Down syndrome and the Third Reich

I have a grand nephew who has Down syndrome, what aches me a lot I haven’t seen him yet. When he was born there were complications so he was on and out of the hospital. He is fine now, but because of the Covid pandemic I haven’t been able to fly to the Netherlands as of yet.

This made me think, if this would have been the 1930/40s in the Netherlands there was a chance I would never get the chance to see him. The Nazis would have probably murdered him.

At the beginning of World War II, individuals with mental or physical disabilities were targeted for murder in what the Nazis called the “T-4,” or “euthanasia,” program. The first to be eliminated was too young to speak on their own behalf. In fall 1938, the parents of a severely disabled infant petitioned Hitler for the right to kill their child. He granted the petition and saw in the request an opportunity to encourage what he called “mercy killings” or “euthanasia.” which became the T4 program. I have written about the T4 victims in the past.

In this post I just want to focus on one victim to remember all the forgotten victims.

Anna Lehnkering was born with a learning disability. In 1934, she was diagnosed as “congenitally feebleminded,” sterilized and committed to an institution. In 1940, she was sent to the Grafeneck euthanasia facility and gassed to death. According to her death certificate, Lehnkering, who once dreamed of working in a nursery, died of peritonitis, an inflammation of the tissue lining the stomach.

Sigrid Falkenstein found her aunt’s name – Anna Lehnkering – on a list of 30,000 people who were murdered by the Nazis as part of the Aktion T4 project in the year 1940/1941. This spurred Sigrid on to find out more both about her Aunt and Aktion T4, the Nazi programme for sterilising and murdering those with mental or physical disabilities.

One and a half years after being sterilised, Anna was admitted to
hospital suffering from kidney disease. The doctor persuaded Anna’s
mother that she needed to be institutionalised as they would be able to
offer the care that Anna needed. In December 1936 Anna was taken to
a so-called healing and care home. Anna underwent further diagnoses
and tests of her intelligence, with mathematical questions as well as
general knowledge.

Anna was murdered on 23 April 1940. She was gassed. The T4 program was, in essence, a trial run for the Holocaust. It became the template for industrialzed murder.

At least 6,000 children up to the age of 16 were secretly murdered by deliberate starvation or lethal injection.

As far as I am aware there wasn’t an equivalent to the T4 program in the countries occupied by the Nazis. However, that doesn’t mean that people with disabilities were not murdered by the Nazis

sources

Click to access anna_lehnkering_life_story_hmd.pdf

https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/anna-lehnkering/

Aktion T4: leerschool voor de Holocaust

https://www.dw.com/en/bundestag-remembers-nazi-euthanasia-victims/a-37295422

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38773057

Nurses who killed.

SS officers and German nurses gather during the dedication ceremony of the new SS hospital in Auschwitz.
Among those pictured are Karl Hoecker, Josef Kramer and SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Heinrich Schwarz. Among the nurses probably are Martha Mzyk and Lotte Nitschke.

Anyone who ever had to go through a medical procedure will know how important the job of a nurse is. When you arrive at the medical facility it is usually a Nurse who sees you first, A nurse will care for you set you mind at ease, often they get to do the mots horrible tasks after or during a surgery. I remember well how some nurses went beyond their duty when I was in hospital.

It is therefore so surprising that so many nurses in the third reich, were willing participants in the mass murder of the disables and also others.

Christian nurses’ associations dominated German nursing when the Nazis rose to power in 1933. At the time, nursing was widely considered to be more of a spiritual calling or a public service than a professional career. The Nazi regime reorganized Germany’s professional nursing associations. It barred Jewish nurses and restricted membership to politically reliable “Aryans.” Nazi propaganda promoted the idea that nursing was a patriotic service to the state. Nazi nurses’ associations encouraged values of militaristic duty and obedience. Nursing schools began indoctrinating students with Nazi ideology through classes on race and eugenics.

Many nurses who did not necessarily support the Nazi regime still implemented its discriminatory and murderous policies through the course of their regular, daily work. Engaging with patients more frequently and directly than doctors, nurses were often the ones who actually applied the regime’s medical policies. Nurses played a central role in the regime’s so-called “euthanasia” program. Under the program, roughly 250,000 children and adults with mental and physical disabilities were murdered. They were killed by starvation, lethal injection, or gassing.

Although some of these nurses reported that they struggled with a guilty conscience, others did not see anything wrong with their actions, and they believed that they were releasing these patients from their suffering.

Staff at the T4 “killing centres”, where the euthanasia programme was carried out, swore an oath of silence and nurses accompanied patients on special buses with windows blacked out to the gas chambers. at one such “killing centre” at Hadamar near Frankfurt in Germany in 1941, nurses and staff drank beer to celebrate the killing of their 10,000th patient in a special ceremony right outside the door of the gas chamber.

Factors influencing the nurses’ willingness to kill are described and include the socialization of the German people toward euthanasia as well as ideological commitment, economic factors, and putative duress.

Although the Nazis actually carried out the mass murder of the disabled, There were sentiments globally towards euthanasia, for example: A 1937 Gallup poll showed that 45% of the American population was in favor of euthanasia for “defective” infants.

Nurses in Nazi Germany were under the illusion that they were remaining true to their professional ethics, unaffected by the social change around them. Nurses weren’t only working in the T4 centres but also in the concentration camps like Auschwitz and Ravensbrück.

During the Ravensbrück Trials several nurses were sentenced to death.

The first Ravensbrück trial was held from December 5, 1946 until February 3, 1947, against sixteen Ravensbrück concentration camp staff and officials. All of them were found guilty. Twelve were sentenced to death. One died during trial and two committed suicide. The death sentences ,except for one, were carried out on May 2—3, 1947, in Hamelin prison.

Elisabeth Marschall was the Head Nurse at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Her duties included selecting prisoners for execution, overseeing medical experiments, and selecting which prisoners would be shipped to Auschwitz. At the Hamburg Ravensbrück Trials, she was found guilty and sentenced to death. On 3 May 1947 she was hanged by British executioner Albert Pierrepoint on the gallows in Hameln prison. Aged 60, she was the oldest female Nazi to be executed.

sources

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-role-of-doctors-and-nurses

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7227577/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1455849/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12735075/

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/nazi-nurses-toasted-10-000th-victim-with-beer-conference-told-1.1144955

https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Elisabeth_Marschall

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01939459922043749

9/11 1941

The picture above is an arrest card of Meijer Barmhartigheid. He was one of the 389 young Jewish man who were arrested during raid in Amsterdam on February 22 and 23 ,1941.

Of those 389 only 2 survived the Holocaust. 100 of them were murdered in the Hartheim clinic, which was also the clinic used for the T4 program.

Meijer Barmhartigheid was gassed on August 14,1941 at the Hartheim clinic. But the Nazis couldn’t even be honest about that. They had registered his death on September 11,1941 in Mauthausen, 80 years ago today.

Barmhartigheid is the Dutch word for merciful. Meijer did not get a merciful death.

I can only assume that they changed the date and the location of the murder due to the fact that the T4 program officially ended in August 1941, although unofficially the program kept going to nearly the las day of the war.

Hitler’s cousin Aloisia Velt was also one of the T4 victims.

sources

https://www.joodsmonument.nl/nl/page/204397/meijer-barmhartigheid#intro

https://www.amsterdam.nl/stadsarchief/themasites/razzia/meijer-barmhartigheid/

The survival of Robert Wagemann

A little known fact is that the Jehovah Witnesses were also persecuted by the Nazi regime.

It is estimated that 1,000 German Jehovah’s Witnesses died or were murdered in concentration camps and prisons between 1933 and 1945, as did 400 Witnesses from other countries, of which were about 90 Austrians and 120 Dutch Jehovah Witnesses . In addition, at least 273 Jehovah’s Witnesses were sentenced to death by military courts for refusing military service and were executed.

The imprisoned Jehovah’s Witnesses were given the document below. By putting a signature on that declaration they would be renouncing their faith and would be released. Of all the Jehovah Witnesses imprisoned, only fa handful of approximately two-thousand signed the declaration and were released.(The translation of the document is below too)

Lotte Wagemann was a practicing Jehovah Witness . In 1937 she was pregnant with Robert Wagemann. Despite being pregnant she was arrested and briefly imprisoned for her activities as a Jehovah’s Witness. She gave birth shortly after her release. Due to the stress of imprisonment and insufficient medical care, Robert’s hip was injured during delivery, resulting in a permanent disability.(His right leg is six inches shorter then the left)

Under the T4 Program, he was classified as “handicapped” , and two times he had been selected for ‘euthanasia’ but really it was for extermination. The first time they escaped to Berlin, and lived with relatives.

In 1943 amidst the growing chaos in Mannheim caused bu allied bombing Robert’s mother was ordered to go with Robert to Schlierbach near Heidelberg to a hospital where he would be examined. The Nazi Doctors confirmed the status of his disability . During the examination, Lotte overheard a conversation where one of the Doctors said that Robert was to be given a lethal injection after lunch..

Lotte waited for the doctors to break for lunch, took Robert and picked up his his clothes, and escaped while the nurses weren’t looking . Because of the increased bombings of the allies I presume the escape by Lotte and Robert didn’t get the same priority as it would have done earlier durig the war or even before the war. Their house was bombed in Mannheim So they spent the remainder of the war hiding with Robert’s grandparents in Iggelheim.

Despite having escaped the clutches of the T4 physicians ,Robert did not stay out of trouble. On his 1st school day he refused to to do the Nazi salute nor did he sing the national anthem.

This drew the attention of the authorities and Robert and his family were forced to move once again. This time to to a town called Haardt by Neustadt and lived with Robert’s maternal grandparents (. There in a little cabin in the woods they spent the remainder of the war.

The family survived the war, Robert emigrated to the United States in 1963 where he married . Robert and his wife have three sons and five grandchildren.

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sources

http://webapps.raritanval.edu/memorial/page1.htm

http://webapps.raritanval.edu/memorial/page2.htm

https://www.alst.org/pages-us/education/classroom-questions/Robert-Wagemann-classroom-questions.html

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-persecution-of-jehovahs-witnesses

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Emmi G.

This is a picture of Emmi G,a victim of the T4  euthanasia program. Killed because she was ‘different’.

What makes her story even sadder is the fact that we don’t even know her full name. All we know is that she was 16 when she was killed with an overdose of tranquilizers on December 7, 1942 in Meseritz-Obrawalde euthanasia center.

Even the date is heartbreaking  it was 1 day after the celebrations of der Heilige Nikolaus, or Saint Nicholas. The traditional German Christmas celebration.Although the war was raging the St Nicolas feast was still celebrated throughout the war.

Emmi G had been diagnosed as schizophrenic,she worked as a housemaid. If she actually was  schizophrenic is doubtful. She was a teenager dealing with teenage anxiety during the most horrible time in history. I have no evidence of this but my presumption is that she had just become an ‘inconvenience’ and was therefore killed.

None of the cases in the T4 program were voluntary.

Even if she had been  schizophrenic that does not warrant a death penalty. What it does require is psychiatric help, but that is something the Nazis did not subscribe to. That is why the designed the T4 program. The irony is the real mental cases were the Nazi leaders themselves.

The story of Emmi G does come with a warning though. We may think that this could not possibly happen here however some European countries do allow Euthanasia on teenagers and even younger children. even children with mental problems

 

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Source USHMM

 

Memorandum authorizing involuntary euthanasia

Five short lines determined the lives or rather the end of lives of up to 300,000 innocent people.

“Reichsleiter  Bouhler and Dr. med.  Brandt are hereby instructed and authorized to broaden the powers of designated physicians to the extent that persons who are suffering from diseases which may be deemed incurable according to standards of human judgment based on a careful examination of their condition shall be guaranteed a mercy death.
— Adolf Hitler, Memorandum Authorizing Involuntary Euthanasia, Berlin, 1 September 1939.”

The memorandum refers to these deaths as mercy deaths but in fact they were brutal murders. The document was the authorisation for the so called “Aktion T4” The involuntary euthanasia of approximately 300,000 people with mental and physical disabilities as determined by the Nazi Nuremberg Laws. Basically no life was sacred for the Nazis If it did not fit their idea of a perfect Aryan your life was not certain.

There  is of course an abbreviation for involuntary euthanasia which is murder.

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Tiergartenstraße 4

Tiergartenstraße 4, may look like an ordinary German address. But is an address which is synonymous to unspeakable evil.

It was the address of a villa in  the Tiergarten or Zoo district in central Berlin.

But more then that it was the headquarters of the Nazi “euthanasia” program ,the mass murder of disabled people and others, code named Aktion T4.

An estimated 300,000 people with disabilities were killed as a result of the T4 Aktion program. The definition of disability was very loosely used by the Nazis. Even a political dissident could be marked as disabled.

What often is overlooked is that the authorizing of  the euthanasia program was signed by Adolf Hitler and dated Sept. 1, 1939. The very same day as the Nazi regime invaded Poland.

Officially the program  ended in  August 1941 amid a welter of protests from many quarters of German society. But in reality the killing continued to the end of the war.

 

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Sources

Britannica

gedenkort-t4.eu

All that is interesting.

Werner Catel—Deciding Who Lives

One of the most disturbing aspects of the Holocaust I found is, the fact, that so many who were instrumental in so many evil deeds were allowed to continue after the war.

In February or March 1939, a farmer called Richard Kretschmar and requested Catel’s permission to euthanize one of his children. The child, now known as Gerhard Kretschmar, often referred to as Child K, was born blind and deformed.

Werner Catel deferred the matter and advised the father to write directly to Hitler for permission. Hitler subsequently sent Dr Karl Brandt to confer with Catel to decide a course of action. On 25 July 1939, the decree passed to euthanize Child K. This was the first child killed under Aktion T4 or the T-4 program. Technically, the poor boy became the pilot case.

A year later, Werner Catel set up children’s wards in Leipzig-Dösen and the University Children’s Hospital in Leipzig. He was an expert on the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses. Sometimes, he killed children with mental or physical disabilities with his own hands.

The T4 program was influenced by a popular book, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens [translation: Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living], written in 1922 by Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding.

Catel argued for the reintroduction of euthanasia. As had Binding and Hoche, Catel identified three possible types of euthanasia.

Reine Euthanasie
Real euthanasia was the killing of a person suffering from so much pain that an ever-increasing amount of pain-reducing drugs had to be administered. It consequently leads to the person’s death.

Euthanasie im engeren Sinne
The killing of a patient whose illness “according to medical experience” is so bad “that there is no hope of recovery”, but whose death is also not to be expected shortly. (See terminal sedation)

Euthanasie im weiteren Sinne
The extermination of the life of an idiot child or an adult in a similar condition. Catel defined”idiot children as being such monsters…which are nothing but a massa carnis [translation: lump of flesh].

Basically, Werner Catel was one of the people who felt they had the right to decide who would live or die.

After the war, Catel fled from Soviet-controlled Leipzig in 1946, to West Germany. The West German authorities de-Nazified him in 1949, and classed him as »Persons Exonerated. Afterwards, he was shortlisted for several professorships. In 1954, he was appointed Professor of Paediatrics in Kiel, despite the fact his function on the Reich Committee was known. Due to public pressure and the debate about his role in National Socialism, Catel took early retirement in 1960. Catel continued to propagate in public the idea of the euthanasia of children with mental and physical disabilities.

He died on 30 April 1981 at age 88. Many of his victims did not even reach the age of 88 months.

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Sources

T4-Denkmal

Der Spiegel

Reporting of children who showed signs of severe mental or physical disability.

They say a picture paints a thousand words.But ever since I have been doing blogs about the holocaust I have seen many pictures that have left me speechless, and none more so then the suffering of children.

On August 18 1939, Wilhelm Frick ordered all physicians, nurses and midwives to report children under the age of three who showed signs of severe mental or physical disability. This was the first phase in the Nazi Germany’s child euthanasia program. The so called T4 program.

The key document was a circular from the Reich Minister of the Interior of 18 August 1939, Ref: IVb 3088/39 – 1079 Mi, which was marked “Strictly Confidential” and specified the groups to be included and how they were to be assembled. After that, doctors and midwives together with maternity hospitals, obstetric departments and children’s hospitals, except where a senior doctor was not present or did not get the instruction, were required to report in writing to the appropriate health authorities:

if the newborn child is suspected of being afflicted with the following congenital disorders:

1) Idiocy and mongolism (especially cases combined with blindness and deafness),
2) Microcephaly
3) Hydrocephalus, to a severe or advanced degree
4) Malformations of all kinds, particularly the absence of limbs, severe midline defects of the head and spine, etc.
5) Paralysis, including cerebral palsy

A template of a reporting form was enclosed with the circular, which had to be sent by public health authorities as required to their higher administrative authority.  Uniquely, a reward of 2 RM for each report was given to the midwives and nurses affected “for professional services rendered”.

At the start only children under the age of 3 were to be reported. The prescribed registration form gave the illusion that registration was only being sought with the aim of providing special medical care, in fact they were designed to determine if a child would be killed or not, the technical term was if they were eligible for euthanasia, as if that was a good thing.

Three experts were appointed from the National Committee who had been heavily involved in the preparatory committee, Werner Catel, Hans Heinze and Ernst Wentzler. Hefelmann  who remarked  later,that Professor Heinze and Dr. Wentzler  supported euthanasia with great enthusiasm and Professor Catel with conviction, and so they agreed without any pressure to so act as expert assessors.

But it wasn’t only Physicians who killed children,some nurses killed children, saying that they were under orders.

Below is a picture of  Richard Jenne-  the last known child murdered in the T4 program.

 

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Hans Asperger—A Highly Regarded Physician who Ruthlessly Sent Children to Their Death

First, do no harm—is a key element of the Hippocratic oath—the oath physicians take. However, before and during  World War II, many physicians working for or with the Nazi regime were happy to forget that oath.

And not all of them were members of the Nazi party, as was Dr Hans Asperger, an Austrian doctor. He is best known for his early studies on mental disorders, especially in children and especially children with autism.

He was a pioneer in autism research whose name describes high-functioning people with the disorder, referred to as Asperger Syndrome had a previously unknown dark past that included sending children with disabilities to a euthanasia program run by the Nazi regime, according to new investigations into his long-lost files.

In a questionnaire from October 1940, Hans Asperger registered several memberships in Nazi-affiliated associations. However, he did not join the Nazi party.

Herwig Czech, from Vienna’s Medical University, had reported in an academic paper published in the open-access journal Molecular Autism following eight years of research into the paediatrician Hans Asperger.

Czech’s research revealed that Dr Asperger was not the courageous defender of his patients against euthanasia by the Nazis, as many had thought. In fact, it was far from it—he benefited from his cooperation with the regime and publicly legitimized race hygiene policies—including forced sterilization—according to a study published online on 19 April 2018 in the journal, Molecular Autism.

Asperger was a scientist who aligned himself so closely with the Nazi ideology that he regularly referred children to the Am Spiegelgrund Clinic, which was set up as a collecting point for children who failed to conform to the regime’s criteria of worthy to live. Nearly 800 children died at the clinic between 1940 and 1945, many of whom were murdered under the notorious child euthanasia scheme.

Hundreds were either drugged or gassed to death from 1940 to 1945. Even the children authorised for treatment were not killed immediately as a rule, but were used, sometimes for months, in scientific research.

Among Czech’s findings is a photo of the distraught face of Herta Schreiber, who died of pneumonia three months after her admittance to Spiegelgrund, on Asperger’s orders, a day after her third birthday. She had suffered from encephalitis. Encephalitis is a swelling of the brain and can be caused by infection or an allergic reaction. Assessed in late June 1941, the young girl suffered from a severe personality disorder, idiocy and seizures. Asperger added, “She must be an unbearable burden to her mother,” and then recommended permanent placement at Spiegelgrund.

Herta was admitted to Spiegelgrund on 1 July 1941.

On 8 August, she was reported to the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses, the secret organisation behind child euthanasia. With zero chance of recovery and no shortened life expectancy, she was recommended for the program and the euthanasia experts viewed this as an unacceptable combination. On 2 September, a day after her third birthday, Herta died of pneumonia, the most common cause of death at Spiegelgrund. A specimen of her brain was found in a preparation jar in the clinic’s basement in the 1990s and buried in 2002.

“There was no evidence that Asperger deliberately targeted euthanasia for the patients with distinct psychological characteristics he had labelled autistic psychopaths, under the diagnosis for which he became famous,” said Czech. But his diagnoses proved burdensome for many of his patients, even years after the collapse of the Nazi regime. Asperger continued working as a doctor for more than three decades.

The term Asperger Syndrome first came up in London in 1981, by Dr Lorna Wing. She and other scientists, clinicians, and the broader autism community, were unaware of Hans Asperger’s close alliance with, and support of, the Nazi programme of compulsory sterilisation and euthanasia.

Of course, this does not reflect in any way, shape or form on those who are diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, but I do believe we should start looking more critically at the work of scientists of the Nazi era.

Hans Asperger (front row, right) with his medical colleagues in Vienna in 1933. Photograph: Medical University of Vienna/Josephinum)

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Sources

Livescience

The Guardian

Biomedcentral