KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (48 page)

His verbosity aside, Dr. Mennecke cut no exceptional figure among
the T-4 physicians. Mass murder seems to have come easy to them. Like Mennecke, the others saw the killings as an opportunity—an important step for the Third Reich and an important step for their own careers. What is more, they did not have to execute the death sentences they signed, quickly moving on to the next KL. The general atmosphere during these trips was friendly and collegial, as the
T-4 men often shared the same hotels and socialized, drawing on their expense accounts. From the outside, they must have appeared like salesmen on a business trip. And this impression was not entirely wrong; it was just that their business was death.

The mood of T-4 doctors was particularly buoyant in early September 1941, when they met in Munich for their biggest mission yet, in nearby Dachau.
The situation inside was largely unchanged since Himmler’s visit in January: no other KL held more sick and dying men. This was why, presumably, the camp was only targeted now, after the murderous operation was fully up and running.
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In late summer 1941, the Dachau Camp SS selected two thousand prisoners to be presented to the T-4 commission; many of them had arrived on “invalid transports” from
other camps. To guarantee the speedy examination of these prisoners, T-4 managers mobilized at least seven physicians, headed by Professors Heyde and Nitsche themselves; the latter was determined to make the most of his trip to southern Germany and brought along his wife and daughter, who went on an excursion to the Alps. The T-4 officials, meanwhile, paid a preparatory visit to Dachau on September
3, 1941. Because the SS had not yet completed all its paperwork, the doctors stayed only briefly and took the rest of the day off. Dr. Mennecke, Professor Nitsche, and a few others took advantage of the sunshine and strolled along the scenic Lake Starnberg. They did some more sightseeing back in Munich, before moving on to dinner. Afterward, the group split; most doctors went to the movies,
while Mennecke and his friend Steinmeyer carried on drinking in a popular wine bar. The next morning, the group went back to Dachau to begin the selections.
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Inside Dachau, the T-4 doctors acted professionally, corresponding to their self-image as men of Nazi science. To deceive the prisoners about their ultimate fate, they put on a farce, just as they had previously done in other camps. They
approached the inmates calmly and politely, in deliberate contrast to the Camp SS. One T-4 official even made a show of chastising a young Dachau block leader for his brutality, to the amazement of onlooking prisoners. The doctors behaved in “a very odd and completely unprecedented” manner, Karel Ka
š
ák wrote in his secret notes in September 1941—perhaps the beginning of a better life for the prisoners,
he speculated.
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Such hopes were raised further after the T-4 doctors promised the selected prisoners that they would be taken to a camp with light work and better conditions.
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This chimed with claims by Camp SS men, who also painted a rosy picture of transfers to sanatoria, hospitals, and recuperation camps.
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All these lies were designed to make the doomed prisoners compliant. Just as during
the general “euthanasia” action, the plan was to leave the victims in the dark until the moment they were killed; even the gas chambers were disguised as washrooms, complete with tiles, benches, and showerheads.
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It was not just the prisoners who were deceived. The whole operation was shrouded in secrecy to prevent the spread of public rumors of the kind that had disrupted the general “euthanasia”
program.
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In line with this covert nature, T-4 doctors like Mennecke received most of their instructions during face-to-face meetings and telephone calls.
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Meanwhile, SS officials inside the camps had to sign a written pledge to keep silent about the operation.
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There was no more open talk of murder in the internal correspondence either, as there had been during the first KL executions in September
1939. When it came to the mass murder of invalid prisoners, the officials used a code name, Action 14f13 (insiders immediately recognized its significance: on Camp SS paperwork, the prefix “14f” always referred to the death of prisoners).
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Naturally, the rule of secrecy applied to the victims’ relatives, too. Camp SS doctors sometimes wrote letters with fake medical details, adding condolences
about the sudden deaths and assurances that everything had been done to save the deceased (there was no such subterfuge in the case of Jewish prisoners; here, a curt notification of death was considered enough).
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Despite these provisions, Action 14f13 did not proceed as smoothly as the perpetrators planned. There was plenty of improvisation and confusion, as the following example of selections
in Ravensbrück shows. On the afternoon of November 19, 1941, Dr. Friedrich Mennecke—seen by his T-4 superiors as the concentration camp specialist—arrived in the town of Fürstenberg near the camp. He came straight from Berlin, where he had met with Professors Heyde and Nitsche to confirm his itinerary for the coming weeks. After dropping off his suitcase in a local hotel, Mennecke walked to the
camp and briefly talked with the adjutant, who told him that the SS had identified a total of 259 prisoners for the examination. Afterward, Mennecke discussed the next steps with Commandant Max Koegel over coffee and beer in the SS mess hall, and then strolled back into town.

Early the next day, Mennecke called Heyde in Berlin to tell him that he would carry out his assignment without the help
of other T-4 doctors. He then returned to Ravensbrück and examined the first ninety-five women, who had to appear naked before him. He also held another meeting with Koegel and the camp doctor, convincing them that a further sixty to seventy prisoners should be included. All seemed to be going according to plan, and Mennecke was even more pleased with himself than usual as he returned to his hotel.
But later in the evening, he was surprised by the arrival of two colleagues who brought news from Berlin: T-4 leader Viktor Brack had given instructions for a vast two thousand prisoners to be examined in Ravensbrück—around one in every four inmates. Mennecke immediately dispatched a letter to his wife to complain about the administrative chaos. “Nobody cares if that many [prisoners] actually
fall under the general guidelines!” he grumbled.

Next morning, the three physicians went to Ravensbrück for a meeting with the commandant about the new directives. Before the expanded selections really got started, however, Heyde called and ordered the two doctors, who had only just arrived, back to T-4 headquarters. The two men were furious and Mennecke, who worked alone again, also fumed about
the “height of Berlin
in
competence.” One day later, on November 22, 1941, Mennecke received yet another call from the headquarters, informing him that Heyde now expected the Ravensbrück Camp SS to prepare the paperwork on some 1,200 to 1,500 prisoners by mid-December—the fourth target figure in three days. He dutifully passed the message to Commandant Koegel during a final meeting on Monday, November
24, 1941, before leaving for Buchenwald. By then, Mennecke had examined almost three hundred women. Once the Ravensbrück SS had picked out the additional prisoners (including men from the local subcamp), Mennecke returned on January 5, 1942, to finish the job. He selected hundreds more to die, completing 850 forms in little more than a week. The first transport left the camp in the following
month, probably for the killing center in Bernburg.
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Dr. Mennecke’s murderous mission to Ravensbrück highlights the ad hoc aspects of Action 14f13. At the same time, it marked a significant moment in the treatment of female prisoners. Previously, the women in Ravensbrück had been spared some of the most deadly SS excesses. Now they were included in the KL extermination policy, although some
differences between the sexes remained. Proportionally, the Ravensbrück SS presented far more male prisoners to Mennecke than female ones, probably a reflection of the devastating conditions inside the small compound for men. This highlights another important element of the murderous program: its divergent impact on different prisoner groups. Once again, suffering in the KL was not equal.
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Extending Action 14f13

Did Ferdinand (Faybusch) Itzkewitsch have any idea—as he boarded a truck with ninety-two other Buchenwald prisoners in mid-July 1941—that he only had a few hours to live? A forty-nine-year-old Russian Jew who settled as a shoemaker in Germany after the First World War, Itzkewitsch had been held in Buchenwald since 1938, following a prison sentence for “race defilement” (he
was convicted for his long-term relationship with his German partner). He had hoped in vain to be released and to emigrate, suffering untold horrors in the camp. But in a letter of June 29, 1941, he still tried to sound upbeat, telling his teenage son that “I am doing well, health-wise” and asking for a quick reply. He probably expected that he would soon leave the camp. Two weeks earlier, he had
been among around two hundred prisoners selected by T-4 doctors (Itzkewitsch was presumably picked because of a physical disability). Many Buchenwald inmates had been alarmed by these examinations, after one of the T-4 doctors, Bodo Gorgass, had deviated from the usual script. As Dr. Mennecke noted when he came to Buchenwald a few months later, his coarse colleague “is said to have behaved like
a butcher, not like a doctor, damaging the reputation of our action.” To calm the prisoners, Buchenwald SS men promised that there was nothing to fear, as the selected men would be taken to a recuperation camp. Not all inmates were fooled. But there were plenty who wanted to believe the lies; the weaker the prisoners were, the harder they clung to the SS fairy tales. In the end, many men who left
Buchenwald in mid-July 1941, on two separate transports, must have still had some hope of being saved. But all of them, including Ferdinand Itzkewitsch, were gassed in Sonnenstein.
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As Action 14f13 continued, the wall of deception inside the concentration camps began to crumble. Some prisoners heard about the murders from SS men who could not bite their tongue.
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Several Kapos, meanwhile, learned
the truth after the SS brought back the victims’ clothes and other possessions. Not long after the lethal transport of Ferdinand Itzkewitsch to Sonnenstein, Rudolf Gottschalk, a prisoner clerk in the Buchenwald infirmary, saw the SS return with dentures, spectacles, and crutches. Later Gottschalk was ordered to prepare death certificates for all the departed men. When he asked about their cause
of death, the Camp SS doctor handed him a medical dictionary and said “just pick out what you need”; in Itzkewitsch’s case, he chose “pneumonia.”
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The news about the prisoners’ true fate quickly made the rounds in Buchenwald, just as it spread through other KL after the first transports. Many inmates were shocked. The Camp SS, they felt, had crossed a threshold. Prisoners knew their captors to
be capable of heinous crimes, but few, it seems, had expected them to turn to systematic mass murder.
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From now on, no one volunteered for transports to the so-called sanatoria, as had sometimes happened in the past, and those who were selected desperately tried to get struck off the lists, though with little hope of success.
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Just as prisoners’ awareness of Action 14f13 grew over time, so
did T-4 selections. In line with Himmler’s original orders, selections initially focused on sick, weak, and disabled prisoners—all those written off as unproductive. The victims’ national backgrounds varied from camp to camp, depending on the local makeup of the prisoner population. In Gusen, for example, Poles and Spaniards were in the great majority when the T-4 commission arrived in summer 1941,
and consequently accounted for almost all the victims.
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Dachau, by contrast, still held a large number of German men, and they made up almost half of those selected to die by the T-4 doctors in September 1941.
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Although every infirm prisoner was threatened by Action 14f13, some were more likely to be killed than others. Sick and weak “asocials” and “criminals” were specially targeted, it seems,
perhaps because the SS saw their inability to work as confirmation of their “work-shy” nature.
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Criminality figured prominently on the official forms, and the T-4 doctors, who had already considered deviance an aggravating factor during earlier “euthanasia” selections in asylums, now appeared to apply similar rules to the KL.
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Summing up his impression of the inmates he had selected in Sachsenhausen
in April 1941, Dr. Mennecke informed his wife that they were all, without exception, “‘antisocials’—to the highest degree.”
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The hunt for the infirm hit many prisoners at the bottom of the SS hierarchy, since they were generally in the worst state of health. This was true for social outsiders, and it was even truer for Jewish inmates, outcasts in all the concentration camps. Since the war began,
Jews had swelled the ranks of the dying, and by 1941, only a few men with the yellow star were not injured, ill, or starving. Once Himmler launched Action 14f13, the weakest Jewish prisoners, and those with disabilities, like Ferdinand Itzkewitsch and Siegbert Fraenkel, were doomed.
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They were conspicuous not only because of their physical condition. T-4 doctors had already become used to racial
mass murder, overseeing the killing of all Jewish patients during the general “euthanasia” program. When it came to the selection of invalids in the KL, a prisoner’s Jewish background must have often tipped the scale.
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Consequently, Jews made up a disproportionately large number of victims; forty-five percent of the 187 Buchenwald prisoners gassed in Sonnenstein in mid-July 1941 were Jews like
Ferdinand Itzkewitsch, even though Jews only made up seventeen percent of the camp’s prisoner population.
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