*
The Archive of the Dead In March 1997, a previously locked cellar under the old autopsy rooms at Steinhof was opened up and, inside it, the body parts of almost eight hundred children, all one-time ‘patients’ at the Spiegelgrund clinic, were discovered. The items removed from their corpses were stored in thirty-centimetre-tall glass jars, carefully labelled, numbered and lined up on the dusty shelving. No personal details are given on the labels. The specimens were sorted by age and gender (e.g. 4 J – it stood for: boy [Junge], aged 4) or body weight (e.g. 10 kg) but the labels usually also state the main diagnoses, written with blue ink that has faded over the years – Results: Normal; Diagnosis: Idiocy. All belong to what Doctor Gross has referred to in innumerable scientific articles as his personal set of anatomical specimens: a remarkable range of good-quality anatomical specimens … probably the greatest and most wide-ranging collection of its kind available anywhere in this country. Behind the grimy glass, whole brains or dissected bits of the central nervous system float in viscous formaldehyde solution; a child’s jaw with a preserved growth clinging to it like swollen seaweed; an entire face floating as if in a dream, with its eyes closed while its slightly parted lips curl in an expression of perennial wonder. Between the rows of tightly packed glass jars, the jars on the next rack of shelving can be glimpsed. An ever-unfolding perspective, as one line of shelves opens out into a view of another in a space that seems without end. The search for the identity of individuals will surely also go on forever, with the numbered jars being checked against case-note entries to find the diagnosis of the brain damage so that each anonymous specimen is seen to have been part of someone once alive. Whole body paralysis. Hermine A. Hermine is admitted to Spiegelgrund on 8 February 1943 and Doctor Illing’s diagnosis is profound idiocy (tief-stehende Idiotie). On the same day, the state committee in Berlin is notified of her case. The girl’s general health is ‘deteriorating markedly’ (a case note records ‘fever, 39 degrees’) but despite this, a full pneumoencephalographic investigation is carried out five days later. Doctor Illing has already scheduled the autopsy of Hermine’s body but wants a set of the images of the live brain tissue. After the skull X-rays, Hermine dies without regaining consciousness. Fifteen-year-old Ingeborg S. Ingeborg S suffers from paraplegia but also occasional muscle spasms and cramps. The case notes show that her fits are treated with Luminal. The girl has to be ‘tied’ so as not to ‘tear herself free’ during the night. Doctor Illing notifies the Berlin committee of Ingeborg’s case – his stated reason is that the Luminal has failed to bring about any ‘progress’ – and then she, too, is subjected to a pneumoencephalography, even though she fell ill with measles the week before and, as the day nurse notes, ‘runs a high temperature’. Two days later, Ingeborg succumbs to ‘bilateral pneumonia’. As in all other cases, it is Doctor Uiberrak who carries out the post-mortem examinations, usually with either Gross or Illing present as curious observers – as Doctor Uiberrak made a special point of stating in the pre-trial interviews. The brain is lifted out and placed in the correct strength of formaldehyde solution. A selection of glands are also removed and preserved. The girl has been transformed into a nameless object to be taken out and examined, again and again. The dead don’t die just once. They keep dying.
*
The Last Interview with Doctor Gross In April 1997, a court case is once again brought against Heinrich Gross. This time, the charges are based on new evidence that includes a document recovered from an old Stasi archive in Berlin. In it, Doctor Illing asks the committee to approve a retrospective grant to the clinic in order to finance the work done by Doctor Gross during the summer of 1944, in view of his record of ‘support for the great task of the Reich committee’. Gross had previously claimed that, during the summer of 1944, he was resting and, in any case, he had not set foot in the clinic since he was called up to join the Wehrmacht in 1943. This time round, the prosecutor can prove that Doctor Gross was fully engaged in the work of the clinic throughout the summer, and that he, during that time, examined, notified the authorities and subsequently ‘treated’ twelve children or more, of whom the youngest was ten days old when examined, and the oldest fourteen. Hannes Pichler was one of these children. He was seen by Gross on 19 July 1944. Hannes was three months old and had been born with a severe malformation of the face. Evaluations of the child’s psychological or neurological status were ‘impossible in the circumstances’, according to Doctor Gross’s notes. Following routines that were by then established since years back, the boy is taken to the infant ward in pavilion 15, pneumoencephalograms are produced, and Berlin is notified of the case. Presumably in view of the child’s malformed face, the committee recommends ‘treatment’ and the baby dies on 26 August that year. But even though both the record of the examination and the report to Berlin carry his signature, Doctor Gross continues to deny everything.
ANONYMOUS INTERVIEWER: Does the name Hannes Pichler mean anything to you?
DOCTOR GROSS: No.
INTERVIEWER: It doesn’t remind you of anything at all?
DOCTOR GROSS: No, nothing whatsoever.
INTERVIEWER: But you have, after all, referred to his case in scientific articles published in 1956, 1957 and 1973. Also, in the articles you discuss histological specimens of his brain tissue that you prepared yourself.
DOCTOR GROSS: So what if I did? It still doesn’t mean that I know who he was.
INTERVIEWER: This is a case of a child admitted to Spiegelgrund, who died or was murdered there. You examined him and he died during the time you had taken on the post as Doctor Illing’s deputy.
DOCTOR GROSS: It is possible, but I don’t remember anything about it. Not by now.
INTERVIEWER: But Illing wasn’t there! Who was ultimately responsible when Doctor Illing wasn’t in his post?
DOCTOR GROSS: I have no idea. Decisions may well have been made earlier. I don’t remember.
And so, Doctor Gross, through the medium of his team of lawyers, continues to contradict and deny everything, despite the prosecution’s presentation of solid evidence for his participation in twelve murders. In parallel with these denials, the defence also attempts to persuade the court that Doctor Gross is incapable of following the proceedings. The court is shown medical certificates stating that the defendant is suffering from a whole array of illnesses: diabetes; chronic infection of the bladder; angina; impaired mobility; and partial deafness. 21 March 2000 turns out to be the last day of the trial. Doctor Gross is eighty-four years old, his back is bent and he moves with small steps, dragging his feet across the floor. He wears a cap pulled down over his eyes and leans on his stick while gripping the arm of his lawyer’s son, who slowly escorts him to the defendants’ seats. He sinks rather than sits down, then slumps so that all you see under the brim of his cap are his large, broad-rimmed glasses and a part of his bulbous nose. As the hearing gets underway, Doctor Gross sags so much that he almost falls off his chair, a disaster prevented only when a court attendant reaches out to support him at the last moment. By now, the judge is worried enough to incline towards the defendant: Mr Gross, do you understand what I’m saying? he asks. The reply is indistinct but something like: not so well. A bit. At this juncture, the lead advocate in the Gross team opens his document case and produces a trump card: a recently done CT scan of his eminent client’s brain. It demonstrates advanced dementia, a process which, according to the psychiatrist who had requested and then analysed the scans, would bring about memory loss and recurring states of confusion. It takes only another five minutes for the court to decide that, in view of the defendant’s failing health, the proceedings should be postponed for another eighteen months. However, Doctor Gross is spared more court attendances. He dies on 15 December 2005, aged ninety, in his home town of Hollabrunn. He seems not to have recovered from his selective memory loss. And he is never convicted of the murders of the Spiegelgrund children, or even of being an accomplice to the murders.
DOCTOR GROSS: No – no! With t
he utmost respect to the court. I have never, be it directly or indirectly, participated in acts that could have led to deaths, of children or of adults.
Never. Exactly that: never. I don’t remember.
I remember nothing whatsoever.
One night, as I lay in bed listening to the flow of the river, I felt it was true; I was like a river with the earth below and the air above. The true river had stopped, and I was the one who flowed farther and farther away, all alone in the center, trees on both sides.
From Death in Spring (La mort i la primavera) by Mercè Rodoreda. Translation from the Catalan by Martha Tennant (Open Letter Books, University of Rochester, 2009)
XVII
The Nameless Dead
From one day to the next, without any noticeable resistance, a hospital in Wien turned into a camp for children with alleged mental handicaps. At Spiegelgrund, these children were subjected to tests of their fitness for life; they were measured, reported on, maltreated, tortured and murdered. The authorities slandered their parents and operated behind their backs. ‘Once the child has died, its relatives tend to stop caring’, one murderous doctor wrote in someone’s case notes. He does not mention that he had prevented the parents from being in contact with their child before as well as after the murder. He would later deny what had happened and stay silent until all was forgotten. Some of the children escaped from this lethal institution, others survived inside it. All those who survived have for decades borne witness to what went on at Spiegelgrund. They have described, carefully and circumstantially, the individuals who tormented and murdered the children there but who still have, unhindered, carried on living and working in this city as if their pasts were clean. After the sentence passed in the court of Oberlandsgericht Wien on 30 March 1981, it became possible to declare everywhere in this nation that Doctor Gross, a senior consultant, had collaborated in ‘the killing of an unknown number of children diagnosed with mental illness, mental retardation or severe malformations (who may or may not have been ill for genetic or other reasons) and that the unknown number of victims, while likely to have been very large, at least can be stated with certainty as amounting to several hundred’. Here, in the city graveyard of Zentralfriedhof, more than six hundred urns have been buried. As of today, we are aware of seven hundred and eighty-nine murdered children. The number grows with every passing year. Today, we also know that no less than fifteen per cent of the total population of Wien were destined to be eliminated. This was the estimate of the ‘required negative selection’ recommended by eugenics specialists as an essential measure of ‘racial hygiene’. Even so, the doctor who had made euthanasia part of his work could continue in the post he held in 1981: medical director at Steinhof. At the time, the Secretary of State for Healthcare was Alois Stacher. Gross became a recognised forensic psychiatrist. The Minister of Justice at the time was Christian Broda. Gross kept his post at the Boltzmann Institute. The research community did not find it problematic in the slightest when we presented evidence proving that the specimens used by Doctor Gross were taken from murder victims. Herta Firnberg was the Minister for Science and Bruno Kreisky the Chancellor of Austria. At the time, only the survivors, who are represented here today, protested against this terrifying indifference. Since 1981, they have been striving towards a single aim: that the children who were reduced to medical specimens should be mourned and buried. What Antigone demanded for her brother, slain by Creon, is what we, too, have demanded for two decades on behalf of the innocent children who died at Spiegelgrund: a grave. Why deny them a grave for so long? Why has society refused to believe in the witness statements made by the survivors? Why has everyone seemingly chosen to trust the forensic medical men and women, and not the historians of medicine? The answer is there for all to see but no one cares to take it on board. We therefore want to make it clear, in front of everyone here, that the injustice has not been wiped from the slate of history, that all the perpetrators have not been punished but that they have been forgotten through a deliberate loss of memory, a forgetfulness legitimised by the authorities. Justice has not been done. There is not even a verdict of ‘guilty’. To question the usefulness and value of human life brings nothing but misery and it must never again be done, never and by no one …
The Chosen Ones Page 48