The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  Those selected for killing were told they were being moved to better conditions. After the first inspection, the remaining inmates knew better, and told their fellow prisoners to take off their spectacles before they paraded before the doctors, and not to register with minor injuries if they could manage it. The fact that the selected inmates were told to leave their spectacles behind, along with artificial limbs and other accoutrements of the disabled, before they embarked on the transport, was rightly taken as a clear indication of the fate to which they were going. The numbers of those selected were considerable. Already in the first trawl, of the camps in the Old Reich and the former Austria - Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, Neuengamme and Ravensbrück - the doctors selected no fewer than 12,000 victims. This was not altogether to the liking of Himmler, who instructed the camp commandants that only those inmates incapable of work should be killed; in April 1943 this was restricted still further to the mentally ill. Nevertheless, the total number of concentration camp inmates murdered in the gas chambers of the T-4 programme has been put at around 20,000. From April 1944 the concentration camp at Mauthausen, where 10,000 out of some 50,000 inmates were registered sick, began to send inmates directly to the gas chamber at Hartheim without involving the euthanasia organization in Berlin; an unknown number of inmates were killed in this way. The programme was important enough for the planned demolition of the gas chamber to be put off until 12 December 1944.224

  This was not the only purpose for which Hartheim and the other killing centres of the T-4 programme were used after August 1941. Brack and Bouhler not only sent their experts to the camps, or seconded them to the Reinhard Action in the east, they also used them to carry on the original killing programme in secret. Galen’s protest had weakened the political position of their organization, which became the object of bureaucratic in-fighting between the T-4 group, based in the Leader’s Chancellery, and the Interior Ministry, ending in an uneasy compromise in which the programme was put under the formal control of Herbert Linden, who filled the new post of Reich Commissioner for Healing and Care Institutions within the Ministry of the Interior. But the T-4 group continued to do its work. Viktor Brack, its leading figure, explained to those involved ‘that the “Action” was not ended by the stop that happened in August 1941 but will continue’.225 Subsidiary organizations such as the transport group that moved the patients to the killing centres also remained in existence. It was clear to all that the mass killings now had to give way to individual murders, so as not to arouse public suspicion. For the closure of the gas chambers had not quelled public unease. On 18 November 1941, for example, in what was undoubtedly the strongest open attack on the programme by any medical man in the course of the Third Reich, Franz B̈chner, a professor of medicine at Freiburg University, asked rhetorically in a lecture on the Hippocratic Oath: ‘Is the human being of the future only to be assessed for his biological value?’ His answer was unambiguously negative. ‘Every physician who thinks Hippocratically will resist the idea that the life of the incurably ill should be described in the sense of Binding and Hoche as a life not worth living.’ Binding and Hoche, the authors of an influential tract advocating involuntary euthanasia, were thus in his view advocating the violation of basic medical ethics. ‘The only master the physician has to serve,’ declared B̈chner, ‘is life.’226

  But medical staff at the T-4 headquarters in Berlin and in psychiatric and care institutions continued to be committed to the idea of killing ‘life unworthy of life’. The murder of children through fatal injections or deliberate starvation continued as before, but these methods were now applied to adult patients as well, and in a far wider range of institutions than the original killing centres. At Kaufbeuren-Irsee, patients who could work on the asylum farm or in some other capacity were fed what was categorized as a ‘normal diet’, and those who could not were given a ‘basic diet’, consisting of small amounts of root vegetables boiled in water. After three months of ingesting virtually no fats or proteins, they would be so weak that they could be killed with an injection of a small quantity of sedatives. By late 1942 so many were dying that the director of the asylum banned the ringing of the chapel bell during burials, in case its frequency alarmed local people. Conferences were held between the directors and staff of different institutions to determine the best way of starving inmates to death, and orders were issued, for example by the Bavarian Interior Ministry, providing for the food rations of the ‘unproductive’ to be cut. At Eglfing-Haar, patients selected for killing were isolated in special pavilions, soon dubbed ‘hunger houses’. The director, Hermann Pfannm̈ller, was quite open about the purpose of these diets, and regularly inspected the asylum kitchens in order to ensure that they were enforced. Aware of what was going on, the cook added fats to the cooking-pot after he left. Nevertheless, from 1943 to 1945 some 429 inmates died in the hunger houses. At Hadamar, patients deemed incapable of working were fed on a diet of nettle soup, just three times a week; relatives who received letters from them asking for food parcels were told that feelings of hunger were a symptom of their illness, and that in any case soldiers and people who were working for the nation had to get priority in the distribution of food supplies. 4,817 patients were transported to Hadamar between August 1942 and March 1945: no fewer than 4,422 of them died.227

  By this time, starvation and lethal injections were also being used to kill poorly disciplined and refractory patients, as well as any whom the asylum directors felt would be poor workers, irrespective of the form-filling operations run by T-4 headquarters. At Kaufbeuren-Irsee, for example, a fifteen-year-old Gypsy who stole from hospital stores was killed with a lethal injection, which he was told was a typhus inoculation; at Hadamar, in December 1942, an inmate who worked on the estate was found to be telling stories about the asylum in the local town, confined to quarters, and died within three days. Corruption played a part too: patients who owned a good watch or a stout pair of shoes would sometimes be killed by nurses eager to acquire their possessions, while in the Kalmenhof psychiatric reformatory, produce from the institution’s 1,000-acre estate frequently went to the director and the staff instead of the inmates, who had to survive on about half their planned allocation of milk, meat and butter.228 The killing programme even became more intensive in 1944-5, and continued in some institutions all the way up to the end of the war; in Kaufbeuren-Irsee, indeed, one killing was recorded on 29 May 1945, nearly a month after the war had officially ended.229

  In the intervening period, new categories of victims had been added to the original list. Towards the end of 1942 the central directorate of the euthanasia programme began to organize the killing of foreign forced labourers, particularly Poles, who had become mentally ill or had contracted tuberculosis; over a hundred of them were murdered in Hadamar between the middle of 1944 and the end of the war, and more in Hartheim and other established killing centres as well as new camps and institutions designated for the purpose. The killings extended to babies born to female forced labourers who had resisted the pressure to have an abortion; sixty-eight children under the age of three were killed at the Kelsterbach institution from 1943 to 1945 because they were classified as the racially undesirable offspring of such women.230 At Hadamar, more than forty healthy children moved there in April 1943 were killed because they had been classified as ‘mixed-race of the first degree’, that is, one parent was Jewish. Often they had been taken into care because their parents were dead, or the Jewish parent had been killed and the remaining parent had been ruled incapable of caring for them. The chief physician at Hadamar, Adolf Wahlmann, justified these murders by classifying the victims as ‘congenitally feeble-minded’ or ‘difficult to educate’, although there was no medical or psychiatric justification for such a designation at all.231

  The killing of psychiatric patients also extended beyond the Reich. Already in 1939-40 it had encompassed asylums in occupied Poland. From the summer of 1941 it also operated in the parts of the Soviet Union conquered a
nd occupied by the German armies in the course of Operation Barbarossa. As well as killing large numbers of Jews and Communist Party officials, the SS Task Forces that followed the German army sought out psychiatric hospitals and systematically killed the inmates by shooting them, poisoning them, depriving them of food, or putting them outside in the winter cold to die of exposure. From August 1941, on Himmler’s instructions, they began to look for other means, in view of the stress that these direct methods placed on the SS men, some of whom were turning to drink or suffering from nervous exhaustion. With the help of equipment provided by Albert Widmann and the Criminal-Technical Institute, the SS first tried locking patients into a building and blowing them up with explosives. This turned out to be too messy for their taste. So they went over to gassing them with carbon monoxide in mobile gas vans as suggested by Widmann. Carried out in this way, the Task Force killings of psychiatric patients in the occupied Soviet Union continued sporadically until late 1942. Although the exact number will never be known, Soviet sources suggest that about 10,000 people were exterminated in this way.232

  Increased efforts were made after August 1941 to keep such murder programmes from attracting public attention. The transportation of patients was now justified as a means of removing them from the danger posed by air raids, for example. Yet the killings could not be kept entirely secret. On 21 October 1943 Herbert Linden complained to the President of Jena University that his staff were being too open about the continuing ‘children’s euthanasia’ programme:

  According to Director Kloos in Stadtroda, the mother of a young idiot boy was told the following in the clinic at Jena: ‘Your boy is an idiot, without any prospect of developing, and he must therefore be transferred to the regional hospital in Stadtroda, where three physicians from Berlin examine the children at certain intervals and decide whether they should be killed.’233

  This laxness had to be stopped, he said. ‘As you know,’ he added in a second letter, ‘the Leader wants all discussion of the question of euthanasia to be avoided.’234 Voices were also raised in protest from within the Confessing Church, most notably in October 1943, when a synod in Breslau stated publicly: ‘The annihilation of human beings simply because they are relatives of a criminal, old, or mentally ill, or belong to a foreign race, is not wielding the sword of state given to the authorities by God.’235 Protestant welfare institutions like Bodelschwingh’s Bethel Hospital sometimes tried to delay the transport of patients to the killing centres, or to send them out of harm’s way, but even Bodelschwingh met with only limited success in these efforts.236 The Catholic Church was initially hesitant, though it soon realized that the killing programme was continuing. A joint pastoral letter on the topic, drafted in November 1941 by a group of bishops, was suppressed by Cardinal Bertram, who was reluctant to exacerbate the situation still further in the wake of Galen’s sermon. Instead, early in 1943, the bishops instructed Catholic institutions not to co-operate with the registration of patients for the Reich Ministry of the Interior, which had ordered it at the end of the previous year with the obvious intention of compiling lists of people to be killed.237 On 29 June 1943 Pope Pius XII issued an Encyclical, Mystici Corporis, condemning the way in which, in Germany, ‘physically deformed people, mentally disturbed people and hereditarily ill people have at times been robbed of their lives . . . The blood of those who are all the dearer to our Saviour because they deserve the greater pity,’ he concluded, ‘cries out from the earth up to Heaven.’238 Following this, on 26 September 1943, an open condemnation of the killing of ‘the innocent and defenceless mentally handicapped and mentally ill, the incurably infirm and fatally wounded, innocent hostages and disarmed prisoners of war and criminal offenders, people of a foreign race or descent’ by the Catholic bishops of Germany was read out from the pulpit in churches across the land. The breadth of the terms in which it was couched was remarkable. Its overall effects were minimal.239

  V

  Among the many people whom the Nazis regarded as racially inferior, a special position was reserved for the Gypsies. Himmler regarded them as particularly subversive because of their itinerant lifestyle, their alleged criminality and their aversion to regular, conventional employment. Racial mixing with Germans posed a eugenic threat. By September 1939 German Gypsies had been rounded up and registered with a special office in Berlin. Many of them were in special camps. As soon as the war broke out, the SS took the opportunity to put into effect what Himmler had already called the ‘final solution of the Gypsy question’.240 Restrictions were placed on their movements, and many were expelled from border areas in the belief that their wanderings and their supposed lack of patriotism made them suitable for recruitment by foreign intelligence agencies. A plan to resettle them in occupied Poland was shelved while Himmler sorted out the resettlement of ethnic Germans there, but a meeting of SS officials chaired by Heydrich on 30 January 1940 decided that it was time for the plan’s implementation. In May 1940 some 2,500 German Gypsies were rounded up and deported to the General Government. In August 1940, however, it was decided to postpone further deportations until the Jews had been dealt with. While the SS dithered, the persecution of those Gypsies who remained in the Reich intensified. Gypsy soldiers were cashiered from the army, Gypsy children were expelled from schools, Gypsy men were drafted into forced labour schemes. Early in 1942 Gypsies in Alsace-Lorraine were arrested, and some of them were taken to concentration camps in Germany as ‘asocials’. 2,000 Gypsies in East Prussia were loaded on to cattle cars at the same time, and taken to Bialystok, where they were put in a prison, from which they were later moved to a camp in Brest-Litovsk. Meanwhile, Dr Robert Ritter’s research team, based in the Reich Health Office, was painstakingly continuing its registration and racial assessment of every Gypsy and half-Gypsy in Germany. By March 1942 the team had assessed 13,000; a year later the total assessed in Germany and Austria had reached more than 21,000; and by March 1944 the project was finally completed, with a final tally of precisely 23,822. However, by this time, many of those who had been assessed by Ritter and his team were no longer alive.241

  The killings began in 1942. The previous year, the Reich Criminal Police Office, which had already concentrated Gypsies from the Austrian Burgenland into a number of camps in the province, had persuaded Himmler to allow the deportation of 5,000 of them to a specially cordoned-off section of the Lo’dz’ ghetto. Plans to use the adult Gypsies for labour duties came to nothing, however. As typhus began to rage in the ghetto, particularly affecting the overcrowded and insanitary quarter where the Gypsies lived, the German administration decided to take them all to Chelmno, where the great majority - more than half of them children - were killed in mobile gas vans. Around the same time, SS Task Forces in occupied Eastern Europe were shooting large numbers of Gypsies as ‘asocials’ and ‘saboteurs’. In March 1942, for instance, Task Force D reported with evident satisfaction that there were no more Gypsies left in the Crimea. The killings commonly included women and children as well as men. They were normally rounded up together with the local Jewish population, stripped of their clothes, lined up alongside ditches and shot in the back of the neck. The numbers ran into thousands and included sedentary as well as itinerant families, despite the fact that Himmler made a clear distinction between the two. In Serbia, as we have seen, the regional army commander Franz Böhme included Gypsies in his arrests and shootings of ‘hostages’. One eyewitness of a mass shooting of Jews and Gypsies by men of the 704th Infantry Division of the regular German army on 30 October 1941 reported: ‘The shooting of the Jews is simpler than that of the Gypsies. One has to admit that the Jews go to their death composed - they stand very calmly, whereas the Gypsies cry, scream and move constantly while they already stand at the place of the shooting. Several even jump into the ditch and pretend to be dead.’ Harald Turner, the head of the SS in the area, alleged (without any evidence) that Gypsy men were working for the Jews in partisan warfare and were responsible for many atrocities. Several thousand we
re killed, although when the gassing of the remaining Serbian Jews in the Sajmiste camp began in February 1942, the Gypsy women and children held there were released.242

  The killing of Gypsies was also carried out by Germany’s Balkan allies. In Croatia, as we have seen, the Ustashe massacred large numbers of Gypsies as well as Serbs and Jews. Similarly, the antisemitic regime of Ion Antonescu in Romania ordered some 25,000 out of a total of 209,000 Romanian Gypsies to be deported to Transnistria, along with 2,000 members of a religious sect, the Inochentists, who refused on grounds of conscience to do military service. Those who were rounded up were mainly itinerant Gypsies, whom Antonescu made largely responsible for crime and public disorder in Romania. In practice, the arrests were often quite arbitrary in character, and the Romanian army protested successfully against the inclusion of some First World War veterans in the deportations. The deportees were described in 1942 as living in conditions of ‘indescribable misery’, without food, emaciated and covered in lice. Increasing numbers died of hunger, cold and disease. Their bodies were found on local highways; thousands had perished by the spring of 1943, when they were transferred to better housing in a number of villages and given jobs on public works projects. Only half of the deportees survived long enough to return to Romania from Transnistria with the retreating Romanian army in 1944.243