Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (32 page)

(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 their fate until the very last minute. They were first subjected to a

kind of reception examination before being taken to the gas chamber that was

disguised as a shower room. Death usually followed within a few minutes. After

gold teeth had been removed and some corpses selected for autopsy, the mortal

remains of the dead were cremated within the perimeter of the institutions.

In the first six months of 1940 the ‘euthanasia’ killings that formed part of the

T4 programme were gradually extended to each of the individual German states

and Prussian provinces until almost the whole area of the Reich was covered.

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The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

If one attempts to reconstruct in detail the chronological and geographical

progress of the mass murder of institutional patients,
46
what emerges is an image of T4 as a completely non-standardized process dependent on a whole

range of disparate factors. The number of people killed in the T4 programme rose

steadily month by month from January 1940 and in August reached its initial high

point with many more than 5,000 victims per month. In the regions affected first

(Baden, Württemberg, Berlin, Brandenburg, and Austria) sometimes a much

higher proportion of patients was murdered than had originally been intended.

This evidently led the organizers of T4 to raise their targets. There is an important

document in existence that suggests that by October 1941 the intention was to

murder between 130,000 and 150,000 people in total.
47

On the other hand, the numbers of those actually murdered each month went

down after September 1940, clearly because regions were being targeted that did

not have their own killing centres. The transportation of patients over large

distances proved to be problematic, not least because the population were

gradually becoming aware of what was happening. Eventually the numbers of

victims reached its nadir between the point when the two killing centres at

Brandenburg and Grafeneck were closed in August and the end of the year.

There exists a further indication from this period that the ‘euthanasia’ organizers

were reducing their target numbers to 100,000
.48
The construction of gas chambers in Bernburg (Anhalt) and Hadamar (Hessen) early in 1941 made it possible

to extend the programme to neighbouring regions that had not hitherto been

included, or had been only partially included, especially Hessen and the Prussian

province of Saxony. At this point the monthly figures began to increase again

sharply and by May were once more well over 5,000 and rising. Now the

attention of the ‘euthanasia’ planners was directed at the richly populated regions

of northern and western Germany, which did not have their own killing centres

and had so far largely been spared. But before these areas could be fully

incorporated into the programme of murders the T4 campaign was stopped, in

August 1941, at precisely the moment when the original target of 70,000 victims

had been reached. I shall go into the reasons why this came to a halt in more

detail later.

Within the context of the T4 programme, therefore, the Chancellery of the

Führer of the NSDAP had developed a process through which a large number of

people had been murdered in procedures that had been centrally directed, were

ostensibly under scientific control, and were bureaucratically managed in the

minutest detail. This programme of murder—which was kept secret—had been

disguised sufficiently well that, from the outside, the true fates of the patients

being ‘transferred’ only became known very gradually, such that protests and

resistance only became effective at a point where the programme had already

largely been completed.

Persecution of Jews in the Reich, 1939–40

141

With the ‘euthanasia’ programmes the National Socialist regime had crossed

the threshold to a systematic, racially motivated policy of annihilation a little

under two years before the mass murder of the Jews began. Important elements of

this policy of annihilation that were to play a central role in the murder of the Jews

can be identified as early as 1939 and 1940 as part of the planning and execution of

the ‘euthanasia’ campaign. Alongside mass executions and the use of fixed as well

as mobile gas chambers, it is particularly important to note that ‘euthanasia’

involved the development of a complex, work-intensive process that deceived

the victims until the last moment and to a large extent also apparently protected

the perpetrators from personal responsibility, in that they received the impression

of fulfilling only a subordinate role in a scientifically controlled process that

obeyed the dictates of reason.

Closer analysis of the T4 programme has shown, however, that carrying out

the murders involved considerable variations at different points and in different

places, and that these can be attributed to a whole series of factors. The T4

Central Office was decisively reliant on the cooperation of individual psychiatric

institutions and that of regional authorities; both were prerequisites for continu-

ity in the deportation of patients to killing centres. Geographical factors, such as

the location of the killing centres and the question of which administrative

authority (state or province) had responsibility for each individual institution,

also played a major role; similarly the conditions operating in individual killing

centres affected the extent and speed of the programme of murder to a consid-

erable degree. It is also apparent, however, that the planners were prepared to

correct the targets of planned victims upwards or downwards. What looks at first

sight like a systematically organized and implemented programme for the

murder of 70,000 people is revealed on closer analysis to be a complex network

of central planning aims and revisions on the one hand and a many-faceted

mode of delivery on the other, which was dependent on several regional and

chronological variants. T4 can be seen as a model for the ‘Final Solution’ in this

respect as well.

There is a further parallel between the two: the T4 programme already

displays a degree of ambivalence between the attempts on the part of the regime

to maintain strict secrecy (but which was impossible, given the sheer extent of

the operation)
49
and targeted references on the part of official agencies to the necessity of such radical measures, which must have fed the rumours that were

already circulating.
50
This ambivalence can be seen as a phenomenon of the

‘open secret’: what was happening was already known in outline amongst broad

sections of the population, but was not commented on in public in any way

at all.

Finally, the fate of the Jewish inmates of the psychiatric institutions within the

T4 programme is of particular interest. Since June 1938 they had been separated

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The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

from the other inmates and were collected together in special institutions from

1940 onwards. From there they were all deported to the killing centres, without

regard to medical diagnosis or capacity to work, including the aged and infirm.

The systematic murder of some 4,000 to 5,000 Jewish patients thus represents an

important ‘bridge’ between ‘euthanasia’ and the later annihilation of the whole

Jewish population.
51

chapter 8

GERMAN OCCUPATION AND THE

PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS IN POLAND,

1939–1940/1941: THE FIRST VARIANT OF

A ‘TERRITORIAL SOLUTION’

Mass Shootings of Poles and Jews in Autumn 1939

Alongside the ‘euthanasia’ programme it was above all with the politics of the

occupation of Poland that the National Socialist regime made its decisive step

towards a racially motivated policy of annihilation at the beginning of the Second

World War.
1

As early as 23 May Hitler had made a speech to the army top brass in which he

spoke of the necessity to achieve ‘an extension of our living space in the East’ via a

war with Poland,
2
and on 22 August, again before members of the army’s most senior ranks, he had given the following guidelines: ‘Destruction of Poland