Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (12 page)

*
Father Schneider, introduced to the author through the good offices of a Bishop in the Vatican Secretariat of State as the Editor in Chief of the team compiling
Les Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatif à la Stconde Guerre Mondiale
and a “spokesman for the Vatican in this matter”, now wishes it to be known that he is not the Editor in Chief and that he is not and never was a spokesman for the Vatican.

*
This development is fully described in Reitlinger’s
The Final Solution
,
this page
.

5

“A
T
H
ARTHEIM
,” Stangl said, “the winding up process ran very smoothly, but not everywhere.” In October 1941 he was sent to Bernburg near Hanover, an ‘institute’ where the doctor in charge was Dr Eberl (another figure, like Wirth, who was to reappear soon afterwards in Poland, and in Stangl’s life).

“There were all kinds of things which had to be settled properly in the institutes,” Stangl said rather vaguely about his “tour” at Bernburg. “I had to look after property rights, insurance and that sort of thing. After all, some of those who died left children who had to be properly provided for. Bernburg was a
mess.
”

Perhaps: but according to the records it was Bernburg as well as Hartheim which, from November 1941, were used for the gassing of political prisoners whose “eligibility” for euthanasia was certified on the “14 f 13” forms issued by a committee of psychiatrists, primarily Professors Heyde and Nitsche and Dr Fritz Mennecke – all now dead.

“
You had no idea
,” I asked Stangl, “
that political prisoners from concentration camps were being gassed in the institutes by then?
”

“No, not within my experience. At least I never knew this.”

Franz Suchomel, however, did know it; of course, as he was then stationed at T4 in Berlin, he can better afford to admit knowing it. “Hartheim existed until the end of the war,” he said. “They brought people there from Mauthausen; I don’t know whether from other places too. But I have even heard tell that they were still gassing at ‘C’ [Hartheim] when the ‘Amis’ [Americans] were already on the Rhine.”

In view of these facts on record regarding events at Bernburg and Schloss Hartheim while Stangl was still there, his assertion that he knew nothing about them certainly throws doubt on his veracity in this instance. It is, however, just possible – and not out of keeping with his personality – that, as he rarely actually
saw
the victims but limited himself to his function of checking the “lunacy certificates” issued by the commission, it may not have occurred to him to question the signatures on certificates of eminent specialists such as Heyde, Nitsche and Mennecke. He could conceivably have accepted these papers as genuine and never have realized that these particular patients were in fact healthy men and women.

While I remain sceptical on this point, I am convinced that Stangl managed to keep his wife in complete ignorance of what he was involved in at Schloss Hartheim. It was not only the secrecy rule that would have prevented him from telling her; it was also because he was profoundly dependent on her approval of him as a husband, a father, a provider, a professional success – and also as a man. Even if he persuaded himself that the Euthanasia Programme was justifiable (
all
of these men did) and even if an occasional remark she made (as she did later to me) could have given him reason to think that at least theoretically she might not totally disagree with this opinion, he could not possibly be sure that she would react with anything but horror to the idea that he himself was actively involved, and he would certainly not have risked the consequences of such a reaction.

“Yes,” Frau Stangl said to me in Brazil. “Of course I remember when he was called to Berlin. He didn’t know [what T4 was]; certainly it seemed to me at the time that he had no idea what was wanted of him. When he came back he merely said he’d been transferred to a special job, but not far away and that he would be able to see us quite often. He said that his assignment was an official secret, and that he couldn’t say anything, so I didn’t ask further. I did see him every two weeks after that: I saw no change in him during that time. But then, when he came home, he only stayed for a few hours, a night perhaps. No, I had no idea there was anything wrong – I suspected nothing.”

In February 1942, after “cleaning up the mess in Bernburg”, Stangl returned briefly to Schloss Hartheim, “really only to say goodbye and collect the rest of my gear. It was all over with there: the staff was still there, but everything was empty and quiet – no patients. I was told to report to T4 in Berlin to get new orders. I went and my briefing was very short; I was told that I could either return to Linz and put myself at the disposal of Prohaska, or, alternatively, I could elect a posting east, to Lublin.” (“He left, I think in March,” said Frau Stangl, “from Linz. I remember I went to the station in Wels when he came through – we must have prearranged my coming to the station, though I don’t remember doing that. But I remember, there were other people on the train who knew him. And I remember he got off the train and hugged me very hard. He didn’t say where he was going except to get his marching orders in Berlin. All I had was his
APO
number.”)

“
What did they tell you you’d be doing in Lublin?
” I asked Stangl.

“Something was murmured about the difficult situation of the army in Russia, and anti-partisan action, but this was never elaborated on. Anyway, for me it wasn’t a difficult decision: I was prepared to fight partisans any day rather than Prohaska in Linz. I was told to proceed to Lublin and to report to the
SS
Polizeiführer, Brigadeführer Globocnik.”

6

T
HE QUESTION
of the role of the Euthanasia Programme as a preliminary to the extermination of the Jews, and of how the people who operated both came to be selected, has never been fully developed.

I believe this to be a point of primary importance in relation to evaluating individual responsibility. And it was largely to discuss this question that I sought out Dieter Allers.

When World War II broke out, Herr Allers – a young lawyer – was working in the department of education of the Reich Ministry of the Interior. Mobilized, he was sent to Poland as a sergeant training recruits. “I was scheduled to go to officer’s training school,” he said, “but then, in November 1940, my mother met Werner Blankenburg in the street in Berlin. When she told him what I was doing he said, ‘That’s ridiculous. There is an opening in my department for a lawyer. I’ll fix it.’ And that’s how I got into T4. When Brack and Blankenburg instructed me about my job a month later,” he continued, “they said specifically that the assignment would be for about half a year. I thought I’d be a soldier again in July or August.”

“Of course they told you what it was about; how did you yourself feel about the moral side of it?”

“Well, as far as I myself was concerned, the idea of euthanasia was not new to me; I had read quite a lot about it. Good heavens, it’s been discussed, and on the cards, for centuries. What was intended at the time has been completely distorted since.”

Herr Allers, like so many others who held high position in the Nazi administration, is an intelligent man. Intelligence, of course, is not necessarily equated to morality; indeed can become perilous if applied to nefarious purposes. My four talks with Herr Allers and his wife – who was always present – were amongst the most difficult I had in the course of preparing this book. As a man and a German, Herr Allers is totally unrepentant. While one can have an inverted kind of respect for someone who has the courage, or stubbornness, to admit to ideals which many others so rapidly disclaimed after the Nazi defeat, it is at the same time frightening when a man of intelligence is so blind to the reality of the past.

“You ask how did people generally get into T4,” he said; “not the administrators, but those who then worked in the institutes and so on. Well, I was always of the opinion that most people got in through connections. They would hear of the job as being ‘attached to the Führer Chancellery’ and that sounded good. Then of course these jobs carried extra pay; and it meant not having to go to the front.”

“That’s right,” said Frau Allers. “After all, that’s how I got into it.” She, like her husband, was in T4 until the end. “I was working in a fashion boutique and I was desperate to do something more useful for my country. A friend told me she thought she might be able to help me get into the Führer Chancellery where she was working as a secretary. ‘Secret work,’ she said. Well, that sounded very exciting, so I went. And got in. I had no idea what it was until I was in there.”

“There was this tailor from Bohemia,” said Herr Allers, “let’s not mention names. But he suddenly wound up in T4 as a photographer. The way that happened, no doubt at all, was because he had a pal from his home-town who was already in there as a photographer and they fixed it between them.” (Franz Suchomel, who told me he had “no idea how I came to be posted to T4”.)

“On the other hand,” Herr Allers continued, “you have somebody like Christian Wirth. Everybody now is on about how he was the arch-villain, how awful he was.…”

“He
was
awful,” Frau Allers interrupted; she did a short tour of duty – six weeks – as a secretary at Schloss Hartheim. “After that I asked to be transferred back to Berlin,” she said. “I couldn’t stand it. But Wirth was awful to the men; he was a vulgar horrible person.”

“He is dead,” said her husband, “so it’s easy to say that now.…”

“You didn’t see him with his men: he
was
horrible.…”

“He was an officer in World War I [non-commissioned]. He was decorated with the very rare golden Military Cross. He was a good soldier. When this business here started, he was a police officer in Württemberg. You don’t know the Württembergers,” he said both to his wife and to me. “They
are
like that: a rough lot who use coarse gestures and language. But I am sure that when Grafeneck [the first euthanasia institute] was opened up and they needed a couple of police officers to put in charge, whoever was the chief of police in that district simply said ‘You and you’ – and one of them was Wirth. Perhaps it was because he was a tough sort of man his superiors thought capable of doing a difficult job; but it wasn’t a matter of careful or scientific selection of these people. Stangl, for instance – I think he got into it because he had connections; how do
I
know with whom? Perhaps Eigruber, the Gauleiter. A lot of Austrians were in it, as you know. Anyway, somebody from down there recommended him. It certainly wasn’t that he was known in Berlin; how would
they
have known him? His story of being interviewed by Ministerialrath Werner,” he said, “that’s phoney for a start. Ministerialrath Werner was the second-highest ranking official of the Reichssicherheitsamt; you don’t think a man like that would have bothered to see a mere Kriminalassistent, do you? Oh yes, Brack saw him, that’s for sure; he saw everybody, including the chars.”

As it happens, I looked into this with some care and according to the records it was indeed Kriminalrath Paul Werner (later promoted, now retired) who instructed Stangl.

We discussed at some length the claim made by Simon Wiesenthal in his book
The Murderers Are Among Us
,
*
that the euthanasia institutes, in particular Hartheim, Hadamar, Sonnenstein and Grafeneck were used as formal “schools for murder”. (“Hartheim,” Herr Wiesenthal writes, “was organized like a medical school – except that the ‘students’ were not taught to save human life but to destroy it, as efficiently as possible.”)

The fact that not only Herr Allers, but four of the
SS
men I discussed these infamous places with at great length were all rather nonplussed at this idea, and all said that they certainly hadn’t been “schools” is not of decisive importance: the statements of former
SS
personnel who administered, or worked in these places, and later in the extermination camps in Poland, must be taken with the utmost caution. However willing they may be now to speak with relative frankness, there must always be an element of self-protection. But what
is
important is that it is hard to see in this instance what they have to gain by denying that they had been “schooled” for murder at the euthanasia institutes, if that in fact was what happened. They would surely appear in a slightly less terrible light if they could claim that they had been scientifically conditioned – brainwashed – to death-camp work, rather than assigned to it because their natures seemed particularly suited to such activity.

“I’d give anything to understand,” said Horst Münzberger, whose father was in charge of driving people into the gas chambers in Treblinka. “If I could only know why they chose just him, just my father.”

Gustav Münzberger, who when I talked with him in 1972, was sixty-eight and just out of prison after serving a twelve-year sentence for his part in the murders of Treblinka was loth to discuss anything to do with Treblinka but had little hesitation in talking about his time at Sonnenstein. But the idea of the place being used as a “training centre, with students” seemed genuinely new to him. Shedding for a moment the pose of senility which he affected for most of our conversation, he became reasonably alert and articulate. “I can’t think that it was,” he said in the tone of someone having a stimulating intellectual discussion. “If it had been, we in the kitchen would have known” – he was on kitchen duty throughout, he says – “because of the rations, you see. One time there was a big meeting, with doctors from everywhere and officials from Berlin. We catered for that – I remember that very distinctly. But students – no, there weren’t any; no outsiders at all, just the permanent staff.”