Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Peter Longerich (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

this document, which Hitler significantly backdated to 1

September 1939, the activities of those who were responsible for the ‘euthanasia’

programme and who had so far been acting without any legal basis were legitim-

ized. Terms such as ‘critical investigation’ and ‘merciful death’ were intended to

obscure the fact that what was being organized was in fact mass murder. 34

From October 1939 psychiatric institutions were asked to indicate on special

forms those patients who were suffering from certain serious psychological

conditions and who were ‘unemployable or only able to fulfil mechanical tasks’.

In addition, without reference to health profile or capacity for work, registration

was required for all patients who had been in an institution for more than five

years, who had been detained as criminally insane, or who ‘do not possess German

citizenship or are not of German or similar blood’: this formulation referred to

patients who were of Jewish, Gypsy, or non-European origin. 35

138

The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

However, even before the mass murders of the T4 Programme had begun,

patients in institutions for the mentally ill had already been systematically killed,

especially in the annexed areas of Poland but also within the Old Reich, in

Pomerania. At least 7,700 people fell victim to this programme of mass murder.

From the end of September to December members of the Eimann Special Guard

Division (Wachsturmbann Eimann)—a unit made up of SS members from

Danzig, ethnic German Self-Defence Corps (volksdeutscher Selbstschutz) and

members of Einsatzgruppen (task forces) in the new Reichsgau of Danzig-West-

Prussia—shot thousands of the inmates of psychiatric institutions, most notably

patients in the Kocborowo (Conradstein) Mental Hospital. The victims were

people incapable of work or those of Polish or Jewish ethnicity. 36

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