Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (7 page)

“Did you know then what Tiergartenstrasse 4 was?”

“I had no idea. I had heard it vaguely referred to now and then as T4, but I didn’t know what their specific function was.”

This was no doubt true at that time. For Tiergartenstrasse 4 was the hub of what was for years the most secret operation in the Third Reich: the administration first of the “mercy-killing” of the mentally and physically handicapped in Germany and Austria, and later of the “Final Solution”: the extermination of the Jews.

The building which housed T4 – as it was called for camouflage purposes – was an inconspicuous villa in Berlin-Charlottenburg, one of Berlin’s exclusive suburbs. The planning and orders came from the Führer Chancellery in the building of the Reichs Chancellery in the centre of Berlin, a special department Hitler had created to administer his private affairs and consider petitions addressed to him personally. The Führer Chancellery was a comparatively small and very exclusive organization headed by Philip Bouhler whom Gerald Reitlinger has described as the most “shadowy figure the National Socialist hierarchy produced”, and who exerted considerable influence on Hitler’s thinking and actions.

Men like Bouhler, Brack and Blankenburg
*
(now dead) and a few others, and the medical “luminaries” who eventually lent their names to these activities, particularly the psychiatrists Professors Nitsche, Heyde and Dr Mennecke, were the so-called “desk-murderers”. None of them, nor their staff in the offices of T4, ever actually committed murder. And some of them – at least at the start of these appalling events – seem to have believed sincerely that a “merciful” Euthanasia Programme was justified: a belief shared by the many perfectly honourable people who today propose legalizing euthanasia on demand. But once the euthanasia “institutes” came into being, no one either in the Fhürer Chancellery or T4 could continue to harbour illusions; it was abundantly clear that what was happening was not “assisted suicide”, or the “mercy-killing of grievously suffering patients upon their own or their relatives’ request on therapeutic grounds”, but legalized murder, undertaken for starkly economic – and later political – reasons … and even at that, its “legality” was only a pseudo – legality. The Führer-order on which the programme was launched was never officially recognized by the Reich Ministry of Justice, which in fact, within the limitations imposed by its members’ fear of the consequences, opposed Hitler’s order in this instance all along as “unconstitutional”.

The planners and administrators of these “programmes” were, of course, mainly bureaucrats functioning in offices hundreds of miles away from where their ideas and orders were put into practice. During the first and decisive years, 1938 and 1939, they were physically, and therefore psychologically, far removed from the terrifying reality of their activities. They were thus enabled to convince themselves – as all those who lived to testify in trials were to claim – that they were simply administering the “public health” of the nation and were in no way directly concerned with violence or horror.

But for those who were actively involved it was very different.

When Stangl, in his conversations with me, began to speak of his transfer to the Euthanasia Programme, I noticed for the first time an alarming change come over his face: it coarsened and became slack and suffused. The veins stood out, he began to sweat, and the lines in his cheeks and forehead deepened. This was to happen repeatedly in the days and weeks to come when he had to speak about a new and terrible phase in his life.

“Kriminalrath Werner said that both Russia and America had for some considerable time had a law which permitted them to carry out euthanasia – ‘mercy-killings’ – on people who were hopelessly insane or monstrously deformed. He said this law was going to be passed in Germany – as everywhere else in the civilized world – in the near future. But that, to protect the sensibilities of the population,
they
were going to do it very slowly, only after a great deal of psychological preparation. But that, in the meantime, the difficult task had begun, under the cloak of absolute secrecy. He explained that the only patients affected were those who after the most careful examination – a series of four tests carried out by at least two physicians – were considered absolutely incurable so that, he assured me, a totally painless death represented a real release from what, more often than not, was an intolerable life.”
*

“What was your first reaction, your first thought when Kriminalrather Werner said these things?”

“I … I was speechless. And then I finally said I didn’t really feel I was suited for this assignment. He was, you know, very friendly, very sympathetic when I said that. He said he understood well that that would be my first reaction but that I had to remember that my being asked to take this job showed proof of their exceptional trust in me. It was a most difficult task – they fully recognized it – but that I myself would have nothing whatever to do with the actual operation; this was carried out entirely by doctors and nurses. I was merely to be responsible for law and order.”

“Did he specify what he meant by law and order?”

“Yes. I would be responsible for maintaining the maximum security provisions. But the way he put it, almost my main responsibility would be to ascertain that the protective regulations regarding the eligibility of patients would be adhered to, to the letter.”

“But the way you are telling about it, now, you were obviously not ordered to do this. You were given a choice. Your own immediate reaction, quite properly, was horror. What made you agree to do it?
”

“Several times during this talk, he mentioned – sort of by the way – that he had heard I wasn’t altogether happy in Linz. And then, he said, there was this disciplinary action pending against me. That would of course be suspended if I accepted this transfer. He also said I could choose either to go to an institute in Saxonia, or one in Austria. But that, on the other hand, if I chose to refuse the assignment, no doubt my present chief in Linz – Prohaska – would find something else for me to do.”

“And that decided you, did it?”

“The combination of things did; the way he had presented it; it was already being done by law in America and Russia; the fact that doctors and nurses were involved; the careful examination of the patients; the concern for the feelings of the population. And then, it is true, for months I had felt myself to be in the greatest danger in Linz from Prohaska. After all, I already knew since March 13, 1938, that it was simpler to be dead in Germany than anywhere else. I was just so glad to get away from Linz.”

“So what happened?”

“I reported to Tiergartenstrasse 4, I think to
SS
Oberführer Brack who explained what my specific police duties would be.” (When Stangl said this, and for some time after, it seemed significant that he, at that point a police officer of comparatively minor formal rank, should have been interviewed and instructed by
SS
Oberführer Victor Brack, who was one of the top officials of the Führer Chancellery. Since then, however, I have learned from Dieter Allers, former chief administrative officer of T4, that Brack interviewed and instructed personally
all
personnel assigned to T4 – “He even interviewed the chars,” said Allers.)

“I said I’d try to do it, and that I would like to stay in Austria where I would be nearer my family. He said that, to be effective in my new job, I had to be superior in rank to the local police chief of the nearest police authority, Alkoven – it was a man called Hartmann – and I would therefore be transferred to the uniformed branch with the rank of lieutenant.”

“Were you to wear uniform?”

“Yes, the green police uniform [which he continued to wear until Christmas 1942, when – in Poland – he became assimilated to the
SS
and was given the grey
SS
field uniform worn by all German
SS
at Treblinka]. He gave me the name of a village not too far from Linz, and a telephone number; I remember, it was Alkoven 913. I was to return to Linz, pack and tell nobody where I was going. I was to go to an inn on the outskirts of Linz – the Gasthaus Drei Kronen it was, on the Landstrasse – and phone that number. And I’d be given instructions.”

(“Yes, of course I remember when he was first called to Berlin,” said Frau Stangl thirty-one years later in Brazil. “He told me he had to report to Tiergartenstrasse 4. He said, ‘I wonder what
that
is.’ ”)

“I only stayed at home for a day, I think,” Stangl continued, “and then did what they had told me to do: you know, I went to the Drei Kronen and called Alkoven 913. A man answered, I told him my name and he said, ‘I’ll come and get you’ – and about an hour later a kind of delivery van drove up – the driver was in civvies, a grey suit. When I asked him where we were going he wouldn’t say – he just said, ‘In the direction of Everding.’ And after an hour we got to Schloss Hartheim.”

“How did it look?”

“Oh, it was big you know, with a courtyard and archways and all that. It hadn’t been a private residence for some time: they’d had an orphanage in it I think, and later a hospital. Almost the first person I saw – it was such a relief – was a friend: a colleague from the police, Franz Reichleitner.”

It would appear that Reichleitner,
*
whose subsequent career paralleled Stangl’s, if on a slightly lower level, was equally glad to see him. “He said they’d told him I was coming and he’d been waiting for me near the entrance. He had arranged for us to share a room. He’d show me around later, he said, but first he had to take me to meet the doctors in charge and Hauptmann [Captain] Wirth.”

This was the first appearance of Stangl’s next
bête noire
, the notorious Christian Wirth – the “savage Christian”, as he was to be called. It was Wirth who carried out the first gassing of Germans certified incurably insane, in December 1939 or January 1940 at Brandenburg an der Havel. According to Reitlinger’s
The Final Solution,
“Wirth’s name does not occur in any of the surviving correspondence concerning euthanasia.” It would now appear from Stangl’s account, which is confirmed by one of his former subalterns, Franz Suchomel, that in mid-1940 Wirth was appointed as a kind of roving director or inspector of the dozen or so institutions of this kind in “Greater Germany”. Suchomel says that he came to Hartheim as a
“Läuterungs-Kommissar
because the place was an undisciplined pigsty”. A little over a year later he was appointed Kommandant of Belsec, the first of the three principal extermination camps to be installed in occupied Poland between March and May 1942. And later again – according to surviving documents–in August 1942 he was designated supervising “Inspector” of these three camps, Belsec, Sobibor and the largest – Treblinka.
§
This sequence of appointments reconfirms the preparatory role played by the Euthanasia Programme for the “Final Solution”. (In practice, if apparently not, as has also been claimed, as a formal training.)

“Wirth was a gross and florid man,” Stangl said. “My heart sank when I met him. He stayed at Hartheim for several days that time, and came back often. Whenever he was there, he addressed us daily at lunch. And here it was again, this awful verbal crudity: when he spoke about the necessity for this euthanasia operation, he wasn’t speaking in humane or scientific terms, the way Dr Werner had described it to me. He laughed. He spoke of ‘doing away with useless mouths’ and said that ‘sentimental slobber’ about such people made him ‘puke’.”

“What about the other people there? What were they like?”

“There were the two chief medical officers: Dr Renno
*
and Dr Lohnauer.
†
And fourteen nurses; seven men and seven women. Dr Lohnauer was a rather aloof sort of man, but very correct. Dr Renno was very nice, friendly.”

“In the weeks and months to come, did they ever talk to you about what was being done there?
”

“Often, very often, especially Dr Renno. You know …” he suddenly said, sadly, “you have no idea what the patients were like who were brought there. I had never known there
were
such people. Oh my God – the children.…” (Dieter Allers said later that he couldn’t understand this reference to children: “No children were killed at Hartheim,” he said. “There were special places for that”; and the Ludwigsburg Central (judiciary) Authority for Nazi Crimes confirmed that if there were children who were killed at Hartheim, it could only have been isolated cases.)
‡

“But didn’t it ever occur to you to think ‘what if my mother or my child were in this position’?”

“Ah,” he answered at once, “but they had told us immediately that there were four groups who were exempt: the senile; those who had served in the armed forces; those who had been decorated with the
Mutterkreuz
[a decoration for women designed to glorify motherhood],
and
relatives of Euthanasia Aktion staff. Of course, they had to do that.”

“But aside from that then, did you have any more scruples?”

“For a long time. After the first two or three days I told Reichleitner that I didn’t think I could stand it. By then I’d heard that the police official who’d had the job before me had been relieved upon his request because he had stomach trouble. I too couldn’t eat – you know, one just couldn’t.”

“Then it was possible to ask to be relieved?”

“Yes. But Franz Reichleitner said, ‘What do you think will happen if you do the same? Just remember Ludwig Werner.’ He knew of course about my friend Werner’s being sent to the
KZ
.
*
No, I had very little doubt of what would happen to me if I returned to Linz and Prohaska.”