The German War (16 page)

In January 1940, after attending a demonstration of gassing at the former hard labour penitentiary at Brandenburg, the experts and T-4 bureaucrats knew they had a method for killing at least twenty patients at a time. Before the month’s end, patients from asylums across the Reich were channelled through a system of holding sanatoria to Brandenburg and Grafeneck in the Swabian Alps and Hartheim near Linz to be killed. As operations were wound down at Brandenburg in September, another centre was constructed at Bernburg. At Professor Paul Nitsche’s Sonnenstein asylum at Pirna near Dresden, the patients had already been subjected to a cost-cutting ‘hunger diet’ since the start of 1939, a regimen copied in other Saxon asylums. By May 1940, Nitsche joined the staff running the central T-4 operation full-time.

Whereas the execution of conscientious objectors was public knowledge and covered by military law, killing the disabled was neither announced nor covered by a legal decree, although key figures involved in it clearly lobbied for one. Eventually, Bouhler and Brandt extracted two lines in Hitler’s hand sanctioning a ‘mercy death’. Even though the meaning of that confidential document remained ambiguous, the dictator would never again take the risk of putting his name to further documents permitting secret killing. The process of selecting patients and even arranging for the killing often fell to the medical directors of psychiatric asylums like Friedrich Mennecke, urged on by senior provincial bureaucrats such as Fritz Bernotat in Hesse-Nassau. Many were Nazis, but they had the scope to take their own initiatives and their guiding ideas were not of uniquely Nazi origin. Rather, they took their cue from the 1920 tract
Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life
by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, which had radically redefined ‘mercy killing’ from a matter of individual choice to escape a painful terminal illness to a legitimate means for society to dispose of ‘useless ballast existences’.

The repeated financial crises of provincial and national government during the 1920s – and especially following the Wall Street crash of 1929 – only steeped German bureaucrats more deeply in this culture of cost-cutting and harsh choices about resource allocation. In their eyes, petty criminals became ‘psychopaths’ and vagrants and the long-term unemployed were classified as ‘asocials’ and, most irredeemably, ‘community aliens’. The Nazi regime encouraged such tendencies, fostering an administrative culture where police, the courts, youth and social welfare boards, the SS, prison governors and reformatory directors could all see themselves as engaged in a common project of national discipline. This was not difficult, because so many of these middle-class, politically conservative men had drawn the same lessons from the breakdown of order at the end of the last war. The country had simply not fought it ruthlessly enough.
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What the Nazi regime did was to provide the impetus, institutional cover and secrecy that enabled the implementation of ideas which had never won over a majority within the medical and welfare lobbies, let alone mainstream public opinion. From the first, the medical killing was conducted on the assumption that the German public would not approve of such measures, and that at least sections of religious opinion would oppose them. Considerable effort was expended on keeping the families of their victims away, mainly by manipulating normal bureaucratic procedures, such as inserting delays in informing families about each of the stages by which patients were transferred via a network of intermediary asylums to a killing institution like Hartheim or Grafeneck until it was too late. Some asylums, like the Kalmenhof in the Hessian town of Idstein, routinely used the excuse of military priorities on the railways to forbid visits.
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The sheer numbers led doctors to be careless in logging false causes of death as they sought to preserve the programme’s secrecy. Some relatives were told that patients had died of appendicitis when they had had the organ removed long before. Even sending paper urns of ashes to families had its pitfalls. When relatives found a woman’s hairpins in the urn for a man or received an urn for a son whom they had removed from an asylum two weeks before, they began to ask questions. In the immediate vicinity of asylums like Grafeneck in the Swabian Alps, the gassing was no secret at all. In Swabia, where the Confessing Church was strong, the provincial Church Council and the Inner Mission, which ran Protestant psychiatric asylums, joined together and channelled local protests to the regime. In early July 1940, a member of the Church Council, Reinhold Sautter, wrote to Gauleiter Wilhelm Murr’s office, while Bishop Theophil Wurm took the matter up with the Minister for Church Affairs, Hanns Kerrl, the Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick, and finally, on 25 July, wrote to Hans Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery. All these interventions were couched in terms of loyal criticism, warning that the action was undermining popular belief in the ideal of the ‘national community’ and the Nazi Party’s own commitment to care for all and support a ‘positive Christianity’. Although copies of these letters of petition continued to circulate in private, the clerics contained their protests within these confidential channels and studiously avoided any open breach with the regime. The number of petitions to the Gauleiter was so great that even Murr passed on his reservations to Berlin.
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In September 1940, pastor Ludwig Schlaich, the director of the asylum at Stetten, received notice that another 150 patients would be collected from his asylum. He wrote to Goebbels, Murr, the Minister of Justice, Franz Gürtner, and Lammers, questioning the ethics and legality of the programme. When Frick sent a curt reply, telling him to co-operate, Schlaich took the unprecedented step of contacting the relatives of his patients, telling them to come to the asylum before it was too late to save their loved ones: many came to say heart-rending farewells, leaving highly agitated patients behind. Of the 441 patients at Stetten who were put on successive transport lists, a mere 16 were saved by their relatives. Few families took this opportunity, even, Schlaich ruefully noted, amongst those with sufficient means to care for someone with a disability at home. Some other Protestant asylum directors in Württemberg followed Schlaich’s example and informed relatives that they could no longer guarantee their patients’ safety.

The civic courage displayed by Schlaich remained highly unusual. Beyond Württemberg, the asylums run by the Inner Mission made no effort to warn families. Instead they fell into line with greater or lesser enthusiasm behind the President of their Central Committee, Pastor Constantin Frick. An ardent advocate of ‘euthanasia’, he was in a position to force recalcitrant directors of Protestant asylums to fall into line. Usually, threatening them with the ruinous loss of state-funded patients was enough; in other cases, they were replaced. Many actively assisted in the programme. Some of the asylums run by the Catholic charity Caritas followed suit, despite official Catholic opposition to both contraception and euthanasia.
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It was easier to silence than to persuade the theologians. Paul Althaus had spoken out briefly against the radical ‘racial hygienists’ in July 1933, and – despite his general view that in all other things the individual was subordinate to the needs of the national community – in this one key instance he insisted that ‘God is the creator and master of life.’ Within the month he was instructed by the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior not to discuss issues connected with ‘race hygiene’ again. Althaus held his peace, although he had personal reasons to remain concerned: his disabled daughter lived in the Bethel asylum, which actively participated in the ‘euthanasia’ programme.
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Once the killing was under way, it proved impossible to prevent knowledge spreading and opposition mounting in the immediate vicinity of the asylums. As a result of the Swabian protests, killing operations were transferred during January to March 1941 to Hadamar on the Lahn from Grafeneck but not before 9,839 people had been gassed there. At Hadamar too the crematoria chimneys gave off thick plumes of smoke, which confirmed the loose talk of the labourers responsible for disposing of the bodies, and soon local children were greeting the grey buses as they drove patients through Hadamar with the chant, ‘Here come the murder boxes’. Elsewhere news leaked out more slowly, mainly through private channels of communication in the public health system and via the churches. But, if they lived far from the asylums, did not belong to the well-connected professions, and were unable to visit often because of wartime travel restrictions, many relatives remained ignorant of what was unfolding. News spread unevenly, starved – during the first eighteen months of medical killing – of the oxygen of public discussion.
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The German war began with massive targeted violence. In occupied Poland, it aimed to make the destruction of the Polish nation permanent by removing those who could provide ‘national leadership’; and it prepared parts of the country for German colonial settlement. Within Germany’s pre-war borders, state violence targeted small and socially marginal groups which might undermine the war effort – Freemasons, Communists and Jehovah’s Witnesses – and it swept away those whose ‘idiocy’ drew on resources urgently needed elsewhere. All of these were pre-emptive, ground-clearing operations, dealing with an anticipated threat or difficulty rather than a serious challenge which had already manifested itself. Many were not the work of new, Nazi institutions: they were carried out by existing professional elites who formulated the general rationale of what they were doing in their own fashion. In one way or another, they were expunging the ignominy of November 1918, that betrayal of Germany’s armed forces by communists, women and Jews. Given this mindset, the most surprising omission from the list of ‘internal enemies’ identified for liquidation in 1939 was Germany’s remaining Jewish community.

War immediately provoked fears of a new pogrom. Instead, Jochen Klepper and Victor Klemperer were astonished to find that the media quickly toned its anti-Semitic rhetoric down, perhaps as a gesture towards its new Soviet ally. Then, at 9.20 p.m. on 8 November, a bomb went off without warning in the Munich beer cellar where the ‘old fighters’ of the Nazi movement were gathered for the annual celebration of their putsch attempt of 1923. Hitler had left to catch the train back to Berlin a mere ten minutes before the bomb exploded in the pillar behind the podium where he had stood, killing eight people and injuring sixty-four others. As news of the assassination attempt spread the next day, many employers called special workplace meetings and extra assemblies were held at schools where the children gave thanks for the Führer’s providential escape by singing the Lutheran hymn ‘Now Let All Give Thanks to God’. People spoke bitterly about those they presumed to be responsible for the attack – ‘the English and the Jews’ – and expected retaliation against both.
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Official response to this attempt on the life of the Führer was muted, especially compared to the Beer Hall reunion of November 1938. Then, Goebbels had exploited the death of a minor German diplomat at the hands of a Polish Jew in Paris to launch a nationwide pogrom in which Nazi storm troopers, SS men and in some places even boys and girls had dragged Jews from their homes, beating and clubbing them, looting their shops and setting synagogues ablaze, while the fire brigade stood by to make sure that no adjacent buildings caught fire. Then ninety-one Jews had been killed outright, by the official count, and 25,000 men were bundled off to concentration camps where hundreds of them were murdered.
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Now, in November 1939, two British agents were arrested on the Dutch border and the media contented itself with pointing the finger of blame – wrongly, as it turned out – at the British and Jewish warmongers. But there was no fresh pogrom. Instead of the fierce onslaught that Victor Klemperer and Jochen Klepper awaited with trepidation, the ageing community of Jews who had been unable or unwilling to emigrate was subjected to a deluge of minor regulations. Between the pogrom of 9 November 1938 and the outbreak of war, 229 anti-Jewish decrees had been issued. Between September 1939 and the autumn of 1941, agencies worked out a particular anti-Jewish variant to every new measure governing the German home front and published another 525 decrees constraining the daily lives of Jews. They were prevented from buying underwear, shoes and clothing, even for their growing teenage children. Radios and record players had to be surrendered. By the Nazis’ own measure of things, this was an extraordinarily restrained response to the one group it held principally guilty for both wars. Given Hitler’s linkage of anti-Semitic policy to international relations, it suggested that he still hoped to come to terms with Britain and France.
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PART TWO

MASTERS OF EUROPE

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From first light on 10 May 1940, there was no chance of sleep for Paulheinz Wantzen. The pillow would not block out the continuous roar of aero-engines. When the newspaperman got up, he could see the bombers and fighters climbing above the roofs in a tight spiral from Münster’s two airfields. As soon as Wantzen reached his office, he turned on the radio and heard the news. The phone rang at the same moment – the Propaganda Ministry with instructions to print a special edition. Wantzen hardly managed to write the editorial comment, because the phone kept ringing. Every civic authority in Münster was trying to find out what was happening. How far had German troops got? Were they facing resistance? Was it true that Italy had entered the war? The SD phoned and told him that the military orders for the attack had gone out so late the previous evening that the police had to round up soldiers from the cinemas, theatres and pubs. Then the first plane returned carrying three German dead and eight wounded from the assault on the Dutch airfield of Ypenburg near Rotterdam. At 11 a.m., press guidelines arrived from the Propaganda Ministry, announcing that ‘Holland and Belgium are the new objectives for attack by the Western powers. English and French troops have marched into Holland and Belgium. We are hitting back.’ The Allied aim was ‘to advance against the Ruhr’. In the afternoon, the SD rang back to ask Wantzen ‘about the mood of the population’: it clearly hoped that the journalist had his ear to the ground.
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