T4 – History of Sorts

Lesbians in the Third Reich

I know that some people may be offended by the title, and to be honest, that is their loss. I am simply using the terminology used in the 1930s and 1940s.

The experiences of lesbians in Nazi Germany, or the Third Reich, were complex and multifaceted, shaped by broader Nazi ideologies and policies on sexuality, gender, and race. Below are some points to understand their situation:

Nazi Ideology on Gender and Sexuality

Heteronormativity and Reproduction: The Nazi regime emphasized traditional gender roles and heteronormativity. Women were expected to focus on motherhood and raising Aryan children, contributing to the regime’s goal of increasing the population of the “Aryan race.”
Persecution of Homosexuals: The Nazis considered homosexuality a threat to their vision of a racially pure and reproductively prolific society. Male homosexuality was specifically criminalized under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, and many gay men were persecuted, imprisoned, and sent to concentration camps.

Lesbians Under the Third Reich

Legal Status: Unlike male homosexuality, lesbianism was not explicitly criminalized. Paragraph 175 did not mention women, which meant that lesbians were not subjected to the same legal persecutions as gay men.
Social Pressure and Surveillance: Despite the absence of specific laws against lesbianism, lesbians faced social ostracism, surveillance, and discrimination. The Nazis sought to enforce traditional gender roles, and women who deviated from these norms, including those in same-sex relationships, could be subject to scrutiny and punishment.
Living Conditions: Lesbians often had to lead double lives, hiding their sexual orientation to avoid persecution. Some joined organizations like the Nazi Party’s women’s wing to mask their true identities, while others formed secret networks to support one another.
Concentration Camps: While there were no systematic round-ups of lesbians like there were for gay men, some women were arrested and sent to concentration camps for being perceived as “asocial” or “deviant,” which could include those in same-sex relationships.
Resistance and Survival: Some lesbians actively resisted Nazi policies by participating in underground movements, supporting each other, and maintaining their relationships in secret.

Individual Experiences

Individual experiences varied widely. Some women managed to live relatively undisturbed lives if they conformed outwardly to societal expectations, while others faced severe consequences. Stories of persecution, survival, and resistance among lesbians during this period contribute to a fuller understanding of the impact of Nazi policies on sexual minorities. The persecution of lesbians under the Third Reich has often been less documented and recognized compared to that of gay men. It is only in recent decades that scholars and activists have begun to uncover and acknowledge the full extent of their experiences.

Collage created after the Nazi regime began to force gay and lesbian gathering spaces to close. It was published in the magazine, Der Notschrei. Berlin, March 1933.

Beginning in 1933, the Nazi regime began to harass gay and lesbian communities and individuals by shutting down and raiding their meeting places and organizations. At first, Nazi actions were uneven. They depended on the priorities of local government and police officials. For example, in the spring of 1933, the Nazis ordered the Prussian police to close some bars. Among those closed were the Eldorado in Berlin and the Dornröschen in Cologne. Nonetheless, some established gay and lesbian bars were able to remain open in cities like Berlin and Hamburg until the mid-1930s. Underground meeting places remained open even later. These, however, came under increasing police surveillance. As part of the Nazi regime’s restrictions on the free press, the government also shuttered gay and lesbian newspapers and journals.

By eliminating gay and lesbian gathering places and presses, the regime effectively dissolved the lesbian communities that had developed during the Weimar Republic.

Henny Schermann was a German lesbian of Jewish descent who became a victim of Nazi persecution. Her life and tragic end highlight the broader context of how the Nazis targeted individuals who did not conform to their ideologies on race, sexuality, and social norms. Here are the key points about her life: She was born on February 19, 1912, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She was of Jewish descent and worked as a sales clerk.

Henny’s parents met in Germany soon after her father emigrated from the Russian Empire. Henny was the first of the Jewish couple’s three children. The family lived in Frankfurt am Main, an important center of commerce, banking, industry, and the arts.

1933-39: After the Nazis came to power, they began to persecute Jews, Roma (Gypsies), men accused of homosexuality, people with disabilities, and political opponents. In 1938, as one way of identifying Jews, a Nazi ordinance decreed that “Sara” was to be added to official papers as a middle name for all Jewish women. Twenty-six-year-old Henny was working as a shop assistant and was living with her family in Frankfurt.

1940-44: In early 1940, Henny was arrested in Frankfurt and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. On the back of her prisoner photo was written: “Jenny Sara Schermann, born February 19, 1912, Frankfurt am Main. Unmarried shopgirl in Frankfurt am Main. Licentious lesbians only visited such [lesbian] bars. Avoided the name ‘Sara.’ Stateless Jew.”

Henny was among a number of Ravensbrück prisoners selected for murder. On May 30, 1942, Henny was gassed at the Bernburg T4 killing center.

Henny Schermann’s story is a poignant reminder of the multiple layers of persecution faced by those who lived at the intersection of marginalized identities during the Third Reich. Her experiences as a Jewish lesbian highlight the Nazis’ extensive system of oppression and the tragic consequences for those who defied their narrow definitions of acceptable identity and behavior.

Sources

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/lesbians-under-the-nazi-regime

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/id-card/henny-schermann?parent=en%2F6695

Bibliography on lesbian and trans women in Nazi Germany

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/central-european-history/article/abs/heterogeneous-persecution-lesbianism-and-the-nazi-state/2AF4CC39C3F7DD47C4AD3FBFF0AC1FAA

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Nazi Science

The above photograph is of Eugen Fischer, a German professor of medicine, anthropology, and eugenics and a member of the Nazi Party. He authored a 1913 study of the Mischlinge (racially mixed) children of Dutch men and Hottentot women in German Southwest Africa. Fischer opposed racial mixing, arguing that Negro blood was of lesser value and that mixing it with white blood would bring about the demise of European culture. After 1933, Fischer adapted the activities of his institute to serve Nazi antisemitic policies. He taught courses for SS-Doctors, served as a judge on the Hereditary Health Court of Berlin and provided hundreds of opinions on the paternity and racial purity of individuals, including the Mischlinge offspring of Jewish and non-Jewish German couples.

Eugenics was not a German concept. Types of eugenic practices have existed for millennia. Some indigenous peoples of Brazil are known to have practised infanticide against children born with physical abnormalities since pre-colonial times. In ancient Greece, the philosopher Plato suggested selective mating to produce a guardian class. In Sparta, to determine whether or not a Spartan child was fit to live, the children were inspected by the council of elders, the Gerousia.

The Nazis modelled their Eugenics program on the American eugenics movement. It was rooted in the biological determinist ideas of Sir Francis Galton, which originated in the 1880s. In 1883, Sir Francis Galton first used the term eugenics to scientifically describe an improvement biologically of genes in human races and the concept of being well-born.

The Nazis also admired the Jim Crow-era laws that discriminated against African Americans and segregated them from European Americans, and they debated whether to introduce similar segregation in Germany. Yet they ultimately decided that it would not go far enough.

The views of Eugen Fischer helped create the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, serving as justification for the Nazi belief that Aryans were racially superior to other races—especially the Jews. Adolf Hitler read the works of Fischer while imprisoned in 1923 and used his eugenic notions to support a pure Aryan society in his manifesto, Mein Kampf.

Fischer retired in 1942 as Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. After the war, he worked to secure university teaching positions for many of his former students (including Otmar von Verschuer). As professor emeritus at the University of Freiburg, Fischer continued to lecture and publish articles in anthropological journals. He died in 1967.

Paul Nitsche, a founding member of the German Racial Hygiene Society and prominent psychiatrist, long-combined the advocacy of treatment, including occupational and electroshock therapy, for fitter patients with support for mercy death for incurables. A member of the Nazi Party since May 1933, he served as deputy, then head, of the T-4 Medical Office, a division charged with selecting patients for transfer to T-4 facilities.

Nitsche received his medical license in 1901 and a professorship in 1925. Nitsche did not join the Nazi Party until May 1933. He was a strong supporter of eugenics and euthanasia and was present at the gassing demonstration at what would become the Brandenburg euthanasia centre in either December 1939 or January 1940. He was driven not so much by Nazi racial ideology as by his support of racial science and his vision of progressive medicine. Being well established, Nitsche was no longer motivated by the prospect of career advancement but ideologically committed when he later joined Action T4.

In 1948, Nitsche was placed on trial in Dresden by East German authorities for his crimes in the T-4 Euthanasia program. In 1948, the psychiatrist received the death penalty and was executed.

Otmar von Verschuer (rear) supervises the measurement of two men’s heads as part of an anthropometric study of heredity.

Otmar von Verschuer (rear, in the photo above) supervises the measurement of the heads of two men as part of an anthropometric study of heredity.

Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, as the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute—Department for Human Heredity, Verschuer, a physician and geneticist, examined hundreds of pairs of twins to study whether criminality, feeble-mindedness, tuberculosis, and cancer were inheritable. In 1927, he recommended the forced sterilization of the mentally and morally subnormal. Once a member of an ultra-nationalist paramilitary Freikorps unit of World War I veterans, Verschuer typified those academics whose interest in German national regeneration motivated their research.

In the late stages of the Second World War, Verschuer directly or indirectly started to use research material obtained in the Auschwitz concentration camp, mainly through his former student Josef Mengele, who served there as a camp physician.

Verschuer was never on trial for war crimes despite many indications that not only was he fully cognisant of Mengele’s work at Auschwitz, encouraging collaboration with Mengele. In a report to the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; DFG) from 1944, Verschuer talked about Mengele’s assistance in supplying the KWI-A with some scientific materials from Auschwitz:
“My assistant, Dr Mengele (MD, PhD), has joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed as Hauptsturmführer and camp physician in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Anthropological investigations on the most diverse racial groups of this concentration camp are being carried out with the permission of the SS Reichsführer [Himmler]; the blood samples are being sent to my laboratory for analysis.”

A prominent figure in German psychiatry, genetics, and eugenics in the first half of the 20th century was Ernst Rüdin. Rüdin began his career in psychiatry in Munich. He amassed a vast collection of patient genealogies and concluded that mental disorders were genetic and could be predicted and averted through sterilization. In 1931, he became the director of the government-funded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry in Munich. Believing one of the critical dangers facing Germany was the growing number of the mentally unfit. Rüdin helped draft the Nazi sterilization law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring and wrote its official commentary.

The American Rockefeller Foundation funded numerous international researchers to visit and work at Rüdin’s psychiatric genetics department, even as late as 1939. These included Eliot Slater and Erik Stromgren, considered respectively the Founding Fathers of psychiatric genetics in Britain and Scandinavia, and Franz Josef Kallmann, who became a leading figure in twins research in the US after emigrating in 1936.[⁶] Kallmann had claimed in 1935 that minor anomalies in otherwise unaffected relatives of schizophrenic people should be grounds for compulsory sterilization.

Claiming that he was a scientist and not a politician, Rüdin was de-Nazified and classified as a nominal party member. The psychiatrist who helped develop the Nazi mass sterilization law died in retirement in 1952.

These were just the Nazi scientists. There were many more—and they often obtained well-paid jobs after the war.

https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/deadly-medicine/profiles/#01-fischer

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

Gottlieb Hering—Pure Evil

I could nearly do a whole blog on how inappropriate this evil man’s name Gottlieb—translates to God Love. I doubt that very much.

Gottlieb Hering was involved in the T4 program and later on, was the second and last commandant of the Belzec Extermination Camp.

After Action T4, Hering was posted briefly to the Sicherheitsdienst in Prague in June 1942 and then transferred to Operation Reinhard in Lublin, Poland. He replaced Christian Wirth as commandant of the Bełżec Extermination Camp at the end of August 1942. He served as the camp’s commandant until its closure in June 1943. The Nazis commenced the construction of Belzec in November 1941, as a result of Aktion Reinhard—the Nazi plan to exterminate two million Jews in the Generalgouvernement. In total, 600,000 people, mostly Jews and a few hundred Gypsies, were murdered at Belzec.

Both commandants, Wirth and Hering, were described as ruthless and fanatical National Socialists. They were seriously feared and known to react violently, especially if the unconditional obedience they demanded was refused.

Rudolf Reder, one of the few survivors of Belzec, wrote about Hering:
“We knew that in the most beautiful house close to the station of Belzec lived the commander of the camp. He was an Obersturmführer. He seldom was present in the camp and came only in connection with some event. He was a tall bully, broad shouldered, age around forty, with an expressionless face. He seemed to me as if he were a born bandit. Once the gassing engine stopped working: When he was informed, he arrived astride a horse, ordered the engine to be repaired and did not allow the people in the gas chambers to be removed. He let them strangle and die slowly for a few hours more. He yelled and shook with rage. In spite of the fact that he came only on rare occasions, the SS men feared him greatly. He lived alone with his Ukrainian orderly, who served him. The Ukrainian submitted to him the daily reports.”

Tadeusz Misiewicz, a Pole who lived in the village of Bełżec and worked at the train station, testified about Hering:
“Once the major, the commander of Belzec death camp, invented a new type of entertainment: he tied a Jew with a rope to his car; the Jew was forced to run behind the car and behind them ran the major’s dog and bit the Jew. The major rode from the camp to the water pump, which was in Belzec on Tomaszowska Street, and back. What happened to this Jew I do not know. This event was witnessed by the people of Belzec.”

As you can see from the picture at the start of the post, he clearly enjoyed his job.

After the termination of Operation Reinhard and the closure of Belzec in June 1943, Hering remained the commander of the Poniatowa concentration camp reassigned as subcamp of Majdanek from the forced labor camp supporting the German war effort. On 3–4 November 1943, German police killed the remaining Jews at Poniatowa during Aktion Erntefest (German: Operation Harvest Festival). Hering then joined fellow SS men from the Operation Reinhard staff in Trieste, Italy. On 9 October 1945, Hering died of mysterious complications in the waiting room of St. Catherine’s Hospital in Stetten im Remstal.

sources

https://www.holocausthistoricalsociety.org.uk/contents/aktionreinhardt/gottliebhering.html

https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1682&context=ilr

Click to access Belzec.pdf

https://www.infocenters.co.il/gfh/notebook.asp?lang=ENG&dlang=ENG&module=notebook&page=notebook&rsvr=@1&param=%3Cbook_id%3E58643%3C/%3E%3Cchecktab%3E0%3C/%3E%3Cnum_page%3Emain%3C/%3E%3Cnob%3E-1%3C/%3E%3Cincomer%3Eprevitem%3C/%3E&param2=&site=gfh

https://www.tracesofwar.com/sights/124310/Commandants-House-Belzec.htm

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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

Letter from a Bishop to the Reichsminister

No one can deny that the Roman Catholic Church, and especially the Vatican have a lot to answer for when it comes to its part in the Holocaust.

However, some Catholic clergymen did speak out to the Nazi regime and many of them paid the ultimate price.

Antonius Hilfrich was a German priest and Roman Catholic Bishop of Limburg, Germany. Amid 1941 Catholic protests over Nazi euthanasia led by Bishop Clemens August von Galen of Münster, Hilfrich wrote to Franz Gürtner, the German Minister for Justice, to denounce the murders, calling them an “injustice that cries out to heaven…”

Below is the translated version of that letter.

The Bishop of Limburg

“Limburg/fiahm, 13 August 1941

To the Reich Minister of Justice
Berlin

Regarding the report submitted on 16 July (sub. ZV, pp.6-7) by the Chairman of the Fulda Bishops’ Conference, Cardinal Dr Bertram, I consider it my duty to present the following as a concrete illustration of the destruction of the so-called “useless life.”

About eight kilometres from Limburg in the little town of Hadamar, on a hill overlooking the town, there is an institution which had formerly served various purposes and of late had been used as a nursing home. This institution was renovated and furnished as a place in which, by consensus of opinion, the above-mentioned euthanasia has been systematically practised for months— approximately since February 1941. The fact is, of course, known beyond the administrative district of Wiesbaden because death certificates from the Hadamar-Moenchberg Registry are sent to the home communities. (Moenchberg is the name of this institution because it was a *Franciscan monastery prior to its secularization in 1803.)

Several times a week buses arrive in Hadamar with a considerable number of such victims. Schoolchildren in the vicinity know this vehicle and say: “There comes the murder box again.” After the arrival of the vehicle, the citizens of Hadamar watch the smoke rise out of the chimney and are tortured by the ever-present thought of depending on the direction of the wind.

The effect of the principles at work here is that children call each other names and say, “You’re crazy; you’ll be sent to the baking oven in Hadamar.” Those who do not want to marry, or find no opportunity, say, “Marry, never! Bring children into the world so they can be put into the bottling machine!” You hear old folks say, “Don’t send me to a state hospital! When the feeble-minded have been finished off, the next useless eaters whose turn will come are the old people.”

All God-fearing men consider this destruction of helpless beings a crass injustice. And if anybody says that Germany cannot win the war, if there is yet a just God, these expressions are not the result of a lack of love for the Fatherland but of a deep concern for our people. The population cannot grasp the fact that systematic actions carried out in accordance with paragraph 211 of the German Penal Code are punishable by death. High authority as a moral concept has suffered a severe shock as a result of these happenings. The official notice that N. N. died of a contagious disease and, therefore, his body had to be burned, no longer finds credence, and official notices of this kind which are no longer believed have further undermined the ethical value of the concept of authority.

Officials of the Secret State Police, it is said, are trying to suppress discussion of the Hadamar occurrences by means of severe threats. In the interest of public peace, this may be well intended. But the knowledge, the conviction, and the indignation of the population cannot be changed by it; the conviction will be increased with the bitter realization that discussion is prohibited by threats, but that the actions themselves are not prosecuted under penal law.

I beg you most humbly, Herr Reich Minister, in the sense of the report of the Episcopate of 16 July of this year, to prevent further transgressions of the Fifth Commandment of God.

[Signed]
DR.HTLFBICH£

11 days later on 24 August 1941 Hitler ordered the cessation of Nazi Germany’s systematic T4 euthanasia program of the mentally ill and the disabled due to protests, although killings continue for the remainder of the war.

source.

Letter from Bishop of Limburg to the Reich Minister of Justice

Women Victims of the Holocaust

Female prisoners of Ravensbruck dig under a guard’s watchful eye

I don’t know why I decided to do a blog specifically about the women victims of the Holocaust, but I just felt compelled to do one. I am married to a beautiful wife, and we have a beautiful daughter. I have two older sisters, and of course, like everyone else I also have a mother, who sadly passed away in 1996. All of these women have played an important part in my life, if not the most important part in my life. It is because of them I am the man I am today.

I could not imagine living without them. During the Holocaust, the treatment of women was harsh, more so than men. At least some men, if they were young enough and reasonably healthy, would have a slightly better chance of surviving.

It was normalized for women to be sent to the gas chambers immediately after selection on arrival at the death camps, especially when they had young children. The women not selected for immediate death, were subjected to experiments, forced sterilizations, rape, and punishments.

Following are just a few of the women victims of the Holocaust.

On July 14, 1933, the Nazi dictatorship enacted the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases. Individuals who were subject to the law were those men and women who “suffered” from any of nine conditions listed in the law: hereditary feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive disorder, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea (a rare and fatal degenerative disease), hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, severe physical deformity, and chronic alcoholism.

Gerda D., a shop worker, was one of an estimated 400,000 Germans the forcibly sterilized. After a disputed diagnosis of schizophrenia, they sterilized her. Later, Nazi authorities forbade Gerda to marry because of the sterilization.

Women laborers forced to dig trenches in Ravensbruck for no other apparent reason than to dig trenches for the sake of it.

Emmi G., a 16-year-old housemaid, was diagnosed as schizophrenic. She was sterilized and sent to the Meseritz-Obrawalde Euthanasia Center. There she was murdered with an overdose of tranquilizers on December 7, 1942. Place and date uncertain.

13-year-old Vera Berger caught typhus and tuberculosis in Bergen-Belsen and suffered starvation, but the young Czechoslovakian survived the liberation. Ravensbruck Camp Hospital, 1945.

sources

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/women-during-the-holocaust-photographs

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/ravensbrueck

Industrial Murder

One of the most disturbing aspects of the Holocaust is the ‘wholesale murder’ approach the Nazis took, the industrialization of death.

The gassing already started in 1939 as part of the T4 program, the murder of the disabled, what really is sickening is the fact that the first of such killings was on request by parents of a severely disabled child.

But the T4 murders were relatively small scale, for lack of a better word, compared to the gassings that took place in Auschwitz, Chelmno, Sobibor and the other extermination camps.

The gassing was kind of suggested to be a humane way of killing. But there was nothing humane about it. It was only humane for the perpetrators. After the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union and Einsatzgruppe mass shootings of civilians, the Nazis experimented with gas vans for mass killing. Gas vans were hermetically sealed trucks with engine exhaust diverted to the interior compartment. Use of gas vans began after Einsatzgruppe members complained of battle fatigue and mental anguish caused by shooting large numbers of women and children. Gassing also proved to be more effective and cheaper.

On October 24, 1980, Lesław Dyrcz, a student from the Brynek Forestry Vocational School, found a leather briefcase buried at about 40 centimeters deep in the ground while clearing the area around Birkenau crematorium III of stub and roots. Inside the briefcase was a thermos liner which had belonged to Marcel Nadjari. a Jewish Greek

In November 1944, two months before the liberation of the camp, Nadjari had buried a twelve-page manuscript written in Greek on November 3 on pages taken from a notebook, in which he described his observations of Auschwitz

In his manuscript, he writes: I want to live, to revenge the deaths of Dad and Mum, and that of my beloved little sister Nelly.

Below are some notes of his manuscript.

“Our work was first to welcome them. Most didn’t know their fate. The laughed or cried. They were told they were going to take a shower and they went clueless to [their] death. To date, my dear ones, I don’t tell them they they are going for a shower, although I can lie to them, I only told them that I didn’t understand the language they spoke, and to the comrades, men and women, that I realised were doomed I told the truth.”

“Almost every time they kill, I wonder if there is a God and yet I have always believed in Him and still believe that God wants it, let His will be.”

“Often I thought of going in with the others, to put an end to this. But always revenge prevented me doing so. I wanted and want to live, to avenge the death of Dad, Mum and my dear little sister,”

“The crematorium is a big building with a wide chimney and 15 ovens. Under a garden there are two enormous cellars. One is where people undress and the other is the death chamber. People enter it naked and once about 3,000 are inside it is locked and they are gassed. After six or seven minutes of suffering they die,”

“The gas canisters were always delivered in a German Red Cross vehicle with two SS men. They then dropped the gas through openings – and half an hour later our work began. We dragged the bodies of those innocent women and children to the lift, which took them to the ovens.”

Nadjari did survive.

After the war he got married and in 1951 moved to New York. He already had a one-year-old son, and in 1957 his wife Rosa gave birth to a girl, whom they named Nelli – after Marcel’s beloved murdered sister.

Sources

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/at-the-killing-centers

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42144186

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/gassing-operations

https://www.history.com/news/the-jewish-men-forced-to-help-run-auschwitz

Marcel Nadjari’s Manuscript November 3, 1944

Click to access Microsoft%20Word%20-%206234.pdf

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The evil of Georg Bessau

I watched ‘Charité at War’ on Netflix the last few nights. Although I felt that one or two portrayals gave a bit too much credit to some characters, overall I believe it was a good reflection of the situation in the hospital during the last years of the war.

The show takes place in 1943 at the hospital under the Nazi regime during World War II and shows how the war affected the doctors, nurses and students at Berlin’s renowned learning hospital. The series includes the using of archival film from the time to set the tone. It has a mix of fictional and real characters.

There are a few subtle nuances which I found quite powerful, but may not have been picked up by everyone watching the show. For example there is reference made how the mother of one of the Doctors could not visit Berlin because a shortage of trains.

One character in the show, although not a main character. was Dr. Georg Bressau. he was a German pediatrician and university professor. There are a lot of aspects to Dr Bressau’s career. for example in 1939 he introduced the preventive treatment of rickets with vitamin D in infants.

But there is a much more evil side to him too.

In Berlin he was continuing following his well-known research into a dead vaccine against tuberculosis. After the Lübeck vaccination accident in 1931, the use of live vaccines was banned.

The incident was a disaster caused by use of Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) for tuberculosis vaccination, which struck the German city of Lübeck. During 1929 and 1930, 72 babies died from tuberculosis out of 252 vaccinated. Many other infants were made ill as a result of vaccination. The vaccine used was later found to have been contaminated with a human tuberculosis strain being studied in same lab where the vaccine was produced.

Initially Bressau conducted animal experiments and there were promising signs for the experimental vaccine. However he then continued doing experiments on humans .For the experiment Bessau used physically and mentally disabled children from several children wards and hospitals . These were institutions that continued to covertly pursue the killing of disabled children after the end of the “T4 action”. In Berlin it was the children psychiatric clinic “Im Wiesengrund” in the Reinickendorf district.

Between 1942 and 1945, 175 children were tortured here. And 81 were murdered. These children were seen as rejects by the state and therefore no consent was needed from the parents to experiment on these kids.

The picture at the start of the blog is of the clinic.

Bressau wasn’t the only Doctor carrying out these experiments, but he was one of the most senior ones.

In his honor, the intensive care unit of the children’s clinic at the University of Giessen (now the University Clinic Giessen and Marburg ) was named “Ward Bessau” until a few years ago.

Dr Bressau wasn’t the only Doctor portrayed in the show. Dr Ferdinand Sauerbruch, is a prominent figure in the show. Although they do make some sort of reference to him signing some approvals, they don’t mention that he allegedly personally approved the funds which financed August Hirt’s experiments with mustard gas on prisoners at Natzweiler concentration camp from 1941 until 1944.

I do recommend the show though.

sources

https://research.uni-leipzig.de/catalogus-professorum-lipsiensium/leipzig/Bessau_15/

https://gedenkort.charite.de/en/locations/pediatric_clinic/

Die zwei Gesichter des Kinderarztes Georg Bessau

http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/children/berlinwittenau/berlinwittenau.html

stc3a4dtische_nervenklinik_fc3bcr_kinder_und_jugendliche_wiesengrund

https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/tuberculosis-l%C3%BCbeck-disaster

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4721647/

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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/

Nazi Ideology on Gender and Sexuality

Lesbians Under the Third Reich

Individual Experiences

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