Jews as victims of Nazi euthanasia




Aktion "T4" 1940/41

Before the decision made in the second halt of 1941 about the "Final solution of the Jewish question", mental patients of Jewish origin - like the majority of mentally and physically disabled people in the German Reich - had become the victims of the first big systematic program of mass murder carried out by the Nazi regime. In the course of the Aktion "T4" (named after the address of the Berlin Euthanasia Headquarters at Tiergartenstraße 4) carried out in 1940/41, Jewish hospital patients were registered, selected, and deported to extermination institutions, and gassed to death with carbon monoxide.

In Austria, where Jews at that time were already ghettoized in special mass housing in Vienna, the Wagner von Jauregg Mental Hospital "Am Steinhof" functioned as a collection place. In the summer of 1940 patients were brought to the Hartheim extermination institution; some of them were brought there via the Niedernhart sanatorium. The monthly report of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Vienna dated July 1940 states that 400 Jews had been deported from "Steinhof." In the course of the year 1940 some reports of deaths and some urns of ashes reached Vienna. Inquiries about the fate of these people were dryly answered with the words "transferred by ministerial order to a hospital that has not been identified." The cause and the place of death were systematically forged in documents relating to the patients deaths and in explanations given to relatives or authorities. Many death certificates relating to deported Jewish psychiatric patients were issued by "the registry office, Chelm, Lublin district", but in actuality they had been fabricated in the Berlin "T4" headquarters, brought to Lublin by a messenger, and mailed from there.

The "14 f 13" programme

From the spring of 1941 the "euthanasia" programme was extended to the concentration camps and executed under the name "Special Treatment 14 f 13", whereby the file mark "f 14" in the camp administration stood for death, and the following number indicated the circumstances of the inmate's death. On the orders of Heinrich Himmler experts of the "T 4"-programme were sent to the concentration camps, to select prisoners incapable of work, who were then murdered in the "euthanasia" institutions (Hartheim, Bernburg, Sonnenstein). These experts often based their decisions on political and racial, rather than "medical" criteria. It was mainly Jewish inmates that were affected by this programme, without consideration being paid to the state of their health. Thus for example, the social scientist Dr. Käthe Leichter was murdered with poison gas in the Bernburg/Saale murder institution.

Deportations 1942

After Hitler had broken off the Aktion "T4" on August 24, 1941, Jewish patients who were still in hospital were included in the deportation transports of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA.) The transport of the remaining Jewish patients from "Steinhof" by the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung in Vienna took place on August 30 and 31, 1942. The transports in September and October 1942 went to Theresienstadt or Maly Trostinec, where almost all deportees died.

Child euthanasia 1940-1945

In the course of the Nazi child euthanasia from 1940 to 1945 "deformed" children up to three years of age and later up to 17 years of age were murdered in "Kinderfachabteilungen" (special child units), and were also subjected to "medical" research. The murder of at least four Jewish children and youths (between two and fifteen years of age) has been proven to have taken place within the "Am Spiegelgrund" clinic set up within the system of the mental institution "Am Steinhof."

From euthanasia to Holocaust

Euthanasia affected Jews not only as murder of mentally and physically handicapped Jewish people. Euthanasia paved the way to the Holocaust in an organisational, personal and technical ways. After the discontinuation of the Aktion "T4" on August 24, 1941, the staff of the extermination institutions were transferred to the "Aktion Reinhard", the murder of the Jews in the "Generalgouvernment", run by Odilo Globocnik. The methods of killing, particularly the use of poison gas, the construction of fixed gas chambers and the deportation transports to just a few places of extermination, were taken over in a modified fashion. Staff from the Hartheim extermination institution were given important functions in the extermination camps on Polish territory: Like this the head of the Hartheim administration, Captain Christian Wirth became camp commander of Belzec, his deputy Franz Stangl became commander of Sobibor and Treblinka, Franz Reichleitner became commander of Sobibor, and Gustav Wagner the deputy commander of Sobibor. Finally, Dr. Irmfried Eberl, an Austrian doctor who was promoted from director of the euthanasia institutions in Brandenburg/Havel and Bernburg/Saale to be the first commander of Treblinka extermination camp also deserves to be mentioned in this context.



Door to the gas chamber at Schloss Hartheim.




The social scientist, Dr. Käthe Leichter, was born on August 20, 1895, in Vienna). She gained academic and political reputation as member of the Arbeiterkammer, and above account of her research on the life conditions of maids and home workers and through her union activities. As an activist of the Revolutionäre Sozialisten, she was arrested on May 30, 1938, by the Gestapo and transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp in January 1940. In the course of the Aktion "14 f 13" Leichter was murdered with poison gas in March 1942 in the euthanasia institution Bernburg.




Margarita Singer was born on September 25, 1909, the daughter of the zoologist, Prof. Hans L. Przibram. A patient of "Am Steinhof", she was deported on Oktober 5, 1942, to Maly Trostinec, where she was murdered.


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