres, the atmosphere frequently belied the impression of cold calculation conveyed by the numerous forms and documents that it generated. Those who actually carried out the murders were frequently drunk on the special liquor rations they received. They were reported to indulge in numerous casual sexual affairs with one another to take their minds of the all-pervasive stench of death. At Hartheim the staff held a party to celebrate their ten-thousandth cremation, assembling
in the crematorium around the naked body of a recently gassed victim, which was laid out on a stretcher and covered with flowers. One staff member dressed as a clergyman and performed a short ceremony, then beer was distributed to all present. Eventually no fewer than 20,000 were gassed at Hartheim, the same at Sonnenstein, 20,000 at Brandenburg and Bernburg, and another 20,000 at Grafeneck and Hadamar, making a total of 80,000 altogether.259

  IV

  Despite the secrecy that surrounded it, the involuntary euthanasia programme could not long remain unnoticed in the world beyond the T-4 bureaucracy and its killing centres. People living near Hadamar noticed clouds of smoke rising from the institution’s chimneys not long after the arrival of each transport, while members of staff who went on shopping expeditions or drank in the local inns on the rare occasions on which they were allowed out inevitably talked about their work. Others noticed when the buses arrived in their locality to take mental patients away; on one occasion, early in 1941, coaches loaded up patients from an institution in Absberg not inside the gates but on the town square, in full view of the local people, who began to protest, weeping and shouting abuse, as the patients began to resist and were manhandled on board by burly orderlies.260 More widespread still were suspicions among relatives of those taken to the killing centres. Some actually welcomed the prospect of their children or dependants being killed; the less perceptive allowed their fears to be dulled by the deceptively reassuring messages that came out of the institutions themselves. But most parents and relatives had their own networks, and knew others in a similar situation to their own, having encountered them at hospital visits or, earlier on, at the doctor’s surgery. They knew instinctively what was happening when they learned that their dependants had been transferred to somewhere like Hartheim or Hadamar. Sometimes they tried to take them home before they could be put on a transport list. One mother wrote to the director of her son’s institution on hearing that he had been transferred: ‘If my son is already dead then I request his ashes, because in Munich all kinds of rumours are going around and for once I want clarity.’ Another woman wrote in the margin of the official notification of her aunt’s transfer to Grafeneck: ‘In a few days we will now receive the news of poor Ida’s death . . . I dread the next letter . . . We won’t even be able to go to Ida’s grave and one doesn’t even know whether the ashes that are sent will be Ida’s.’ With increasing frequency, fear became anger when the official death notice arrived. Why, the sister of one murdered man wrote to the director of the institution from which he had been transported, had he been taken at all if he had been so sick that he had died so soon afterwards? His illness could not ‘just have occurred yesterday’. ‘In the end,’ she told him furiously, ‘we are dealing with a poor, sick, human being in need of help, and not with a piece of livestock!!’261

  Some judicial officials began to notice the unusual frequency of deaths among the inmates of institutions and some prosecutors even considered asking the Gestapo to investigate the killings. However, none went so far as Lothar Kreyssig, a judge in Brandenburg who specialized in matters of wardship and adoption. A war veteran and a member of the Confessing Church, Kreyssig became suspicious when psychiatric patients who were wards of court and therefore fell within his area of responsibility began to be transferred from their institutions and were shortly afterwards reported to have died suddenly. Kreyssig wrote to Justice Minister G̈rtner to protest against what he described as an illegal and immoral programme of mass murder. The Justice Minister’s response to this and other, similar, queries from local law officers was to try once more to draft a law giving effective immunity to the murderers, only to have it vetoed by Hitler on the grounds that the publicity would give dangerous ammunition to Allied propaganda. Late in April 1941 the Justice Ministry organized a briefing of senior judges and prosecutors by Brack and Heyde, to try to set their minds at rest. In the meantime, Kreyssig was summoned to an interview with the Ministry’s top official, State Secretary Roland Freisler, who informed him that the killings were being carried out on Hitler’s orders. Refusing to accept this explanation, Kreyssig wrote to the directors of psychiatric hospitals in his district informing them that transfers to killing centres were illegal, and threatening legal action should they transport any of their patients who came within his jurisdiction. It was his legal duty, he proclaimed, to protect the interests and indeed the lives of his charges. A further interview with G̈rtner failed to persuade him that he was wrong to do this, and he was compulsorily retired in December 1941.262

  Kreyssig was a lone figure in the persistence of his attempts to stop the campaign. Concerned lawyers and prosecutors had their doubts quelled by the Ministry of Justice, and no legal action ensued. More widespread, perhaps, were the concerns of religious leaders. Despite the transfer of many patients to state institutions since 1936, a very large number of the mentally and physically handicapped were still cared for in hospitals and homes run by the Churches and their lay social welfare organizations, the Inner Mission in the case of the Evangelical Church, and the Caritas Association in the case of the Catholic. Some directors of psychiatric institutions run by the Inner Mission tried to delay the registration and transfer of their patients, and one in particular, Pastor Paul Gerhard Braune, director of a group of such hospitals in Ẅrttemberg, also enlisted the aid of Pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, a celebrated figure in the world of Protestant welfare organizations. Bodelschwingh ran the famous Bethel Hospital in Bielefeld and refused point-blank to allow his patients to be taken off for killing. The Regional Leader of the Party in his area refused to have him arrested, since his reputation was not only national but even worldwide; Bodelschwingh was legendary for his selfless application of Christian principles of charity. In the middle of the stand-off, shortly after midnight on 19 September 1940, an aircraft appeared over the hospital and proceeded to bomb it, killing eleven handicapped children and a nurse. Goebbels was quick to direct the press to go into overdrive against the barbarity of the British - ‘Infanticide at Bethel - Revolting Crime’, screamed the headline in the German General Paper. How, asked the state-controlled media, could the British single out such a well-known centre of Christian charity? Bodelschwingh himself was only too aware of the irony. ‘Should I,’ he asked the local state administrator, ‘condemn the deed of the English and shortly afterwards take part in an “infanticide” on a far greater scale at Bethel?’263

  Two days after the attack, a German official who was one of the American correspondent William L. Shirer’s informants came to his hotel room and, after disconnecting the telephone, told him that the Gestapo were killing off the inmates of mental institutions. He hinted strongly that the Bethel Hospital had been bombed by a German plane because Bodelschwingh had refused to co-operate. By late November Shirer’s investigations had yielded results. ‘It’s an evil tale,’ he noted in his diary. The German government, he wrote, was ‘systematically putting to death the mentally deficient population of the Reich’. One informant had given the number as 100,000, which Shirer considered an exaggeration. The American reporter had found out that the killings were taking place on Hitler’s written order and were being directed through the Leader’s Chancellery. His informants had also noted a bunching of death notices of patients at Grafeneck, Hartheim and Sonnenstein, put in by relatives, sometimes in coded language that made it clear they knew what was going on: ‘We have received the unbelievable news . . . After weeks of uncertainty . . . After the cremation had taken place we received the sad news . . .’ German newspaper readers, he thought, would know how to read between the lines of such notices, which is why they had now been banned. The programme, Shirer concluded, was ‘a result of the extreme Nazis deciding to carry out their eugenic and sociological ideas’.264

  Bodelschwingh and Braune went to see Brack to protest against the killings, and then, joined by the famous surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch, they lobbied Reich Justice Minster Gürtner. Neither meeting had any effect, so Braune compiled a detailed dossi
er on the murders and sent it to Hitler, apparently in the belief that he knew nothing about it. At the end of his long and detailed exposition, Braune asked for the programme to be brought to a halt. ‘If human life counts for so little, will that not endanger the morality of the entire people?’ he asked rhetorically. He was told that Hitler was unable to stop the programme. On 12 August 1940, Braune was arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo; but he was released on 31 October 1940, after a short time, on the condition that he would stop his campaign.265 Theophil Wurm, Protestant Bishop of Ẅrttemberg, wrote to Interior Minister Frick on 19 July 1940, asking for the murders to be brought to a halt: