Persecutions of Siniti and Roma, Hereditary Ills, Asocials and Homosexuals
Source: M. Burleigh and W. Wippermann, The Racial State, Germany 1933-1945 (Oxford, 1991), pp.113-122, 136-156, 167-176, 182-192.
Having selected a number of suitable asylums, including Grafeneck, Hadamar, Bernburg, Brandenburg, Hartheim and Sonnenstein, SS personnel carried out technical "modifications" and teams of selected medical and nursing staff moved in. In the latter case, group initiation and indoctrination were employed to minimise the likelihood of dissent. The forms marked with red "+" were sent to Gekrat, which forwarded lists of names to the asylums concerned. The lists of names were usually longer than the number of those to be taken away, a device used to involve the asylum staff in the "selection" of their own charges. The lists of names were accompanied by precise instructions on the patients' belongings or on the need to restrain or sedate persons who became difficult. A standard letter, notifying the patients' relatives of the transfer was to be sent out after the person had been relocated. 23
Although at first those transferred were sometimes glad to be going on an outing, with complaints from those left behind, this mood soon gave way to terror at the regular arrival of the vans which never brought patients back. Although those involved in the program preferred to delude themselves that those transferred were unaware of their fate, there is substantial evidence to the contrary. Long-term residents were severely traumatised by being removed from their accustomed habitat; others tried to cling on to nursing staff they knew and trusted or uttered a few words of apparent resignation; some had to be put in strait-jackets or handcuffs to get them into the vans. Asylum staff subsequently began to encounter deep suspicion in the course of carrying out injections or electro-shock therapy.
The patients "selected" were transferred to special asylums where they were subjected to a perfunctory medical check, photographed, and killed in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, or vans into which carbon monoxide was released from the front cab. Their corpses were burned in crematoria, whose ill-designed chimneys sometimes sent flames five metres high and which spread a pall of noxious smoke over the surrounding countryside. Relatives received notification of the patients' transfer and information that he/she has arrived safely', followed a week or so later, by a schematic letter of condolence announcing the person's demise. Sometimes these were given a personal touch, as in this extract from a letter to the parents of a small girl: Today the asylum accounting office received your credit transfer of RM20 intended for flowers for the grave of your little daughter Irmgard ... Concerning your little daughter, we can report that Irmgard was still overjoyed with the little coat, and above all with the lovely little dolly, which she had in her arms to the very end.' 24 Irmgard was in one of 275 (numbered) graves, each of which contained four corpses. The cause of death was usually selected from a range of diseases whose common characteristics were an absence of visible symptoms ΓÇô unless they existed already ΓÇô and a sudden onset. The extermination centres took elaborate precautions to conceal large number of deaths occurring in any one place. Each had its own registry office engaged in the falsification of death certificates, and each employed couriers to post the urns of ashes in surrounding towns.
Despite these measures, the "euthanasia" program quickly became an open secret. The victims' clothing was returned to the original asylums. Families received two urns when they had one member in an asylum. Hairpins turned up in the ashes of males. The cause of death was given as appendicitis in cases where the patient had had their appendix removed years before. Parents who had removed their children from asylums were nonetheless notified of their unexpected death. The asylum personnel drank too much in local hostleries and made macabre jokes about the quality of fertilisers. People could smell death. Persistent relatives lobbied the authorities to discover the truth, and sometimes used the deaths columns of newspapers to vent their dissatisfaction with the answers they were given: His sudden death will always remain a mystery for us' or, Walter R., holder of the Iron Cross for service at the Front in 1914-18 ... Following days of great uncertainty we received news of his sudden death and of the cremation which had already taken place in Linz on the Danube.' 25 In a few asylums, ugly scenes occurred between the transport service personnel and the staff of the asylums as the latter sought to protect their charges. In one case, a crowd of local people gathered and the local mayor traced the name "Haarmann" (a notorious murderer) in the dust on the side of one of the buses. In other words, the regime's policies had come into serious conflict with ingrained moral precepts and compassion towards the weak. Of course, these seem to have subsequently gone into limbo in the case of the extermination of the Jews.
Complications multiplied as awareness of the program spread. Relatives contacted clergymen, the judicial authorities, or contacts at various levels of the NSDAP. The judicial authorities began to ask awkward questions concerning patients who were wards of court. The following example, from evidence assembled by the higher public prosecutor's office in Dresden, is typical:
The deaf and dumb cigar-maker Erich S., born in 1912, was committed by the courts to the Waldheim Asylum on 13 October 1937. In response to an inquiry from the higher public prosecutor, the asylum stated on 15 February 1940 that the object of the committal would be attained, if in future S. could be maintained in an institution for the deaf and dumb. The implementation of this recommendation was impossible, however, because on 27 February 1940 S. was transferred in a group transport to an asylum whose name is not known at Waldheim. The higher public prosecutor tried unsuccessfully to reach the Community Patients Transport Service by telephone; the municipal relief office in Berlin had not heard of the company. However in response to a written inquiry, Dr Schmitt of the provincial asylum in Brandenburg informed them that S. had died as a result of pneumonia on 16 March 1940. 26
Although the Reich Ministry of Justice, which had misgivings about the legality of the program, merely confined itself to passing on complaints to the Ministry of the Interior and the Reich Chancellery, one judge ΓÇô Lothar Kreyssig ΓÇô instituted criminal proceedings against Bouhler for murder. 27 Summoned to the Ministry of Justice, Kreyssig was shown Hitler's authorisation, which, however, he refused to accept as an adequate legal basis for what had been done. He was subsequently prematurely retired. Similarly, while individual churchmen like the Protestant Pastor Paul Braune protested against the program, both confessions controlled asylums, which co-operated in the program, and corporate ecclesiastical protest was confined to behind the scenes negotiations concerning access to the sacraments of those to be killed 28 . This was to compromise with those responsible for the program. The churchmen's conscience-stricken passivity was dramatically disturbed by a sermon delivered by the Bishop of Muenster, Cardinal Clemens August Count von Galen on 3 August 1941. In his passionate and embarrassingly specific address, this conservative clergyman stated unequivocally: Never under any circumstances may a human being kill an innocent person apart from war and legitimate self-defence.' 29
He stated further:
If you establish and apply the principle that you can kill "unproductive" fellow human beings then woe betide us all when we become old and frail! If one of us is allowed to kill the unproductive people then woe betide the invalids who have used up, sacrificed and lost their health and strength in the productive process. If one is allowed forcibly to remove one's unproductive fhuman beings then woe betide loyal soldiers who return to the homeland seriously disabled, as cripples, as invalids. If it is once accepted that people have the right to kill "unproductive" fellow humans ΓÇô and even if it only initially affects the poor defenceless mentally ill ΓÇô then as a matter of principle murder is permitted for all unproductive people, in other words for the incurably sick, the people who have become invalids through labour and war, for us all when we become old, frail and therefore unproductive.
Then, it is only necessary for some secret edict to order that the method developed for the mentally ill should be extended to other "unproductive" people, that it should be applied to those suffering form incurable lung disease, to the elderly who are frail or invalids, to the severely disabled soldiers. Then none of our lives will be safe any more. Some commission can put us on the list of the "unproductive", who in their opinion have become worthless life. And no police force will protect us and no court will investigate our murder and give the murderer the punishment he deserves. Who will be able to trust his physician any more? He may report his patient as "unproductive" and receive instructions to kill him. It is impossible to imagine the degree of moral depravity, of general mistrust that would then spread even through families if this dreadful doctrine is tolerated, accepted and followed. Woe to mankind, woe to our German nation if God's holy commandment Thou shalt not kill', which God proclaimed on Mount Sinai amidst thunder and lightning, which God our Creator inscribed in the conscience of mankind from the very beginning, is not only broken, but if this transgression is actually tolerated and permitted to go unpunished. 30
Copies of the sermon were duplicated, to be leafleted eventually by the RAF, sensitive since the Nazis had made black propaganda out of the alleged bombing of the Bethel asylum. Galen's action was soon followed by a number of individual clerics. Although there was talk among Nazi leaders of hanging the Bishop of Muenster, detention in concentration camps for denouncing the program ΓÇô although this reason was never given ΓÇô was confined to lesser clergy who decided to emulate him. It is not clear whether the protests, which ensued after Galen's sermon prompted Hitler to halt the official program on 24 August 1941. It is unlikely that he did so because, as was later claimed, he was confronted by a hostile crowd on a Bavarian station when his train happened to halt beside a train being loaded with mentally-handicapped children. More likely, the program was halted because the original target figure had been reached. 31 According to an internal T-4 reckoning, up to 1 September 1941 70,273 persons had been "disinfected". Further statistics produced later that year, which took into account persons killed other than by gassing, indicated that 93,251 beds had been "released" from among the 282,696 beds reserved for mental patients.
Disquiet among sections of the population lent added urgency to the regime's ongoing efforts to win, if not support, then collusive passivity for the "euthanasia" program. The oblique approach was in evidence in these examples culled from school mathematics books:
Question 95: The construction of a lunatic asylum costs 6 million RM. How many houses at 15,000RM each could have been built for that amount?
Question 97: To keep a mentally ill person costs approx. 4RM per day, a cripple 5,50RM, a criminal 3,50RM. Many civil servants receive only 4RM per day, white-collar employees barely 3,50RM, unskilled workers not even 2RM per head for their families. (a) Illustrate these figures with a diagram. According to conservative estimates, there are 300,000 mentally ill, epileptics etc., in care. (b) How much do these people cost to keep in total, at a cost of 4RM per head? (c) How many marriage loans at 1,000RM each... could be granted from this money? 32
Films stigmatising the mentally and physically handicapped were produced from the mid-1930s onwards. In October 1939 Brack commissioned one of the Grekat staff, Hermann Schweninger, a failure with cinematic pretensions, to make propaganda films on "euthanasia", designed for the day when the program would operate in the light of legality. 33 The scripts, written in conjunction with physicians involved in the program, latched on to pre-existing formats. The usual object was to contrast the expense put into maintaining "ballast existences" with the limited therapeutic "results" achieved. To this end, Schweninger sought out locations which would emphasise:
The marvellous situation of the asylums in the countryside.
The vast expanse of the asylum area in the case of so-called pavilion system asylums.
The attractiveness and care devoted to the gardens and grounds of the asylums.
The good ways in which the buildings have been converted.
The aesthetic value of old castles and monasteries, which are still used today as asylums.
The marvellous view from the asylums.
and inside:
The almost luxurious interior settings.
Their modernity and costliness. 34
By way of dramatic contrast, Schweninger was instructed to seek out particularly photogenic hopeless cases, some of them being given a temporary reprieve from the gas chambers situated in former palaces until the cameramen had passed through.
The most glaring and shocking types, for example, idiotic and deformed children as well as adults of a similar appearance.
Totally stunted types in contrast to the beauty of the gardens, art, etc. 35
But preparations for the documentary approach were abruptly shelved in late 1940 as the program encountered opposition. In line with Goebbels' dictum that the best propaganda works indirectly', the T-4 film-makers switched over to the feature film approach. Human interest stories would soften the stark realities of what was being done by occluding the issues in a mist of pseudo-moral dilemmas. Decisions being taken by the State in terms of cold, global statistics were thrust back on to each individual film-goer through the agency of sentiment. "Euthanasia" was presented as everyone's choice. Those cunning considerations were apparent in the film I Accuse , which was released in August 1941. The main plot, which exploits the medical drama/pioneering scientist genres, concerned a professor of pathology, Heyt, whose young wife Hanna develops multiple sclerosis. This is diagnosed by the family physician, Lang, one of Hanna's former admirers. Lang is a convinced opponent of "euthanasia" although his convictions are gradually eroded throughout the film, by, inter alia , his confrontation with a horrendously deformed child whose life he had managed to save as a baby. Both Heyt and Lang endeavour to alleviate Hanna's suffering, her husband by devising a cure in his laboratories. Faced with the limits of his own ingenuity, Heyt resolves to help his wife die. Hanna's brother brings an action against Heyt for murder, which allows the film-makers to rehearse the issues through the device of a concluding courtroom drama. The six jurors adopt different stances, but the spokesmen of "consensus" argue that the law needs to be changed to permit "mercy killings", a view which dovetailed felicitously with the regime's intentions. Lang makes his road to Damascus; the tormented scientist-hero emerges clean.
From the script of I Accuse :
Hanna (continuing to speak): I wish that was the end.
Heyt : It is the end, Hanna.
Hanna: How I love you, Thomas...
( He weeps )
Hanna: I wish I could give you my hand, Thomas. 36
The retired Major's speech from the jury scene:
Don't get me wrong, gentlemen, but when one deploys hundreds of thousands of physicians, sisters, and nurses, and puts up vast buildings with laboratories and medicaments and God knows what, simply in order to keep a few pitiful creatures alive, who are either too crazy to get anything out of life, or a threat to the community, or in general just like animals - and that at a time, when one doesn't have enough people, room, or the wherewithal to keep the healthy in health, or to properly provide for tmothers of new born babies ΓÇô then that is the most harebrained nonsense! The State has the duty firstly to look after the people who in general are the State ΓÇô namely for workers ΓÇô and as far as those are concerned who would like to die, because they were once healthy and now cannot endure any longer ΓÇô my view is that the State, which demands from us the duty to die, must give us the right to die... I am an old soldier, and I know what I am talking about. 37
I Accuse was seen by 18 million people. According to a lengthy SD report, apart from a docile press the reactions were mixed. The film was unpopular in Roman Catholic areas, where the clergy endeavoured to discourage people from seeing it. Some regarded it as an attempt by the State to refute charges made in Galen's sermon. Younger physicians reacted positively to the film; lawyers were concerned about the legislative foundations for "euthanasia". The "broad masses of the German people" also reacted affirmatively to I Accuse , although they thought it essential that careful [...]
References:
23.For examples see Noakes, Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919ΓÇô1945: A Documentary Reader , Vol. 3, pp. 1028ΓÇô9.
24.Ernst Klee, Was sie taten ΓÇô Was sie werden. Aerzte, Juristen und andere Beteiligte am Kranken- oder Judenmord (Frankfurt am Main, 1986), p. 204.
25.Klee, Euthanasie' , p. 249 for several examples.
26. Ibid. , p. 240.
27.On Kreyssig, see Klee, Euthanasie' , pp. 209f.
28.On Braune, see Klee, Euthanasie' , pp. 211f.
29.For Galen's sermon see Noakes and Pridham, Nazism 1919ΓÇô1945: A Documentary Reader , Vol. 3, pp. 1036ff,; see also Peter Loeffler (ed.), Bischof Clemens August Graf von Galen. Akten, Vols, 1ΓÇô2 (Mainz, 1988), 2, nr. 341, pp. 874ff,; Klee, Euthanasie' , pp. 334ff.
30.Noakes, Pridham, Nazism 1919ΓÇô1945: A Documentary Reader , Vol. 3, p. 1038.
31.Klee, Euthanasie' , pp. 33ff.
32.R. Dorner (ed.), Mathematische Aufgaben aus der Volks-Gelaende und Wehrkunde , 1. Teil ( Mittelstufe ) (Frankfurt am Main, 1936), p. 21; reprinted in Tuchel (ed.), Kein Recht auf Leben' , p. 47. See also Klee, Euthanasie' , p. 53.
33.For the background to these films see, above all, the definitive study by Ludwig Rost, Sterilisation und Euthanasie im Fdes Dritten Reiches'. Nationalsozialistische Propaganda in ihrer Beziehung zu rassenhygienischen Massnahmen des NS-Staates (Husum, 1987); Karl-Heinz Roth, Filmpropaganda fuer die Vernichtung der Geisteskranken und Behinderten im Dritten Reich', Beitraege zur nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik , Vol. 2 (Berlin, 1985), pp. 125ff. In English see Erwin Leiser, Nazi Cinema (London, 1974), pp. 89ff.; David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933ΓÇô1945 (Oxford and London 1983), pp. 121ΓÇô34; Michael Burleigh, ΓÇ£Euthanasia' and the Cinema in Nazi Germany', History Today , 40 (1990), pp. 11ΓÇô16. Both authors would like to thank Ludwig Rost for advising us on this subject. Copies of the earlier Racial Political Office of the NSDAP documentary films, e.g. Suenden der Vaeter and Erbkrank , are in our possession. We would like to thank the Filmarchiv, Koblenz and the Filmarchiv der DDR, East Berlin.
34.Roth, Filmpropaganda', pp. 135ΓÇô6.
35. Ibid.
36.Roth, Sterilisation und Euthanasie , p. 255. Michael Burleigh would like to thank Ludwig Rost for copies of Liebeneiner's script for I Accuse and other documents connected with the film.
