Your son, Alfred Wödl, on the date as shown above, was admitted to the clinic for children under the control of Wiener Städtische Jugendfürsorgeanstalt known as ‘Am Spiegelgrund’, 109/14 Sanatoriumstrasse 2, Wien.
On 15 February, Doctor Heinrich Gross examined Alfred and also took a photograph of him. In the photo, the miracle-boy Alfred Wödl stares with serious, eerily enquiring eyes at the doctor and his camera. Perhaps the child had not quite grasped what an enlightening observation Gross felt that he had just made. The doctor added a triumphant note to Alfred’s record: The child is half Jewish! (15.02.41). Clearly, the pieces had clicked into place: Alfred was born out of wedlock, the Wödl woman had never disclosed who the father was and the boy’s condition had never been ascribed to a credible medical cause. Meanwhile, Anny Wödl succeeded in getting in touch with the Spiegelgrund clinic’s medical director, Doctor Erwin Jekelius. Many years later, she tells the court that she had completely given up on hoping to save her child and says this about the meeting with Jekelius:
All I wanted was to stop them from transferring Alfred to somewhere else. If it was necessary for him to die then I at least wanted to make sure that he wouldn’t suffer. So I asked Doctor Jekelius in case he felt that he could not save my son’s life, he could surely see to it that Alfred’s death was as quick and painless as possible. If he did, or if he passed the task on to someone else and, if so, what that person did – I don’t know.
Anny Wödl sits looking down and crying quietly. The courtroom is still and silent. The chairman of the bench calls the witness Anna Katschenka. The chief witness for the prosecution. Now, the atmosphere among the public changes to outrage. Someone screams murderess! when Katschenka is escorted into the court. She walks at her usual slow pace but to the public it looks as if she tries to resist the two court attendants who hold on to her arms. To those who know her, she seems wearier than before. She will now be asked to testify about the actions of the defendants, who are seated together, Hübsch and Illing on either side of Türk. They all stare at her with inexpressive faces. Faces set in stone. It is impossible to tell whether they feel ill at ease or are supremely indifferent. The prosecutor starts speaking at once about the so-called mercy killing of children. He reads aloud from a text which sets out the events following a child’s admission: the physical examination followed by a report to the committee in Berlin, and the subsequent response by Spiegelgrund staff to the ministry’s decision about the child, including any recommended ‘treatment’.
Have I described all this correctly, Mrs Katschenka?
Anna Katschenka doesn’t know what to say. She looks at the stone faces opposite her, then down at her hands – worn, rough-skinned but clean hands, used to doing what they intend, effectively, be it to tuck in a corner of a sheet or compress a vein before inserting the syringe needle; they are supportive, helpful and sometimes punitive hands and not the kind that are mere tools. You cannot ignore what they have been up to. Sometimes, she has thought that her hands are her: all she is. And sometimes, at night, she has put them on her face and thought that they should stay there, stay for so long that they fuse to her skin. She doesn’t know if this would be a gesture towards expressing shame or grief or abandonment or all of these things at the same time. But she knows that she will sit with her face resting on those hands until the sentence is announced and the stone faces will observe her with their high-minded or indifferent eyes and everyone will think that she is to be punished as it is only what she deserves, given the acts these hands have carried out.
PROSECUTOR: Can you tell me when and by what means you were first informed that the euthanasia – mercy killing – was practised on the clinic’s children?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I had never in my entire professional life seen patients who were as ill as these children and, in no other hospital, experienced anything like this clinic.
PROSECUTOR: That is not what we’re talking about at present. When did you find out that children were euthanised at the clinic where you were working?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I had heard rumours suggesting that adult, mentally ill patients at Steinhof had been killed.
PROSECUTOR: As for the children …
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I knew nothing about that.
CHAIRMAN OF THE BENCH: [interrupts] Mrs Katschenka, you have stated in interviews prior to this trial that even Doctor Jekelius systematically terminated the lives of children who had been deemed unfit to live by the committee in Berlin and that your allotted task was precisely this: to judge who was due for termination and who should continue to be under observation. It was the point of the whole enterprise, if you excuse the levity. Children were subjected to euthanasia in the clinic. Is that not so?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: There might have been certain suspicions. prosecutor: Suspicions about what?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: About the procedures not being quite right but more …
PROSECUTOR: But more?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: More than that I can’t say.
CHAIRMAN: [interrupts] Excuse me, Mrs Katschenka, but you initially were the Ward Sister and later also Deputy Matron. It was part of your conditions of work – indeed, of your duties – to see to it that the sick children were treated according to doctor’s orders. It is simply not possible that you remained unaware of what the medical staff prescribed for the children.
ANNA KATSCHENKA: Yes … that’s true.
CHAIRMAN: Or are you suggesting the children themselves got hold of these powerful drugs?
[Ripples of nervous laughter in the audience.]
ANNA KATSCHENKA: […]
CHAIRMAN: In the preparatory hearings, you stated the following about how the ‘special treatments’ were carried out: [reads] For those who were able to eat more or less normally, we mixed the medication into the food. For very ill infants who couldn’t swallow, we administered drops of morphine in very small doses. The larger children were mainly given Luminal. Furthermore, in your answer to the question ‘And everyone knew that treatment of this kind would end in a death?’ you replied unconditionally that yes, it would would end in death, and yes, everyone did know. On whose orders did you do these things?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: [weeps]
PROSECUTOR: Were the orders in fact not given by the three defendants, seated here in the courtroom today? the stone faces
ANNA KATSCHENKA: Doctor Illing … and Doctor Türk both paid great attention to the well-being of the children and there were no objections to the manner in which they treated the children.
CHAIRMAN: [speaking sharply] Mrs Katschenka! Who or what has caused you to say these things today which are completely the opposite of what you said in the investigation interviews? During the time that has passed since then, what kinds of pressure you been under? And who has exerted this pressure?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: [weeps] the stone faces
CHAIRMAN: I would like the two court attendants to step forward.
[The court attendants approach hesitatingly.]
Please, Mrs Katschenka, will you stand up now?
[Katschenka attempts to stand.]
I hereby order that this witness is arrested and imprisoned with immediate effect on the grounds that she is suspected of being an accomplice to murder. From now on, this woman is under arrest.
Much celebration in the courtroom. Anna Katschenka does try to stand up but on hearing the words of the most senior judge present, she sinks back onto her seat and almost falls forward, burying her face in her hands. When the attendants put their hands under her arms to support her, her weeping makes her shoulders shake so much it is almost impossible to raise her. For a brief moment, the woman, her face streaming with tears, looks up at the three stone faced doctors on the defendants’ seats: superiors whom she for this last time could not bring herself to betray. When she is led away, the audience is in uproar. This is more than anyone dared to hope for: a murderess who is arrested right in front of witnesses and victims. The three stone faces stay where they are. Illing turns his hea
d slightly away, as if he found the entire performance repulsive.
*
Atonement The sentence in the separate trial of Anna Katschenka was announced in April 1948. She was condemned to eight years in prison with the additional punishment of three months’ hard labour every year. She was to do her time in Maria Lankowitz, a women’s prison near Graz. The prison housed more than three hundred inmates who had to sleep in cells shared between up to twenty prisoners at a time. The cells lacked toilets and running water. The only source of warmth was a big stove in the middle of the room which was only sparingly supplied with fuel, even in the winter. Of course, tightly packed human bodies give off their own warmth. During the first few months, before her cell was changed, she had nowhere to keep her personal belongings and nowhere to sit except on her bunk. The prison board did not encourage differentiation between inmates on grounds of their offences. Women who had been served more than year-long terms for theft, fraud or falsification of official documents sometimes shared cells with murderers on life sentences. For a while, Anna Katschenka was courted by a younger woman who had poisoned and killed her own daughter. To look at, this woman seemed ordinary enough. She kept clean and neat, was always polite and respectful, if perhaps a little distracted at times. If spoken to, she inclined her head and smiled enigmatically with her eyes fixed on the floor or a nearby wall. Her interest in Katschenka was quite rational: she had read about the Steinhof trials and was simply keen to know how Katschenka and her colleagues had ‘gone about doing it’. They never shared a cell, which was just as well, because Anna Katschenka soon came to dread her like the plague. The woman was a curse that had taken on human shape. Katschenka tried her best to avoid having to pass her in the corridors and always left the prisoners’ canteen as soon the poisoner turned up. She even went to the length of formally asking to be moved to the so-called Labour Building where prostitutes and drug addicts were held. Later on, she withdrew inside herself and deliberately avoided all contact with people, warders and fellow prisoners alike, and stayed silent unless ordered to speak up. She was haunted by a recurring image of herself alone on the defendant’s seat. Again and again, other details from the trial proceedings also came back to her mind. Officially, the prosecution’s case was not just against her but also her colleagues in pavilion 15: Maria Bohlenrath, Erna Storch, Emilie Kragulj and Cläre Kleinschmittger. But she had been given to understand that the police had failed to find and arrest any of them, despite extensive searches. What would have happened if she hadn’t returned to the hospital that day? What would have happened if she had stuck to her original witness statement regardless of Illing and Türk’s confessions and washed her hands of the accusations, insisting, as had Marianne Türk, that what she had done only amounted to carrying out orders given by others. After all, decisions about treating or not treating were made in Berlin and not in the clinic at Spiegelgrund. I only did my duty. Now and then, she forced herself to go even further back in time: what if she hadn’t applied for that post at Spiegelgrund with Jekelius? But at that point, her speculations had to stop. There had been a war on. If she couldn’t earn, what would her family have lived on? She was her father’s supporting arm, her mother’s map of the world. She felt now that, by being locked up, she had let her patients down and betrayed her responsibility towards them. The days went by, and the years, each day being added onto the previous one like a small cog in a wheel that moved a tiny little bit closer to the end of her prison term. All the while, another bigger wheel, whose cogs made it move in the opposite direction towards her own ageing and death, seemed to drive her deeper and deeper into darkness. The burden of punishment never became lighter but instead ever more impossible to endure. Altogether, she was to spend four years, five months and eight days of her life in prison, including the time in police cells. Throughout, she who had spent her professional life watching and judging others had to put up with being watched herself, having every aspect of her body and personality measured and weighed, scrutinised and analysed. Her lawyer’s application for parole led to her being subjected to a wide range of medical examinations in April 1950. The records show that her already sparse hair had thinned further and gone grey. Her body, always a little on the sturdy side, had swelled and hardened. Katschenka cannot stand being touched by strangers and bursts into tears easily. She is said to suffer from cyclical attacks of depression and these pronounced mood swings, together with her enhanced sensitivity and marked secretory activity, were considered by the examining doctor to be symptoms of excess thyroid hormone production, which would also fit with her irritability. From the application for parole, it is also clear that Katschenka has gained exceptionally high approval ratings for good behaviour. She works as an assistant in the prison hospital and is praised by the doctors for her ‘diligence and sober attention to detail, her willingness to help at all times and her gentle and sensible manner’. She is allowed to leave the prison in December 1950, but her release is conditional and the remainder of her sentence has been changed into a five-year-long trial period. She is now allowed to look for real work and manages to land a job after about six months of applying: the post is in a children’s hospital, the St Anna Kinderspital on Kinderspitalgasse in Wien’s 9th Bezirk. Now she can work with children, the kind of nursing she loves better than any other, as she has claimed in her witness statement and parole application. But the St Anna Kinderspital is a private hospital. Her position in the city healthcare system was lost the moment she was sacked from Spiegelgrund. A permanent post, with the possibility of a payout on retirement of what she had saved for her pension, is out of her reach unless she becomes fully rehabilitated. So far, all her applications have been refused. In September 1956, when a last application has again been turned down, she appeals in a letter to the Minister of Justice, Otto Tschadek, pleading that he should intervene on her behalf:
Most highly esteemed Minister,
I believe that I need not try to express how hard this refusal has been for me other than to say that, after all these years of worry and grief, I hoped once more to have the right to feel a worthy human being. The documentation I have enclosed demonstrates that, since my release from prison, I have strenuously devoted myself to return to my previous profession of nursing, and also what difficulties my efforts encountered. I have to support my elderly parents and also build a new existence for myself. My sentence entailed the loss of my post in the Gemeinde Wien after 21 years of service and also my old-age pension since I can work only in privately run institutions. In January 1951, I applied to Gemeinde Wien for reinstatement in the healthcare services but have to this day not had any reply even though influential civil servants have intervened on my behalf.
The Chosen Ones Page 46