Army of Evil: A History of the SS (28 page)

In all, some six thousand children were murdered between 1939
and 1945 in the children’s euthanasia programme,
¹⁰
with some of these deaths taking place
after
Germany’s unconditional surrender. Many more were killed as part of the wider “T-4” programme that is described below.

For adult incurables, Bouhler and Brandt set up a secret-service-style operation to ensure that everything ran smoothly. The headquarters were in a villa at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in central Berlin; hence, the operation became known as T-4. Bouhler and Brandt’s first task was the recruitment of personnel. Initially they turned to friends and students of the senior T-4 officials, who learned of the new operation through word of mouth. Others were recruited from the wider medical profession, because this was to be mass murder disguised as medical procedure. Finally, police officers and SS men joined the operation to perform the actual killing. One such was Franz Stangl.

Stangl was an Austrian policeman and National Socialist Party member who was summoned to Berlin by Himmler. His superior, Detective Werner, told him what he would be required to do in his new role:

After receiving this explanation, Stangl accepted the new position and became a “security officer” at Hartheim Castle, one of the main killing centres of the euthanasia programme. He was one of a number of SS personnel who joined T-4. Around Christmas 1939, SS-Sergeant August Becker, a professional chemist, was sent to meet SS-Senior Leader Viktor Brack, who had been an SS and party member since 1929 and had been working for Bouhler since 1932. Brack, who would later become the day-to-day administrator of T-4, explained that all incurable “idiots” and mental patients were to be eliminated from Germany. It had already been agreed that the best means to achieve this was poison gas, so the acting head of the chemistry department of the Criminal Technical Institute of Kripo, Dr. Albert Widmann, had been asked to find a suitable agent.

This was a highly significant development. In effect, the SS was preparing to implement National Socialist ideology: Himmler had taken it upon himself and his organisation to “improve” the German race. He conceived of the SS as the
Staatsschutzkorps
(state protection corps), whose role had previously been to protect the state against external and internal ideological enemies. Now it also included protecting Germany against biological enemies.

Widmann had decided that the best poison for his purposes was carbon monoxide, so fifty steel canisters were dispatched to IG Farben in Ludwigshafen and filled with the gas. These were then transported to the former castle of the dukes of Württemberg at Grafeneck, which was being used as an asylum by the Evangelical (Protestant) Church in Stuttgart. The building was requisitioned from the church in October 1939, and shortly afterwards a group of ten SS NCOs who had been seconded from Death’s Head units arrived. They were dressed in civilian clothes and were supposedly working for the
Gemeinnutzige Stiftung für Anstaltspflege
(Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care)—T-4’s cover designation. Using local craftsmen and labourers, the unit quickly began the process of turning the castle into an extermination centre: they converted an old coach shed
into a gas chamber and installed two crematorium furnaces in a nearby hut.

In mid-January 1940, the gassing process was tested at the old prison in Brandenburg, near Berlin. Among the spectators were Widmann, Brack, Brandt, and a former Stuttgart detective, Christian Wirth—a coarse bully who had been selected as head of administration at the Hartheim killing centre, near Linz, Austria.
*
A group of fifteen to twenty naked men were escorted into the gas chamber and sealed in, and then either Becker or Widmann released the carbon monoxide. Within a few minutes, all of the men were dead. Later that day, Widmann injected eight men with scopolamine and curare, two highly toxic paralysing agents, but these failed to kill the men, so all eight were placed in the gas chamber to be murdered. A further gassing was then carried out, this time with Dr. Irmfried Eberl operating the controls.

In the weeks following these tests, Becker travelled to the other killing centres to demonstrate installation and operation of the equipment. Perversely, considering that this process was as far removed from medical treatment as it was possible to get, Brack decreed that only qualified doctors should be allowed to turn on the gas.

As with the children’s euthanasia project, the murder of adult incurables remained entirely extralegal, and it was carried out by deception and subterfuge. In September 1939, the Reich Doctors’ Leader, Leonardo Conti, had written to all public and private asylums in Germany, requesting general statistical information and asking them to register all patients who were “(1) suffering from schizophrenia, epilepsy, senile dementia, therapy-resistant paralysis, feeblemindedness, encephalitis and Huntington’s Chorea, who were incapable of anything other than purely mechanical work; (2) patients who had been in the asylums for more than five years; (3) the criminally insane,
foreign nationals and ‘racial aliens.’”
¹²
This last group is worth noting, because the simple fact of being Jewish overrode any medical considerations: virtually every Jew within the German asylum system was murdered during the course of the first year of T-4 in 1940.

The recipients of Conti’s letter were told that the registration process was “economic planning,” and most hospital, asylum and clinic directors accepted this at face value. They assumed that the government was merely trying to identify additional sources of labour from among their patients. Tragically, this led some doctors to exaggerate some of their more able patients’ symptoms in the misguided belief that this would save them from being used as forced labour. Of course, in reality, it served as a death sentence.

Once the completed forms had been returned to T-4, they were copied before being sent on to “expert referees” for scrutiny. Again, each form supposedly required three referees to agree before the victim was marked for death. However, the referees were each expected to process some 3,500 cases per month, in addition to their normal duties, so it is highly unlikely that they gave any of the forms more than a cursory glance. Nevertheless, they were paid 400 marks a month for their time. Each and every form was then supposedly checked by Professor Werner Heyde, the senior referee, before the lists of victims were passed on to the Patients’ Community Transport Service—T-4’s transport fleet, driven by SS men in civilian clothes. They collected the patients from their “home” asylums and took them either to a “transit” asylum or directly to one of the killing centres. Even at this stage, the medical pretence was maintained. Typically, when the victims arrived, they were met by doctors, nurses and orderlies in medical garb and taken to changing rooms, where they were stripped, sometimes photographed, and given a further cursory examination, often to ascertain whether their corpses might be used later for scientific dissection or autopsy. Only when all this had been done were they led into gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. The doors were then sealed and the carbon monoxide was released to kill them.

This method of killing was anything but “merciful” or “humane.” Acute carbon monoxide poisoning typically causes headache, dizziness, nausea, confusion and convulsions, and even at relatively high concentrations death is unlikely to occur before fifteen or twenty minutes have elapsed. Usually, the victims were left in the gas chambers for an hour to ensure that they were all dead before extractor fans were turned on and the bodies were removed by teams of “burners” (or “disinfectors,” as they termed themselves). Any gold teeth were extracted before the corpses were carted to nearby furnaces for cremation. Later, an urn of ashes was sent to each victim’s family (of course, any ashes would do, as far as the killing centres were concerned), together with a letter of condolence and a death certificate that gave a plausible cause of death.

Notwithstanding all of this deception, T-4’s attempts to keep the programme secret were doomed to failure almost as soon as it got under way. When the first group of patients left the asylum at Kaufbeuren-Irsee for Grafeneck, few of the asylum staff suspected that their charges were about to be executed. However, a few days later, the victims’ clothing and personal effects—stained with vomit, blood and faeces—were returned to the asylum. The medical staff instantly guessed what had happened to them, and word soon spread among the rest of the staff and the patients about the true destination of the grey buses. This pattern was repeated in all of the other asylums. Scared patients often tried to hide when the transports arrived and physically resisted being loaded aboard. Some were then manacled to their seats to stop them escaping. This should come as no surprise. Although National Socialist propaganda attempted to portray incurable psychiatric patients as frightening, sub-human monsters, in reality only a small minority could not comprehend what was happening to them. And many of the groups that were targeted—such as epileptics and paralytics—were not reason-impaired at all. At least one of the eighty or so patients who were forced onto the second transport from Kaufbeuren-Irsee asked for a priest so he could make his final confession.

Word of what was happening also spread in the localities of the killing centres as the personnel talked freely in pubs and cafés. And, of course, the local residents saw the buses arriving, followed shortly afterwards by smoke and fumes from the crematoria chimneys. It was so obvious what was going on that railway workers at Grafeneck removed their hats out of respect as transport trains passed through their station.

Furthermore, some of the victims’ families knew that the authorities were lying to them. Inevitably, mistakes were made by the administrators, so, for example, a sister might be told that her brother had died of acute appendicitis, even though he’d had an appendectomy fifteen years before. But even more importantly, the vast majority of the incurables were much-loved sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. Their families genuinely cared for them, were concerned about their fate and did not want them arbitrarily killed at the whim of the state. Therefore, as the death toll grew, so did resistance to the euthanasia programme. This reached surprisingly vociferous levels, given that it took place in Hitler’s Germany.

At first glance, this might be interpreted as an indication of pure compassion among the citizens of the Third Reich, as evidence that they were not prepared to accept the wholesale slaughter of innocent people purely because they were different from the rest of society. However, before drawing this conclusion, it should be remembered that there were no comparable demonstrations when the extermination of the Jews got under way. And there is nothing to suggest that the general population of Germany held particularly enlightened views about how the disabled and the mentally ill should be treated. In fact, they seemed to take issue with the manner in which the killing was carried out, rather than with the killing itself: no law had been passed to authorise the programme; relatives were not informed of the victim’s true fate; and the process appeared to have no rules. It may well have been the arbitrary nature of the programme that caused most concern, with many people understanding that anybody might need
psychiatric treatment at some point in their life or might suffer an injury that leaves them permanently disabled. This would have been especially appreciated in Germany in 1940, because so many people had been through the horrors of the First World War and had seen friends and family members wounded or struck down by “shell-shock.”
*

Whatever it was that motivated the protesters, they made their voices heard. Some organised rallies outside the killing centres. Others took their concerns directly to the asylums and managed to extricate their relatives from the clutches of T-4. Others, ironically, petitioned Hitler through the Führer Chancellery, not realising that this organisation was orchestrating the whole project. However, the most effective protests came from members of the Catholic Church. Foremost among these was the Bishop of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen.

Von Galen was a member of an old aristocratic family—ultraconservative, snobbish, racist and reactionary. A Jesuit, he had long publicly opposed the National Socialist regime, but principally because he thought it was led by social upstarts and foreigners. He first received information about T-4 as early as July 1940, but was dissuaded from denouncing the project by Cardinal Bertram, the Archbishop of Breslau. However, the following year, the Gestapo seized Jesuit property in Münster and von Galen decided to act. On 3 August, he delivered a ferocious sermon from his pulpit in the Lambertikirche, which concluded: