War Crimes, Judgment, (Non)Memory”

FORUM

http://dx.doi.org/10.30970/uam.2020.28.1154

“The Useless people”: War crimes, judgment, (non)memory”

Contributors:

Mary V. SEEMAN — MDCM, DSc, Professor Emerita, Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto, Canada. [email protected] Björn M. FELDER — PhD, lecturer, History Department at the Georg-August- University Göttingen, Germany. [email protected] Alexander FRIEDMAN — PhD, lecturer, University of Saarland and at the University of Applied Sciences for Public Administration and management of North Rhine- Westphalia (Duisburg, Germany), researcher for the documentary projects “Jews in the Third Reich” by Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel) and “Resistance in the Rhineland, 1933–1945” (Bonn, Germany). [email protected] Patricia HEBERER RICE — PhD, Director, Division of the Senior Historian, The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, USA. [email protected] Wiebke LISNER — PhD, research associate, Institute for History, Ethics and Philosophy of Medicine at Hannover Medical School, Germany. [email protected] Robert PARZER — researcher, Documentation and Information Centre (DIZ) Torgau, Germany. [email protected] Dieter POHL — PhD, professor, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Institut für Geschichte, Austria. [email protected] Dmitry ASTASHKIN — PhD, senior researcher, Saint-Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, RF. [email protected].

he Forum invited experts on the history of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and Nazi euthanasia to answer question about mass violence against patients in psychiatric clinics in Eastern Europe and about Tdecision-making and participation in this crime by various groups. The authors generally agree with the thesis that events proceeded erratically and that there was no central program for killing in the abovementioned territories; they also

30 “The Useless people”: War crimes, judgment, (non)memory”

note the different degrees to which local medical personnel was involved, from FORUM risky rescue operations to direct participation in the murders. In addition, both parallels and differences are highlighted regarding the implementation of the Т4 program in Germany and the killing operations of patients in Eastern Europe. In part, the motivations and killing methods are similar to the forced euthanasia carried out in Germany. However, in contrast to the T4 program in Germany, which was organized and conducted by medical personnel, in Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland) the violence against patients was perpetrated by Einsatzgruppen, the Wehrmacht, and the military administration. Moreover, the killings are characterized as being pragmatic, governed not so much by “racial hygiene” as by the logic of emptying premises and disposing of “superfluous eaters.” The forum participants also note that from an organizational, personnel, and chronological point of view the killing of patients in Eastern Europe can be considered as a step towards the Holocaust. In analyzing the court proceedings that took place in the postwar period, scholars emphasize the significant difference between the trials in West Germany and those in the Soviet Union and East Germany. In the context of interdisciplinary studies, there is a great potential for cooperation between historians and medical specialists. Finally, the memorialization of the killings of mentally disabled patients in Eastern Europe during the Second World War still remains a marginal niche in the official culture of memory of the agencies and hospitals, testifying to their “worthlessness to society.”

Keywords: psychiatric hospital patients, euthanasia, T4 Operation, court trials.

1) Nazi policy concerning persons with mental or physical disabilities in the occupied Eastern European countries was inconsistent and ambiguous. Can it be considered an element of the Aktion T4 involuntary euthanasia plan, or of the Holocaust? Under what other contexts should this policy be considered?

Mary V. Seeman Nazi policy toward the disabled varied in the different regions occupied by Germany during World War II. It depended in part on the needs of the German war machine. For instance, Aktion T4 in Germany itself seemed to be motivated in large part by the need to empty the psychiatric hospitals so that the beds could be used for the wounded German soldiers. It was guided, of course, by a eugenics policy of ridding the German nation of “useless eaters” and also to prevent procre- ation of the unworthy. In western Poland, psychiatric hospital administrators were replaced by German officials, and patients were shot or gassed so that hospital beds could be used for German military needs. In Eastern Poland, Polish administrators were not replaced, and the disabled—except the Jewish disabled—were generally not killed if they could work. There was a German overlord assigned on a regional basis, and much, of course, depended on the dictates of that person. In Belarus, psychiatric patients were shot by the Einsatzgruppen, and when that proved too taxing for the soldiers who had to do the shooting, a system was devised of herding

31 УКРАЇНА МОДЕРНА Число 28. “Непотрібні люди....” patients into trucks and gassing them to death en route to their burial ground. The killing method changed with time as the Nazis became more and more efficient. Much also depended on the “race” of the victims. There was a hierarchy, with Scan- dinavians on top (most Danish and Norwegian patients were not killed because they were considered descendants of the Vikings, the closest non-German Aryans) and the Jews and Gypsies at the bottom. The lowest rungs were killed first, whether disabled or not. Ukrainians came somewhere near the bottom of the Slavic hierarchy. Croats and Slovaks were accepted as Aryan because they had been “Ger- manized” in the Middle Ages. The Nazis divided the Slavs into several gradations of untermensch Slavs: Russians were inferior to Ukrainians and Belarusians, and those, in turn, were inferior to Poles. Can this treatment of the disabled be considered part of the Holocaust? Proba- bly not, although the lessons learned in the killings were used in the extermination camps. There, the disabled were sooner used for medical experiments than for im- mediate gassing. The Holocaust usually refers first to the segregation of Jews and Roma in ghettos, then their being transported to labour camps, followed by death by gassing, cremation in the ovens, and mass burials.

Björn M. Felder I think it is a common view that killing of the mentally ill in the occupied territories of Eastern Europe by the Nazis was connected to what is called “Nazi euthanasia”—which includes Aktion T4 from 1939 to summer 1941 but also the so-called “decentralized” killing of mental patients in Germany after 1941. From a European perspective, it seemed that killing mentally ill and disabled persons was part of the general Nazi agenda even if there was no central organized action. We can see this phenomenon in Western occupied territories such as France or the Netherlands as well as in Eastern Europe. I think the occupied Balkan and Scandi- navian countries are not reached that much. There are documented links between Aktion T4 and the Shoah—for example, the transfer of equipment and personnel (mechanics and managers) from T4 to the Nazi extermination Camps in Poland. In some way, Aktion T4 can be seen as a pilot project of the Nazis for mass killing with the use of poison gas. Though the ideological axiom of the Holocaust was racist biological anti-Semi- tism, in case of the killing of the mentally ill it was eugenics, what the Nazis called “racial hygiene”. Still, there is an ongoing debate concerning the killing action in Ger- many compared to that in Eastern Europe. One side emphasizes the less ideological (eugenic) reasons, citing a cynical pragmatism due to the war effort and radicaliza- tion of the regime, in contrast to recent research which emphasizes that patients were mainly killed if they were not able to work (this was actually not the case in Eastern Europe, and especially in Ukraine, were virtually all clinic patients were doomed). The other approach argues along the ideological lines of eugenics and follows the eugenic argumentation in the Nazi perspective at that time that the mentally ill were inferior human beings because they were assumed to be carriers of genetic diseases. Further, eugenicists were also following the social-Darwinist approach

32 “The Useless people”: War crimes, judgment, (non)memory” that the costs of care for mental patients would be a burden for the national economy—again, this was the Nazi propaganda of the time. Given this latter view, some scholars see the Nazi regime as a “racial state”; this concept was introduced by Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann in 1991 with their study The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945. The authors empha- sized the völkisch-racial understanding of nation and postulated the main eugenic agenda by the regime was to “purify” the Nation. In this context, killing of the mentally ill would be an instrument of purification: annihilating every group considered to be inferior or dangerous—including gypsies, “asocials”, and others, who were all labelled as genetic deviants in the Nazi perspective. Following this approach, killing of the mentally ill (and Jews) in the “East” was a contribution to the genetic “purification” of a region that later was to become a large Nazi colony. Put in a broader framework, both seemed to be elements of the Generalplan Ost.

Alexander Friedman Nazi policy concerning persons with mental or physical disabilities in the occupied Eastern European countries should first of all be considered in the general context of the occupation policy, which was aimed at economic exploitation, further colonization, and ensuring that invaded countries would serve Germany’s in- terests. Persons suffering from mental or physical disabilities were treated as ballast that Adolf Hilter’s “New Europe” would get rid of. Annihilation of this target group in Eastern Europe was a quasi-philosophical and logical continuation of Aktion T4, as well as a forerunner of the Holocaust: Jewish patients from medical institutions and other Jews suffering from mental or physical disabilities were the first to be annihilated. The patients of psychiatric hospitals in Minsk and Mahil- ioŭ [Mogilev, Belarus] became the subjects of test methods of mass destruction of people (e.g., exhaust gas poisoning) in 1941. These methods were then used for the elimination of Jews and other civilians.

Patricia Heberer Rice I would argue that the murders of patients with mental or physical disabilities in German-occupied Poland and the Soviet Union do not fall within the parameters of the Operation T4/Euthanasie program in the German context. Although there are of course certain similarities in the motives and sometimes in the method of killing (starvation, lethal overdoses of medication), the personnel who perpetrated these crimes were profoundly different. The T4 operation in its Euthanasie gassing phase for adults between January 1940 and late Au- gust 1941 was carefully choreographed by T4 operatives in the Tiergartenstrasse, 4 office and beyond. Meanwhile, the second phase of the Euthanasie program, which employed overdoses of medication and starvation as means of killing, was more decentralized in nature; however, there was still some organization from the T4 apparatus, including the registration of institutionalized patients and collective transport of patients to the killing centres. Moreover, the actual perpe-

33 УКРАЇНА МОДЕРНА Число 28. “Непотрібні люди....” trators of the Euthanasie crimes were medical professionals, mainly doctors and nurses. As for the murders of institutionalized patients with disabilities in the German-occupied East, the perpetrators were generally not indigenous medical staff but German occupation officials, German staff, or Einsatzgruppen- mem bers. As the question itself notes, Nazi policy concerning persons with mental or physical disabilities in the occupied Eastern European countries was inconsistent and ambiguous. The motives and methods differed from place and place, and often based themselves on local initiatives. I think we must connect this policy more with the brutal and devastating policy of occupation, particularly in the Soviet Union.

Wiebke Lisner In the Reichsgau Wartheland, the killing of the mentally and physically disabled is to be contextualized threefold: within the Euthanasie program of the German Reich as well as within the campaigns to secure and Germanize the conquered and annexed territory (Alexa Stiller). According to Friedländer, Euthanasie was also closely connected to the Holocaust. The murder of mentally and physically disabled persons was conducted in three main phases (Volker Rieß; Enno Schwanke): 1. Until December 1939, Jewish and Polish (and also German) patients of psychiatric wards in Polish territories were killed, sometimes without preliminary assessment. The murders of [physically] disabled patients took place in parallel and thus were closely connected to mass executions of the Polish elite, Jews, and political opponents during the initial months of occupation in order to conquer and secure the territory (Witold Kulesza). In the “old” German Reich, a cadre of authorities and health experts planned the Euthanasie operation starting in the spring of 1939. However, in western parts of Poland, in the Wartheland and the Danzig Westprussia, the first mass murders of disabled persons were conducted even before Hitler signed the Ermächtigungsbefehl (order of warranty) in October 1939. 2. In December 1939 Arthur Greiser, governor of the Wartheland, set up an administration located in the Gau council to organize and coordinate the Eutha- nasie program within the context of Germanizing the annexed territory. The Gau council acted independently of the Reich administrations and the T4 management in Berlin, deciding itself which patients were to be murdered. The Sonderkom- mando Lange special forces carried out the killings. 3. In August 1941 the German Reich authorities officially stopped the Euthana- sie. At the same time, the Gau council and the T4 management in Berlin agreed to close cooperation, and as a result, patients of psychiatric wards were transported to the Wartheland for killing. The personnel of the psychiatric wards now murdered patients on their own authority, by starvation and with overdoses of medication. In the fall of 1941, when the Sonderkommando Lange set up the Kulmhof extermination camp and began exterminating Jews in the Wartheland, among the victims were also mentally and physically disabled people of all ethnic groups.

34 “The Useless people”: War crimes, judgment, (non)memory”

Robert Parzer will probably describe the Euthanasie operation in annexed western Poland in more detail. My primary purpose is to point out how German midwives were involved in the program in the Wartheland. Starting August 1940, German midwives and physicians were obliged to report the Gesundheitsgefährdete (people seen as health hazards as well as those at risk of illness) and Erbkranke (congenitally ill) in Polish territories to the public health officer.1 The health authorities aimed to detect and register the mentally and physically disabled in these lands, as well as persons suffering from infectious diseases who were still at home with their families and were not yet in clinical treatment. Their plan was to deport the high-priority registrants to the Generalgouvernement. The registration and deportation of theGesundheitsgefährdete should be contextualized within the National Socialist Germanization policy and Volkstumspolitik (ethnic policy). Maria Fiebrandt sharpens this analysis when she claims that the registrations were part of a volkstumsbiologische (ethnic and biological) extermination policy. In the Generalgouvernement the disabled and ill had few chances of surviving; moreover, some of the registrants were also possibly included in the euthanasia in the Wartheland organized by the Gauselbstverwaltung. In Septem- ber 1941, the health administration claimed they had received about 18,000 file cards of Gesundheitsgefährdete Poles.2 The reports of midwives and physicians thus facilitated the registration of mentally and physically disabled persons, and of those suffering infectious diseases, on a wider scale. The registration was part of the organization of and therefore preparation for further action—in particular, either deportation to the Generalgouvernement or murder under the Euthanasie program in the Wartheland. Midwives and physicians were also obliged to report German mentally and physically disabled newborns and toddlers to the public health officer starting in March 1940;3 in the German Reich itself they had been obliged to do so since August 1939. Thus, regarding the euthanasia of children, the program running already in the “old” Reich was extended to the Wartheland. With the obligation of reporting disabled newborns and toddlers, the health authorities aimed to detect and register children who were living at home with their families. Mid- wives and physicians registering the children had to fill in detailed forms; for their efforts, they received extra payment. The public health officer sent the reports to the Reichsausschuss für erb- und anlagebedingte schwere Leiden (Re- ich Committee for Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses) in Berlin. The children were torn away from their families and brought

1 Vgl. Schreiben des Reichsstatthalters an das Rassenpolitische Amt der NSDAP, 11. September 1940. In: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej Łódź, GK 746/95, Bl. 5–6. 2 Leistungsbericht der Abt. II der Reichsstatthalterei, Dr. Korth, 6. Sept. 1941. In: Archiwum Panstwowe w Poznańiu, RSH 1878; Leistungsbericht des Rassenpolitischen Amtes Reichsgau Wartheland, Hauptstelle praktische Bevölkerungspolitik, gez. Dr. Iden. In: ebd. 3 Schreiben des Reichsstatthalters vom 27. August 1940. In: Archiwum Panstwowe w Poznańiu, RSH 2105, Bl. 17.

35 УКРАЇНА МОДЕРНА Число 28. “Непотрібні люди....” to special pediatric wards. In the Wartheland, the special pediatric ward was set up as part of the Tiegenhof/Dziekanka Psychiatric Clinic in 1943. Howev- er, it is unknown how many children were reported by midwives or doctors in the Wartheland before the special pediatric ward was set up, or even after. De- spite the fact that the special pediatric wards in annexed western Poland were set up several years later than in the German Reich, killing of disabled children was also practiced before that in the Wartheland. Children were among the victims right from the beginning of the killing of mentally and physically disabled persons organized by the Einsatzgruppen and the Gauselbstverwaltung. In the Warthegau, authorities modified the practice of euthanizing children that had been organized by the Reich Committee to include Polish children as of August 1943. By 1945, one hundred thirty-eight German and Polish children between the ages of four months and fourteen years were recorded in total at the Tiegen- hof special pediatric ward; as Maria Fiebrandt points out, 64% of the children died.

Robert Parzer The mass killings of persons with disabilities in the occupied Eastern European countries cannot be considered to have been a part of Aktion T4. When the first killings using a gas chamber at Fort VII in Posen (Poznań) started, the T4 bu- reaucracy in Berlin was just about to be established. Later, the doctors and other personnel posted there had no idea what was going on in the occupied Soviet Union. Furthermore, they seem not to have been particularly interested, as there are no records showing that they would have been aware of or interfered in what the Einsatzgruppen did. Although a lot of Jews were killed in actions taken against persons with disabilities, they were not taken against Jews because they were Jews but because they were inmates of asylums or similar institutions. As can be shown by the example of Arthur Greiser, Gauleiter of the Wartheland, this mass murder can be understood as a kind of “race to the bottom”: Who would be the first of the Diadochi to be able to claim his realm free of Jews, of Poles, of persons with disabilities? Cleary, the prevalence of eugenic thinking among National Socialist leaders (and not only them) made disabled persons especially vulnerable to becoming victims of the desire to create the pure Volksgemeinschaft. Pragmatic reasons—including the planned usage of buildings belonging to asylums and the like for other, more “useful” purposes—may have been the driving force behind the clearing of some of them from “life unworthy of life”, but not in the majority of cases. As can be shown by studying the fate of asylums in the Warthegau, several them were emptied by killing the inmates and then quickly reinstated as psychiatric institutions—in which the patients also included those of an ascribed lower racial value.

Dieter Pohl Actually, the inhuman treatment of mentally ill persons in Eastern Europe cannot be considered as part of the Nazi killing programs within the German Re- ich. Of course, the willingness to kill inmates of psychiatric institutions originated

36 “The Useless people”: War crimes, judgment, (non)memory” from the killings in Poland (from late 1939) and Germany (from early 1940). The centralized killings within Germany and Austria proper consisted of several programs, the most important of which was Erwachsenen-Euthanasie—the murder of around 70,000 adults in six extermination centres (T4 is a postwar term and came up during interviews in the late 1950s; it was not in use during the war). The killings in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union were by and large based on the initiatives of the occupying forces—both military and civil occupation administrations. Apparently there was no centralized program or order, though some con- nections to the centralized killing did exist; for example, the Kulparkiv Hospital in Lviv communicated with the Reich’s Ministry of Interior, and the German Army High Command discussed whether to transfer a killing unit from western Poland to Novgorod.

2) How are we to evaluate today the role of local medical personnel in the perpetration of mass killings, given that sometimes they were forced into it and other times they cooperated in the killing of some while simultaneously assisting others to escape? Should they be investigated only within the classi- cal framework of Perpetrator Studies? What other research approaches could facilitate productive solutions to this problem?

Mary V. Seeman Local medical staff were caught in impossible situations during the time of the killings. When they knew that patients were about to be put to death, the medical staff of a psychiatric hospital for Jewish patients in Zofiówka (Poland) chose either to flee, escort their patients into the front yard of the hospital where they were all gunned down together, or commit suicide.4 Knowing the Nazi attitude toward mentally ill persons, the staff of a psychiatric hospital at Simferopol, with director Naum Balaban, started early on to evacuate their patients, sending them back to their families. They saved 600 of 900 patients in this way. Dr. Balaban and his wife, Elizaveta, then committed suicide by taking potassium cyanide. The doctors at the psychiatric hospital in Dnipropetrovsk [today Dnipro] also started discharging their patients as the Germans approached. They even changed the diagnoses in their medical charts, removing the more serious diagnostic labels. Nevertheless, 1,300 patients were exterminated when the Germans arrived. When the asylum in Poltava was handed over to the Wehrmacht for use as a military hospital, the residents were made to work on the surrounding farm. Those who were unable to work, or who were Jewish, were killed—740 people all together. The medical director at the Poltava facility had also had advance warning, but she cooperated with the Germans. Her only concern seemed to be that the killings might cause unrest among the remaining residents of the hospital. This problem was solved by announcing that the disappeared had been transferred to a better

4 Seeman, M.V.: The Jewish psychiatric hospital, Zofiówka, in Otwock, Poland. History of Psychiatry 26(1): 98–104 (2015).

37 УКРАЇНА МОДЕРНА Число 28. “Непотрібні люди....” asylum in Kharkiv. The Ukrainian police force is also said to have cooperated with the killings. At the mental asylum in Chernihiv, two hundred seventy patients considered to be incurable were killed by the Einsatzgruppen, apparently at the request of the director.5 At the time of the [German] occupation of Kyiv, there were about 1,500 patients in the Kyiv psychiatric hospital. Supplies were immediately reduced when the hospital was placed under the authority of the Reichskommissariat’s Health Care department. Patients began to die of starvation. After a visit by German physicians, the hospital director, P.P. Chernay, grouped all the Jewish patients into one ward— to transport them, he said, to Vinnytsia to an all-Jewish treatment centre. In reality, all three hundred eight Jewish patients were exterminated in the forest grove next to the hospital. Upon discovering this calamity the head physician, Dr. M. Tan- chura, quickly discharged five hundred other patients to save them from a similar fate. Of the remaining patients, five hundred twenty-five were killed in mobile gas chambers. Director Chernay managed to leave Kyiv before the Soviet Army re-entered the city. In a closed trial conducted by the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs in 1943–44, Dr. Tanchura and many other employees who tried to save patients were accused of murder. They received terms of 2 to 10 years in labour camps, but the verdicts were reversed in 1946 by the Military Board of the Ukrainian SSR Supreme Court. This example illustrates how difficult it is to distin- guish possible motives or actually confirm the culpability of perpetrators. It is possible—perhaps even likely—that the medical personnel who cooperated with the Nazis considered a quick death by gunshot or gas to be more merciful than slow starvation or death by hard labour. Moreover, many may have feared the consequences to themselves if they refused to follow orders. Some may have even been convinced by Nazi propaganda that killing those who were incurable would permit more food and better conditions for the remaining patients. Indeed, anyone who was not there should not leap to judgment.

Björn M. Felder In evaluating the situation of local clinics, several approaches are possible. First- ly, one must consider their relations with the local health departments—insofar as they were, in fact, involved. This might be of importance in answering the question of how the Nazi hunger policy was implemented in the clinics. The same applies to the role of individual clinic directors, their behaviour toward their patients, and how the nursing staff was informed and involved. All these variables reinforce the hypothesis that there were likely different approaches in different clinics. Furthermore, it might be important to consider what image the physicians, and also the nursing staff, had of their patients. To answer this, it would be necessary to investigate the Soviet-Ukrainian discourse on eugenics, the mentally ill, disability,

5 Arad Y, Krakowski S, Spector S, eds. The Einsatzgruppen Reports. New York Holocaust Library. http://www.einsatzgruppenarchives.com/directives.htm, 1989.

38 “The Useless people”: War crimes, judgment, (non)memory” and euthanasia. This is an important aspect we still do not know much about. Be- sides eugenics, scholars should also look to the characteristics of Stalinist society, which was highly hierarchical and racist. How did Soviet psychiatrists approach their own patients in the age of Stalinism? In seeking answers to this question, we could learn much about the possible reaction of physicians toward the Nazi practice of patient killings.

Alexander Friedman When studying the deeds of local medical staff, it behooves us to refrain from applying a black-and-white division into collaborators (criminals and accom- plices) and fighters against fascism; this tendency existed in the USSR and is still widespread in some post-Soviet countries (e.g., Russia, Belarus). Otherwise it’s not possible to properly assess the situation, motivation, or logic of the doctors and medical staff. In their quest to survive under the dramatic war conditions and to rescue even a limited number of patients, they were forced to adjust: accept the rules imposed by the Nazis, cooperate with the invaders (to varying degrees), and come to terms with their conscience. It should be noted, however, that some doctors cooperated with the invaders by sharing the ideological beliefs of the Nazis or motivated by desperation to improve the situation for themselves. In general it can be concluded that using local medical staff made it easier for the Nazis to realize their criminal plans.

Patricia Heberer Rice This is a difficult problem to assess. There was not a clear pattern of how the murders at German-occupied Soviet or Polish facilities were carried out. Some- times patients were murdered directly in the wards by Einsatzgruppen units. Sometimes patients were herded into lorries and taken away to be shot in nearby woods or ravines. In Poland, and particularly in the part of Poland annexed to the Greater German Reich, medical personnel and staff were often dismissed and -re placed with German physicians, nurses, and administrators. In several instances, the medical staff were actually killed along with their patients; the staff of Jew- ish parochial institutions in particular were deported along with the patients they were entrusted to protect, or met the same fate. In these cases, of course there was very little that the medical staff could do. Indeed, local staff were sometimes actually instructed to murder their patients. Often, in these circumstances a number of German guards or occupation officials remained at the site, so that it was difficult for staff to intervene or resist without endangering themselves. It is clear that the staff in these facilities had less leverage and leeway to refuse or to remove themselves from their situation than the medical personnel did in the Euthanasie facilities in Germany proper. For example, from 1942 to 1945 female nurses could often avoid participating in the killing by feign- ing pregnancy or volunteering for the night shift (when killing by lethal overdose of medication often occurred), while male nurses had the not-always-agreeable option of joining the army. These choices were not available, however, for the staff

39 УКРАЇНА МОДЕРНА Число 28. “Непотрібні люди....” in the German-occupied territories. We know that in many cases, the staff helped patients to escape. This was difficult and dangerous in itself, because we know that frequently, even before German occupation officials or Einsatzgruppen units de- scended on a facility to murder the patients, the staff were strictly forbidden from allowing their discharge. I think that in cases where the staff in these facilities played a direct role, or even a passive one, in the killing of patients, we must view them as we do, for example, the Jewish community leaders in Germany, or in other annexed or occupied territories, who were forced to guard or help deport their co-religionists. The vast majority of the medical staff in these facilities in the occupied Eastern territories had limited choices and few options.

Robert Parzer Local doctors and nurses played a rather unique role in the killings. Their skills were in high demand, and with the progress of the war and the drafting of ever more doctors into the army, racial barriers began to increasingly blur. Compari- sons to other groups of ethnic residents of the occupied lands—e.g., with police- men—are appropriate only to a certain extent, because the latter did not need as much training time. Several studies have shown that these medical staff reacted in many ways, from open opposition to full collaboration. There are many factors to be considered here. One that I find quite intriguing is the knowledge transfer that local doctors and nurses could participate in if they complied with the German rule. For example, until World War II Germany had played a key role in psychiatry, and German was a lingua franca read by most scholars and a lot of practitioners in the field. The Germans often introduced rare medical technologies into the occupied countries, such as electric shock treatment. Cooperating with the occupation force could mean not only surviving but possibly learning, or at least not losing contact with scientific progress, even in times of war.

Dieter Pohl Local medical staff participated in one way or another in the killings within the occupied Soviet Union, but the dimension of this participation is largely unknown, except for a few individual cases. It still remains to be established how much these people acted under coercion and how much voluntarily. Persons directly participating in the killings should be considered perpetrators.

Dmitry Astashkin Applying the categories of Holocaust studies, the medical staff in Soviet hospitals can be divided into four groups: victims (including Jewish doctors, Com- munists, partisans, and others), rescuers, perpetrators, and bystanders with various degrees of involvement. In individual cases, these boundaries could blur some- what. For example, Lev L., a medical director, was making lists of patients to be destroyed in 1941, but in 1943 he was sent to a German prison for his ties to the Soviet partisans. Soviet courts attempted to ascertain the degree of participation (and motivations) of the medical staff in their crimes (albeit within the parameters

40 “The Useless people”: War crimes, judgment, (non)memory” of Stalinist jurisprudence). Moreover, the punishment could inexplicably vary for the same crime, even at the same hospital. In this respect I would note the work of Russian historian Boris Kovalev, who classified the various types and forms of collaboration in the RSFSR, going beyond the legal definitions. As examples he even studied the biographical trajectories of the medical staff. For further development of the topic it may be useful to apply the prosopographic method, which allows us to establish a collective portrait of the various categories of medical staff, taking into account their pre-war and postwar activity.

3) Nazi policy regarding mentally ill and disabled persons in the occupied countries of Eastern Europe depended on a number of factors, such as personal contacts and local cooperation with the Einsatzgruppen, the occupation government, and the Wehrmacht, as well as the degree of involvement of hospital staff in the killings. In your opinion, is it possible to also speak of a gender aspect to this policy?

Mary V. Seeman Both men and women cooperated with the Nazis, and both men and women at times resisted or suicided, knowing they could do nothing to change the situation. With respect to the patients, those who could do hard labour were saved, at least temporarily, and given more rations; they were mostly men. To survive, one had to prove oneself indispensable to the Germans, and handfuls of both men and women, out of desperation, were able to do that for short periods of time. Both men and women were sexually humiliated in the camps and ghettos and subjected to sadistic rape. Women could sometimes trade sex for food or safety (“survival sex”), but usually for brief periods only.6 Both women and men were subjected to forced sterilization, and women were forced have abortions. Some women were also forced to work in the concentration camp brothels.7 There is a gender aspect to everything, but it was probably not a deliberate plan by the Einsatzgruppen to treat men and women differently.

Björn M. Felder Certainly, at first view we have the clear scheme that mainly male perpetrators (Nazi officials, soldiers, physicians) were killing male and female victims. There might be a few female perpetrators, at least at the level of the nurses. I am no expert on the Soviet Ukrainian medical profession, but the experience of [Russian] Soviet medicine shows that in contrast to official propaganda, there were only a very few female doctors. It is also questionable whether female physicians, or even female clinic directors, would have been acting differently. From Germany we know of

6 Hajkova A. Sexual barter in the times of genocide: Negotiating the sexual economy of the Theriesenstadt ghetto. Signs:Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 2013;38) (3): 503–33. 7 Heinemann E., Sexuality and nazism: The doubly unspeakable?Journal of the History of Sexuality. 2002;11(1–2): 22–66.

41 УКРАЇНА МОДЕРНА Число 28. “Непотрібні люди....” cases of nurses who had been charged because of involvement in the Nazi Eutha- nasie program after the war.

Alexander Friedman The gender aspect is not one to be dismissed. The German and local administrations were dominated by men and the medical staff by women, while the patients were both. The following example is useful to emphasize the gender aspect: during a court case against several Nazi criminals in Minsk in January 1946 and again during an interrogation by the KGB in the Belarusian SSR in July 1969, Na- talia Markova, the head doctor of the Navinki Psychiatric Clinic (near Minsk), re- vealed that a German officer visited the hospital on the eve of a mass annihilation of patients in September 1941. The perpetrator was drunk. A patient had asked him for a cigarette and tried to kiss him, at which point he shoved her away in dis- gust and shot her. Attempting to justify his action, the officer demonstrated an attitude profoundly influenced by Nazi racial hygiene ideology: the Germans would “liberate” the world from the “ballast” of “hopeless people” that no one needed. In order to avoid further disturbance among the patients, the Germans ordered that all traces of blood be removed; the murdered patient was buried that night. The patient seemed to have been murdered not just because of her mental disorder but also because she was female.

Patricia Heberer Rice I am not so certain of a gender aspect connected with the murder of disabled patients by the German authorities in the occupied Soviet Union and Poland. Gen- der issues would seem to have been more at play with respect to the criteria and manner of institutionalization of male and female patients at these facilities, and less so concerning the selection criteria, as the murders of patients at Polish and Soviet facilities were often carried out en masse. There was usually no registration of the patients for selection in the occupied territories, as there was for the T4 (gassing) program, nor was there a daily selection, usually based on the patient’s ability to work, as was seen in the Euthanasie program in Germany in 1942–45. Without seeing the patient records for each facility in Poland and the Sovi- et Union, I can only hazard a guess, but from experience I would suggest that there might be more female victims than male victims at these facilities. Women had longer life spans than men during this period, and as elderly and dementia patients were typically committed along with the persons with mental illness or disability, females might have represented a good portion of the elderly patients in these facilities.

Wiebke Lisner German midwives, as women and experts in birth and reproduction, were assigned a specific function in the implementation of racial hygiene measures with respect to the German population, as well as of the eradicating Volkstumspolitik (ethnic policy) in the Polish population. This twofold orientation was typical not

42 “The Useless people”: War crimes, judgment, (non)memory” only in the work of the midwives but also in the entire health care sector in the Warthegau (Maria Fiebrandt). The cooperation of midwives was of significance, for they were the ones who filled in birth reports, indicating newborns and toddlers with disabilities or diseases—as well as Poles who were considered to be “health hazards”—to the public health office, which had the power to follow up. Midwives were included in the crimes of the Euthanasie program, due to their involvement in the registration and documentation of victims. Working in the homes of expectant mothers qualified them to carry out this task. Midwives cared for women throughout their pregnancies, at birth, and in postpartum care, which therefore brought them into contact with the respective families over a certain period of time. Furthermore, they were medically trained specialists in the fields of childbirth and reproduction and were therefore capable of detecting diseases or abnormal development of newborns and their older siblings. Participation of the midwives, in my opinion, illustrates the broad and cooperative inclusion of health professionals—both men and women—in the practices of racial hygiene and “euthanasia”.

Robert Parzer To my knowledge there were no specific actions taken against either men or women. Also, the treatment of hospital personnel depended on their ascribed racial status and their willingness to comply rather than their gender. There are no sources, at least related to the area I study—which is occupied Poland—that would provide any hints that gender perceptions would have played any role. Male and female patients alike were killed on the same dates in the same geographical areas.

Dieter Pohl Nearly everyone participating in the killings were men—in the German administrations and killing units but also among the management personnel of the hospitals. Female nurses were indeed involved, however, but at a lower level and as far as I know, very little is known beyond some individual cases which were raised after 1943/44.

4) Several important studies have recently appeared about the mass violence perpetrated by Nazis against persons with mental disability in Ukraine, Po- land, and Belarus; documents have been collected and published, etc. As part of the research in this area, what other topics deserve special attention? Are some problems destined to remain as lacunae in the scholarship? Why would this be?

Mary V. Seeman Pinpointing something that is missing is very difficult. For myself, I would be interested to know what happened to the young men of the Einsatzgruppen after they returned home. It is said that it was not easy for them, shooting and gassing all those people. Were they able to forget or did it continue to haunt them? I would

43 УКРАЇНА МОДЕРНА Число 28. “Непотрібні люди....” like to know how they justified to themselves what they were doing. Did they see it as a part of the war? Did they develop post-traumatic symptoms? On the other hand, was any sort of compensation offered to the families of those who were killed? Did the sterilization and killing of so many psychiatric patients cause few- er or more psychiatric illnesses in future generations? Do current-day psychiatric patients know this history, and if they do, how do they react? The issue of collaboration is always a difficult one to address—how much or how little did ordinary people help the Nazis to carry out their deadly work? Were they passive bystanders, did they feel they had no choice, were they seeking promotion, or were they simply doing whatever they could to protect their own families? Because motives are omitted or camouflaged in the written accounts of events, this may remain a permanent lacuna.

Björn M. Felder The latest research on the Nazi killing of mental patients in Belarus, the Bal- tic States, and elsewhere shows the necessity of examining several issues around “local” history in order to understand and categorize local reactions—especially the history of eugenics, the history of local psychiatry, and what Sovietization and Stalinism did to Ukrainian society. Eugenics as a model was closely connected to debate surrounding the Eutha- nasie program, as it contains the paradigm of “inferiority” (especially of the mentally ill), social Darwinism, and a genetically “healthy” society. Known as “racial hygiene”, eugenics was an important part of Nazi ideology, and as some scholars emphasize, it was also one of the main agenda items of the Nazi “racial state”. But eugenics was not an elite Nazi idea—rather, this concept had been broadly discussed since about 1900 throughout Europe and abroad. It would be important to study the historical eugenics debate in Ukraine. There might be discussions even dating to before World War I, as the discourse had reached the Russian Empire around that time. As we know, eugenics was also part of the Soviet medical edu- cation until at least the early 1930s, and some historians tend to see evidence of a hidden eugenics agenda also in the medical (and genetic) disciplines after its official condemnation in the era of Lysenkoism. (Soviet-)Ukrainian eugenics is definitely a terra incognita—not to mention that parts of Soviet Ukraine had earli- er belonged to Poland. A blind spot concerning Soviet eugenics is also the eugenics practice per se; namely still unknown are the eugenics aspects of the Soviet health system, abortions, etc., which is really a broad field to cover, including also the period after World War II. Secondly, it would be interesting to learn how patients with mental diseases and disabilities were treated in the 1920s and 1930s. What impression of their patients did the psychiatrists and medical staff have? Generally, psychiatrists were eugenics-minded and convinced of the “inferiority” of their patients; this should not mean that they would voluntarily, or with any conviction, kill their patients. Nevertheless, psychiatry therapies could be very rough indeed, if not downright brutal, at that time. Besides the medication aspect of treatment, it would also be

44 “The Useless people”: War crimes, judgment, (non)memory” interesting to study the general situation of patients in Soviet wards, particular their nutrition. And here we come to the third point—that is, the situation of mental patients in Soviet society. It is commonly known that at the time of the German occupation, Ukrainian society was already heavily traumatized by civil war, collectivization, the Holodomor, multiple terrors, mass executions, etc. Under Stalinism the society was strongly hierarchic; we could call this a racist approach: significant subsets (social and ethnic groups) of society were labelled as “enemies” and no longer seen and treated as humans by state agencies. Considering what we know about psychiatric patients in the Stalinist empire, their place might be at the very bottom. We often read about hints in studies dealing with the Stalinist terror (by, e.g., Nicolas Werth, Armir Weiner, and others), that mentally ill persons and those with disabilities were put on deportation lists as “unwanted eaters”, sent to the Gulag, or killed in the 1930s. But there has been no specific research done on this topic yet, as far as I know. Moreover, research on the everyday conditions in psychiatric wards, and on Soviet health policy, would be important and interesting, too.

Alexander Friedman Nazi criminals persecuting persons suffering from mental or physical disabilities should be researched in the wide context of the prewar, wartime, and postwar history. Among the topics to be studied should be the Soviet policy concerning this target group and the structures that existed in the hospitals and special treatment institutions before the German invasion and its devastating influence on the tragic events of the wartime period. Another serious issue that historians face in their research is the absence of patient records in many cases (for example, in Belarus). This fact makes it harder to reconstruct the fate of many patients. We don’t know much about the influence of the Nazi racial hygiene on Soviet doctors, and there are only a few occasions when the biographies of doctors who cooperated with the Nazis have been studied.8 The question of how the local people reacted to the Nazis crimes against persons suffering from mental or physical disabilities still doesn’t have an answer. The perception of crimes in the postwar USSR and their influence on the Soviet health policy still remain to be studied.

Patricia Heberer Rice Part of the difficulty in this area is the paucity of documentation surrounding the topic concerning the killings both in Poland and in the former Soviet Union. Soviet, Polish, and German sources are fragmentary, and in some places Soviet and Polish investigation records are difficult to reconcile with German sources that were recorded as the crimes happened. Much of the primary source material

8 Andrei Zamoiski/Johannes Wiggering, Zwischen sowjetischer Medizin und Volksdeutschtum: Der Internist Theodor Hausmann, in: Alexander Friedman/Rainer Hudemann (eds.), Diskriminiert–vernichtet–vergessen. Behinderte in der Sowjetunion, unter nationalsozialistischer Besatzung und im Ostblock 1917–1991, Stuttgart 2016, 95–105.

45 УКРАЇНА МОДЕРНА Число 28. “Непотрібні люди....” is missing or has been destroyed. It is difficult to piece together a puzzle where several of the pieces are missing.

Robert Parzer In the study of mass murder of the disabled, research efforts are focused on the fate of those who were inmates of large, often state-run asylums and psychiatric hospitals. In vast areas of Eastern Europe, however, there were hardly any such facilities available to the general public. So, one must assume that a lot of persons with symptoms of psychiatric illnesses lived within their communities and must have been perceived by the occupation authorities as problematic. One of the very few known examples is the fate of several mentally handicapped ethnic Ukrainians who lived in the tiny village of Teniatyska in what is now eastern Poland. Accord- ing to a single source only, they were registered by German bureaucrats, deported, and executed at the end of 1943. The complete lack of such sources in other areas means that the fate of similar such persons is likely to remain unknown also to future researchers.

Dieter Pohl Concerning the killing of mentally ill persons in the occupied Soviet Union, the research is still in its infancy. It is necessary to combine these investigations with the history of psychiatric institutions in the Soviet Union (as well as the Baltics and Eastern Poland), which has already been done in some cases. Then we need an overall picture of all the killings, of the statistical composition of the victims (gender, age, psychiatric diagnosis), and of course any comprehensive research must aim at the full identification of all the victims. It is, however, also important to analyze the societal conditions in the occupied localities, e.g., how did the local administrations act, how about the local auxiliary police, and how did family members react, did they try to save their relatives? The lack of sources makes all of this very difficult.

Dmitry Astashkin The topic of Nazi crimes “under the guise of euthanasia” is rarely studied in Russia. For a long time victim categories were not even defined in the USSR, and this “tradition” has in part been continued in Russia, as well. There is a lack of in- formative books, there is no single database of documents, there are no interactive maps. New investigations are hampered by restricted access to case files in the Russian secret service archives. For example, the file on Paul Hermann Kern [senior medical officer of the German garrison at Kursk] was declassified only in 2006, while most similar files are still top secret to this day. Because practically all such hearings in the RSFSR were closed, their materials weren’t reflected in the state propaganda; for that, more often than not the accessible records of the Extraordi- nary State Commission are used. That is, this topic in Russia consists only of some isolated files concerning specific crimes. Some regions have no research going on at all. For instance, the fate of the psychiatric hospital in Petrozavodsk during the

46 “The Useless people”: War crimes, judgment, (non)memory”

Finnish occupation is virtually unstudied at a scholarly level (most of the patients and staff were evacuated, while a minority remained and survived). Of course, we should not restrict ourselves to our own national history, either. It’s important to do comparative analysis on the topic of Nazi medical war crimes, among countries as well as in a Europe-wide context. It would be instructive to compare the medical experiments of Japanese war criminals and the Nazis. As an example I will mention the symposium “War and Medical Ethics: A Comparison of the History of Investigations in Germany and Japan” (November 2012, Kyo- to University), whose materials were published in the journal Japanese Scientist (2013, Vol.48, No.8). A global examination of the problem would be able to unite scholars in various fields (history, law, medicine) and from various countries under a single research project.

5) Consider the specificity, if such it is, of the available sources for the study of mass killings of mentally ill and disabled persons by the Nazis in Eastern Europe during the Second World War. Should cooperation between historians and medical representatives be required to ensure the quality of research in this area?

Mary V. Seeman A lot of the information comes from the records of the Einsatzgruppen. Ger- man and Soviet sources will undoubtedly differ. Hospital archivists and medical records are important sources of information, as well as city death records, diaries of medical staff and families of patients, letters from German soldiers to their families, and of course, the uncovering of mass graves. Archival documents are still being discovered, especially in former KGB archives. The reminiscences of participants and witnesses are invaluable.

Björn M. Felder I would recommend cooperation with medical psychiatric experts for research on the killing of mentally ill persons in Ukraine. First, historians should study medical terms, everyday conditions in the clinics, specific sources as patient files, and especially about the therapies and practise of psychiatry. Not every researcher is a specialist in the history of medicine. This knowledge is necessary to understand the context of the actions and reactions of local physicians and nursing staff toward the Nazi policy. Second, in terms of memory it would be good to involve medical representatives, and for clinic personal to learn about the history of their institution. I have had the experience that in many psychiatric clinics in the post-Soviet space there is no memory about the Nazi killing of mentally ill patients in local institutions—at least in the Baltic States. Furthermore, medical representatives could also learn also from historians about the history of psychiatry and/or help medical experts to reflect their discipline. Historians of medicine often describe physicians and the medical science under Soviet rule as being very conservative and supportive of the regime. This

47 УКРАЇНА МОДЕРНА Число 28. “Непотрібні люди....” is said especially about the psychiatric discipline. It is said that there might be an unbroken continuity in psychiatry from the Soviet era to the post-Soviet period that is characterized by a lack of reflection by the discipline on its past, with its dark spots including Stalinism and abuse by the Soviet state as an instrument of repression. This was also the case in Soviet Ukraine, with the peculiarity that in the 1960s people who we would today call “human rights activists” were in- carcerated in psychiatric prisons because some of them were, for example, cam- paigned for rehabilitation of and justice for the Crimean Tatars, who were deported by Stalin. Cooperating on researching the killing “the useless people” might also give an impulse to the medical actors to reflect their ethical approach, today and in history.

Alexander Friedman Yes, no doubt about that. Cooperation between historians and medical staff will definitely open new perspectives for future research.

Patricia Heberer Rice In my work I am often asked whether having a medical degree would help to examine “euthanasia” crimes in Nazi Germany. My response is that although these crimes were committed by doctors and nurses against their patients, the “euthanasia” murders are not about medicine. Gassing one’s patients is not a medical proce- dure. In the German-occupied Poland and Soviet Union, most of the perpetrators were not medical professionals, and in the case of crimes committed by Einsatz- gruppen units that involved shooting and gas vans, the victims were often removed from medical facilities proper for killing. On the other hand, when teamed with historians medical professionals are helpful, for example, in discussing how facilities functioned before and during the occupation, what types of patients lived at a particular facility, what their living conditions were like, and related issues which might be unclear to a historian.

Wiebke Lisner Cooperation between historians, medical practitioners, and medical institutions is fruitful and desirable in different respects. With regard to the exploration of sources for research, close cooperation between clinics and historians is helpful, perhaps even indispensable. It is very likely that documentation still exists in several of the clinics’ basements, attics, or internal archives. Unless they are submitted to state archives, these existing documents are at risk, either through inadequate storage or of simply being discarded. In 2016, for example, the entire medical staff and administrative documentation of the former Landesfrauen- klinik (gynecological clinic) Hannover, spanning over 100 years, was shredded. Even though cooperation between historians, the archive, and the administration of the clinic didn’t work in this case, we can only hope that in the future it will work to save sources and allow access to historical research. Therefore, interdisciplinary cooperation between historians and medical practitioners is

48 “The Useless people”: War crimes, judgment, (non)memory” indeed desirable. Also, it is fruitful to cooperate on this basis, for example, in interpreting patient files, to obtain a better understanding of medical treatment and routines in hospitals.

Robert Parzer Historians and medical representatives can both contribute to the study of the Nazi Euthanasie policies. Several research projects conducted in Germany have shown that cooperation can be fruitful, as typically historians do not know much about the historical context of diseases and their socio-cultural contexts, while doctors are not typically trained in historiographic methodology. However, I would object to the notion that cooperation be made a requirement.

Dieter Pohl The most important sources are the post-1943 investigations. Perhaps it would be possible to identify the files of psychiatric hospitals and the personnel files of physicians and nurses. This requires research in archives but also cooperation with medical institutions. Relatively little such information would come from the Ger- man occupation files or the records of local administrations. In some cases, Ger- man legal investigation files are available.

Dmitry Astashkin As concerns Soviet sources, investigators have access to Soviet government reports on the evacuation of medical facilities. Reality differed from the reports, but there has been little critical work done on this topic. Researchers have mainly focused in the legal area, making use of the dispatches of the Soviet partisans, official documents of the Extraordinary State Commission, and investigation documents. Some of these records were submitted by Soviet authorities to West Germany as part of requests for extradition. Among strictly German sources I might mention an important visual source, that is, the photographs of victims just before their execution. In theory, from these photographs one could identify victims and medical personnel, and also glean some information about hospital conditions. Definitely, for effective work with sources the help of medical experts is needed. Without them it’s impossible to study the subject in the context of medical ethics. How else can we conduct a competent analysis of the lectures (mentioned in investigative documents) given by German doctors on how to carry out the “euthanasia” in the captured hospitals? In addition, specialists may be asked questions about the diagnoses, forms of treatment, and effects of forced labour on the patients (the Nazis used mobile patients to build fortifiations). Medical specialists can assist in answering many technical questions on types of executions. Besides shooting, the Nazis in fact employed various methods of killing: fatal doses of medication (scopolamine and others), air injected in the vein, and poisoning in gas chambers. In Soviet documents, these types of executions are sometimes not described completely accurately.

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Sometimes, a hospital would consist of a complex of buildings that included labour and juvenile penal camps as well as its own subsidiary farm. How did these places operate before, during, and after the war? Here the knowledge of specialists in the history of medicine would be useful.

6) In recent years, it has become increasingly popular to investigate Nazi crimes from the point of view of the punishments—as judged by international tribunals as well as court systems in individual countries. Are there any particular characteristics that differentiate the postwar court cases that investigate mass killings of mental patients from other similar cases, both in the USSR and in Western states?

Mary V. Seeman I don’t know the answer to this question but, in my experience mental patients are always placed on the lowest rung of importance. Perhaps this is the case because they do not have adequate advocates to speak on their behalf. Pun- ishment for mass killings is a difficult issue: is it a domestic crime or an international crime, a crime against humanity? Under what laws should the tribunal function? And when does the killing of seriously disabled persons cross over into being viewed as euthanasia, where punishment is much more lenient than it is for murder?

Björn M. Felder The main and substantial difference was that states of the Soviet bloc did not have an independent legal system, in contrast to Western states. The USSR was far beyond a rule-of-law state. The courts were organs of the state and the Party, meaning that defendants often had no chance of a fair process or the possibility of a proper defense. Trials were often very political, especially against “Fascists”, “Collaborators”, etc. In West Germany, trials were opened against perpetrators in the context of the Nazi patient killings already in the late 1940s; they were in- itiated by the Allied government but also then continued by the German courts. Very few of the defendants, who were mostly physicians and clinic managers, were sentenced in the end; nursing personnel were very often not charged at all. The German judges, as many others, were somehow still under the influence of Nazi ideology. This changed only in the 1960s, fostered by the work of the general prosecutor Fritz Bauer that led to the Auschwitz trials. The perspective and motivation of the German justice system were transformed, and from this point on the Nazi crimes, including Euthanasie killings, were prosecuted much more seriously. In the Soviet Union under Stalin, the first trials after the war were not public, mostly conducted by state security organs. The main stated aim was to search for “enemies”. Therefore, what single individuals actually did in the war was less important compared to the organizations they were members of (German military, police units, etc.) or whom they “collaborated” with. Physicians were charged for

50 “The Useless people”: War crimes, judgment, (non)memory” supporting the German administration or writing scientific reviews or forensic reports of victims of Soviet mass murders, etc. Only in the 1960s were trials also opened in the USSR to be more than mere show trials but with charges of Nazi war crimes—although the defendants were still denied fundamental rights. In this period sentences were handed to Russian physicians who personally killed their mental patients with poison injections during the time of the Nazi occupation. Still, I have the impression that for Soviet law enforcement and prosecutors during the post-Stalin period, Nazi killing of patients was not high on their agenda. Mentally ill and disabled persons did not belong to a social group that the Soviet government focused on to any great extent.

Alexander Friedman A case study by Andrei Zamoisky on the role local medical staff played in the destruction of patients in Mahilioŭ,9 as well as my own research on the destruction of patients in psychiatric clinics in Minsk,10 have shown that the court trials were not only aimed at punishing Nazi criminals but were also highly important in terms of propaganda and frequently used during the Cold War—in both the USSR and East Germany. The context shouldn’t be omitted when scrutinizing the documents of court trials. The Cold War context had an influence on the court trials in West Germany; these were typically held without witnesses from the USSR, and the authenticity of the documents submitted by the Soviets authorities was occasionally doubtful. Defendants in East Germany and the USSR could not count on an independent and fair consideration of their cases, they were put under con- stant pressure, and their lawyers were very passive. Meanwhile, defendants in West Germany felt far more comfortable, and their lawyers employed every possibility to ease the punishment of the defendants.

Patricia Heberer Rice It is my understanding that the murders of institutionalized persons with disabilities in Poland were included in wider national war crimes trials in Poland, and in local trials against Nazi perpetrators and their indigenous collaborators in the Soviet Union. I distinctly remember that the gassing of patients in a gas van at Krasnodar figured prominently in the testimony given in the Krasnodar Trial in 1943, the first proceeding adjudicating war crimes committed during World

9 Andrei Zamoiski, “Einheimische Mediziner und die nationalsozialistischen Krankenmorde in der Stadt Mahileŭ”, in Diskriminiert–vernichtet–vergessen. Behinderte in der Sowjetunion, unter nationalsozialistischer Besatzung und im Ostblock 1917–1991, eds. Alexander Friedman and Rainer Hudemann (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag 2016), 415–22.. 10 Alexander Friedman, “Krankenmorde im Raum Minsk 1941 und ihre Aufarbeitung in der Sowjetunion und in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland”, in Diskriminiert–vernichtet–vergessen. Behinderte in der Sowjetunion, unter nationalsozialistischer Besatzung und im Ostblock 1917– 1991, eds. Alexander Friedman and Rainer Hudemann (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag 2016), 395-414.

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War II. In Germany, “euthanasia” crimes were handled differently. In the earliest “euthanasia” trial—the October 1945 trial of Hadamar personnel by the US occupation authorities—the US Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) prosecutors deter- mined that there was no precedent in international law to prosecute the Hadamar defendants for the murder of German patients. Because German citizens had carried out the “euthanasia” killings against German nationals, these crimes could not be considered a violation of international law. As the Hadamar trial preceded the December 1945 promulgation of Allied Control Council Law No. 10, which per- mitted the more elastic charge of “crimes against humanity”, an American military tribunal had no jurisdiction to try such a case. How would these crimes then be prosecuted? On 30 October 1945 and again in December 1945, as a step toward democrati- zation, the Allied occupying powers issued Control Council Law No. 4 and Con- trol Council Law No. 10, whose Article 3 extended the authority of the German courts to all punishable acts except those perpetrated by German citizens against Allied nationals or their property. Two months later, the quadripartite Allied Con- trol Council cemented its commitment to involve German justice in the adjudica- tion of war crimes and crimes against humanity. On 20 December 1945, it prom- ulgated Control Council Law No. 10, which stated, “The occupying powers may authorize German courts of law to pass sentence on crimes committed by German subjects or German citizens against other German subjects or German nationals, or against stateless persons”. Following the example set at the 1945 American Had- amar Trial and by its precedents in international law, the occupation forces left the “euthanasia” offenses—for the most part a German-on-German crime—to newly reconstructed German tribunals.

Robert Parzer As can be shown by the example of Germany, judicial representatives were quite reluctant to pursue cases of medical killings after an initial phase of hard- nosed prosecution in the late 1940s, where several death sentences were handed out. As late as the 1980s, judges and state prosecutors used defamatory language when describing the victims and did not shy away from describing them in similar terms as officials in the 1930s would have done. This clearly affected the sentences, as perpetrators were often granted leniency given that had to deal with “monstros- ities” and “lives unworthy of life”. Such wording was not used in trials dealing with Jewish victims. Also, considering the roles of witnesses, there are clear-cut differences: in hardly any case were surviving patients even considered to be capable of being called to the stand in order to testify.

Dieter Pohl The international tribunals did not touch upon the killing of mentally ill persons in the occupied Soviet Union, but of course Polish and Soviet investigations did. Soviet investigations are highly problematic, especially the ones from the Sta- linist period, since the Soviet Union was not a law-abiding state and the Soviet Se-

52 “The Useless people”: War crimes, judgment, (non)memory” cret Police was a totalitarian force. With a deliberately methodological approach, however, it is possible to use them as factual sources for legal discourse—but less so concerning individual allegations.

7) According to the leading scholar in memory studies, Alaida Asman, today’s society is in a transition phase, moving from a political to a moral paradigm of regarding the past. The transition entails replacing the memory of heroes who actively fought and gave their lives for the sake of certain ideals with the memory of passive and defenseless victims of violence who experi- enced collective persecution and destruction. What kind of memory should be or is already being developed for this so far little-researched group of victims?

Mary V. Seeman If history is written by the victors, then victims always get short shrift. Never- theless, our society as a whole has become sensitized to victimhood, and there is massive identification all over the world with victims of injustice, accompanied by increasing demands for reparation on behalf of many victimized groups. In general, it is easier to identify with one victim’s specific personal story than it is to empathize with large unidentified masses of unnamed victims, especially victims who have left no written description of their suffering and whose persecution has left behind no visual image. In this case, there are surviving medical records with names, and some of those medical files contain letters from family members and photographs—they bring the victims to life. There are witness accounts and recol- lections of doctors and nurses. Moreover, there are now organizations of psychiatric patients who honour the lives of the patients killed over that nearly twenty-year stretch in the middle of the last century solely because they were considered “useless eaters”.

Björn M. Felder For several years there has been a memorial for the victims of the Aktion T4 operation in Germany, including not only a monument in the centre of Berlin but also a virtual monument that is still under construction but already offers much information about the Nazi killing of mentally ill patients (www.gedenko- rt-t4.eu). The first step in terms of establishing culturala memory in the sense of Alaida Assmann would be an investigation of the killing of patients and a public information campaign. For example, I believe that psychiatric clinics should research the fate of their patients in the 1940s and could document this on their web sites. In my experience, in the post-Soviet space one seldom finds this kind of memory—there is a legacy of Soviet history policy, which reflects also the Soviet approach to mental illness: the asylums for the mentally ill used to be somewhere far off, in the forest etc. The public discourse on Nazi-“Euthanasie” should not only commemorate the historical victims but also lead to reflections on the imag- es of mentally ill and handicapped persons in today’s Ukrainian society.

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Alexander Friedman There is, and has been, a tendency in research to describe persons suffering from mental or physical disabilities as inactive, depersonalized, and marginal— groups of victims living under dramatic conditions, as such having no stake in society. It is mostly because of lack of sources that would allow for the biographies of the victims to be reconstructed. In memory studies, persons suffering from mental or physical disabilities must first and foremost be treated as a part of the society, and the crimes committed against them must be understood as an important element of the Nazi crimes in the occupied territories.

Patricia Heberer Rice I hope that recent scholarship will help future generations to understand the fate and suffering of persons with mental and physical disabilities who were murdered in the German-occupied East European countries. These are faceless victims. Faceless because in many cases we do not know about the individuals or even know their names. Faceless because the history of individuals with disabilities is an understudied facet of mainstream Holocaust studies. Faceless because, until recently, even experts in the field were unaware of the plight of patients with disabilities in German-occupied Eastern Europe. We must work to make scholars and the general public in both east and west more familiar with these events and make this history a more integral part of Holocaust studies.

Wiebke Lisner I would prefer not to think in a dualistic fashion of “heroes” and “victims” but rather to explore the scope of possibilities for action as well as associated logic, and in this context maybe also consider the moral concepts of the protagonists. Why did German midwives, for example, report Poles seen as “health hazards” and disabled children? And were there families they didn’t report? I would like to ask about the motives, aims, and scopes of practice of the German and Polish personnel, such as midwives, involved in the “euthanasia” within the context of occupation and Germanization, in order to get a more comprehensive picture of how “euthanasia” was planned and put into practice during the occupation. With respect to the victims of the executions of mentally and physical disabled persons, I would recommend following the approaches of, for example, the research groups around Maike Rotzoll and Gerrit Hohendorf, and try to identify biographies and conditions in the clinics prior to the killings and before the war, as well as the reactions and actions of relatives in the annexed Western Polish territories—even though it might be difficult to find answers given the lack of sources. In this way, the victims may be remembered as individuals, and we might learn more about social structures and family ties, too. However, at the same time, “euthanasia” should be contextualized within the setting of occupation and race policy.

Robert Parzer In the “age of inclusion”, many envision disabled people becoming or already as members of society, just as anyone else. This role model is often imposed on

54 «Непотрібні люди»: злочин, суд, (не)пам’ять the victims of the Nazi Euthanasie program. While the motive is understandable, though, it is lamentable that specific historical contexts and the extreme vulner- ability of the disabled in times of war and genocide tend to be lost on those who wish to commemorate.

Dieter Pohl I think Assmann’s approach is too unspecific; there are much more promising concepts. It is high time to acknowledge this group of victims both in Germany and in the post-Soviet countries. This encounters specific problems: for example, families of the victims often tried to hide their fates because they feel embarrassed. It is necessary to identify all the victims but also to address the discourse on weak and mentally ill members of society in general. Of course, all places where victims were taken from and where they were killed need to be identified and marked as memorial sites.

Dmitry Astashkin Under the framework of memory studies, it is difficult to consider a hospital as a “memory space” (according to the concept of Pierre Nora). How are the mem- ories of various categories of victims killed in a given hospital to be preserved (or accumulated)? To be sure, at various times during the occupation, the hospital was a place of execution for Jewish doctors, patients transferred from other medical facilities, wounded Red Army soldiers, and insubordinate medical personnel (incidentally, at the hospitals the fate of the medical staff extended to that of their families). They were killed by various means and for various reasons. The Nazis covered up the traces of their crimes at hospitals by killing witnesses, plun- dering, destruction, and arson. To what extent do the memorials at the hospitals (some have none of any kind) reflect the entire spectrum of these crimes? Regardless of the scale of the tragedy, there is so far little study concerning its memorialization.

«Непотрібні люди»: злочин, суд, (не)пам’ять

Учасники:

Мері В. СІМАН — MDCM, професорка-емерит, факультет психіятрії, Університет Торонто, Канада. [email protected] Берн M. ФЕЛДЕР — PhD, викладач, факультет історії, Ґеттінґенський університет імені Ґеорґа-Авґуста, Німеччина. [email protected] goettingen.de

55 УКРАЇНА МОДЕРНА Число 28. “Непотрібні люди....”

Александр ФРІДМАН — PhD, викладач, Саарський університет, Університет прикладних наук для державного адміністрування й управління у Північному Рейн-Вестфалії (Дуйсбурґ, Німеччина), дослідник у документальному проєкті Яд Вашем «Євреї в Третьому Райху» (Єрусалим, Ізраїль) та «Опір у Рейнленд, 1933–1945» (Бонн, Німеччина). alexander. [email protected] Патриція ГЕБЕРЕР РАЙЗ — PhD, директорка Відділу провідних істориків, Центр досліджень Голокосту імені Джека, Джозефа і Мортона Менделів, Меморіяльний музей Голокосту, США. [email protected] Вібке ЛІСНЕР — PhD, наукова співробітниця, Інститут історії, етики й філософії у Вищій медичній школі Ганновера, Німеччина. lisner.wiebke@mh- hannover.de Роберт ПАРЦЕР — дослідник, Центр документації та інформації в Торгау, Німеччина. [email protected] Дітер ПОЛЬ — PhD, професор, Альпійсько-Адріятичний університет Клагенфурта, Інститут історії, Німеччина. [email protected] Дмітрій АСТАШКІН — к. і. н., старший науковий співробітник, Санкт- Петербурзький інститут історії РАН, РФ. [email protected]

Форумі запрошені експерти з історії Другої світової війни, Го- локосту й нацистської евтаназії відповідають на питання про траєкторії масового насилля щодо пацієнтів психіятричних клінік Уу Східній Европі, динаміки в ухваленні рішень та ступеня участи в цьому злочині різних груп виконавців. Автори переважно погоджуються з те- зою про амбівалентний перебіг подій та відсутність центральної про- грами умертвіння на вищезгаданих територіях та відзначають різний рівень включення місцевого медичного персоналу — від ризикованих акцій порятунку до безпосередньої участи у вбивствах. Окрім того, темати- зуються як паралелі, так і відмінність у втіленні програми Т-4 в Німеч- чині та акції вбивств пацієнтів у Східній Европі. Частково мотивацій- ні схеми та методи знищення схожі з проведенням примусової евтаназії в Німеччині. Однак, на відміну від Німеччини, де акцію Т-4 організовував та проводив медичний персонал, у Східній Европі (в Україні, Білорусії та Польщі) у насильницьких акціях щодо пацієнтів були задіяні айнзатцгру- пи, вермахт, військова адміністрація. Окрім того, відзначається прагма- тичний характер убивств, де не так «расова гігієна» керувала вбивцями, як логіка звільнення приміщення та можливість позбавлення від «зайвих їдців». Учасники форуму також відзначають, що акції вбивств пацієнтів у Східній Европі в організаційному, персональному та хронологічному кон- тексті можна розглядати як сходинку до Голокосту.

56 «Непотрібні люди»: злочин, суд, (не)пам’ять

Аналізуючи судові процеси в післявоєнний період, науковці підкреслю- ють істотну відмінність між ними в Західній Німеччині й Радянському Союзі та НДР. У контексті міждисциплінарних студій відзначаєть- ся високий потенціял у співпраці істориків та медиків. Меморіялізація вбивства психічнохворих під час Другої світової війни в Східній Европі залишається й надалі марґінальною нішею в офіційній культурі пам’яті закладів та будинків інвалідів через сприйняття цих осіб як «непотріб- них суспільству», як «зайвих їдців».

Ключові слова: пацієнти психіятричних лікарень, евтаназія, «Акція Тір- гартенштрасе 4», судові процеси.