The Chosen Ones (48 page)
Authors: Steve Sem-Sandberg
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Extract from the hearing of the witness Dr Barbara Uiberrak, senior registrar and pathologist at Steinhof, January 1946:
I have been employed at the Steinhof asylum since 1933. Since that year, I have been in charge of post-mortem examinations for the entire hospital complex, i.e. not only for the mental hospital but also for all institutions linked to the Steinhof asylum. Over the years, the hospital has of course undergone several changes. The children’s clinic was opened and then a reform school. In addition, a labour camp for women was established and then a military hospital.
Throughout these changes, I carried out autopsies as required by all these institutions, including the military hospital. Practically all dead bodies were autopsied. It was only when the workload became so large that we were no longer able to sustain the burden that we stopped carrying out post-mortem examinations on subjects who had died from old-age-related decay.
Doctors Illing and Türk I only know of as colleagues at work. We did not meet privately. Doctor Türk was known as someone who was not a National Socialist, while Doctor Illing was widely known to be a National Socialist. He wore his party badges prominently at all time.
I was not aware that there were state instructions about carrying out euthanasia in certain parts of the institution. My staff would talk about these matters, for instance the rumour that procedures in the children’s clinic were not what they should be. Personally, I gave no credence to all that. There was a lot of loose talk going around at the time which turned out to be quite unfounded. As for the children’s corpses, I never picked up anything untoward at autopsy.
All I can say about Dr Illing is that he gave me the impression of being an exceptionally meticulous physician who took a most unusual interest in individual cases. It often happened that he came to see me in order to examine more closely some particular autopsy observation or generally to survey the material. In brief, to my mind, he left a very good impression indeed, as a doctor and a human being – a morally highly commendable person and very devoted to his duties as a doctor.
As required, I shall here make short statements concerning some of the cases of morbidity I saw at the time:
I. Boys:
1) Sturdik, Anton: The child was unfit for life. It is hard to judge how long he would have survived. This boy was paralysed and, as shown in two of the photos, he is, as it were, lying on his head. This is normal in children with severe muscular spasms in the legs. The photograph of his brain indicates clearly the expanded ventricular system (internal). Otherwise, no marked changes. If one went by the brain development alone, such debility would be unexpected. As in so much research into brain function, the effects of lesions are obscure.
2) Wenzel, Johan: An advanced case of hydrocephalus (water on the brain) with diminished brain development.
3) Lasch, Wolfgang: A child of spiritually highly developed parents, Wolfgang sustained brain damage due to X-ray irradiation during the second month of the mother’s pregnancy. The child was a complete idiot. He survived until his seventeenth birthday. I believe that the child’s mother died before her son. Her nerves were completely damaged.
4) Rothmayer, Gerhard: Very severe brain damage, however, relatively difficult to find any lesions from external inspection alone.
5) Rimser, Günther: Severe brain damage. This pattern continues throughout all the case histories of the children.
II. Girls:
1) Schmidt, Brigitte: Severe brain injuries shown on X-rays. Injuries of this type can be inherited defects or also have been caused during labour, e.g. at forceps delivery. Destroyed brain cells do not regenerate.
2) Kramerstätter, Maria Theresie: In this case, the cerebellum is almost entirely missing.
Almost all these cases are exceedingly interesting from a scientific point of view. We have preserved 700 or so brain specimens, which are kept here, ‘Am Steinhof’. In most cases, fixed speciments of all endocrine glands have also been kept. The intention was that all these anatomical items should become available for scientific study, especially to illuminate neurological pathology. I think one or several cases could usefully be investigated annually. This would be a way to achieve a wide overview.
*
‘Save yourself, Mrs Katschenka’
You’re out of your mind, Otto says when he realises the kind of admissions that his sister had felt that she must make.
You’re out of your fucking mind
. His eyes have gone blank, his lips are quivering like an upset child. She tries to convince him that she had no choice. If her own ex-superiors, like doctors Illing and Türk, are retracting their previous statements and admit that the clinic’s children were subjected to euthanasia – what can she do? Doctor Illing even insisted that he is proud of his achievements. He says that he has at all times been on the right side of the law. They will always have the law on their side or find a senior person to hide behind, Otto says, but who will protect and defend you? The war ended a year ago but Otto is still employed on clearing-up crews and is at this point out at Lobau, where the Nazis had been busy constructing a new facility for landing oil. The excavations were done by tens of thousands of Soviet POWs who had been transported there. Otto inspected the barracks where the workers were housed. They lived in quite a style, he says, and his voice is full of contempt. Much better than we did. Can you explain that? Why should they, who were prisoners after all, have been provided with all these goodies like housing and free food? Back then, they were much better off than us ordinary honest workers, and that’s still true enough. She
realises that his bitterness festers like a wound. She still remembers the day when he came home on leave and placed his hands on the table as far from the plate as he reasonably could, as if he didn’t want to recognise them as belonging to him, and that was when she knew that his hands had been used to kill. For whom, for
what
had he killed? He is asking himself that and now she is aware that she, too, could ask herself that question. A few weeks after putting her signature to the last witness statement, she gets a phone call from a man who says that he is Doctor Illing’s legal representative. She doesn’t catch his name, maybe he never said, but he is punctiliously polite and enquires about her family and how she is managing
during these difficult times
before he launches into his real reasons for calling her. He asks her if she has completely grasped that Doctor Illing will stand accused in court of crimes which were lawful acts in the legal context that applied during the war. Surely, the man insists, the fact was that if Doctor Illing had acted in contravention of the regulations in force at the time, he would have been guilty of a punishable offence. He might have been dismissed from his post, and possibly brought in front of a military court. Perhaps, Mrs Katschenka, you have not given sufficient weight to the same considerations in your own case. You should do so without delay. You, too, followed the institution’s rules and regulations at the time. No human being can set him – or herself – above history or commit themselves to obeying another, supposedly ‘higher’ form of law and justice than that which governs other citizens. You would be punished for such heresy. This is why I beg you: save yourself, Mrs Katschenka. Don’t agree to say in court what you have been told to say. Everyone knows that you were the person responsible for seeing to it that the prescribed lethal doses of certain drugs were given to the children. Therefore, don’t admit to anything that might compromise you further or, indeed, any of
your previous superiors. By inducing you to make these admissions, the People’s Court doesn’t aim at arriving at a clear understanding of what happened in the interest of what they would call justice. Instead, they will try to turn your statements against you. Which is why I advise you to make no admissions whatsoever. Repeat to the court that you don’t know and can’t remember. I beg you, Mrs Katschenka. Lives depend on you. Not only those of your former superiors, but your own.
Who was that on the phone?
Otto asks when she has put the receiver down, but she doesn’t know what to tell him so she says that she’s in a hurry because of an arrangement to see one of her woman friends. Otto’s gaze goes blank again. He knows that his sister isn’t going to meet a friend. She has no friends, male or female. But he does not try to prevent her from going out. When she is in the street she can’t think what to do and, because she is at a loss, she boards the number 6 tram at Matzleinsdorferplatz as she used to do every morning when she went to work. It is a mistake. She understands that at once.
There she is!
she hears a voice call out from the back of the carriage. When she turns to look, there
they
all are, of course. All the crazed mothers who used to hang around the hospital gates, waiting, are now seated around her and behind her. Mrs Barth and Mrs Schelling, the mother of the girl they had to tie down all the time; Felix Keuschnig’s mother, and Mrs Althofer, whose daughter was the girl with the pigeon chest. They seem to re-enact their children’s behaviours: Mrs Schelling strokes her wrists constantly, as if still feeling pain where the leather straps would have marked them; Mrs Keuschnig drags her feet and pulls her legs along one at a time, just like her son; Mrs Barth’s hands are constantly visiting her broad behind and she licks her lips as if they were smeared with excrement, too. And, indeed, Mrs Althofer has a pigeon chest. She sits, as if up to her ears in concerns, her pointy chin jammed into the base of her
neck while her stumpy arms wave in the air. All these women are fumbling to get hold of her, touching her with their small, repulsive hands, flapping about and squeaking and shrieking.
Kill her, kill her!
they yell. She throws herself forward, begs the driver to stop, while around her the mothers are barking with wide-open maws and wildly staring eyes. A tram-stop sign slips past, the doors open and she is free of them at last. The next morning, she walks to the
Landesgericht
and says that she wants to retract everything she said in her last interview session. But the investigating judge isn’t there or, perhaps, doesn’t want to see her.
*
Stone Faces
The trial of the three main defendants in the so-called Steinhof case – doctors Illing, Türk and Hübsch – began on 15 July 1946. That day was a Monday and the trial continued for the rest of that week. Anna Katschenka, nominated by the press as the leading witness for the prosecution, was called to take the stand on the second day, the Tuesday. Earlier that morning, Marie D testified. She was the mother of sixteen-year-old Martha, who had been born with a cranium as thin as a bird’s egg. Martha was unable to walk or to speak, and the slightest touch caused her pain. Mrs D directs her words alternately to the judge and to the members of the public who had struggled to get in and now packed the courtroom. Everyone is following the proceedings in and around the witness stand with tense attention. Mrs D speaks of how she, from the very first, had done everything in her power to make her little daughter better. She fed her special nutritional supplements and bathed the twisted infant body in rock-salt solution to strengthen her skeleton. However, none of the many doctors she consulted dared to give her any hope. No medicine in the world can save a child like yours, one of the doctors told her. In September 1944, she had used up the last of her strength
and the angelic patience that everyone who knew her agreed that she had shown, and brought her daughter to Spiegelgrund in a taxi. She was received in the clinic by Doctor Illing, who initially impressed her as ‘graciousness personified’. He asked her why she hadn’t sought help earlier and assured her that, to him, there were no ‘hopeless cases’. When Mrs D had explained her circumstances in more detail (the child was apparently born out of wedlock and the father was simply never mentioned) and her fear that her fragile daughter would be hurt at the hands of strangers, Doctor Illing became quite upset:
Do you really believe so ill of us, Mrs D? We are here to help people like you. I am a father myself and I treat every child in this clinic as if he or she were one of my own.
But despite his vehemence, Mrs D had not felt wholly convinced. In the days that followed after she had left Martha, she made several visits to the clinic, but every time she asked to see her daughter, the staff told her that it was impossible. Doctor Illing had banned all visits in view of the child’s ‘weak nerves’. After another few failed attempts to see Martha, Mrs D was finally ushered into the ward where Martha’s bed was. Her daughter had changed for the worse:
Her hair had been combed straight back, her lips were blistered, her head lay weakly on the pillow and her tormented body expressed itself in incessant whimpering and weeping. That upset me more than anything else, these tears that kept flowing from her eyes, my girl who had never as much as whimpered a complaint in her entire life. I immediately asked to see the doctor and demanded to know what she had done to my daughter. Then, Doctor Türk answered that, in the first place, your daughter is very ill, her temperature is very high, and that is only to be expected with a child like yours, you must prepare for the worst.
And then, on 23 October 1944 when, after endless waiting, I was finally allowed to see my child, death had already left its mark. Under the thin coverlet, her thin body looked famished, like a skeleton, her eyes were unnaturally large and she no longer had the strength to even lift her head from the pillow. I was close to insanity, out of control. I wanted to speak to the doctor at once but the doctor was unavailable and wouldn’t be back on the ward until the following morning. I had to wait.
Next, Mrs D received a notification of bad news – a
Schlechtmeldung
. By this stage, Mrs D’s identification with her ill daughter had become so intense that she describes how it felt as if she had
herself
been given a ‘dose of powder’ by the staff. She was struck down by fever, her temperature rose to forty-two degrees centigrade and, when a doctor was called, he diagnosed ‘nerve fever’. Two days later, the final letter arrived:
