Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (13 page)

And the permanent staff, according to Stangl, Franz Suchomel and all remaining documentation, was very small. Simon Wiesenthal in his book had quoted an Austrian photographer as admitting having taken photographs of the victims in their death agony. All the former
SS
men agree that photographs were taken. “I don’t think, though,” said Suchomel, who seemed sincerely interested in clearing up this point, “that there were ever any photographs taken of people actually being killed. You see I would have seen them; because later my work included filing all the photographic material. And as for ‘schooling’ or ‘training’ – what would they have taught anybody? What is true, of course, is that the people who were involved in the actual killing process in the institutes, those who worked in the crematoria – we called them
die Brenner
[the burners] – became calloused, inured to feeling. And they were the ones who were afterwards the first to be sent to Poland.” This sounds to me convincing – except for the attempt to limit the conditioned callousness to a few. There
was
no need for training in the sense of formal schooling for anything. What indeed could they have been taught? But the work at the euthanasia institutes, as Suchomel says, did “inure”
all
of them to feeling and thus prepare them for the next phase.

“The photographs,” Herr Allers said, “were taken for the record – for each patient’s file. This was usually done in the Zwischeninstituten [intermediate institutes] most of them were sent to for a while.”
*
He shook his head. “This is all part of the distortion I mentioned before: all this was really just the beginning of a very wide and long-term research programme to improve the public health of the nation.”

“One thing I can testify to personally,” said Frau Allers, “and you can quote me: as far as Schloss Hartheim was concerned, there wasn’t any possibility of taking photographs of people while they were dying. There was nothing in the door but a tiny peep-hole, like one has on a front door. You put one eye to it to see, but you couldn’t take a photograph through it.”

“You saw this tiny peep-hole yourself?”

“Yes, I did.”

“That was just there to allow the doctors to confirm when it was over,” said her husband. “There
was
one person who was sent to Hartheim for a week or two to see how it worked, I remember that; that was Dr Gorgass who later worked at Hadamar. But as far as I know, that was the only time that happened.”

I asked Herr Allers whether the personnel files at T4 showed evidence that the psychiatrist Professor Heyde had a hand in evaluating the T4 personnel. He said there
were
no personnel files at T4; he claimed the men’s records were kept at their home-stations. (This is not true: T4 personnel were paid, either entirely or certainly their supplements, by the T4 office. When pressed on this point, Herr Allers conceded that there might have been “file cards” for each man, for “administrative purposes”, but no personnel files.) He also said that as far as he knew, Professor Heyde had nothing to do with the evaluation of personnel.

He then came back once more to how people got into T4. “None of them, except those they later called the burners, could have got in without their own doing,” he said again. “You mentioned Münzberger: for heaven’s sake, he was a
carpenter
; why on earth should anybody recruit just
him
for this work – unless, as he no doubt did, he put in a request for what sounded like a cushy job, just like all of them did. Except the burners – that was perhaps different; they were strictly the troops. They were ordered there, by numbers. Some sergeant picked them out ‘you and you and you’. And you can take my word for it that the sergeant didn’t know what he was picking them out for. When the Euthanasia Programme finished …” he said, and I interrupted.

“But of course, it didn’t
really
finish then, did it? Then came ‘14 f 13’, didn’t it?”

“Up to now,” he said angrily, “we have talked sensibly; if you are now going to bring that up, there is no use in continuing.” However, he did continue. “I don’t know much about this – only what I’ve read. But I do know one thing from following the ‘doctors’ trials’: as far as I can remember, Professor Nitsche, who was a wonderful old man [“A lovely man,” said his wife] only went to Dachau once; he testified about that in his trial; he had not found anyone there he considered mentally ill, and he had said so at the time. I can’t say the same about Professor Heyde, or Dr Mennecke; they and some others were
SS
medical officers; they may have had to go there more often. But certainly both Nitsche and Heyde believed in euthanasia, not as Nazis, but as responsible physicians.

“What I was going to say: when the Euthanasia Programme ended, almost all of the personnel – don’t forget, there were four hundred of them – were sent to Russia. You tell me now that
Wirth and a group went to Chelmno-Kulmhof:
*
well, I promise you, this is the first I’ve heard of it. I know Dr Eberl went to Russia for a while as a medic and I certainly always thought all of them did.

“They all had a piece of red paper in their paybooks signed by the
OKW
(Oberkommando der Wehrmacht),” continued Herr Allers, “saying they were not to be employed at the front. This was a Führer command: he didn’t want any of them caught by the Russians.” (The same notation was in the paybook of all members of the
Einsatzgruppe
1005.)

The fact that Herr Allers claims – I believe in good faith – that he didn’t know until now “that Wirth and a group” had gone to Chelmno, is not as surprising as one might think. The extent of interdepartmental intrigues and personality feuds in the Reich administration was quite extraordinary and often resulted in people who were theoretically closely involved with events, in practice not knowing anything about them. The apparently minor point Herr Allers has raised here is in fact an interesting and significant illustration of these conditions, and his information about the transfer of the T4 personnel to Russia may possibly allow a new view of the famous letter Dr Fritz Mennecke wrote to his wife on January 12, 1942. “Since the day before yesterday,” he said, “a large delegation from our organization, headed by Herr Brack, is on the battlefields of the East to help in saving our wounded in the ice and snow. They include doctors, clerks, nurses and male nurses from Hadamar and Sonnenstein, a whole detachment of twenty to thirty persons.
This is a top secret.
Only those persons who could not be spared were excluded. Professor Nitsche regrets that the staff of our institution at Eichberg had to be taken away so soon.”

This letter – quoted in all histories of the period – has always been interpreted as referring to the transfer of euthanasia personnel to
Poland
for the extermination programme. It had seemed to me for some time that neither the description of this group, nor the dates, fitted this description; Chelmno
was
set up–by Wirth–but in the early summer of 1941, several months
before
this particular group went ‘East’. And what’s more: for reasons which remain
obscure, Chelmno did not come under the authority of T4 but was always under the immediate supervision of RSHA (
Reich-sicherheitshauptamt
). However, as it was originally planned as a euthanasia institute, it may well at first have been staffed with doctors and nurses. But when Chelmno, in December 1941, became the first of the extermination camps for Jews–at that point possibly only intended for the Jews of the new (Germanized) province “Warthegau”
*
–there can be little doubt that the medical staff would have been withdrawn. Except for the terrible Dr Eberl who was first director of the Bernburg institute and later briefly commanded Treblinka, no
SS
doctors or
SS
female
nurses are known to have worked in any of the extermination camps in Poland. So it is indeed possible, and even probable, that “most of the four hundred personnel from T4”
were
sent to Russia, to be used as medical personnel behind the front lines while being kept in reserve for the expanded Euthanasia Programme already in the planning stage for the rest of Europe. Only ninety-six of them–the sum total of German
SS
to be actively involved–were picked out of these four hundred to run the three camps of the
Aktion Reinhard:
the extermination of the Jews in Poland.

One might well be sceptical of Herr Allers’ opinion – though he should know – that none of these men were chosen on the basis of specific qualities or qualifications; that in fact they either volunteered or were assigned to these tasks by chance. And disbelief appears to be supported by the case of Otto Horn, an
SS
man at Treblinka who was acquitted at the Treblinka trial in Düsseldorf but who, none the less, appears to me particularly significant from the point of view of establishing whether or not these people were simply assigned because they happened to be available, or whether they were carefully selected.

The details of Horn’s story are presented somewhat differently by him and by his former colleague at Treblinka, Suchomel. Both versions, however, point to a definite pattern of selection.

Horn, a professional male nurse originally from eastern Germany, who says his war-record has prevented him from ever getting a job since, is a small man with white hair, a firm trim body and a smooth and rested face. He lives by himself in a neat first-floor flat in a pleasant, generously heated block on a tree-lined street in the centre of Berlin. The living room is well furnished, with silver, glass, knick-knacks and a beautiful radio-record player; it is the home of a comfortably established man.

Horn became a nurse as a very young man, working mostly in mental hospitals. “Until I was called up,” he said, “in 1939. Then of course they put me in the medical corps. Political? No, I wasn’t ever political. When it [the Nazis] started, I just ignored it. I had an interesting profession – what did I care about their politics? But, of course, in Germany nurses are civil servants – and because of that, later on I had to join the Party, otherwise I couldn’t have kept my job. But it was only a formality. And then, when we were called up, what did
we
know of what they were doing in Berlin? I was in Kiev when I was suddenly told I was transferred. Those things happened – one didn’t ask why – one just went. In fact, it was funny because I was actually discharged; I had my discharge papers and was told to go home and report to my unit in Dresden. At my home station later I was notified to report to – I think Berlin. And then they sent me to Sonnenstein (the institute at Pirna) and then to Poland.

“I stayed only a few days at Pirna,” he said. “Four, I think. I don’t know what they wanted of me there. I wondered too. By that time – September 1942 – there was nothing and nobody left there – just a few men.…” He then mentioned some names of other euthanasia and Treblinka men. “And oh yes, I met a friend from home, also a medic and we just stuck together. We didn’t do anything there – exercises, I think, and otherwise we just lay about – for eight or fourteen days [he had forgotten that he had earlier said ‘four’]. No, they didn’t tell us anything.… Oh well, yes, we did hear that they had killed people there. What did I think? Well – that that won’t do …” the sentence trailed off. “No, we didn’t talk about it much. My chum and I, we said something now and then, but on the whole we didn’t discuss it.

“And then we went to Poland – twenty of us. No, nobody told us where we were going and why – oh yes, finally somebody said it was a resettlement camp for Jews.…”

Franz Suchomel’s version is so different that it requires mentioning: “Horn,” he says, “was at the
Sonne
much earlier. It was from there he came to the photo-section in Berlin [where he was himself] in the early winter of 1941. [That would have been around November.] And from there he was sent to Russia as part of the
OT-Einsatz
– a purely T4 organization. Then he came back to Berlin to the photo-section, and then to Poland.” Suchomel adds that Horn had the reputation in Treblinka of being a decent man who never hurt anyone, and this was in fact confirmed by a number of survivors.

None the less, Horn’s transfers – it emerges clearly both from his own evasions, and from Suchomel’s quite precise account – were by no means as haphazard or casual as he (and Herr Allers) claim. When telling me his story, he made a very special point of his having travelled back from Russia by himself. “Oh yes,” he said, “I had travel orders and all that. But nobody had given me any schedule: they just said, ‘Go on home.’ ”

This already points to a very exceptional position; as we know, the German army didn’t operate this casually.

What emerges from these two accounts is: Otto Horn, a young male nurse, a citizen of Silesia, in Germany proper – i.e. the
Altreich
– was recruited, or assigned, we cannot know which unless he (or Herr Allers) tells us the truth, to T4 probably in early 1940 when he was sent to the euthanasia institute Sonnenstein. From there – presumably when the Euthanasia Programme officially ended – he was temporarily transferred to the photo-section at T4 in Berlin (also rather mysterious, for what was a nurse doing in a photo-section?) and was then sent to Russia, probably as part of the general transfer of T4 personnel that Herr Allers spoke of. The significant point however is that, according to his own description, he – by himself – was “suddenly told” in Kiev that he was transferred back to Germany. Why, out of several hundred personnel, would
one
man, who had already been sent all the way East, to the Ukraine, be picked out to go back to Germany, in order – as he claims, although Suchomel’s story differs – to be sent back East again, to Poland, just a few weeks later?

The only convincing explanation is, in fact, that Otto Horn – and all the others who were picked for the
Aktion Reinhard
– were individually selected on the basis of evaluation of their previous record in the Euthanasia Programme.