Leonardo Conti was a Swiss German physician who served as the Reich health leader in Nazi Germany. As an SS-Obergruppenführer, he was the most senior medical practitioner in Nazi Germany. Involved in the infamous Aktion T-4 euthanasia program, he oversaw the murder of many Germans who were deemed to be of “unsound mind.”
Leonardo Ambrogio Giorgio Giovanni Conti was born on August 24, 1900, in Lugano, Switzerland, to a Swiss Italian father, Silvio, and a German mother, Nanna. His parents divorced in 1903. Nanna Conti would later become the Reich midwifery leader under the Nazis. In 1915, Conti received German citizenship, and in 1918, he completed his examinations at the Friedrich-Wilhelms high school in Berlin. He then volunteered as a gunner in a Küstrin artillery regiment. In 1918, he cofounded the antisemitic Kampfbund Deutscher Volksbund and was highly responsive to the völkisch movement that became popular in Weimar Germany.
From 1919 to 1923, Conti studied medicine in Berlin and Erlangen, and together with his brother, Silvio Conti, he became active in the nationalist student movement. In 1919, he joined the DNVP (German National People’s Party) and participated in the 1920 Kapp Putsch against the Weimar Republic.
Having passed his state examination in 1923, he joined the National Socialist SA (Sturmabteilung) and became its first physician. In 1925, Conti received his doctorate on facial soft tissue surgery and published Über Weichteilplastik im Gesicht (About Soft Tissue Plastic in the Face), a book about facial plastic surgery. On August 22, 1925, he married Elfriede, who was a member of the NSDAP, and they had four children together.
After a medical internship and a volunteer assistant position, he worked as a general practitioner and pediatrician in Berlin between October 1925 and February 13, 1933. In December 1927, he joined the NSDAP. In 1928, he organized the structure of the medical service for the SA, and Conti, together with Martin Bormann and Gerhard Wagner, developed the Aid Organization for the Wounded. In 1929, he cofounded the National Socialist German Doctors’ League (National-socialisticher Deutscher Ärtzebund, or NSDÄB), on whose board he served from 1931.
As senior physician east of the Berlin SA, Conti treated the SA leader Horst Wessel, who had been injured during fighting with communists, from January 14, 1930, until his death a few weeks later, on February 23. That same year, Conti moved from the SA to the SS and headed the medical services supporting the annual Nuremberg Party Rally.
In 1931, Conti joined the Berlin Medical Association, and in May 1932, he was elected as a member of the Prussian Parliament, where he served as a deputy until its dissolution in the fall of 1933. On February 13, 1933, Conti, as a party “old fighter,” was appointed by Hermann Göring to the Prussian Ministry of Interior as commissioner for special purposes. On April 9, 1933, he was expelled temporarily from the SS, only to be reinstated the following month, on May 12, 1933.
After Adolf Hitler became chancellor, Conti volunteered to serve for the Reich Ministry of the Interior. In February 1934, he headed up the Main Office of Public Health of the NSDAP in Berlin. On April 12, 1934, he was appointed by Hermann Göring to the Prussian State Council.
In 1936, Conti took command of the medical health services for the Berlin Olympic Games, and in 1937, he was elected to the presidency of the International Federation of Sports Medicine. In addition, in 1936, Conti lectured on public health at the University of Berlin.
On January 30, 1938, Conti became an SS-Brigadeführer, and in September 1938, he was appointed as secretary of state in the Reich Ministry of the Interior. He also took over the NSDAP Main Office for Public Health, where he initiated, among other things, the establishment of the Reichsvollkornbrot (rich whole-wheat bread) committee. Behind this was the National Socialist idea that the “people’s body” must be strengthened to achieve greater work, higher fertility, and better combat power. From 1939, Conti was the Reich medical officer, head of the Main Office of Public Health, and remained head of the NSDÄB.
Leonardo Conti was a staunch promoter of a public medical administration strongly controlled by the Nazi state. Under his leadership, local health offices were further expanded to allow for a genetic control and selection of the population so that “weak” elements were removed for the improvement of the German race. “Racial hygiene” was a lethal part of the Nazi philosophy. Conti shared responsibility, with SS-Obergruppenführer Phillipp Bouhler and SS-Gruppenführer Karl Brandt, for the forced sterilization program, racially motivated forced abortions, and ultimately the Aktion T-4 program. Conti’s participation in human experiments, such as with typhus at the Buchenwald concentration camp, is also undisputed.
This euthanasia program was the basis for later programs of mass murder during the Holocaust and in other contexts. Many of the SS staff involved in these murders developed their lethal methods during the Aktion T-4 program overseen by Conti. Victims were deceived in the same way as in Aktion T-4, using very elaborate means to convince them that no harm was intended.
In August 1941, Conti once more became a member of the Reichstag. On April 20, 1944, he was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer. He was closely involved in forensic investigations into the Katyn Forest massacre of Polish military officers in the Soviet Union and received a detailed report, known as the Katyn Commission, from an international team of experts. In August 1944, he resigned as Reich health leader, and on January 17, 1945, he was appointed as an honorary professor in Munich. Another appointment as honorary professor at the State Academy for the public health service in Berlin followed on March 3, 1945.
On May 19, 1945, after Germany’s surrender, Conti was arrested. He was investigated for his involvement with the euthanasia program and would have been brought before the International Military Tribunal as part of the Doctors’ Trial for his involvement in Aktion T-4. However, on October 6, 1945, over a year before the trial began, Leonardo Conti hanged himself in his Nuremberg cell.
László Csatáry, a Hungarian, was convicted in absentia as a Nazi war criminal in 1948 by a Czechoslovak court and sentenced to death, but he escaped, fled to asylum in Canada, and later fled to Budapest, dying at the age of 98 without ever facing trial.
Csatáry was born on March 4, 1915, in the small town of Mány, Hungary (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). He became a policeman, and in 1944, after the German invasion of the country, he collaborated as the Royal Hungarian Police commandant in charge of the Jewish ghetto in Kassa (Košice, Slovakia). In this capacity, Csatáry organized the deportation of over 15,500 Jews to Auschwitz, where practically all of them perished.
Reports have surfaced of Csatáry’s extreme cruelty to inmates and the demonstrable pleasure he took in it. Among other things, he was accused of having physically brutalized Jews in detention, beating them with his hands and a dog whip.
After he was sentenced to death in 1948, Csatáry escaped to Canada and sought asylum there, justifying his request on the ground that he sought sanctuary from the Hungarian communist regime. Living under an assumed identity, he worked as an art dealer in Montreal, where he became a Canadian citizen in 1955. Thereafter he led a peaceful and quiet life until 1997, when his war history was drawn to the notice of Canadian authorities. Csatáry’s Canadian citizenship was revoked for lying on his citizenship application, and while the Canadian government was preparing his deportation, Csatáry fled Canada in late 1997.
Based on a tip received by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in September 2011, Csatáry was located in Budapest, Hungary, in 2012. In the summer of that year, his address was revealed by reporters, and on July 18, 2012, he was taken into custody for questioning by Hungarian authorities and indicted for war crimes. On July 30, 2012, the Slovak justice minister, Tomáš Borec, announced that Slovakia was ready to bring a prosecution case against Csatáry and requested that Hungary extradite him. Czechoslovakia had abolished the death penalty in 1990, and so on March 28, 2013, the Slovak County Court in Košice changed the 1948 verdict in Csatáry’s case from the death penalty to life imprisonment.
In August 2012, the Budapest Prosecutor’s Office decided not to proceed with the charges, on the basis that further research had revealed that Csatáry was not in Kassa at the time and lacked the rank to organize the transports. In January 2013, however, Slovak police found a witness to corroborate other charges relating to the deportation from May 1944 of 15,700 Jews from Kassa. On July 8, 2013, a Budapest higher court adjourned the case, stating that Csatáry had already been sentenced for the crimes included in the proceedings, in former Czechoslovakia, in 1948.
Csatáry remained in Budapest and died there from pneumonia, on August 10, 2013, aged 98. He never faced trial.