The German War (27 page)

The bishops’ public protests against the killing of psychiatric patients in 1941 served to broaden a conflict in which they felt that vital Church interests were at stake. They succeeded in returning crucifixes to the schools of Upper Bavaria during September and October. But they did not regain their lost lands and monastic buildings, although Hitler did ban further sequestrations of Church property. Neither side had anything to gain from the confrontation, and the bishops also set about scaling down their protests. Even at the height of the struggle, Galen’s criticism of local Party leaders and the local Gestapo never extended to national leaders. Indeed, all three of his sermons of protest in July and August 1941 closed with prayers for the Führer. The bishops slowly returned to Cardinal Bertram’s tried and tested method of staying within the bounds and sending to members of the regime private letters of protest against specific violations of the Concordat. Neither Galen nor his Paderborn colleague, Lorenz Jäger, would make medical killing a public issue again.
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Even more psychiatric patients were killed in Germany after August 1941 than in the ‘T-4’ action. The murder of children did not stop at all; it was simply decentralised further. The killing of adults resumed after a year-long pause: 87,400 patients fell victim from 1942 to 1945, more than the 70,000 who were gassed in the first phase from 1939 to 1941. Almost as many patients again died of starvation in asylums which did not specialise in killing, bringing the total number of deaths to over 216,000. This time more effort was made to hide the evidence. But news did reach the Church leaders through priests working in Catholic asylums. By November 1942, the Catholic Church possessed incontrovertible evidence that medical killing had restarted. Its Fulda Bishops’ Conference determined not to take a stand in public again: instead, the Catholic asylums were simply discouraged from co-operating in the action. Even Bishop Galen, informed by a priest that the killing of the mentally ill had resumed, carefully avoided breaking the public truce and contented himself with a private letter of enquiry, addressed not to any of the national leaders but to the head of the provincial administration. He did not receive a reply and let the matter drop.
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In August 1942, a new team was assembled at Hadamar under the abrasive chief administrator Alfons Klein, and his gentle-mannered chief doctor, the 66-year-old Dr Adolf Wahlmann. Over 90 per cent of patients sent to Hadamar between August 1942 and March 1945 died, accounting for at least 4,400 deaths. On arrival at Hadamar, adult patients were immediately divided into those who could and those who could not work. Those unable to work received stinging nettle soup three times a week until they died of starvation. Each morning, Wahlmann met with Klein to compile the list of patients to be killed. The nursing staff then usually administered the lethal doses of Trional or Veronal in tablet form in the evening. Those still alive the next morning were injected with morphine–scopolamine. In order not to dismay the locals by the telltale plume of smoke billowing out of the crematorium chimney, the bodies were buried in a new cemetery behind the asylum. If relatives attended the funeral, there was a brief service with a coffin; if not, the bodies were consigned, naked, to mass graves.

Much of the information about the first phase of ‘euthanasia’ had leaked out of the medical and social welfare bureaucracy itself. In particular, as payments for medical care followed the patients from one psychiatric asylum to another, the money trail revealed their final destination. In the second phase, from 1942 onwards, a new payments office was inserted as a buffer so that the provincial administration which paid for a patient’s care could no longer see this trail. An unintended consequence of this new layer of secrecy within the bureaucracy was to undermine one of the principal purposes of medical murder: instead of ploughing the money saved on patient care back into the war effort, it had to be retained within the provincial administration in order to safeguard the secret of its origins. Unspent surpluses accumulated in the coffers of provincial administrations where patients were killed. In Hesse-Nassau, murder at Hadamar released millions of marks for building funds and other forms of civic expenditure, from war memorials to the Nassau provincial library and the Rhine-Main provincial orchestra.
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Despite all these precautions, revelations emerged. In October 1942, two months after Hadamar restarted, the Senior President of the Rhine Province wrote to Adolf Wahlmann to ask why so many of their patients had died so soon after arriving in his asylum. Although he held back from explaining how the patients had died, the chief doctor’s reply was anything but a denial:

I cannot square it with my National Socialist outlook to devote medical resources, be they medicinal or any other kind, to prolonging the life of these individuals who have completely fallen out of human society, most of all in the current time of our struggle for existence, in which each bed is needed for the most valued of our people.

The number of Germans murdered in the psychiatric asylums exceeded that of any other group of domestic victims of Nazi persecution. They had relatives spread throughout German society and, for a brief period, it looked as if the Catholic Church was willing to use its standing as the most powerful civic institution to champion their cause. But without such institutional backing, families faced major obstacles. An administrative paperchase made it even more difficult for families to reach the asylums before their relatives died, with deliberate delays in sending telegrams warning of serious illness, and forward-dating of the deaths. Instead of receiving paper urns with ashes, in the post-1942 phase of killing, families had the right – if they could afford the costs – to have the bodies collected by firms of undertakers for private burial. The firms themselves soon complained about the rough, unfinished coffins and the state of the naked corpses. But, as the Church fell silent, the hundreds of thousands of Germans affected by medical killing were isolated. Many lived far away from the asylums where their relatives were killed and may have remained unaware of what had really happened. Many too felt isolated in their communities, embarrassed by the stigma of carrying a ‘degenerative illness’ within their families.

Others struggled to care for a relative with utterly inadequate support and came to rely on the asylums as partners in care; as places of temporary respite. Ria was 5 when her mother left home for the first time. From 1925 onwards, Maria M. spent brief spells in Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic and the asylum at Wiesloch for what was diagnosed as ‘schizophrenia’. In 1929, Ria’s father died. His sister, Sophie, stepped into the breach to care for his 9-year-old daughter and widow. Sophie also came to rely on the Wiesloch asylum as a partner she could rely on, and the next time, Maria stayed there for five years. In 1941, after a long, stable period at home, she again started hearing voices and suffering from insomnia. Ria told the admitting doctor that her mother’s symptoms were the result of the noise of all the building works in Mannheim, to construct air raid shelters. Soon Ria and her aunt were writing separately to the asylum director, the one lobbying to have her mother released, the other to persuade him that her sister-in-law should remain there. In 1942, Ria succeeded in bringing her mother home again, but within six weeks Maria M. had a sudden violent episode in which she smashed the windows and a kitchen cabinet and her daughter had to return her yet again to Wiesloch. On 6 June 1944, Ria received a letter from the asylum at Hadamar to say that her mother had been transferred there, but that ‘owing to the difficult conditions of travel’, visits would only be permitted in ‘especially pressing’ cases. Shortly afterwards, on 13 July, Ria received a telegram from Hadamar informing her that her mother had contracted pleurisy. The death notice followed two days later. On 18 July Ria travelled to Hadamar to collect her mother’s wedding ring, savings account book and clothes.
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That was not the end of the matter, however. A month later, Ria wrote to Hadamar’s chief doctor, Adolf Wahlmann, to ask his advice on hereditary illness. Having become a mother herself, she wanted to know whether her mother’s schizophrenia could be inherited by her own son, ‘and if so’, she asked, ‘whether it would not be better for me to allow myself, and later on my son, to be sterilised, so as to smother the genetic trait in its cell’. Wahlmann took the time to reassure the unhappy young mother by return of post. Pointing out that, as long as there was no history of the illness on her husband’s side, the fact that she had grown up without evincing any symptoms suggested that the illness would not reappear in the next generation. Ria’s extraordinary letter to Wahlmann highlights a pattern discernible in many other cases. Under the strain of coping with a difficult and dependent relative, Ria and her aunt had each seen the asylum as a stable and trustworthy partner, occasionally to be lobbied as they argued with each other over their ability to care for Maria at home. They were hardly in a position to question, let alone rally opposition against, what was happening in Hadamar on their own. With neighbourhood sympathy never free of stigma, theirs were private tragedies, the cause of shame as well as grief.
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PART THREE

THE SHADOW OF 1812

6

As darkness fell on 22 June 1941, the men sheltering in the small wood checked their equipment one more time, while engineers pumped up the inflatable assault craft for the crossing. Marking the Romanian–Soviet border, the river Prut was a fairly wide but slow-flowing tributary of the lower Moldovian stretch of the Danube. Helmut Paulus embarked in one of the first boats of the 305th Infantry Regiment and, as their regimental commander waved to them, he was reminded of Roman gladiators and their greeting, ‘Those who are about to die salute you’. Then pandemonium broke out. A nervous non-commissioned officer fired his sub-machine gun into the side of one of the inflatables, and the occupants of another panicked and capsized their boat. The heavy machine gun and ammunition boxes sank to the bottom. The men had to wade through chest-high water to other boats. From their left came the rattle of machine guns, but nothing hit them. Other German units had crossed further upstream and were flushing the Russians out of Skuleni, the Bessarabian village on the opposite bank.
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As the Red Army units pulled back and the Germans advanced, Helmut’s infantry company reached a hilltop where they dug in. From daybreak, waves of Soviet planes strafed them every three to four hours, trying to dislodge the German bridgehead. Two days later, Helmut was still there, cowering in a tank trap they had dug, waiting for the Russian armoured divisions to resume their counter-assault. ‘One has feelings which are indescribable,’ he jotted in his notebook. He had envied the men who conquered France in 1940 while he was still doing basic training. Now, enduring his own ‘baptism of fire’, the 19-year-old was terrified. Apart from their company commander, a veteran of the First World War, none of them had seen battle. They clung to their bridgehead until 1 July, weathering the Soviet counterattacks. Having been trained to operate in small primary groups, the men could count on those loyalties above all others. Finally, after nine days, their 198th Infantry Division broke out and Helmut’s company found itself leading an attack on Finduri. It cost them thirty-seven men.
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Helmut and his comrades were part of the 11th Army. Fighting alongside Romanian troops, they formed the most southerly wing of the 3.5-million-strong force invading the Soviet Union. Commanded by Gerd von Rundstedt, Army Group South’s objective was the conquest of Ukraine, the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. Hitler also coveted Soviet oil, and the route to the wells in the Caucasus lay via Ukraine’s Black Sea coastline. Meanwhile, Army Groups North and Centre were to strike at the nerve centres of Leningrad and Moscow. Hitler had issued his first orders for the invasion of the Soviet Union nearly eleven months earlier, on 31 July 1940, the same day that he had given the green light to bombing Britain. For Hitler the two campaigns remained closely linked. As the ‘England attack’ failed, he convinced himself that blockading Britain and eliminating her Soviet ally would create another means to bring Britain to the negotiating table. But the German dictator’s strategic choices also fulfilled a long-cherished desire to destroy ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and conquer colonial ‘living space’ in the east, goals Hitler had openly proclaimed in
Mein Kampf.

There was another important link between the two campaigns. By continuing to mount major bombing raids against Britain into June 1941, the Luftwaffe succeeded in disguising the movement of most of its forces to the east. Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London, was certainly fooled, as was Stalin. So, too, were most Germans. To start with, Helmut Paulus had mistaken the river crossing for an exercise. At daybreak on Sunday, 22 June 1941, just after the invasion of the Soviet Union had begun, Hitler’s proclamation to the troops was read out. At 5.30 a.m. Goebbels read a similar announcement over German radio, dictated by Hitler the previous day. Its tone was patient and forbearing. ‘Burdened by grave worries, condemned for months to silence, finally the hour has come in which I can speak openly,’ Hitler began before setting out the history of British attempts to encircle Germany, most recently with Soviet help. He admitted that the alliance with Stalin had been a necessary expedient to break British attempts to force Germany into another two-front war. Despite all the signs of Soviet aggression against Finland, Yugoslavia and, most recently, Romania, the Führer had held back, but now action could no longer be delayed:

Today, some 160 Russian divisions stand on our border. For weeks, continual infringements of this border have been taking place . . . Russian pilots have made a sport of simply overflying it to demonstrate that they feel they are already masters of this region. On the night of 17–18 June, Russian patrols once more crossed into the Reich and were only driven back after a prolonged firefight.