Polizeihauptmann Christian Wirth. ‘Euthanasia’ Inspector and Purge Commissar (10 January 1940 – 24 August 1941)
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1By the summer of 1940, four ‘euthanasia’ gassing centres were operational, in the castles of Grafeneck in Württemberg, Germany, and Hartheim in Upper Austria, in an old prison in the city of Brandenburg, and at the ‘Sonnenstein’ institution behind an old fortress above the town of Pirna on the river Elbe in Saxony. The sole function of these establishments was the extermination of mentally ill patients from psychiatric institutions throughout the Reich.
- 1 Staatsanwaltschaft Tübingen. Ks 6/49: Dr Wilhelm Westkott, director of the Weissenau asylum, Württe (...)
- 2 International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg. Document No. NO-830, Prosecution Exhibit Code: 382. Rep (...)
- 3 Ibid., NO-156: Generalstaatsanwaltschaft Stuttgart to Reich Justice Ministry Berlin, 15 July 1940. (...)
2Within a few weeks of these institutions becoming operational, rumours began to circulate about what was happening to the busloads of patients who were taken behind the walls of these places and disappeared. The close proximity of Grafeneck to the military proving grounds near Münsingen in Württemberg led to the persistent rumour that new poison gases were being tested on the patients for use on the battlefield. The rumour was reinforced when the relatives were informed that patients had been ‘transferred for military reasons’.1 And most disturbing was the rumour that soldiers who had been severely wounded on the battlefields in Poland and France were being put to death at Grafeneck, together with World War I veterans. How could so many patients arrive, never to reappear, when it was obvious that they could not possibly all be accommodated at the castle? What epidemic was preventing visits or any approach to the premises?2 And the ever-increasing number of death notices arriving at the Probate Office in Stuttgart from the Special Registry Office in Grafeneck also caused great concern. The Special Registry Office (Sonderstandesamt) issued the death certificates in seemingly large numbers which indicated that the rumours about mass murder being carried out at the castle were true. The Senior State Prosecutor in Stuttgart therefore asked the Reich Justice Ministry in Berlin whether the Gestapo should be assigned to investigate whether a crime was indeed being committed at Grafeneck. If such was the case, then under Article 211 of Reich Penal Code, the statutory punishment for murder was death.3
- 4 Ibid., NO-829. Ibid., 1 August 1940.
- 5 Klee, Ernst (ed.), Dokumente zur ’Euthanasie, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985, 111
3Throughout that summer, the Senior State Prosecutor in Stuttgart and the presiding judge in the magistrates court wrote reports about the unrest stirred up by the rumours about Grafeneck which originated from the nearby villages of Dapfen, Gommadingen and Steingebronn, all located within three kilometers of the castle. A judge in the city added that “serious unrest is slowly spreading among the population about these things” and that “even children brought such news from school and from the street.”4 In the asylums of Württemberg and Baden, it seemed to the medical and nursing staff that their patients appeared to know more about what was going on than they did, as reported by a nurse at the Freiburg asylum in Baden: “They knew about these things during their outings to the town and then brought these stories back to us. We nurses then talked about it […] that these were crazy rumours – until after the first transport, when the death notices arrived and the clothing of the patients from the transport was returned to us. These clothes were in such a condition that they must have been ripped off the patients. When we saw that, we feared the worst.” (Als wir das sahen, packte uns ein Grauen).5
Christian Wirth (1885-1944, in the centre of the picture) in 1943, at the time when he was supervising the extermination centres of Aktion Reinhardt

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- 6 Schilter, Thomas, Unmenschliches Ermessen. Die nationalsozialistische ‘Euthanasie’-Tötungsanstalt P (...)
4In Berlin, the mysterious removal of the patients was organized by the Gemeinnütziger Stiftung für Anstaltspflege – Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care, abbreviated to ‘the Foundation’ (‘die Stiftung’), a fictitious organization that hid the direct involvement of Hitler’s private chancellery in the secret killing operation. When the sinister convoys of red buses with the painted-over windows, hired from the Reich Post Office by the Gemeinnütziger Krankentransport GmbH, abbreviated to ‘Gekrat’ (the Charitable Patient Transport Company, Ltd.), passed through towns and villages, the inhabitants knew the destinations but not the precise fate of the victims, only that they were being secretly killed. In the Dolderbach valley below Grafeneck, railway workers on the line that passed below the ramparts of the castle doffed their caps and stood with bowed heads as the convoy travelled along the parallel road, “as if a funeral were passing by.” In Pirna-Sonnenstein, Saxony, the buses were known as ‘fluster wagons’ (‘Flüsterkutsche’) because public recognition of their purpose was highly dangerous. The clouds of black, stinking smoke billowing out of the crematorium chimney at Pirna-Sonnenstein was plainly visible from the town below, and the curious townsfolk asked one another about what was being burnt up there. An inhabitant who lived on Waldstrasse at the foot of Sonnenstein Hill, remarked that it stank of human flesh. There was a good view of the asylum buildings from the Elbe Bridge below, and everyone who crossed the river via the bridge could plainly see the smoke rising over the town. A common remark at the sight was: “There go more souls flying up to heaven!” In the local school in Pirna the schoolteacher, a long-standing member of the Nazi Party who proudly wore the Gold Party Badge, was very frank about the source of the smoke. When asked by inquisitive children what it meant, they received the blunt and ideologically correct reply that: “The smoke is from the extermination of elements unworthy of life.”6 At the Brandenburg institution located in the centre of town, the smoke, soot and foul stink polluted the surrounding houses and streets to such an extent that the crematorium had to be relocated to a remote farm just outside the hamlet of Paterdamm, six kilometers from the city centre. At Hartheim, too, the smoke from the crematorium furnaces often shrouded the narrow streets of the village clustered around the castle, but for the villagers of Hartheim there was no solution to the problem.
5Rumours also began to spread about the removal of brains from the victims for ‘scientific research’ and it was even claimed that entire heads or other parts of bodies were removed. Other rumours spoke of the elderly being ‘done away with’ and entire old people’s homes cleared of their residents and closed down. The public and asylum staffs were warned by the Gestapo not to listen to such ‘rumours and fairy tales’, and that the spreading of such rumours in wartime was a serious criminal offence that carried the direst penalties.
- 7 Alexander, Leo, Public Mental Health Practices in Germany: Sterilization and Execution of Patients (...)
6Finally, because of the ever-widening circle of people involved in the transfer and transportation of the patients, sometimes by trains of the Reichsbahn which involved large numbers of railway staff, by the summer of 1940 the killing operation was no longer a State Secret but an ‘open secret’ that no one dared mention aloud, or as one doctor put it. “While nobody was supposed to talk about it, the sparrows were whistling it from the rooftops.”7
7Mistakes were also made in the bureaucracy in the gassing institutions. The clerical staff in the Special Registry Office at each instititution which issued the death certificates, and also sent so-called ‘letters of condolence’ and urns of ashes to the families of the victims, made errors that threatened to confirm that the rumours were indeed true: an impossible cause of death was stated on a death certificate, a family received two urns of ashes when only one relative had died, and a family received an urn of ashes of a male relative that contained female hair pins. And why was it necessary to cremate the body of a patient ‘to prevent the spread of contagious diseases’ when according to the death certificates the patient had died of heart or brain diseases that were not contagious? Suspicion was further aroused by the alarming number of patients dying in a very short time in one institution or from a particular town or locality. In the obituary columns of local newspapers, the death announcements made it clear that the victims’ families knew that something terrible was happening in secret. How could a patient who had been perfectly healthy only a few days previously die ‘suddenly and unexpectedly’, according to the letters of condolence?
8At the Charitable Foundation in Berlin drastic measures were needed to stem this flow of macabre rumours and suspicion. The most suitable person for such a task was a 55-year-old Kriminalinspektor from the Stuttgart police, Christian Wirth, an officer with twenty years experience, who was selected to tighten up the bureaucratic procedures and preserve the secrecy of the killings. Wirth already had a prewar reputation for organization and leadership, and in January 1940 had set up the bureaucratic procdures in the Brandenburg gassing institution, and since the beginning of February had been in charge of security and documentation in the Special Registry Office at Grafeneck. Despite his rank of Kriminalkommissar, throughout his duty with the Foundation Wirth wore the green uniform of the Schutzpolizei, the regular uniformed police, with the rank of police captain (Hauptmann der Polizei). This was a ploy to convince the local population that the whole mysterious affair was being carried out by members of the uniformed police at each gassing centre where they signed the death certificates, and therefore whatever was happening was legally sanctioned.
- 8 Staatsanwaltschaft beim Landgericht Düsseldorf. 10 Js 38/60: Friedrich Tillman, 20 March 1961.
9Wirth was assisted in this task of tightening-up and further camouflaging the administrative procedures by 37-year-old Friedrich Tillmann who had been employed by the Foundation in Berlin since the beginning of the year. Formerly a welfare officer in Cologne in charge of orphanages in the district, towards the end of 1939 Tillmann had organized the evacuation of orphanages in the Rhine province during which he met Dr Herbert Linden, the head of Departament IVg at the Reich Interior Ministry responsible for all psychiatric institutions, hospitals and sanatoria in the Reich. Linden recruited Tillmann to the Foundation early in 1940 and by the summer of that year, Tillmann was the overall supervisor of the Special Registry Offices at the individual gassing centres. A small attic room in a recently-acquired villa at Tiergartenstrasse 4, the new headquarters of the the Foundation, was placed at his disposal, as well as a room in each of the gassing centres which he visited in rotation during fortnightly trips.8
10The simplest method devised by Wirth and Tillmann to camouflage the location and actual number of deaths at each gassing institution was to exchange the paperwork between the institutions, and to refer to them only by a code letter: Grafeneck (A), Brandenburg (B), Hartheim (C) and Sonnenstein (D). This scheme continued to include the names of Grafeneck and Brandenburg even though they both closed down at the end of 1940, and the institutions at Bernburg (Be) and Hadamar (E) were added when they became operational at the beginning of 1941.
- 9 Hinz-Wessels, Annette, et al., ‘Zur bürokratischen Abwicklung eines Massenmord. Die „Euthanasie”-Ak (...)
11According to the new procedure, each Report Form on the individual patients sent to Berlin by psychiatric institutions throughout the Reich was allocated an internal cypher, a ‘Z’ File (Zentralakte) or ‘Central File’, and each of five photostats made of each Report Form had to bear the same number. This number later appeared on the death notice of the deceased patient in the Special Registry Offices, prefixed by the code letter for the gassing centre. The photographs taken of each naked patient were stuck in pairs onto DIN A4 paper, with the patient’s number stamped on the his/her chest and on the back of each photo; at top left, the gassing centre letter, e.g. ‘D’ (Sonnenstein), and at top right the patient’s ‘Z’ file number. The following information was written in pencil on the back of each photo: the patient’s name, date of birth and the note ‘Des’, i.e. ‘Disinfected’ – gassed. The photos were kept in albums (the majority seem to have been taken in Hartheim) and together with all the murdered patients’ files were stored in the cellars at Hartheim and the villa at Tiergartenstrasse 4.9
- 10 Staatsanwaltschaft beim Landgericht Düsseldorf. 10 Js 38/60: Friedrich Tillmann, 21 March 1961.
- 11 Hinz-Wessels, et al. ‘Zur bürokratischen Abwicklung ... ‘, op. cit., p. 95.
- 12 Hessische Hauptstaatsarchiv, Wiesbaden. Abteilung 631a, Nr. 836b: Viktor Brack to Franz Schlegelber (...)
12The efficient team of Wirth and Tillmann also devised a system to avoid the previous mistake of registering too many deaths at one place within a short time – the ‘Pinning Department’. In each Special Registry Office, big maps were placed on the walls and each individual registration of a death was marked by a coloured pin by which it could be seen at a glance that the causes of death were not concentrated together in a particular neighbourhood. If this did occur occasionally, the cause and date of death were changed, and whenever possibile, also the place of death.10 This ensured a widespread distribution of the faked causes and places of death. To add even further confusion to the system, the ‘Pinning Departments’ also often changed the internal formulae. The ‘Patient’s Number in the Disinfecting Institution’ (Krankennummer der Desinfektionsanstalt), i.e. the gassing centre, became the ‘Patient’s Number in the Authenticating Institution’ (Krankennummer der Beurkundungsanstalt), which was not necessarily the same as the gassing centre where the patient had been killed.11 The Wirth/Tillmann system became so complicated that eventually Viktor Brack at Main Office II of the Führer’s Chancellery, in charge of the day-to-day running of the killing operation, compiled two files, one concerning the criteria by which patients were included in the ‘euthanasia’ operation, and the other ‘with formulae which result in the bureacratic preparation after the deaths of the patients.’ He sent a copy of each file to acting Justice Minister Franz Schlegelberger.12 Wirth – who had long since proved his worth as a meticulous bureaucrat – became the controller of documentation and the custodian of the official records at the gassing centres to ensure the continued smooth running of the operation. He also continued as the head of internal security.
- 13 Fröhlich, Elke (ed.), Die Tagebebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Part I, Vol. 9. Munich: K. G. Sauer Ver (...)
- 14 Staatsanwaltschaft Frankfurt/Main. Ks 2/63: Dr Gerhard Bohne, 25 April, 1961.
- 15 Ibid. Statement by a former Foundation registrar, 12 August 1960.
- 16 National Archive, Kew (London). WO 208/4209: Fritz Bleich, former Foundation registrar, 21 April 19 (...)
- 17 Klee, Ernst, Was sie taten was sie wurden: Ärzte, Juristen und andere Beteiligten am Kranken-oder J (...)
13On 31 January 1941, Propaganda Minister Dr Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary with disgust: ‘The morals of the Party superiors must be improved; many Reichsleiters and Gauleiters live in debauchery and luxury […] There is corruption, unfortunately, also even in the private Chancellery of the Führer; it stinks also in the closest proximity of the all-highest.’13 Goebbels knew what he was talking about. Dr Gerhard Bohne, the upright, prudish managing director of the Foundation who had established in late 1939 the procedures to be followed, had also noted a long list of ‘misdemeanours’ committed by high-ranking Party officials. He himself had little time for the Nazi Party, and apart from his duties with the Foundation devoted much of his effort to the German Red Cross. He wrote a long and detailed memorandum to SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the Reich Security Main Office, in which he complained bitterly about the ‘deplorable state of affairs’ which included ‘profiteering in food and alcohol, over-indulgence in alcohol and sexual excesses’, and ‘the misuse of official vehicles for private use’. The latter complaint was directed personally against Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, the head of Hitler’s private chancellery which issued orders to the Foundation, who ‘in spite of the strict petrol rationing, he is still driving twice a week – there and back in his big Mercedes car – from Berlin to his country estate in Upper Bavaria’.14 These journeys totalled over 1,600 kilometers each week. This was a serious accusation by Dr Bohne due to the strict laws governing fuel rationing in wartime. Bohne also accused Bouhler and Viktor Brack, his deputy in the chancellery and in charge of the day-to-day running of ‘euthanasia’, of having orgies with secretaries from the Foundation during ‘company parties’. Such loose morals, abhorrent to Bohne, in his opinion ‘soon lead to a general decline in government service’.15 Dr Karl Brandt, Hitler’s escorting physician (Begleitarzt), who with Bouhler was the most senior official involved in ‘euthanasia’, was accused by Bohne of being ‘a great womanizer who has affairs with almost every female member of the Foundation. Despite being married to Helene (‘Helli’), known as ‘the most beautiful woman in the Reich Chancellery’ and who was a favourite of Hitler’s, Brandt also had a mistress, Sister Elizabeth Jördens, on his medical staff.16 In the opinion of Dr Bohne, ‘The nearer the Führer, the greater the transgression’.17
Dietrich Allers (1910-1975) took over as director of Aktion T4 in early 1941

As such, he was responsible for the smooth running of the action. He then controlled the extermination centres of Aktion Reinhardt. In 1944, he took over the direction of Einsatz R in Trieste after the death of Christian Wirth
© Bundesarchiv-Bildarchiv, B 162 Bild-00670
- 18 Kohl, Walter, ‘Ich fühle mich nicht schuldig’- Georg Renno, Euthanasiearzt, Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, 2 (...)
14Bohne next complained about other individuals in important positions within the euthanasia organization who also misused resources and ‘behaved arrogantly during visits by Party officials to the gassing centres’. Prominent among these were Drs Horst Schumann and Irmfried Eberl, both married men. Schumann at Grafeneck ‘carried out a blatant affair with a Foundation employee, to the annoyance of the rest of his staff’.18 Eberl at Brandenburg was accused of much the same thing, an accusation that was backed up by members of his staff who knew him as ‘a lecher’. The behaviour of these medical leaders was also amply reflected in the behaviour of their subordinates, especially among those who had first served under Wirth at Grafeneck and called themselves ‘Grafeneckers’; they considered themselves ‘veterans’ and the élite among the Foundation staff. In Brandenburg and later in Hadamar, the SS-NCOs (non-commissioned officer) who emptied the gas chambers and cremated the corpses in particular frequented the local bars and cafés, especially at night, and drank themselves into oblivion in an effort to blot out the events of the day, and to escape the ghastly scenes they had witnessed in the gas chambers and at the cremation furnaces. They were accused of brawling, bullying, and the theft of some of the victims’ property, and when drunk also boasting openly in public bars about their work. Wirth gave this group of SS-NCOs the ghastly name ‘Dezinfektoren und Brenner’ – ‘Disinfectors and Burners’.
- 19 Zehethofer, Florian, Die Abläufe im Schloss Hartheim 1938-1945, Linz: Institut für Neuere Geschicht (...)
15SS-Hauptscharführer Wetschy, the building supervisor at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria who had participated in the construction of the extermination installation at Hartheim, told commandant Ziereis at Mauthausen that he and the camp SS who drank with the Hartheim ‘disinfectors and burners’ were ‘afraid of these always drunk SS-men. They congratulated themselves on how many people they had cremated alive in their furnaces.’ The inhabitants of Alkoven village also heard similar tales from the Hartheim ‘disinfectors and burners’ while drinking in the village tavern. In the gassing centres this group of SS-NCOs were shunned by the rest of the staff, and in the bars and cafés the regular customers took care to avoid them.19 The high moral values Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler expected from his SS had degenerated to a level that would never have been tolerated outside the ranks of the Foundation.
- 20 Kohl, ‘Ich fühle mich nicht schuldig’…, op. cit., 192.
- 21 Landgericht Linz. Vg 10 Vr 2407/6: Vincenz Nohel, 4 September 1945.
- 22 Kohl, ‘Ich fühle mich nicht schuldig’…, op. cit., 161, 172, 184.
- 23 Klee, Was sie taten ... , op. cit., 132.
16Bohne castigated in particular the outrageous behaviour among the staff in Hartheim castle, but he had been preempted by Gauinspektor Stefan Schachermayer in Linz who had had a lengthy correspondence with Werner Blankenburg and Reinhold Vorberg at the Führer’s Chancellery ‘concerning complaints’. Linz Gauleiter Franz Eigruber, however, was in no way averse to frequenting the castle ‘for alcohol and women’.20 The ‘excesses’ at Hartheim concerned not only drunkenness but theft of poultry from neighbouring farms, and inside the castle ‘sexual escapades were common’.21 Even Dr Renno, the deputy medical director, admitted that despite the fact that the staff slept in communal dormitories ‘there was intensive contact between staff members’, which he later expressed more bluntly – ‘everyone was sleeping with everyone else’. After work, Hartheim became a ‘pleasure castle where the female staff were “fair game” for the doctors and SS-NCOs’.22 Bohne was not the only one to complain in this respect. SS-Hauptscharführer Lenz, the deputy head of administration at Hartheim, was also scandalised by the ‘sexual immorality’ among the staff but, unlike Bohne, seemed oblivious to the gassings taking place daily.23 Dr Bohne was especially disgusted to learn that naked men and women were gassed together. He did not object to the gassing as such, only to the fact that to his prudish mind, they should have been segregated ‘for the sake of decency’.
- 24 Kohl, ‘Ich fühle mich nicht schuldig’... , op. cit., 187.
- 25 Ibid. 180f. Wartime Field Post letters between Lonauer and his wife, discovered in 1998, reveal tha (...)
- 26 Ibid. 183. According to Dr Renno, Stangl’s lover was burned to death during the Allied firestorm bo (...)
17There was also what Dr Renno called ‘erotic contact’ between the Hartheim personnel and the SS-staff at Mauthausen concentration camp; some of these ‘contacts’ later married.24 According to Dr Renno, his superior, Dr Lonauer, had a ‘torrid love affair’ with one of the Hartheim nurses. At home he had a domineering wife who nevertheless stood by him; she was a convinced Nazi, had made a career for herself in medicine and the Nazi Party, and firmly believed in her husband’s work in Hartheim.25 The police officer Franz Stangl in the Hartheim Special Registry Office, who was also married, had a lover who worked in the personnel office in the castle.26 But being married was no obstacle to some female members of the Hartheim staff. After all, their husbands were absent, fighting at the front. Such intimate liaisons soon spilled over into Alkoven village and its environs which resulted in a number of illegitimate children being born. Dr Renno stressed the point that none of the female members of staff received any special favours or promotion in return for being compliant partners. Stories of the sex scandals which reached the ears of prudish Dr Bohne involved not only Hartheim but all the Foundation gassing centres and were a result of the conditions extant in the gassing centres at that time.
- 27 Generalstaatsanwaltschaft Frankfurt/Main. Ks 2/63: Dr Gerhard Bohne, 25 April 1961.
18Not only Reichsleiter Bouhler abused the strict fuel-rationing laws, the Foundation staff made free use of the Gekrat buses for their own private purposes. The Hartheim buses were used by the staff to go on shopping sprees in Linz and when only a small group wanted to go shopping, they returned in the buses seated next to the patients who were to be gassed. The excursions also included weekends or longer stays in Haus Schoberstein the Foundation hotel high up on Schoberstein mountain above the Weissensee in Austria. There, too, ‘excesses’ occurred, as mentioned by Dr Renno: ‘There were a lot of parties and a lot of noise’. After such wild parties, the inhabitants of Weissenbach on the lakeside often encountered the revellers staggering around, completely drunk. Sometimes, the Foundation staff continued their drinking bouts in the village taverns and the local inhabitants could see even the doctors staggering around the streets and falling over in drunken stupors. Dr Bohne remembered particularly well that on one occasion a hotel manager had to evict a group of the Foundation doctors, nurses and secretaries from the premises because of their outrageous behaviour which caused offence to the other guests.27
- 28 Staatsanwaltschaft Sigmaringen. Wü 29/3, Acc. 33/1973, Nr. 1752, 50-50v.
19But there were even more serious, criminal offences. In the Grafeneck Special Registry Office, Kriminalkommissar Johannes Wöger, Wirth’s crony from the Stuttgart police, was accused of profiteering in food from the castle farm which came under his authority. He was summoned to the Foundation headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4 for reassignment, but no one wanted anything to do with him. In August 1940, he was discharged from the Foundation and returned to his former job in the Stuttgart police. Soon afterwards, he was seriously injured when involved in a collision with a Wehrmacht lorry which rendered him unfit for further police duty. After convalescence, a job was found for Wöger in the administration office at Eichberg mental asylum near Heidelberg in the Rhine valley.28
- 29 Ibid. Klee, Ernst, ‘Euthanasie’ im NS-Staat: Die ’Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens, Frankfurt/Main (...)
- 30 Ibid. 22 November 1947. No such charge against Dr Baumhardt has been found in the archive of the St (...)
- 31 Copies of the obituary in: Staatsanwaltschaft Tübingen, Ks 6/49, and archive of the ‘Hub’ asylum ne (...)
20In the summer of 1940 in Grafeneck, Dr Baumhardt shot and killed one of the senior female nurses. Ostensibly it was an accident, she happened to step into the line of fire as Baumhardt aimed his pistol at an escaping patient, a leper whose face was eaten away with the disease. The nurse, shot in the neck, was not killed outright but lived for another twenty or thirty minutes. Dr Baumhardt was so aghast at the incident that he contemplated suicide.29 In this case, Dr Gerhard Bohne did everything he could to prevent the relatives bringing a charge of murder against Dr Baumhardt. However, the Grafeneck Registrar, the Stuttgart police officer Hermann Holzschuh, another of Wirth’s prewar detectives, had already been filed a charge of ‘causing death through negligence’ with the State Prosecutor in Ulm.30 The Foundation then took the unusual step of placing an obituary for the nurse in the Völkischer Beobachter, the official newspaper of the Nazi Party: ‘On 4 June 1940, there died as the result of an accident in the course of her duties our highly-esteemed and loyal co-worker, Party member Anna Hagemeier, senior nurse at the Grafeneck State Nursing Institution. She held her unusually difficult and responsible post as an ardent National Socialist. We will always remember her.’31 Nurse Hagermeier was buried in the new cemetery in her home town of Minde, Westphalia.
21The fact that Dr Baumhardt was armed with a pistol shows that not only Wirth and the other police officers and SS-NCOs were armed and had no qualms about shooting patients, but that the Foundation doctors also carried pistols.
- 32 Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Aussenstelle Berlin-Lichterfelde, Abteilung R: SS Personal File August Becker
22In January 1941, the police were called to deal with a drunken brawl in the town of Plauen, sixty kilometers south of Leipzig in Saxony. SS-Scharführer Lorenz Hackenholt, one of the original ‘disinfectors and burners’ at Grafeneck, and Dr August Becker – involved in the procurement of CO gas cylinders for the Foundation gas chambers – had left a wine bar at 05:00 in the company of two prostitutes after a night of heavy drinking. The wine bar owner followed them into the street, taunting Hackenholt and Becker. He finally punched Hackenholt – a foolhardy act because the SS-NCO was well above average height and strong. Hackenholt reacted in self-defence and knocked-out two of the bar owner’s teeth. He called the police, claiming assault. Hackenholt and Becker, who were either en route to or returning from Hartheim, refused to tell the police why they were in Plauen or the nature of their work. The police reported the incident to the SS Head Office in Berlin, which resulted in disciplinary proceedings against both Hackenholt and Becker. After a great deal of internal bureaucratic wrangling the case was dropped on the advice of SS-Gruppenführer Bruno Streckenbach, head of Amt I, the Personnel Office at SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich’s RSHA in Berlin. The only consequence was that Becker missed a promotion that was due to him.32
- 33 Kohl, ‘Ich fühle mich nicht schuldig’ …, op. cit., 125.
23To-date, the authorities in the Führer’s Chancellery and the Foundation at Tiergartenstrasse knew that they could not impose too many restrictions on the personnel in the gassing centres, and had turned a blind eye to the ongoing outrageous behaviour; the most important task was the completion of the killing operation. It was also known in Berlin that many of the Foundation staff in the gassing centres had psychological problems, a few even attempted to commit suicide, others suffered from nightmares. According to Dr Renno at Hartheim, even the hardened SS ‘disinfectors and burners’ were not immune, after their 12-hour shifts dragging corpses from the gas chambers and shoving them into the blazing furnaces, day after day, week after week: ‘The dead came to them at night to haunt them’.33 It was small wonder that they could only function while under the influence of alcohol, both on and off duty. Dr Bohne’s main concern about the outrageous sexual escapades between the members of the Foundation staff was that such behaviour and on such a big scale, extending from the top echelons in Berlin to the lowest ranks in the gassing centres, was seriously hindering completion of the ‘euthanasia’ operation. As no one seemed inclined to interfere, he resigned as the managing director of the Foundation. His final act was to sign the last Grafeneck accounts for December 1940 when the gassing centre was closed down. The accounts were dated 26 January 1941 and submitted to Dr Karl Brandt the medical director of the ‘euthanasia’ operation.
- 34 Klee, Was sie taten … op. cit., 33, 283 note 51.
24Dr Bohne’s memorandum, caused a sensation, not only because he had dared to send copies to Heydrich and other high-ranking members of the security apparatus and the Nazi Party, but because some of the accusations proved to be true. In the opinion of Dr Ruth Eberl, the wife of Dr Irmfried Eberl at Brandenburg, the memo ‘provoked tempers, not least because there was no limit to human nastiness, especially as personal – above all, sexual matters – had been written in an incredible way’. She believed Dr Bohne must have been ‘mental’ himself to have written such accusations against so many high-ranking officials. She attempted to obtain an expert psychiatric opinion to explain his highly dangerous act.34
- 35 Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Aussenstelle Berlin-Lichterfelde, Abteilung R: Personal File Gerhard Bohne.
25Dr Bohne was conscripted into the army in January 1942 but was not arraigned before the Supreme Court of the Nazi Party, presided over by judge Walter Busch, until the following year. As a result of the investigation by the court, Dr Bohne was finally expelled from the Nazi Party on 10 August 1943. The verdict of the court was marked ‘Secret’.35
- 36 Ibid. Aussenstelle Ludwigsburg, 208 AR-Z 251/59: Dieter Allers, 21 March 1962.
26Dr Bohne was replaced as managing director of the Foundation at the beginning of 1941 by 30-year-old Dieter Allers, another lawyer, and member of the Nazi Party and SA since 1932. In 1937, Allers passed the highest law examination and was employed by the Prussian State in the office of the police chief of Stettin on the Baltic. At the time of his recruitment to the Foundation he was serving in the army, first as an instructor with the 10th Company of Regiment 417 in Liegnitz (Legnice), Silesia, and later in Kielce, Poland. Through a chance meeting in a Berlin street between his mother and Werner Blankenburg, deputy head of Main Office II at Hitler’s private chancellery, who had been acquainted before the war. Blankenburg considered Allers’ military service a waste of legal expertise and arranged his discharge from the army and transfer to the Foundation. At the Führer’s Chancellery, Blankenburg informed Allers about the euthanasia operation in which ‘only the incurably mentally ill were being killed to spare them their terrible suffering’. Allers would take over as managing director and would be employed ‘for about six months’. Allers reaction was rather muted. He merely replied that although he was a humanist, he went along with it, ‘that it was humanely justifiable to spare these severely ill people their suffering’.36
- 37 Ibid. 208 AR-Z 252/59: Robert Jührs, 11 October 1961.
27In May 1941, almost six months after Dr Bohne’s complaint about the scandalous situation prevailing among the Nazi leadership, at the Foundation and in the gassing centres, it was decided finally at the Führer’s Chancellery to begin a ‘clean-up’ programme, most likely instigated by Friedrich Tillmann who observed at first hand the indiscipline and chaos during his regular inspection visits. Polizeihauptmann Christian Wirth, already notorious for his ruthlessness within the closed communities of the gassing centres and with a reputation for being ‘a very hard man who tolerated not the slightest opposition’, was appointed ‘Läuterungsinspektor’ – a roving ‘purge commissar’ with the task of bringing the debauched staff at the gassing centres into line. Throughout the gassing centres, Wirth ‘acted like an undisputed lord’ and his evil character really came to the fore. He became generally hated, everyone was afraid of this brutal, sadistic bully who misused his power whenever possible to terrorise his subordinates into submission and achieve his aims and the aims of his superiors in Berlin. Everyone was well aware of his close contact with the Führer’s Chancellery and no one dared utter a word of complaint against him. In each gassing centre in turn he began a reign of terror, screaming, shouting and threatening to send members of staff who stepped out of line with concentration camp – or shooting. Cancellation of leave and withdrawal of privileges became commonplace, and no one was allowed outside the premises without his personal permission.37
- 38 Suchomel, Franz, Christian Wirth – genannt ‘Christian der Grausame’ oder ‘Stuka’, (private typewrit (...)
28Wirth was sent first to the Hadamar killing centre which, in the only four months it had been operational, according to one staff member ‘had sunk quite low in human and moral terms, and lacked discipline.’ Various incidents, especially involving those who had served at Grafeneck who saw themselves as ‘veterans’ and acted accordingly: rowdy behaviour in bars and other occurrences that led to public complaints, were reason enough for him to step in energetically. Wirth had two male psychiatric nurses, Erwin Kainer and Karl Arndt, originally recruited from the Arnsdorf State Mental Asylum in Thuringia and had been previously employed at Grafeneck, sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp for six weeks for breaking their oath of silence. While drunk in the ‘Gotthard’ bar in the town, they had expressed their disgust with the work they had to do in the cellar of the asylum – removing the brains from corpses and preparing them for transportation to various neurological establishments for brain research. On the evening they were committed to the camp, Wirth announced to the assembled staff in his usual coarse manner that ‘two blabbermouths were now behind barbed wire’. When Kainer and Arndt returned to Hadamar, they refused to talk about what had happened to them in the camp.38
- 39 Kinter, Robert (ed.), The Trial of Alfons Klein, Adolf Wahlmann, Heinrich Ruoff et al. (The Hadamar (...)
- 40 Ibid.,115-116.
29A third SS-man, Karl Kircher, employed as a Gekrat driver, was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp for spreading rumours about Hadamar. He was arrested by the Gestapo at the Weilmünster asylum in Hesse where he had driven a Gekrat bus to collect patients. His arrest was announced to the staff by Fritz Bernotat, the evil health official from Wiesbaden who at times rivalled even Wirth in nastiness. Karl Kircher died in Buchenwald in December 1941.39 In Eichberg near Heidelberg in the Rhine valley, Andreas Hung, a labourer on the Wacholder Farm that belonged to the asylum, was also arrested by the Gestapo and incarcerated in Sachsenhausen. His offence was ‘spreading rumours’, he had referred to Eichberg several times as ‘the entrance to death’ – the entrance to Hadamar. After his release from Sachsenhausen, Hung returned to work on the farm. When asked after the war why he had resumed work if he knew that Eichberg was the ‘entrance to death’, he replied: ‘Because they paid a bit better’. He hastened to add that he never had anything to do with the euthanasia.40 After these incidents, no one in the Foundation now doubted that Wirth would indeed carry out his threats.
- 41 Suchomel, Christian Wirth … op. cit.
- 42 Kohl, ‘Ich fühle mich nicht schuldig’ …, op. cit., 128.
30Wirth next travelled to Hartheim castle in Upper Austria which according to reports reaching Berlin had sunk even lower than Hadamar and had become an ‘undisciplined pigsty’. There too he acted ruthlessly, cancelling leave and privileges, and according to one SS-man, ‘generally acted like a beast, threatening all and sundry with concentration camp or shooting’.41 Dr Georg Renno, deputy medical director at Hartheim, described Wirth as an ‘ordinären, ekelhaften Menschen’, for which there are several translations: beastly, disgusting, horrid, nasty, repulsive, repugnant, revolting, vulgar – they all apply to Polizeihauptmann Christian Wirth. He was a petty tyrant, a man who because of the power bestowed on him, relished walking in the aura of fear he deliberately manufactured. He needed to know that fear preceded him and would linger after he had gone. In Hartheim, Wirth’s coarse voice and vulgar manner instilled fear in the staff. This bully with a blood-shot face was hated by everyone and he also did his best to set the staff against each other. The inhabitants of Alkoven village also knew and feared him.42
- 43 Dokumentationszentrum des Österreichischen Widerstandes, Vienna. E18370/3: Emil Reisenberger, 8 Feb (...)
31Emil Reisenberger, employed as the castle janitor at Hartheim should have been shot for a foolhardy and dangerous act he committed. He knew all the staff, and as a convinced Social Democrat, he constantly argued with the staunch Nazis. He finally took the very dangerous step of showing a friend, an outsider not employed by the Foundation, around the castle. Such was his fear of Wirth’s wrath if discovered and that he would be ‘put against a wall and shot’, he went to his room on the first floor of the castle and shot himself. He failed to kill himself, and while waiting for the ambulance to arrive, he was warned to say that the shooting was an accident. Reisenberger was discharged from Linz general hospital a month later and granted convalescent leave. After his return to Hartheim, he was visited by Werner Blankenburg from Hitler’s private chancellery, accompanied by Dr Rudolf Lonauer, the medical director of Hartheim, who informed Reisenberger that he would be sent to a concentration camp for six months. But this never happened. He was discharged from the Foundation and soon after conscripted into the army.43
- 44 Ibid. E 18370/1 (BfI): Bruno Bruckner, 24 May 1962.
- 45 Kohl, ’Ich fühle mich nich schuldig; … , op. cit., p. 114.
- 46 Ibid. 114. Schilter, Unmenschliches Ermessen … op. cit., 82.
- 47 Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Aussenstelle Ludwigsburg. 208 AR-Z 230/59: Kurt Bolender, 8 July 1965.
- 48 Kohl, ‘Ich fühle mich nicht schuldig’ …, op. cit., 173-174.
32No action was taken against Wirth, not even a reprimand for his most brutal and ruthless acts against the staff in the gassing centres; the officials in Berlin did not intervene because he achieved the desired result – discipline in the gassing centres that ensured the further smooth running of the killing operation. Wirth, however, was also most adept at the ‘carrot and stick’ method of persuasion. Those who attempted to rebel against his authority, he abused verbally and sometimes physically, while others who performed well or needed ‘encouragement’, or were depressed by their ghastly work, he rewarded with presents to lighten their burden – usually expensive items taken from the storeroom or parcels sent by the families to relatives long dead. Alcohol was an important ingredient in the killing operation – it bolstered the morale and fortitude of the participants and those who found it especially hard to cope with their tasks were issued with extra alcohol, on Wirth’s orders.44 He ensured that there was always a plentiful supply of alcohol for everyone to soothe frayed nerves and calm troubled minds. A particularly welcome guest at Hartheim was SS-Standartenführer Franz Peterseil, the Gau-Inspektor in Linz and a hero in the city and Upper Austria after he had his photograph taken shaking hands with the Führer during his visit to Linz on 12 March 1938 to celebrate the Anschluss. In 1938, Peterseil confiscated a distillery belonging to the Jewish Mostry family, ‘Aryanized’ the business and thereafter had an almost unlimited supply of alcohol which he shared generously with the Hartheim staff. Dr Lonauer too had a plentiful supply of alcohol: he had his own wine cellar beneath the castle, stored together with thousands of patients’ files. In the callous opinion of Dr Renno, his deputy, the files ‘were worthless because all those patients were dead’.45 In an attempt to restore order and provide some relief from their daily tasks, and further pacify the erstwhile drunken and rebellious staff by means other than Wirth’s reign of terror, attempts were made to improve their psychological well being. In summer, the Gekrat buses were used to take the staff to local beauty spots, especially to the Harz mountains in Thuringia, the lakes of Upper Bavaria and mountains of the Salzkammergut in Austria, and in winter, on skiing trips to the Austrian and Bavarian Alps. The transport for the excursions were the Gekrat buses used to convey the victims to their deaths.46 The Gekrat buses were also used on outings to visit comrades in other gassing centres, where orchestras were formed from among the staff, football and basket ball teams organized and ‘home and away’ matches played between them.47 Visits were exchanged between gassing centres where ‘Comrades Evenings’ and ‘Variety Concerts’ were held. At Hartheim, Dr Renno was particularly proud of the concerts organized at the castle; he was an adept harmonica and flute player and often entertained the staff, especially when visitors from Berlin came on inspection tours. Renno sat on a balcony above the courtyard and played the flute or harmonica while the ‘illustrious visitors’ – among them the heads of the Foundation, Professors Werner Heyde and Paul Nitsche – sat with the audience on rows of chairs in the courtyard below. They ‘listened engrossed’ within a few meters of the hot and smoking cremation furnaces.48 These visits and excursions which became known by the ghastly name ‘gassing tourism’.
33And to reassure everyone that their tasks were vital for the future of the people of Germany, all members of staff had to attend ‘pep talks’ given by the medical leaders at the gassing centres and occasionally by the Foundation leadership from Berlin, and sometimes by the odious Christian Wirth.
34Although the problem of rectifying bureaucratic mistakes was solved and the introduction of deception manoeuvres by the team of Wirth and Tillmann successful, the problem of human failings and discipline among the Foundation staff remained, albeit on a reduced scale, until the halt in the killings on 24 August 1941 on Hitler’s orders.
Notes
1 Staatsanwaltschaft Tübingen. Ks 6/49: Dr Wilhelm Westkott, director of the Weissenau asylum, Württemberg, 12 February 1948.
2 International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg. Document No. NO-830, Prosecution Exhibit Code: 382. Report concerning various incidents in the euthanasia programme, dated 25 July 1940, citing five suspicious sudden deaths at Grafeneck.
3 Ibid., NO-156: Generalstaatsanwaltschaft Stuttgart to Reich Justice Ministry Berlin, 15 July 1940. Reich Penal Code, Art. 211. Intentional Killing of a Person: Whoever kills a person wilfully will be punished by death for murder if the killing was premeditated.
4 Ibid., NO-829. Ibid., 1 August 1940.
5 Klee, Ernst (ed.), Dokumente zur ’Euthanasie, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985, 111.
6 Schilter, Thomas, Unmenschliches Ermessen. Die nationalsozialistische ‘Euthanasie’-Tötungsanstalt Pirna-Sonnenstein 1940/41, Leipzig: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1996, 225-226.
7 Alexander, Leo, Public Mental Health Practices in Germany: Sterilization and Execution of Patients Suffering from Nervous Mental Diseases, Part V. Prof. dr Otto Bumke, Munich, 7 June 1945. Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee (CIOS), Item 24 (Medical). Nuremberg: Armed Forces Supreme Headquarters, 1945.
8 Staatsanwaltschaft beim Landgericht Düsseldorf. 10 Js 38/60: Friedrich Tillman, 20 March 1961.
9 Hinz-Wessels, Annette, et al., ‘Zur bürokratischen Abwicklung eines Massenmord. Die „Euthanasie”-Aktion im Spiegel neuer Dokumente’. Oldenbourg: Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 53(1), 2005, 91-92.
10 Staatsanwaltschaft beim Landgericht Düsseldorf. 10 Js 38/60: Friedrich Tillmann, 21 March 1961.
11 Hinz-Wessels, et al. ‘Zur bürokratischen Abwicklung ... ‘, op. cit., p. 95.
12 Hessische Hauptstaatsarchiv, Wiesbaden. Abteilung 631a, Nr. 836b: Viktor Brack to Franz Schlegelberger, 18 April 1941.
13 Fröhlich, Elke (ed.), Die Tagebebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Part I, Vol. 9. Munich: K. G. Sauer Verlag, 1998, 119. Von Lang, Jochen, Der Sekretär – Martin Bormann: der Mann der Hitler beherrschte, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980, 240.
14 Staatsanwaltschaft Frankfurt/Main. Ks 2/63: Dr Gerhard Bohne, 25 April, 1961.
15 Ibid. Statement by a former Foundation registrar, 12 August 1960.
16 National Archive, Kew (London). WO 208/4209: Fritz Bleich, former Foundation registrar, 21 April 1945.
17 Klee, Ernst, Was sie taten was sie wurden: Ärzte, Juristen und andere Beteiligten am Kranken-oder Judenmord, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987, 30.
18 Kohl, Walter, ‘Ich fühle mich nicht schuldig’- Georg Renno, Euthanasiearzt, Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, 2000, 197.
19 Zehethofer, Florian, Die Abläufe im Schloss Hartheim 1938-1945, Linz: Institut für Neuere Geschichte und Zeitgeschichte, (no date), 38.
20 Kohl, ‘Ich fühle mich nicht schuldig’…, op. cit., 192.
21 Landgericht Linz. Vg 10 Vr 2407/6: Vincenz Nohel, 4 September 1945.
22 Kohl, ‘Ich fühle mich nicht schuldig’…, op. cit., 161, 172, 184.
23 Klee, Was sie taten ... , op. cit., 132.
24 Kohl, ‘Ich fühle mich nicht schuldig’... , op. cit., 187.
25 Ibid. 180f. Wartime Field Post letters between Lonauer and his wife, discovered in 1998, reveal that he was indeed dominated to a great extent by his career-minded wife.
26 Ibid. 183. According to Dr Renno, Stangl’s lover was burned to death during the Allied firestorm bombing of Dresden on 13 February 1945. At that time, Stangl was on duty in northern Italy organizing defences in the Po valley against the Allied assault from the south. There was also a rumour that Wirth had a mistress at Hadamar.
27 Generalstaatsanwaltschaft Frankfurt/Main. Ks 2/63: Dr Gerhard Bohne, 25 April 1961.
28 Staatsanwaltschaft Sigmaringen. Wü 29/3, Acc. 33/1973, Nr. 1752, 50-50v.
29 Ibid. Klee, Ernst, ‘Euthanasie’ im NS-Staat: Die ’Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986, 196.
30 Ibid. 22 November 1947. No such charge against Dr Baumhardt has been found in the archive of the State Prosecutor in Ulm.
31 Copies of the obituary in: Staatsanwaltschaft Tübingen, Ks 6/49, and archive of the ‘Hub’ asylum near Bühl in Baden.
32 Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Aussenstelle Berlin-Lichterfelde, Abteilung R: SS Personal File August Becker.
33 Kohl, ‘Ich fühle mich nicht schuldig’ …, op. cit., 125.
34 Klee, Was sie taten … op. cit., 33, 283 note 51.
35 Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Aussenstelle Berlin-Lichterfelde, Abteilung R: Personal File Gerhard Bohne.
36 Ibid. Aussenstelle Ludwigsburg, 208 AR-Z 251/59: Dieter Allers, 21 March 1962.
37 Ibid. 208 AR-Z 252/59: Robert Jührs, 11 October 1961.
38 Suchomel, Franz, Christian Wirth – genannt ‘Christian der Grausame’ oder ‘Stuka’, (private typewritten report, no pagination). Altötting 1972. Author’s archive.
39 Kinter, Robert (ed.), The Trial of Alfons Klein, Adolf Wahlmann, Heinrich Ruoff et al. (The Hadamar Trial), London/Edinburgh/Glasgow: William Hodge, 1949, 316, 138-140. Testimony of Hadamar nurses Emmy Bellin, Minna Zachow and Käthe Hackbarth.
40 Ibid.,115-116.
41 Suchomel, Christian Wirth … op. cit.
42 Kohl, ‘Ich fühle mich nicht schuldig’ …, op. cit., 128.
43 Dokumentationszentrum des Österreichischen Widerstandes, Vienna. E18370/3: Emil Reisenberger, 8 February 1946.
44 Ibid. E 18370/1 (BfI): Bruno Bruckner, 24 May 1962.
45 Kohl, ’Ich fühle mich nich schuldig; … , op. cit., p. 114.
46 Ibid. 114. Schilter, Unmenschliches Ermessen … op. cit., 82.
47 Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Aussenstelle Ludwigsburg. 208 AR-Z 230/59: Kurt Bolender, 8 July 1965.
48 Kohl, ‘Ich fühle mich nicht schuldig’ …, op. cit., 173-174.
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Title | Christian Wirth (1885-1944, in the centre of the picture) in 1943, at the time when he was supervising the extermination centres of Aktion Reinhardt |
Credits | © All rights reserved |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/temoigner/docannexe/image/10925/img-1.jpg |
File | image/jpeg, 781k |
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Title | Dietrich Allers (1910-1975) took over as director of Aktion T4 in early 1941 |
Caption | As such, he was responsible for the smooth running of the action. He then controlled the extermination centres of Aktion Reinhardt. In 1944, he took over the direction of Einsatz R in Trieste after the death of Christian Wirth |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/temoigner/docannexe/image/10925/img-2.jpg |
File | image/jpeg, 367k |
References
Bibliographical reference
Michael Tregenza, “Polizeihauptmann Christian Wirth. ‘Euthanasia’ Inspector and Purge Commissar (10 January 1940 – 24 August 1941)”, Témoigner. Entre histoire et mémoire, 134 | 2022, 82-95.
Electronic reference
Michael Tregenza, “Polizeihauptmann Christian Wirth. ‘Euthanasia’ Inspector and Purge Commissar (10 January 1940 – 24 August 1941)”, Témoigner. Entre histoire et mémoire [Online], 134 | 2022, Online since 10 April 2023, connection on 17 July 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/temoigner/10925; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/temoigner.10925
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The text and other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.
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