WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) (15 page)

C
RIMES AGAINST HUMANITY

Despite the fact that the treatment of the Jews in Germany and across Europe was more barbaric than anyone could possibly have imagined, the Third Reich operated an efficient bureaucracy that gave an air of supposed legitimacy to the murders. This was perhaps the most sinister aspect of the regime: that ordinary people were easily persuaded to take part in the most appalling crimes against humanity, simply because they were ordered to do so by the government.

After the war, chilling evidence came to light of the methodical way in which the Nazis had catalogued their horrific crimes. For example, the victims’ belongings were carefully listed, and the victims given receipts, possibly to stop them realizing what was going to happen to them. It was this semblance of officialdom that caused many Jews and minority groups to trust their captors, not understanding that they were bound for wholesale slaughter until it was too late.

B
ODY DISPOSAL

Exterminating human beings on the scale that the Nazis envisaged required new technologies, and accordingly, German scientists, industrialists and others worked hard to find efficient killing machines for their victims. Often, the Nazis used mental patients from asylums as guinea pigs, trying out various methods, such as mass shootings, explosives and machine gunning. They found that the most successful method to use was poisoned gas, such as carbon monoxide or Zyklon B, which took less than ten minutes to kill large numbers of people and was an easy way to dispose of hundreds of prisoners at a time.

The next problem was how to dispose of the hundreds of bodies after the gas had done its work. At this point, German industrialists stepped in, eager to lend a hand. Furnaces were developed that operated at high temperatures, and burned using human body fat, making the disposal of thousands of bodies relatively easy.

H
UMAN EXPERIMENTS

With these technical solutions in place, the Germans and the 35 other European nations that collaborated with them set about the mass extermination of the Jews and other ‘undesirables’. However, for some unfortunate victims, the prospects were even worse than death in the gas chambers: the Nazis also carried out experiments on prisoners, including children and babies, under the pretext of advancing medical science, but in reality to feed their taste for sadism. For example, the notorious Dr Josef Mengele, under the guise of research into genetics, carried out horrific experiments on twins, dwarves and gypsies. Unbelievably, in one case he tried to sew two twins together to see what would happen. Another of his specialities was to inject dye into victims’ eyes to see how they would change colour; he also performed amputations and subjected his victims to drug tests and various methods of dying, including freezing. Few of his experiments were of any medical interest, and afterwards, the hapless victims were almost always put to death.

As well as these experiments, there were cruel investigations with the supposed aim of protecting German soldiers. For example, many Russian prisoners were used in experiments, such as being frozen to death in iced water, or subjected to intense air pressure, ostensibly to see how soldiers would fare in a war situation. In other cases, prisoners faced the naked brutality of the Nazi guards for no reason other than to satisfy their captors’ lust for violence; some were hung up on poles, others beaten to death.

C
HILD LABOUR

The thousands of children taken to the concentration camps came in for the most terrible treatment, often being separated from their parents and taken straight to the gas chambers on arrival. Those who did not perish immediately were forced to work as slave labourers in factories and quarries, often ending the day by standing for hours waiting for their names to be read out in a roll call. Badly fed, with no proper medical care or sanitation, many children who lived and worked in the appalling conditions of the camps died before the end of the war.

D
EATH MARCHES

Towards the end of the war, as the Allies were advancing through Europe, the Nazis began to move prisoners out of the death camps in an effort to destroy the evidence of what they had done. Inmates were marched miles through the snow to train stations, transported and then marched to their new camps. Many of the prisoners, who had suffered years of malnutrition and ill treatment, died during the ‘death marches’, as they became called – in total, around a 100,000. And this was not the end of the story. As Soviet and Allied forces began to discover the horrific truth of what had happened at the Nazis’ concentration camps, thousands of inmates were liberated. However, many of the prisoners were so weak by that time that they died within a few weeks of being set free.

The genocide at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators was so extensive during World War II that, after the conflict was over, new legislation had to be enacted to encompass the crimes. The charge of ‘a crime against humanity’, which had been brought in after World War I, was now extended to cover all crimes against humanity and civilization by the Axis powers committed during the war (significantly, any crimes committed by the Allied powers were exempt from this). These crimes included murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhuman acts committed against civilian populations ‘whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated’. What this meant in effect was that German ministers, officials, military officers and civilians could be charged in an international court of law for crimes committed during World War II, even if they were abiding by the rules of the Third Reich and its collaborators. This was because the crimes – whether committed by high-ranking officials, lowly guards or simply members of the public – went beyond the terms of the Geneva Convention, and constituted crimes, on a grand scale, against the whole of humanity.

Had the Allies failed to defeat the Axis powers, there is no doubt that the Nazis would have continued to carry out their programme of genocide in Britain and elsewhere. As it was, their avowed aim to exterminate all Jews in Europe in the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’ failed: but not before millions had been put to death in the most horrifying war crime of the 20th century, if not in the whole of human history.

Action T4 ‘Euthanasia Programme’

1939–41

One of the most horrifying aspects of the Nazi regime in Germany was the killing of up to 100,000 individuals with mental or physical disabilities. Under a programme known as ‘Action T4’, named after the address of the house where the headquarters of the operation was located (Tiergart enstrasse 4 in Berlin), Hitler ordered the killing of those identified as mentally or physically ‘diseased’, so as to cleanse the German people of ‘racial impurities’. Along with Jews, communists, homosexuals and other minority groups, those with any genetic defects, impairments or peculiarities were seen as undesirable elements to be got rid of, that is, put to death.

B
ARBARIC PLAN

The programme was administered by qualified doctors, nurses and other trained medical staff, including Hitler’s own personal physician, Dr Karl Brandt. The director of the operation was Philipp Bouhler, the head of Hitler’s private chancellery. The T4 programme was often referred to as a programme of ‘euthanasia’, implying that the victims wished to be put to death to end their suffering, but that was not the case. In the majority of cases, the victims wanted to live, and most were not in extreme pain. Moreover, in most cases, their families desperately wanted to keep their relatives alive and had cared for them for many years. Despite this, Hitler was determined to carry through the programme, partly because of his crazed belief that only perfect human beings, as he saw it, should be allowed to inhabit the planet, and partly to save money: at the time the programme was launched, Germany was undergoing extensive rearmament in preparation for World War II.

In retrospect, it seems hardly believable that such a barbaric plan, including the murder of all mentally and physically disabled people, should have been conceived by a political leader and put into action by trained medical personnel. However, that is what happened between 1939 and 1941 in Nazi Germany, under the ‘T4 Action’ programme set in motion by the so-called ‘General Foundation for Welfare and Institutional Care’.

Eventually, after meeting a great deal of resistance to the programme, not just from the victims’ families but from political, religious and other figures, Hitler realized that he was not going to be able to mobilize public opinion against the disabled in the same way that he had done against the Jews, so the policy was abandoned in 1941; but by this time, between 75,000 and 100,000 individuals had been cold-bloodedly murdered in one of the most shameful war crimes in history.

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R
ACIAL HYGIENE’

The T4 Action programme appears to have been directly ordered by Hitler himself, as part of his policy of enforcing ‘racial hygiene’. Hitler had a horror of mental illness, perhaps because he was afraid of his own tendency towards it, and there are accounts that he often ranted about how disgusting mentally ill people were. He seemed particularly fixated on those who were incontinent, or ‘put their own excrement in their mouths’ as he expressed it. In addition, he was horrified by physical deformity and believed that anyone with any kind of abnormality should not have children and should be sterilized to prevent such an occurrence.

The Führer, and other members of the Nazi regime, had been influenced by the writings of the late 19th-century scientist Adolf Jost, who had argued that euthanasia – that is the right to end a person’s life to relieve suffering – should be the decision of the state not the individual. From this, it was a short step for Hitler to maintain that the state could choose who was to live and who to die. But in truth, the Nazi T4 programme had nothing to do with euthanasia at all, at least as most people understand it. Firstly, those chosen were not in a great deal of physical pain; and secondly, they were not put to death in a merciful way but subjected to a great deal of abuse and neglect. They were rounded up, separated from their loved ones, held as frightened prisoners in horrifying conditions and then put to death.

E
NFORCED STERILIZATION

The T4 programme was also connected to the eugenics movement, which had become popular in Europe and the USA at the turn of the 20th century. According to this theory, selected breeding could improve the quality of the human race. Some countries, such as Sweden, had already passed laws to encourage sterilization of all those in the population with hereditary defects. In Sweden, thousands of people had been sterilized as a result. In 1933, Germany followed suit, passing a more draconian law ‘for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring’, which enforced sterilization for individuals with a range of mental conditions, from epilepsy and schizophrenia to alcoholism.

Under Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, officials from what were known as Hereditary Health Courts visited psychiatric hospitals, special schools, retirement homes and prisons, assessing individuals and selecting them for the programme. In this way, over 360,000 individuals were sterilized. The enforced sterilization of people with any kind of physical disability was also considered, until it was pointed out that one of the most powerful figures of the Nazi administration, Joseph Goebbels, himself had a club foot. There were also moves to sterilize people whose disabilities were not congenital, despite the fact that this was totally illogical.

Besides holding the opinion that anyone with a disability was not ‘worthy of life’ and should be done away with, Hitler also favoured killing the incurably ill. However, his medical advisors, such as Brandt, tactfully put it to him that he would not be able to persuade the German public to go along with such an idea. Hitler then argued that, should war break out, the task of disposing of the mentally and physically disabled would be considerably eased, because people would be pressured by poverty and would see that resources needed to go towards the war effort rather than towards caring for these individuals. Unfortunately, he was to be proved right.

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HILD MURDERS

In May 1939, as Hitler prepared to invade Poland, a couple near Liepzig wrote to him to gain permission to have their severely deformed child put to death. Encouraged by this, Hitler authorized the setting up of the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses, whose directors were Dr Brandt, Philipp Bouler and an SS Officer, Viktor Brack. The task of this committee was initially to approve voluntary applications from parents and carers of disabled children for their charges to be put to death. However, the brief eventually came to be enlarged, in the most sinister way. Under the new programme, all severely disabled children under three were required to be killed, whether their parents wished this or not.

The disabilities listed by register included Down’s syndrome, malformations, various spastic conditions and so on. In a parody of scientific rigour, three doctors had to give their consent to killing the child, and various other bureaucratic procedures had to be undergone. The selected children were then taken away from their parents to ‘Special Sections’ for assessment, where they were kept for a few weeks before being killed by lethal injection. Their deaths were recorded as pneumonia, and their brains and other body parts were removed for ‘scientific research’. Strange as it may seem, this so-called ‘research’ helped many of the medical staff involved in the programme feel more comfortable about what they were doing.

H
ORRIFIC TRUTH

With the outbreak of war, the remit of the programme became wider. Older children and adolescents were now included, and a wider variety of abnormalities and malfunctions were ‘assessed’, until the programme expanded to include any kind of problem or difficulty, such as delinquent behaviour. By 1940, the mere fact of a child being Jewish, or an ‘Aryan–Jewish half-breed’ could qualify him or her for the Special Sections.

By now, parents were beginning to realize the horrific truth about what was happening to their children, but there was little they could do to resist. In many cases, they were terrorized into surrendering their children to the authorities: for instance, they were often threatened that they would lose custody of all their children if they refused to comply with the programme. Accordingly, many parents felt they had no option but to do as they were asked, and by 1941, 5,000 children had been killed under the programme.

M
ASS MURDER

Worse was to come as Brandt and Bouhler prepared to launch their so called ‘euthanasia’ programme on disabled adults. With the help of the minister for health, Dr Leonardo Conti, and the head of the SS medical department, Professor Werner Heyde, Nazi officials compiled a register of all institutionalized people in the country. Once this was done, they set about visiting the mental asylums and hospitals to claim their victims.

They began by taking inmates from an area of Poland recently invaded by Germany and shooting 7,000 of them, and went on to do the same in other Polish territories. Next, at Posen, they herded hundreds of inmates into an improvised gas chamber and gassed them to death, using carbon monoxide. This was an idea pioneered by Dr Albert Widman, the chief chemist of the German Criminal Police, and later taken up by SS Chief Heinrich Himmler to commit mass murder against Jews and other minority groups.

It is hard to imagine how the general public could have condoned such a programme of slaughter of the innocent, but as the privations of war began to make people’s lives difficult, there was less and less resistance to it. The government argued that besides ridding the state of the expense of paying for the care of mental patients, gassing inmates also had the advantage of freeing up the hospitals for wounded soldiers. Thus, the Nazi troops were also keen to carry on the work of murdering the nation’s most vulnerable people, especially in areas where war was being waged, such as in and around Poland. All in all, over 8,000 German patients were killed in this way, with the approval of Himmler and other high-ranking Nazi officials.

‘
M
ERCY DEATH’

It was not long before Hitler began to set his sights on the incurably ill. Brandt had advised him before the war that the German people would never agree to a programme of killing all those with incurable illnesses, but now in the context of war the situation had changed. Accordingly, Hitler ordered Bouhler and Brack to allow physicians to effect a ‘mercy death’ on all those they deemed incurable.

This programme never had the force of law, but it was launched by a directive from the Führer and implemented by a team of doctors and psychiatrists, some of whom had worked on the previous programme and some of whom were new recruits. The team began by registering all inmates who had been in hospitals, retirement homes and so on for more than five years, and who were diagnosed as ‘criminally insane’. Those of ‘non-Aryan race’ were also selected for ‘assessment’. Next, a list of serious conditions, such as senile dementia, schizophrenia, syphilis and encephalitis, was issued to the institutions. Unfortunately, in many cases the staff from these homes assumed that selections were being made for labour camps and often overstated their patients’ disabilities to protect them from being called up, with devastating consequences. In other cases, staff refused to co-operate with the authorities, especially in homes that were run by Catholic or other religious organizations – only to find that the selection was made for them, and inmates were removed without their permission.

At first there was a system with a semblance of order, whereby three ‘experts’ were required to deliver the death verdict on a patient, but after a while doctors began to make decisions on their own initiative. In the early days of the scheme, victims were killed by lethal injection, but this proved a slow and expensive way to kill large numbers of people, so Hitler told Brandt to gas the patients with carbon monoxide instead. (Incredibly, Brandt later described this development as a ‘major advance’ for medical history.) Accordingly, gas chambers were set up at Brandenburg in 1940, then at other towns across Germany.

Teams of SS soldiers, dressed in white coats to make them look like medical staff, were drafted in to escort the mental patients to the ‘special treatment centres’ by bus. In many cases, patients were sent to ‘transit centres’ in hospitals to be ‘assessed’ on the way: this was really so that their families would lose touch with them and give up trying to visit them. Once at the centre, the patient would be gassed immediately and then burnt, with a pile of other bodies in a furnace. Then, in an extraordinary display of macarbre bureaucracy, the families would be sent an urn of the ashes from the furnace together with a falsified death certificate.