In October, in the new Reichsgau of Wartheland, patients from the Owinska
(Teskau) Mental Hospital were shot if they were not ethnically German. 37 From the end of November patients from two mental hospitals were deported to
Poznan, where the Gestapo ran a concentration camp in Fort VI, and there they
were suffocated with carbon monoxide in a closed room. This was the first
National Socialist mass murder to be carried out using poison gas. In December
Nazi top brass including Himmler and Brandt visited Fort VI and were shown the
latest killing techniques. 38 From the beginning of 1940 this facility was replaced by mobile units of vans; a special unit under the command of an official of the
Criminal Investigation Department, Herbert Lange, deployed these vans to mur-
der patients from the mental hospitals of the Warthegau. 39
In Pomerania the initiative for murdering the inmates of mental institutions
clearly derived from Gauleiter Schwede. In September or October Schwede offered
to put the Stralsund Mental Hospital at Himmler’s disposal as an SS barracks. In
November and December 1939 1,200–1,400 mentally ill patients were ostensibly
‘transferred’ from Pomeranian institutions to West Prussia; in fact they were shot
by the Eimann Special Guard Division. From early 1940 the patients were
deported into the Kosten Hospital in the Warthegau, which had already been
‘cleared’, only to be murdered there in mobile gas chambers by Lange’s special
unit. 40
More operations undertaken by Lange’s unit to murder the inmates of mental
hospitals in the annexed areas can be documented until the middle of 1941,
especially in May and June 1940 and June and July 1941.41 In the autumn of 1941
Lange’s unit was detailed to begin carrying out the mass murder of Jews in the
Warthegau and at the end of 1941 it was to set up a mobile gas chamber operation
in Chelmno in order to be able to perform these murders on a larger scale. 42
Lange’s unit therefore represented an important organizational link between the
systematic mass murder of the disabled and handicapped and that of the Jews.
The institutions and hospitals ‘freed up’ in this murderous manner in the
annexed areas of Poland and in Pomerania were subsequently occupied by SS
units, used as prisons or army quarters, or filled with ethnic German settlers from
Persecution of Jews in the Reich, 1939–40
139
the Baltic who were in need of accommodation. 43 But it would be wrong to deduce the ultimate motivation for the violent clearance of these buildings from the uses
to which they were later put. The murders were committed not for utilitarian
reasons but as part of much more broadly conceived policies for biologically
revolutionizing the lands under German rule. 44
In the old area of the Reich the mass murder of the inmates of psychiatric
institutions was carried out in a manner that proved to be comparatively expensive
and time-consuming. The Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP, which had
been given the task of putting ‘euthanasia’ into practice, erected a comprehensive
camouflage organization: the whole operation was conducted under the name ‘T4’,
an abbreviation for the address of the ‘euthanasia’ central office, Tiergartenstraße 4
in Berlin. Cover was provided by a Reich Working Group of Sanatoria and Nursing
Homes (Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft Heil- und Pflegeanstalten); a Public Patient
Transport Company (Gemeinnützigen Kranken-Transport GmbH) was created
for the transport of victims. 45
Initially, two killing centres were set up in order to carry out the murders, one
in the former Brandenburg prison, the other in the former Grafeneck Mental
Hospital in Württemberg. In January 1940 a ‘test gassing’ of some fifteen to twenty
people was performed in Brandenburg; a gas chamber disguised as a shower room
was used, in the presence of Brandt, Bouhler, Conti, Viktor Brack, Bouhler’s
deputy, and other leading ‘euthanasia’ officials. After this experiment a gas
chamber was also installed in Grafeneck. Further ‘euthanasia’ centres were estab-
lished in spring 1940 in Sonnenstein in Saxony, Hartheim near Linz, and, in early
1941, Bernburg and Hadamar near Limburg replaced Brandenburg and Grafeneck,
which were closed down.
The process for selecting the ‘euthanasia’ victims had several stages. The report
forms filled out by the psychiatric institutions were each sent to three experts by
the Berlin Central Office, who gave them only the most cursory treatment and
who were explicitly required to decide against the patient in cases of doubt. In this
manner not only the mentally ill but also the blind, deaf, and dumb, epileptics, and
people with learning disabilities were judged negatively. On the basis of these
three votes a senior expert made the final decision, which the Central Office used
in order to put together the ‘transfer transports’.
Every effort was made to keep those ‘transferred’ to the ‘euthanasia’ centres in
the dark about their fate until the very last minute. They were first subjected to a
kind of reception examination before being taken to the gas chamber that was
disguised as a shower room. Death usually followed within a few minutes. After
gold teeth had been removed and some corpses selected for autopsy, the mortal
remains of the dead were cremated within the perimeter of the institutions.
In the first six months of 1940 the ‘euthanasia’ killings that formed part of the
T4 programme were gradually extended to each of the individual German states
and Prussian provinces until almost the whole area of the Reich was covered.
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If one attempts to reconstruct in detail the chronological and geographical
progress of the mass murder of institutional patients, 46 what emerges is an image of T4 as a completely non-standardized process dependent on a whole
range of disparate factors. The number of people killed in the T4 programme rose
steadily month by month from January 1940 and in August reached its initial high
point with many more than 5,000 victims per month. In the regions affected first
(Baden, Württemberg, Berlin, Brandenburg, and Austria) sometimes a much
higher proportion of patients was murdered than had originally been intended.
This evidently led the organizers of T4 to raise their targets. There is an important
document in existence that suggests that by October 1941 the intention was to
murder between 130,000 and 150,000 people in total. 47
On the other hand, the numbers of those actually murdered each month went
down after September 1940, clearly because regions were being targeted that did
not have their own killing centres. The transportation of patients over large
distances proved to be problematic, not least because the population were
gradually becoming aware of what was happening. Eventually the numbers of
victims reached its nadir between the point when the two killing centres at
Brandenburg and Grafeneck were closed in August and the end of the year.
There exists a further indication from this period that the ‘euthanasia’ organizers
were reducing their target numbers to 100,000.48 The construction of gas chambers in Bernburg
(Anhalt) and Hadamar (Hessen) early in 1941 made it possible
to extend the programme to neighbouring regions that had not hitherto been
included, or had been only partially included, especially Hessen and the Prussian
province of Saxony. At this point the monthly figures began to increase again
sharply and by May were once more well over 5,000 and rising. Now the
attention of the ‘euthanasia’ planners was directed at the richly populated regions
of northern and western Germany, which did not have their own killing centres
and had so far largely been spared. But before these areas could be fully
incorporated into the programme of murders the T4 campaign was stopped, in
August 1941, at precisely the moment when the original target of 70,000 victims
had been reached. I shall go into the reasons why this came to a halt in more
detail later.
Within the context of the T4 programme, therefore, the Chancellery of the
Führer of the NSDAP had developed a process through which a large number of
people had been murdered in procedures that had been centrally directed, were
ostensibly under scientific control, and were bureaucratically managed in the
minutest detail. This programme of murder—which was kept secret—had been
disguised sufficiently well that, from the outside, the true fates of the patients
being ‘transferred’ only became known very gradually, such that protests and
resistance only became effective at a point where the programme had already
largely been completed.
Persecution of Jews in the Reich, 1939–40
141
With the ‘euthanasia’ programmes the National Socialist regime had crossed
the threshold to a systematic, racially motivated policy of annihilation a little
under two years before the mass murder of the Jews began. Important elements of
this policy of annihilation that were to play a central role in the murder of the Jews
can be identified as early as 1939 and 1940 as part of the planning and execution of
the ‘euthanasia’ campaign. Alongside mass executions and the use of fixed as well
as mobile gas chambers, it is particularly important to note that ‘euthanasia’
involved the development of a complex, work-intensive process that deceived
the victims until the last moment and to a large extent also apparently protected
the perpetrators from personal responsibility, in that they received the impression
of fulfilling only a subordinate role in a scientifically controlled process that
obeyed the dictates of reason.
Closer analysis of the T4 programme has shown, however, that carrying out
the murders involved considerable variations at different points and in different
places, and that these can be attributed to a whole series of factors. The T4
Central Office was decisively reliant on the cooperation of individual psychiatric
institutions and that of regional authorities; both were prerequisites for continu-
ity in the deportation of patients to killing centres. Geographical factors, such as
the location of the killing centres and the question of which administrative
authority (state or province) had responsibility for each individual institution,
also played a major role; similarly the conditions operating in individual killing
centres affected the extent and speed of the programme of murder to a consid-
erable degree. It is also apparent, however, that the planners were prepared to
correct the targets of planned victims upwards or downwards. What looks at first
sight like a systematically organized and implemented programme for the
murder of 70,000 people is revealed on closer analysis to be a complex network
of central planning aims and revisions on the one hand and a many-faceted
mode of delivery on the other, which was dependent on several regional and
chronological variants. T4 can be seen as a model for the ‘Final Solution’ in this
respect as well.
There is a further parallel between the two: the T4 programme already
displays a degree of ambivalence between the attempts on the part of the regime
to maintain strict secrecy (but which was impossible, given the sheer extent of
the operation)49 and targeted references on the part of official agencies to the necessity of such radical measures, which must have fed the rumours that were
already circulating. 50 This ambivalence can be seen as a phenomenon of the
‘open secret’: what was happening was already known in outline amongst broad
sections of the population, but was not commented on in public in any way
at all.
Finally, the fate of the Jewish inmates of the psychiatric institutions within the
T4 programme is of particular interest. Since June 1938 they had been separated
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The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941
from the other inmates and were collected together in special institutions from
1940 onwards. From there they were all deported to the killing centres, without
regard to medical diagnosis or capacity to work, including the aged and infirm.
The systematic murder of some 4,000 to 5,000 Jewish patients thus represents an
important ‘bridge’ between ‘euthanasia’ and the later annihilation of the whole
Jewish population. 51
chapter 8
GERMAN OCCUPATION AND THE
PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS IN POLAND,
1939–1940/1941: THE FIRST VARIANT OF
A ‘TERRITORIAL SOLUTION’
Mass Shootings of Poles and Jews in Autumn 1939
Alongside the ‘euthanasia’ programme it was above all with the politics of the
occupation of Poland that the National Socialist regime made its decisive step
towards a racially motivated policy of annihilation at the beginning of the Second
World War. 1
As early as 23 May Hitler had made a speech to the army top brass in which he
spoke of the necessity to achieve ‘an extension of our living space in the East’ via a
war with Poland, 2 and on 22 August, again before members of the army’s most senior ranks, he had given the following guidelines: ‘Destruction of Poland
a priority. Goal is removal of vital forces not reaching a given line. . . . Close hearts to sympathy. Proceed brutally. 80 mill. people must get what is theirs. Their
existence must be secured. Right is with the stronger. Greatest rigour.’3 On 2 October Hitler went on to say how it was vital to ensure that ‘there must be
no Polish leaders, where Polish leaders exist they must be killed, however harsh
that sounds’. 4 At a meeting of departmental heads on 7 September, the Chief of 144
The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941
the Security Police and the SD, Reinhard Heydrich, gave instructions to the effect
that ‘the higher echelons of the Polish population need to be rendered as good as
harmless’, and on 14 October, to the same body, he made the demand that the
‘liquidation of leading Poles’ that had already begun be concluded by 1 November
at the latest. 5
In the spirit of these instructions, which could hardly have been expressed more
clearly, during the war and the first months of occupation 10,000 Polish citizens
were murdered by German units. The pretext for these murders was atrocities that
the Poles were said to have perpetrated and which German propaganda claimed
had cost the lives of more than 50,000 p
eople. It is true that during the war
between 4,500 and 5,500 ethnic Germans lost their lives, partly as members of the
Polish army, partly as the civilian victims of acts of war, but some were also
transported by order of the Polish authorities, executed by the Polish military, or
the victims of violent attack by civilians. The peak was the so-called ‘Bloody
Sunday of Bromberg’, which claimed about a hundred lives and was depicted by
Nazi propaganda as a massacre with thousands left dead. 6
The systematic mass murder of certain sectors of the Polish population, pre-
sented as ‘retribution’ for these attacks, was directed and implemented to a large
extent by so-called Einsatzgruppen, ‘task forces’ or ‘death squads’. As in the case of
the annexation of Austria, the Sudetenland, and Czechoslovakia, special groups
were set up for the war against Poland consisting of members of the SS, the SD,
and the police. Initially there were five Einsatzgruppen (two more were added after
the start of the war) and they were each assigned to one of the armies; in total, the
seven units comprised some 2,700 men. 7 According to an agreement reached with OKH (Army High Command) in July, these Einsatzgruppen officially had the role
of dealing with all ‘elements hostile to the Reich and to Germany in enemy
territory behind the troops engaged in combat’. In addition, as a file note by
Heydrich from July 1940 establishes, they received instructions that were ‘extra-
ordinarily radical (e.g. the order to liquidate numerous Polish ruling circles, which
affected thousands)’. In concrete terms this meant that they had the authority to
murder members of the intelligentsia, the clergy, and the nobility, as well as Jews
and the mentally ill. 8 Corresponding lists of targets had been drawn up by the Reich Security Head Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) as early as May 1939.9
When the additional instructions that Heydrich referred to were issued is not
clear. Various statements by the Einsatzgruppe leadership suggest that they had
already had a meeting with Himmler and Heydrich by August in which they had
been told that how they should eliminate the Polish intelligentsia was up to
them. 10 This form of highly generalized instruction, giving the junior leadership considerable room for manoeuvre, matches the way the National Socialist
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