Concepts of “eugenics” (in German usually referred to as “racial hygiene”) were common ground in the first half of the 20th century: the development of mankind was to be influenced in a positive way by breeding on the one hand and elimination of unwanted genetic characteristics on the other. The NS regime made use of that established scholarship for their “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases” that went into effect on January 1, 1934. According to its first paragraph the following were named as “hereditary diseases”: 1. hereditary imbecility, 2. schizophrenia, 3. manic depressive madness, 4. epilepsy, 5. St. Vitus’s Dance (Chorea Huntington), 6. hereditary blindness, 7. hereditary deafness, 8. severe hereditary physical deformity. “Severe alcoholism” was mentioned as well. Sterilization was to bring about a “gradual cleansing of the body of the (German) people and the eradication of pathological genetic dispositions. On this basis patients in psychiatric wards and all kinds of handicapped people were sterilized by force against their will. Many people from Augsburg who were moved to the “Sanatorium and Care Facility” in Kaufbeuren-Irsee suffered that fate.
The ultimate step was taken by the program that ran under the misleading title “Euthanasia” and was designed to kill (unwanted) sick and handicapped people. Literally the term “euthanasia” means “pleasant death” in the sense of an easy (not painful and not premature) dying. NS ideology now maintained that the life of inmates of psychiatric wards was a painful burden for them and the state had the duty to “relieve” them from that torment. Hitler himself signed an order, the so-called “Euthanasia Order”, backdated to September 1, 1939. In an office building in Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin (thus the code “T4” for the operation) special consultants were installed who analyzed the detailed documents from all psychiatric institutions and then gave their orders for the killings, under strict observance of secrecy. Large sections of the medical profession in Germany supported these practices.
Particularly psychiatrists who had propagated reforms in their field like Dr. Valentin Faltlhauser (1876-1961), who as a young doctor in Kaufbeuren-Irsee had searched for new methods to heal psychiatric patients, could be won over to collaborate in eliminating supposedly incurable patients. That included children as well. The organized murders were first carried out in gas chambers which caused unrest among the general population as the transports to the six central killing facilities (by way of characteristic gray colored buses) could not be kept secret in the long run. Therefore the operation switched over to killing the victims in the institutions – by giving them overdoses of certain medications (Luminal or Morphine-Scopolamine) or simply by denying them nutrition (so-called hunger rations).
So far biographies could be written for two rather randomly selected victims of these ways of killing in Kaufbeuren-Irsee: for Sophie K. and Josepha S. The texts are based on the hospital files that are kept in the archive of Kaufbeuren-Irsee. According to the Bavarian law on archives the full names may still not be used as the rights to anonymity of relatives could otherwise be violated. For that reason the last names have to be abbreviated.
The best known victim of “euthanasia” in Kaufbeuren-Irsee is the boy Ernst Lossa. He was first moved from the Catholic children’s home in Hochzoll-Nord in Augsburg (where he had grown up) to a reformatory institution in Markt Indersdorf because he was considered a “problem child”. From there he was deported to Kaufbeuren as “unsociable”. His parents were members of the Yeniche minority and thus usually had no permanent residence and had already been harassed by the police before the rise of the NS regime to power. For his biography we could rely on the works of Ernst T. Mader, Michael von Cranach (head doctor of the psychiatric hospital in Kaufbeuren from 1980 to 2006) and Robert Domes (author of a novel on the life of Ernst Lossa).
Dr. Michael Friedrichs
Translation: Wolfgang Poeppel
Literatur
Götz Aly, Die Belasteten: „Euthanasie“ 1939-1945 – eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte, Frankfurt 2014.
Michael von Cranach, In Memoriam, Ausstellung in Gedenken an die Opfer des nationalsozialistischen Euthanasieprogramms aus Anlass des XI. Weltkongresses für Psychiatrie in Hamburg, Kaufbeuren 1999.
Michael von Cranach/Hans-Ludwig Siemen (Hg.), Psychiatrie im Nationalsozialismus, München 1999.
Magdalene Heuvelmann, „Geistliche Quellen“ zu den NS-Krankenmorden in der Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Irsee, Irsee 2013.
Ernst Klee, „Euthanasie“ im Dritten Reich. Die „Vernichtung unwerten Lebens“, Frankfurt 2014.
Ernst T. Mader, Das erzwungene Sterben von Patienten der Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Kaufbeuren-Irsee zwischen 1940 und 1945 nach Dokumenten und Berichten von Augenzeugen, Blöcktach 1982.
Frank Schneider/Petra Lutz, Erfasst, verfolgt, vernichtet. Kranke und behinderte Menschen im Nationalsozialismus, Luxemburg 2014.