Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (8 page)

“You say you saw your wife quite frequently: it must have become obvious to her that you were under strain – it must have shown up somehow. Didn’t she ever ask you again what you were doing? That’s very unlike a wife, isn’t it?”

“She asked, but only casually you know. She was used to my not being able to discuss service matters.”

“Do you think the patients at Hartheim knew what was going to happen to them?”

“No,” he said immediately, with assurance. “It was run as a hospital. After they arrived they were again examined you know. Their temperatures were taken and all that.…”

“Why would anybody want to take the temperature of people who were mentally sick?”

“I don’t know. But that’s what they did. They had two tables in a sort of hall the patients were taken to when they arrived; at one of them sat the doctors and at the other nurses. And each arriving patient was examined.”

“For how long?”

“Oh, it varied; some just a minute, others a bit longer.”

“One has read of patients in these ‘institutes’ trying to run away in terror, with nurses or guards pursuing them along the corridors.…”

“I don’t think that ever happened,” he said, sounding genuinely surprised. “I have certainly never heard of such a thing. You see, even Wirth said, ‘The people must not be allowed to realize that they are going to die. They have to feel at ease. Nothing must be done to frighten them.’ ”

“Were there any wards? Did it ever happen that any of them stayed – a night, or more?”

“Oh no, never.”

That patients were sent to these institutions only to die without delay was confirmed by Franz Suchomel. He, a Sudeten German, was mobilized into the
SS
– he says he doesn’t know why (Dieter Allers was to tell me later more about the method of recruiting for T4), and was first sent to the “institute” at Hadamar as an assistant in the photographic laboratory. Or so he said at our first meeting: later, in one of several letters replying to specific additional questions, he changed this and said that he had been assigned to work at T4 in Berlin. (The truth is that he worked in both these places.) “The institutes”, he said, “were designated from A to F. Hartheim was C; Hadamar was E; Sonnenstein, also called
die Sonne
, was F. They gave me a dark-room and told me to develop photos for the archives. In the four institutes where gassings took place patients never stayed for more than a few short hours. Certainly nobody ever got out.” (There were in fact six where gassing took place, but only four were operational at any one time. And this does not take into account the eleven “special” hospitals where children were “put to sleep” by injections.)

Suchomel said at his first meeting with me that the psychiatrist Professor Heyde had his office next to his dark-room at Hadamar. This man, who was sentenced to death
in absentia
by a German court in 1946, escaped and practised in Flensburg in Germany under the name of Sawade until 1959, when he gave himself up. He committed a slightly mysterious suicide: he was found strangled, lying on the floor, with a noose attached to the central heating pipes – in Limburg prison in 1963. According to Suchomel, “He was the head of the whole thing, he developed it.” In a subsequent letter he says, “Heide [
sic
] had a flat at Tiergartenstrasse 4, next to my office. He was the top expert in the mercy-killing business. He only stayed at his flat when he had official business in Berlin. He was, I was told, an authority in his field.… I know that there was a research institute into mental illness in Strasburg; he may have run that. That’s where the brains of selected mental patients were sent for research purposes.” And Dieter Allers too talked a great deal about the scientific purposes of the Euthanasia Programme. “People have completely misunderstood: now it is constantly being misinterpreted. Just look at the world now: don’t you think something very much like this will have to happen?”

Stangl was in fact intellectually and emotionally considerably more affected by the whole euthanasia issue than the other people I have talked to who were directly involved with the programme.

“You were speaking earlier about having many doubts and many discussions about the rights and wrongs of the euthanasia programme. Can you elaborate a little on this?” I asked him.

“Strangely enough,” he said, “you see there was somehow more freedom to talk there than I had had in Linz. Of course, we couldn’t talk to anyone outside, but amongst ourselves we discussed the fors and againsts all the time.”

“And did you get to the point where you convinced yourself you were involved in something that was right?”

“Of course, I wasn’t ‘involved’ in that sense,” he said quickly. “Not in the operational sense.”

I reformulated my question.
“Did you get to the point where you convinced yourself that what was being done was right?”

“One day,” he said, “I had to make a duty visit to an institution for severely handicapped children run by nuns.…” (“What the devil,” said Allers, “was he doing going to a place like that? He had no business going to any of the hospitals: his job was death certificates.”) “It was part of my function,” said Stangl, “to see that the families of patients – afterwards – received their effects: clothes and all that, and identity papers, certificates, you know. I was responsible for everything being correctly done.”

“What do you mean by ‘correctly done’? How were the families notified?”

“Well, they were told the patient had died of a heart attack or something like that. And they received a little urn with the ashes. But for our records, as I told you, we always had to have these four attestations, otherwise it … it couldn’t be carried out. Well, in this case the mother of a child who had been brought from that particular institution had written to say that she hadn’t received a candle she had sent the child as a present shortly before it died. That’s why I had to go there: to find the candle. When I arrived, the Mother Superior, who I had to see, was up in a ward with the priest and they took me up to see her.

“We talked for a moment and then she pointed to a child – well, it looked like a small child – lying in a basket. ‘Do you know how old he is?’ she asked me. I said no, how old was he? ‘Sixteen,’ she said. ‘He looks like five, doesn’t he? He’ll never change, ever. But they rejected him.’ [The nun was referring to the medical commission.] ‘How could they not accept him?’ she said. And the priest who stood next to her nodded fervently. ‘Just look at him,’ she went on. ‘No good to himself or anyone else. How could they refuse to deliver him from this miserable life?’ This really shook me,” said Stangl. “Here was a Catholic nun, a Mother Superior, and a priest. And they thought it was right. Who was I then, to doubt what was being done?”

“If these people in this mental hospital for children knew what was happening to their patients, then others must have known too: it was known, wasn’t it?”

“This was the only time I heard anyone ‘outside’ speak of it,” he said stiffly.

According to a letter dated May 16, 1941, from the County Court in Frankfurt to the Minister of Justice, Gürtner (actually to his deputy), the Euthanasia Programme had become common knowledge. The children of Hadamar, where one of the “institutes” was located, were in the habit of shouting after the blacked-out buses, “Here are some more coming to be gassed.” “The patients are taken to the gas chamber in paper shirts,” the letter continues. “The corpses enter the furnace on a conveyor belt, and the smoke from the crematorium chimney is visible for miles. At night, Wirth’s experts, picked by the Berlin Gestapo … drink themselves to oblivion in the little Hadamar Gasthof where the regular customers take care to avoid them.”

Frau Stangl too – on the whole a woman of exemplary honesty – confirms that she had been aware of what was going on. “I read – or I may have heard in Church – Graf Galen’s sermon, and I remember even talking to my husband about it when he came on leave. But at that time of course, I neither knew he was stationed at Hartheim, nor, even if I had known, would it have meant anything to me. I never knew that Schloss Hartheim was one of those places until after the war. I can’t remember what my husband replied when I discussed Graf Galen’s sermon with him, though I can recall that he never initiated any talk about that. But then, of course, he wouldn’t have; it was simply part of his personality, his discipline, never to discuss at home things to do with the service. After the war he told me what he told you too now; about the nun, the priest, and the poor little sixteen-year-old idiot boy in the little basket.”

We cannot possibly know now how many nuns and priests, perhaps particularly affected by the sadness and hopelessness
many
people feel who work continuously in mental institutions, came at that time to agree – quite possibly in an agonizing conflict of morals – that euthanasia represented a release, the chance of an eternal and far happier life for these particular patients. But we do know now that at least some of their superiors did not share the attitude of the nun and priest Stangl had met. The protests of various Protestant and Catholic bishops in 1940 and 1941 reached a climax in the Galen sermon on August 3, 1941, at the St Lambert Church in Münster.

It was during that summer too that Hitler, in the course of a trip through Hof, near Nuremberg, where his train was held up when some mental patients were loaded on to trucks, is said to have had the novel experience of being jeered at by an outraged crowd. Whatever the reason, on August 24, 1941, Dr Karl Brandt (as he was to testify later) received verbal instructions from Hitler at his
HQ
to stop the Euthanasia Programme. There is no written record of the order. Brandt transmitted it to Philip Bouhler by telephone.

*
Philip Bouhler, Reichsleiter NSDAP, head of the Führer Chancellery, died, believed suicide, in prison camp at Emmerich, Bavaria, between May 18 and 21, 1945 (according to death certificate).
   Viktor Brack, SS Oberfhürer, Chief of Section II of the Fhürer Chancellery, executed at Landsberg, June 2, 1948.
   Werner Blankenburg, SA Oberfhürer, Brack’s second-in-command; escaped prosecution by changing his name to Bielecke; died in Stuttgart in November 1957.

*
Although the “medical commission” did travel to some institutions, such careful medical examinations were by no means the rule. Most decisions of life or death were much more routinely made at T4, purely on the basis of a questionnaire which had been sent out by “Amt IVg” – subsection for institutional care – of the Ministry of the Interior to all mental institutions, asking for details on all patients who were senile, retarded or suffering a variety of other mental debilities: criminally insane, under care for five years or more, of foreign or racially impure extraction, incapable of work or capable of only routine mechanical tasks such as peeling vegetables. This was sent out on the pretext of gathering information to assist in economic planning (and apparently only two men in the Ministry were informed of the real purpose) but photocopies were then turned over to T4 “medical staff”, who marked each case with a plus or minus sign: Life or Death.

*
Killed by partisans in Trieste in 1944.

§
See
this page
–
this page
for additional history of the camps in Poland and 111 for Stangl’s description, which contradicts the August date in the documents.

*
Excused from euthanasia trial because of ill health; now living in the Black Forest.

†
Committed suicide.

‡
“Child-euthanasia” was, on the whole, a separate programme, which began earlier and ended long after the general euthanasia
Aktion
.
   It was claimed by various defendants in euthanasia trials – and Dieter Allers repeated this to me – that “parents were asked to authorize ‘mercy-death’ ” for their children. What actually happened was that parents were informed that
Kinderfachabteilungen
– Special Sections for children – were being established all over the country. They were asked to sign an authorization for their severely disabled children to be transferred to these wards and were told that, as these were in fact intensive-care units where highly advanced experiments would be carried out, this represented a unique chance for their children’s possible recovery.
This
was how the Nazis obtained authorizing signatures – which were subsequently paraded in the trials. Eleven Special Sections were involved; each of them had between twenty and thirty beds. What
is
true, however, is that unlike the adults – children were kept in these wards for a period of observation lasting between four to eight weeks. But none of my informants was able to recall any case of a child who was returned to an ordinary hospital, or to its parents, once it had been taken to a “Special Section”. The children were “put to sleep” with injections and, from all accounts, were not aware of their fate.

*
Werner was sent to a concentration camp, the legal record shows, not for asking to be relieved but for “having had financial dealings with a Jew”.