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 hier- archy. 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 econ- omy—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 con- sidered 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 oc- cupied Eastern European countries should first of all be considered in the general context of the occupation policy, which was aimed at economic exploitation, fur- ther colonization, and ensuring that invaded countries would serve Germany’s in- terests. Persons suffering from mental or physical disabilities were treated as bal- last that Adolf Hilter’s “New Europe” would get rid of.