Hearing Witnesses Spiegelgrund is no more. The walls, meticulously built around the institution, are now demolished and what the staff had undertaken under oath to keep secret is now public knowledge. The papers frequently uncover new information about the ‘murderous medics’ at Steinhof. So far, no one has got hold of Doctor Gross but doctors Illing and Türk, later also Hübsch, are locked up in their respective police cells and, while there is much speculation about when they will appear in front of the People’s Court in Wien, images are published of pavilions with bars over the windows, of smiling ‘innocent’ children and parents who claim that they had previously been ‘forced to stay silent’ but will now stand up and tell of how they entrusted their children to these kind, confidence-inspiring medical men and women, and then found that they couldn’t get the children back or, when they insisted, were told that their little ones had died, as it happened, killed by the very professionals who had promised to save, even cure them: abgespritzt – the terrible word, which means ‘killed by lethal injection’ but should not be used to signify everything that had been going on in the clinic. Every morning when she wakes up, she is terrified that her name will be announced in one of these fat headlines. What worries her most is that her parents will find out – which is crazy because they have known all along where she was working and, in the end, everyone in their block of flats also knew. But it is one thing to know the kind of things no one really needs to talk about, knowing that gets you nowhere. It is much worse to be aware of something that you realise is common knowledge, spoken about by all sorts of people and, for instance, run in the papers day after day. Still, her father doesn’t read newspapers and there are times when she thinks he wants to escape the stories. Perhaps his inexorable physical and mental decline is no more than a strategy intended to keep harmful knowledge at bay. Now that she no longer works, she takes her father out for walks every day. They descend the main staircase together. Once it was just that – a staircase – but now, to her increasingly frail father it is a dreaded chasm. It is as if the building they have lived in for so long is not constructed with floors and landings now, but with gaping shafts and hollows. Her father grips the railing with his trembling hand and, because his legs are as shaky, he is no longer sure where the next step is. One day, before she has time to grab hold of his shoulders, he falls helplessly down the stairs. As he falls, he gazes up at her with an astonished look in his eyes as if he could not have imagined that her hands, of all hands, could fail him. Afterwards, she sits with his heavy head in her lap and shouts up into the empty stairwell that someone must come and help her, and above her the flat doors open and people come to lean over the railings. But Mrs Katschenka is a nurse, of course, she hears somebody whisper, she’ll manage on her own, surely. It takes time and effort to get her father to stand up again and, with a handkerchief held against the bleeding wound on her father’s forehead, they continue the descent past the voices and smiling faces of people who quickly disappear behind their partly closed doors. Of course people had talked about the Katschenka family before, but it had been in a respectful tone. They were decent people who kept themselves to themselves. Of her, it has always been said approvingly that she had been such a support for her parents. They had said that to her face as well, in the street or the dairy round the corner. What mother wouldn’t have wished for a daughter like her! But now they agree that she is hiding behind her poor, innocent parents. The shame of it! But they will come for her soon, mark my words. Soon, soon – no doubt about it. And Otto, who is the one telling her all this, instructs her that she must not speak to anybody about these matters. If you have done anything that can be held against you, keep it to yourself. Never confess. All they are after is someone to take the burden of guilt off themselves. Don’t let them get away with making a scapegoat of you, Anna, he says. But when the summons to appear in front of the judge leading the investigation finally arrives, she feels almost relieved. She can’t quite explain why. Perhaps because, at last, there is something concrete to discuss – claims and accusations but, be that as it may, these can be rejected or confirmed instead of the endless whispered hints and half-truths. She is a respectable person who has nothing to be ashamed of, and because she believes this she wants to confront the law head on. For the interrogation, she dresses in a skirt and a freshly ironed white blouse with a lace collar. She buttons the blouse all the way to the base of her neck. She puts on gloves and a hat. Throughout, the judge behaves very properly towards her. He is keen to emphasise that she is not herself accused of anything. She has been called by the defence of one of the persons charged, namely Doctor Marianne Türk, who feels that Mrs Katschenka could make a statement in her favour. Afterwards, she is presented with a transcript of the interrogation, and is asked to read it carefully before she signs it.
She does sign it.
Diagnosis
The first interview with the witness Anna Katschenka, November 1945:
THE JUDGE LEADING THE INVESTIGATION: Mrs Katschenka, you were employed at Spiegelgrund from January 1941 and until the liberation. That makes almost four and a half years. From this, one might reasonably conclude that you were well informed about the working conditions on the clinical side of the institution and also about the prevailing mentality of the staff. Is that so?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I suppose so.
JUDGE: I have also been given to understand that you are an honest and fair-minded person. Hence, you presumably have nothing to lose by speaking out.
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I have already told the police everything I know.
JUDGE: Indeed, you have given an account of what you heard and saw. However, at this stage, I am looking for something else. Accusations have been made to the effect that children were subjected to euthanasia. And so on.
ANNA KATSCHENKA: Mostly rumours, I believe.
JUDGE: How would you personally describe such rumours?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: As false. Without any foundation.
JUDGE: I meant: what would you say that the rumours were alleging?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I don’t know. Rumours are rumours.
JUDGE: So, if I put it to you that certain persons have deliberately and with foreknowledge allowed severely ill patients to die. That is, in the expectation that death would occur in these patients although at a later stage. The aim would have been to shorten the suffering of the ill. Would you agree that this is a reasonable definition of the concept of euthanasia?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I don’t quite understand what you mean.
JUDGE: Please, just answer my question.
ANNA KATSCHENKA: Yes, I believe so. It depends.
JUDGE: Depends – on what?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: It is essential to understand all the circumstances in the case.
JUDGE: [leafs through documents] Mrs Katschenka, I think I’m right in quoting a preliminary interview with you in which you stated that the majority, not to say just about all the patients under your care in the clinic, required continuous medication with sedatives or painkillers of some kind.
ANNA KATSCHENKA: That is probably correct.
JUDGE: And it is also correct to say that the substances used in the clinic to provide sedation or pain relief were administered in doses sufficient not only to ease the patient but, conceivably, high enough to be fatal?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: All medication has damaging effects if taken at too high a dose level. The quantity must be adjusted from case to case. As I said earlier, one must have an idea of the history of the illness in its entirety and not just rely on single symptoms.
JUDGE: You stated earlier that there were sedative agents which were also given to control severe fits and spasms in some patients?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: That is what I meant when I said that one must have the whole picture. These matters are judged from case to case.
JUDGE: But surely what you say implies that it must be difficult, not to say practically impossible, to decide whether very ill patients have been given the sedating or pain-relieving drugs in a sufficient or in too high a dose? As it is understood that the same substance that can control the symptoms in certain instances also can contribute to accelerating the progress of the disease.
ANNA KATSCHENKA: You’re trying to make me say something, but I’m not sure what it is.
JUDGE: Is it the morphine or Luminal that kills the patient? Or is it complicating conditions such as pneumonia or circulatory disturbances, for instance?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I don’t understand why you ask me all this. I’m not a doctor.
JUDGE: What I am asking you is whether you can exclude the possibility that in some cases, sedatives or painkillers were administered in such quantities that the drugs contributed to a worsening of the patient’s illness and premature death?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: No. I’m not aware of any such case.
JUDGE: But you can’t exclude that it might have happened?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I am not a doctor. I can’t comment.
JUDGE: But surely you have an opinion? You worked in this clinic for almost five years.
ANNA KATSCHENKA: All I know is that most of the patients that we treated were, medically speaking, completely hopeless cases. Death was a more than likely outcome. I can confirm that, and also the fact that we dealt with children who suffered so greatly from their torments that the painkillers or sedatives given to them, regardless of what their effects may be in the long run, the sufferer must have felt them to be blessings. However, to suggest that sedating or pain-relieving agents were given with intention to kill is quite a different matter.
JUDGE: So, I understand you to say that, in your view, it is utterly unthinkable that any medication with sedating or pain-relieving properties might have been prescribed with the intention of bringing about a fatal outcome?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: Yes.
JUDGE: As for an alleged circular, issued by a relevant authority, that encouraged the practice of regularly administering such medication with a fatal outcome in mind – and this has been said to exist – is it something you’re aware of?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: No. I had absolutely no idea.
JUDGE: May I ask: if this circular had been in force, would you have been aware of it? Its existence, I mean?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: Yes, I assume I would have been.
‘It wasn’t part of my work to feed the children’
Transcript of a new interview with Dr Marianne Türk, January 1946:
I have to make it clear that I no longer stand by what I stated in response to questioning during the interrogations held on 16 October 1945. Then, I claimed that I had no knowledge of any mercy killings carried out in the institution and also that Dr Illing, at the time my immediate superior, had not in any way indicated to me that such acts took place. Now, on the contrary, I am prepared to state that I did know of this. Some time after I had taken up my post at the clinic, Dr Jekelius informed me of the existence of a law that permitted euthanasia in certain defined circumstances. Any relevant cases were to be referred to a state committee for scrutiny. The committee, on the basis of its findings and evaluations of the case histories presented to them, would decide whether euthanasia was to be carried out or not. The legislation conferring these powers on the committee would not be completed until after the war, since the authorities had not quite decided how the bill of law was to be drafted or how it would deal with the relatives. In other words, I knew of these regulations prior to Dr Illing’s arrival at the clinic. Euthanasia cases also took place in Dr Jekelius’s time. When the committee decision became known, it was enacted using Luminal or Veronal tablets. I did not personally administer these drugs since it wasn’t part of my work to feed the children. However, I did pass the task on – or, to be precise, I ordered the nurse on duty to carry out the recommendations received by Dr Jekelius and, later, Dr Illing. […] Injections of morphine-based preparations were used only very rarely: that is, in such cases where the tablets had not had the intended effect, because the parts of the brain normally targeted by Veronal or Luminal were dysfunctional due to the child’s condition. […] I would estimate that between seven and ten children were euthanised in this way every month. […] The reason that I made different statements when interrogated about these matters on 16 October 1945 is that I was required by both Dr Jekelius and later Dr Illing to swear a binding oath not to disclose any of this to anyone. I saw it as my duty to keep my oath also on the occasion of this investigation. As I have already stated, I hardly ever gave the children these drugs myself. I occasionally administered injections. How many children were involved, I don’t know. It was not very many. On the occasions when the nurses did the injections, it is my belief that they [the nurses] were completely aware of the significance of what they did. Exactly how well informed or briefed these nurses were with regard to particulars, I cannot say.
[Sign.]
Dr Marianne Türk
Symptoms
The second interview with the witness Anna Katschenka, 30 March 1946:
JUDGE LEADING THE INVESTIGATION: Are you familiar with this book, Mrs Katschenka? [He holds up, with both hands, a heavy textbook in nursing practice; the cover says HAND- UND LEHRBUCH DER KRANKENPFLEGE.]
ANNA KATSCHENKA: No, I’m not. It was not used during my training years.
JUDGE: No, of course not [leafs through a few more pages]. It was printed in 1940. If I may, I’ll read a short extract to you. It is taken from the third chapter’s second section, second paragraph. It is entitled ‘Other regulations affecting professional healthcare practice’. This is what it says: The National Socialist transformation [of society] has brought about extensive changes in the practice of healthcare. The thinking that now guides German care of the ill as well as general healthcare is based on new approaches to the welfare of the people as a whole. To replace the ‘curative liberality’ that previously dominated the medical profession and which entailed regarding the care of the ill as charity, often exercised by churches and other religious institutions, today’s form of care is directed by the goals already established in our new legislation concerning matters of race and heritability of traits. Hence, new laws and regulations supporting those purposes have been introduced, such as the law defining a Uniform System of Health Care. Also, new organisations have been instituted with the aim of developing and practising NSDAP’s political will and leadership. Are these ideas at all familiar to you?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I have never been a member of NSDAP. I have already made that clear. Party politics do not appeal to me at all.
JUDGE: That’s understood. But what we’re talking about now is not membership of a political organisation. The passage I read to you sets out the law as it affected everyone working in healthcare. It was written in 1940, one year before you, of your own free will, applied for a post at the children’s institution. I take it you can’t seriously claim that you were unaware of the new statutes described in this textbook. Especially as you sought out this workplace yourself and Doctor Jekelius had informed you of the type of children admitted to the clinic. And, presumably, also of what kind of services were expected of you.
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I carried out my work in the same spirit as in the past. And with the same intentions.
JUDGE: I have asked you before if you noted any changes that followed immediately after Doctor Illing’s arrival as medical director. You said no. Is that correct?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: Yes.
JUDGE: However, when Doctor Illing was heard in the People’s Court, he emphasised himself that his powers in the institutional context, and the justification of his right to do what he did, were based on a circular that he safeguarded in one of the desk drawers in his personal office, number 15. I assume that you know of this room, Mrs Katschenka?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: Yes.
JUDGE: Would it be fair to say that you actually went there quite often?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I don’t understand your line of questioning.
JUDGE: This investigation was initiated to prepare for the court case against two defendants who were both your superiors, doctors Illing and Türk. Since the investigation began, a great deal has been unearthed which also changes the circumstances affecting my interviews with you. I believe that you by now have heard of the investigation that is underway in the case of Doctor Margarethe Hübsch, now that she has been found and taken into custody. Apparently Margarethe Hübsch also expects you to be a witness in her favour. But, before you do, I should inform you of the fact that some of your former superiors have changed their statements in view of what has come to light recently. To give you an example, Doctor Türk has admitted that so-called mercy killings were carried out during Doctor Illing’s time as medical director of the clinic. She admits also that these practices were already taking place, although to a lesser extent, during the previous medical director’s time in office. That is, during Doctor Jekelius’s time. Doctor Türk states that she was called in to see Doctor Jekelius soon after she had taken up her post, and that he instructed her about a document issued by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Berlin which set out the recommended procedures and, furthermore, he made it clear that this document was the equivalent of enacted legislation. Now, Mrs Katschenka, I’m sure you will recall that during our earlier conversation, you denied all knowledge of any such circular or document. You confirmed that if there had been such a thing you would definitely have known about it. This would be reasonable in view of your rank in the institution and the nature of your work, and possibly also because of your personal relationship with Doctor Jekelius. When you sought out this institution, it was, you have said, because you wanted to work under Doctor Jekelius. That is already on record and would seem to point to the very likely possibility that you, too, were called to the director’s personal office, number 15, and informed about this document in just the same manner as Doctor Türk. Also, it would indicate that the suggestions that you earlier dismissed as false and groundless rumours were what actually happened.
ANNA KATSCHENKA: […]
JUDGE: Mrs Katschenka?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: [in tears] You don’t understand. You don’t understand what it was like. There were so many of them and they suffered so dreadfully.
JUDGE: Mrs Katschenka. I must reiterate. You are called as a witness. You are not accused of anything. It is also recognised by all of us that we are bound by the oaths of service and that we all have committed ourselves to be loyal to our superiors and have a duty to obey their instructions. I do understand that you feel constrained by such binding declarations but surely you also recognise the absurdity of insisting that you had no idea of what was going on in the institution when those who were your superiors have already admitted that much. Now, you took up your post in 1941, at about the same time as Doctor Türk, isn’t that so?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: [faintly] Doctor Türk was already there when I started.
JUDGE: Well, it’s not important here. You began your work in 1941 and you have already said that you did so willingly because you felt such a great confidence in Doctor Jekelius. Now, it is a fact that even then it was relatively well known what kind of medical man Doctor Jekelius was – if I may put it like that. The condition for Am Spiegelgrund existing at all as a specialist clinic dealing with children with disciplinary problems and, also, very severely ill children, was of course that the majority of the previous in-patients were … let’s call it ‘evacuated’. Transported to another place. Eliminated. This, you must have known. With regard to the daily duties and procedures in your new place of work, you must either have been already aware of them or been told of the aims of the institution after a meeting with Doctor Jekelius, who presumably also felt great confidence in you … [leafs through her personal documents] I can’t see here that you ever looked for another position somewhere else during all those years.
ANNA KATSCHENKA: But you don’t understand. There were … look, I couldn’t get a job anywhere else. All doors were closed to me by then. That was when I realised that there were posts at Steinhof, and that Doctor Jekelius … [weeps] I had been at Lainz but would so much have preferred to work with children. Before, at Wilhelminenspital, I had worked with children, many of them were so very ill but it wasn’t …
JUDGE: So, it shocked you to see what kind of clinic you had signed up for?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I was completely horrified. It was not at all what I had expected. Besides, I had never had any training to prepare me for nursing children who suffered from such extensive malformations or neurological diseases. This was actually true of most of the staff in the children’s clinic – they weren’t trained for this work either. There were some who had qualifications in paediatric nursing but most of them were leftovers from Steinhof. Asylum nurses. And nursing assistants. Soon after I had taken up the post, I asked to see Doctor Jekelius to tell him that I was not suitable, simply not the right person. That was when he explained it to me.
JUDGE: Explained what?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: Well, that letter … the document you were speaking about earlier.
JUDGE: When was this?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I can’t remember. Soon after I had begun my new job. Perhaps just a few days later.
JUDGE: And what did he tell you?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: He said that I had by then seen with my own eyes that the condition of the children who were admitted to the clinic was truly miserable, that some of them were incurable and, in such cases, certain procedures had to be followed.
JUDGE: And what were the procedures in such cases?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: He said that the final decisions were made in Berlin and that the local doctors never decided on their own. In that sense, the children on the wards were there for observation. Our main task was to observe them very carefully so that we could submit accurate and thorough case reports as bases for final conclusions.
JUDGE: When that conclusion from Berlin arrived, what did you do?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: The judgement was up to the doctors.
JUDGE: How did you react when you learnt all this?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I simply didn’t understand at first. I only realised when Doctor Jekelius let me see the Berlin document. He showed me that it was sent out from the Führer’s own ministry and was signed by the Führer personally. Jekelius said that since it came from the person of the Führer, it had the same status as any law, only in this instance the situation demanded secrecy. I assumed that he referred to the war.
JUDGE: And then?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: Then he reminded me that I had taken an oath and sworn to be silent about the work I do. And he said that I must not, in any circumstance, tell anyone about any aspect of the institution or about the principles which were applied and, well obviously, anything about individual cases.
JUDGE: Was that all?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: What do you mean?
JUDGE: Do you remember anything else? For instance, do you remember what the Berlin circular – that’s what we’re speaking about, surely – looked like?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I was far too upset to notice any details. I remember that it was written on quite ordinary letter-pad paper, nothing special at all. Except the symbol, the eagle and the swastika in the top left-hand corner. And the signature at the bottom.
JUDGE: The Führer’s signature?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I believe so.
JUDGE: Then it would be fair to say that, from this time, from this talk, you knew – knew not only what was going on but also what the aim of it was. Is that right?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: […]
JUDGE: I suggest that at this point, we should take a break. The court will rise and you can use the time to consider what you will include in your statement. You may want to discuss it with your lawyer. Then we shall have a look at the case of Doctor Hübsch.
Treatment
The second interview with the witness Anna Katschenka continued:
JUDGE: Now, Mrs Katschenka, have you made up your mind about what you want to include in the final statement? We had better start at the beginning, from the first day you took up your post at the institution.
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I started work at Am Spiegelgrund in January 1941. At the time, Doctor Jekelius was the medical director. My post was Ward Sister and I was allocated to pavilion 15. The institution, as it was then organised, also catered for children with difficult disciplinary problems. But some of the children were profoundly unwell, with differing types and degrees of malformation and debility. On admission, each child underwent a very thorough examination. Our task was defined as observing the children during a limited period of time in order to provide the required details that were to be the basis not only for a final diagnosis but also for any future evaluation of each child’s condition. Each child was also photographed to illustrate the case notes. All sick children admitted to the clinic were then reported to the state committee in Berlin for scientific evaluation of heritable and family background-related severe disease. Then, at a later point, the committee would issue a recommendation about how we should proceed – that is, which children were to receive treatment or continue to be kept under observation.
JUDGE: If the decision was that a child was to ‘receive treatment’, what did that mean?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: It meant that the child should be killed. In the meantime, many children died anyway. It also happened several times that a child whom Berlin had ordered us to treat remained under observation because we still had some hope that their condition might improve. This was what we hoped for all the time. You must understand. These children were very ill and often had very severe inherited organic defects. For instance, some of them lacked certain parts of the brain. We cared for children with water on the brain – hydrocephalus – children with paresis or paraplegia, with spina bifida or spinal cord herniation. At the less serious end of the spectrum were children with cramps, atrophic conditions and paralysis. Most of them were quite heavily medicated. Many had to be tied down at all times, or kept in straitjackets to prevent them from sticking fingers up the rectum and then eating their faeces.
JUDGE: How was the treatment carried out?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: For those who were able to eat more or less normally, we mixed the medication into the food. For very ill infants who couldn’t swallow, we administered drops of morphine in very small doses. The larger children were mainly given Luminal.
JUDGE: And everyone knew that a treatment of this kind would end in death?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: Yes, everyone knew.
JUDGE: How often was this done? Was it a daily occurrence, or weekly? How often would you say?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I don’t quite understand.
JUDGE: Was it part of, as it were, the day-to-day routine to carry out such treatments or to discuss further treatments?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: Yes, that’s right.
JUDGE: On whose orders were these treatments carried out?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: The doctor in charge or, if not there at the time, the doctor on duty.
JUDGE: What you are telling me is that it would be impossible for drugs of this kind to be administered, and the intended effect achieved, without the knowledge of the doctor in charge?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: Yes, that is so.
JUDGE: Now, which doctors are we talking about?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: Doctor Jekelius during his time at the institution. If he wasn’t available in person, doctors Gross or Türk would take over. And, later on, Doctor Illing.
JUDGE: And Doctor Hübsch? She was after all employed as second in command to Doctor Jekelius when he was absent at various times. In your view, was Doctor Hübsch also fully informed and aware of what was required?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: Doctor Hübsch was a senior consultant and didn’t always join in the daily rounds, but because these recommendations were issued by the board and the director of the institution, it is hard to believe that she didn’t know about them. After all, she was the director’s deputy and attended board meetings when Doctor Jekelius was away. Besides, she was a committed National Socialist. She was always dressed according to regulations, displayed NSDAP party insignia and always used the Heil Hitler greeting. I think it’s impossibile that she wasn’t fully informed.
JUDGE: I think this is enough for today, Mrs Katschenka.
Anatomy
Extract from the hearing of the witness Dr Barbara Uiberrak, senior registrar and pathologist at Steinhof, January 1946:
I have been employed at the Steinhof asylum since 1933. Since that year, I have been in charge of post-mortem examinations for the entire hospital complex, i.e. not only for the mental hospital but also for all institutions linked to the Steinhof asylum. Over the years, the hospital has of course undergone several changes. The children’s clinic was opened and then a reform school. In addition, a labour camp for women was established and then a military hospital. Throughout these changes, I carried out autopsies as required by all these institutions, including the military hospital. Practically all dead bodies were autopsied. It was only when the workload became so large that we were no longer able to sustain the burden that we stopped carrying out post-mortem examinations on subjects who had died from old-age-related decay.
Doctors Illing and Türk I only know of as colleagues at work. We did not meet privately. Doctor Türk was known as someone who was not a National Socialist, while Doctor Illing was widely known to be a National Socialist. He wore his party badges prominently at all time.
I was not aware that there were state instructions about carrying out euthanasia in certain parts of the institution. My staff would talk about these matters, for instance the rumour that procedures in the children’s clinic were not what they should be. Personally, I gave no credence to all that. There was a lot of loose talk going around at the time which turned out to be quite unfounded. As for the children’s corpses, I never picked up anything untoward at autopsy.
All I can say about Dr Illing is that he gave me the impression of being an exceptionally meticulous physician who took a most unusual interest in individual cases. It often happened that he came to see me in order to examine more closely some particular autopsy observation or generally to survey the material. In brief, to my mind, he left a very good impression indeed, as a doctor and a human being – a morally highly commendable person and very devoted to his duties as a doctor.
As required, I shall here make short statements concerning some of the cases of morbidity I saw at the time:
I. Boys:
1) Sturdik, Anton: The child was unfit for life. It is hard to judge how long he would have survived. This boy was paralysed and, as shown in two of the photos, he is, as it were, lying on his head. This is normal in children with severe muscular spasms in the legs. The photograph of his brain indicates clearly the expanded ventricular system (internal). Otherwise, no marked changes. If one went by the brain development alone, such debility would be unexpected. As in so much research into brain function, the effects of lesions are obscure.
2) Wenzel, Johan: An advanced case of hydrocephalus (water on the brain) with diminished brain development.
3) Lasch, Wolfgang: A child of spiritually highly developed parents, Wolfgang sustained brain damage due to X-ray irradiation during the second month of the mother’s pregnancy. The child was a complete idiot. He survived until his seventeenth birthday. I believe that the child’s mother died before her son. Her nerves were completely damaged.
4) Rothmayer, Gerhard: Very severe brain damage, however, relatively difficult to find any lesions from external inspection alone.
5) Rimser, Günther: Severe brain damage.
This pattern continues throughout all the case histories of the children.
II. Girls:
1) Schmidt, Brigitte: Severe brain injuries shown on X-rays. Injuries of this type can be inherited defects or also have been caused during labour, e.g. at forceps delivery. Destroyed brain cells do not regenerate.
2) Kramerstätter, Maria Theresie: In this case, the cerebellum is almost entirely missing.
Almost all these cases are exceedingly interesting from a scientific point of view. We have preserved 700 or so brain specimens, which are kept here, ‘Am Steinhof’. In most cases, fixed speciments of all endocrine glands have also been kept. The intention was that all these anatomical items should become available for scientific study, especially to illuminate neurological pathology. I think one or several cases could usefully be investigated annually. This would be a way to achieve a wide overview.
‘Save yourself, Mrs Katschenka’ You’re out of your mind, Otto says when he realises the kind of admissions that his sister had felt that she must make. You’re out of your fucking mind. His eyes have gone blank, his lips are quivering like an upset child. She tries to convince him that she had no choice. If her own ex-superiors, like doctors Illing and Türk, are retracting their previous statements and admit that the clinic’s children were subjected to euthanasia – what can she do? Doctor Illing even insisted that he is proud of his achievements. He says that he has at all times been on the right side of the law. They will always have the law on their side or find a senior person to hide behind, Otto says, but who will protect and defend you? The war ended a year ago but Otto is still employed on clearing-up crews and is at this point out at Lobau, where the Nazis had been busy constructing a new facility for landing oil. The excavations were done by tens of thousands of Soviet POWs who had been transported there. Otto inspected the barracks where the workers were housed. They lived in quite a style, he says, and his voice is full of contempt. Much better than we did. Can you explain that? Why should they, who were prisoners after all, have been provided with all these goodies like housing and free food? Back then, they were much better off than us ordinary honest workers, and that’s still true enough. She realises that his bitterness festers like a wound. She still remembers the day when he came home on leave and placed his hands on the table as far from the plate as he reasonably could, as if he didn’t want to recognise them as belonging to him, and that was when she knew that his hands had been used to kill. For whom, for what had he killed? He is asking himself that and now she is aware that she, too, could ask herself that question. A few weeks after putting her signature to the last witness statement, she gets a phone call from a man who says that he is Doctor Illing’s legal representative. She doesn’t catch his name, maybe he never said, but he is punctiliously polite and enquires about her family and how she is managing during these difficult times before he launches into his real reasons for calling her. He asks her if she has completely grasped that Doctor Illing will stand accused in court of crimes which were lawful acts in the legal context that applied during the war. Surely, the man insists, the fact was that if Doctor Illing had acted in contravention of the regulations in force at the time, he would have been guilty of a punishable offence. He might have been dismissed from his post, and possibly brought in front of a military court. Perhaps, Mrs Katschenka, you have not given sufficient weight to the same considerations in your own case. You should do so without delay. You, too, followed the institution’s rules and regulations at the time. No human being can set him – or herself – above history or commit themselves to obeying another, supposedly ‘higher’ form of law and justice than that which governs other citizens. You would be punished for such heresy. This is why I beg you: save yourself, Mrs Katschenka. Don’t agree to say in court what you have been told to say. Everyone knows that you were the person responsible for seeing to it that the prescribed lethal doses of certain drugs were given to the children. Therefore, don’t admit to anything that might compromise you further or, indeed, any of your previous superiors. By inducing you to make these admissions, the People’s Court doesn’t aim at arriving at a clear understanding of what happened in the interest of what they would call justice. Instead, they will try to turn your statements against you. Which is why I advise you to make no admissions whatsoever. Repeat to the court that you don’t know and can’t remember. I beg you, Mrs Katschenka. Lives depend on you. Not only those of your former superiors, but your own. Who was that on the phone? Otto asks when she has put the receiver down, but she doesn’t know what to tell him so she says that she’s in a hurry because of an arrangement to see one of her woman friends. Otto’s gaze goes blank again. He knows that his sister isn’t going to meet a friend. She has no friends, male or female. But he does not try to prevent her from going out. When she is in the street she can’t think what to do and, because she is at a loss, she boards the number 6 tram at Matzleinsdorferplatz as she used to do every morning when she went to work. It is a mistake. She understands that at once. There she is! she hears a voice call out from the back of the carriage. When she turns to look, there they all are, of course. All the crazed mothers who used to hang around the hospital gates, waiting, are now seated around her and behind her. Mrs Barth and Mrs Schelling, the mother of the girl they had to tie down all the time; Felix Keuschnig’s mother, and Mrs Althofer, whose daughter was the girl with the pigeon chest. They seem to re-enact their children’s behaviours: Mrs Schelling strokes her wrists constantly, as if still feeling pain where the leather straps would have marked them; Mrs Keuschnig drags her feet and pulls her legs along one at a time, just like her son; Mrs Barth’s hands are constantly visiting her broad behind and she licks her lips as if they were smeared with excrement, too. And, indeed, Mrs Althofer has a pigeon chest. She sits, as if up to her ears in concerns, her pointy chin jammed into the base of her neck while her stumpy arms wave in the air. All these women are fumbling to get hold of her, touching her with their small, repulsive hands, flapping about and squeaking and shrieking. Kill her, kill her! they yell. She throws herself forward, begs the driver to stop, while around her the mothers are barking with wide-open maws and wildly staring eyes. A tram-stop sign slips past, the doors open and she is free of them at last. The next morning, she walks to the Landesgericht and says that she wants to retract everything she said in her last interview session. But the investigating judge isn’t there or, perhaps, doesn’t want to see her.
Stone Faces The trial of the three main defendants in the so-called Steinhof case – doctors Illing, Türk and Hübsch – began on 15 July 1946. That day was a Monday and the trial continued for the rest of that week. Anna Katschenka, nominated by the press as the leading witness for the prosecution, was called to take the stand on the second day, the Tuesday. Earlier that morning, Marie D testified. She was the mother of sixteen-year-old Martha, who had been born with a cranium as thin as a bird’s egg. Martha was unable to walk or to speak, and the slightest touch caused her pain. Mrs D directs her words alternately to the judge and to the members of the public who had struggled to get in and now packed the courtroom. Everyone is following the proceedings in and around the witness stand with tense attention. Mrs D speaks of how she, from the very first, had done everything in her power to make her little daughter better. She fed her special nutritional supplements and bathed the twisted infant body in rock-salt solution to strengthen her skeleton. However, none of the many doctors she consulted dared to give her any hope. No medicine in the world can save a child like yours, one of the doctors told her. In September 1944, she had used up the last of her strength and the angelic patience that everyone who knew her agreed that she had shown, and brought her daughter to Spiegelgrund in a taxi. She was received in the clinic by Doctor Illing, who initially impressed her as ‘graciousness personified’. He asked her why she hadn’t sought help earlier and assured her that, to him, there were no ‘hopeless cases’. When Mrs D had explained her circumstances in more detail (the child was apparently born out of wedlock and the father was simply never mentioned) and her fear that her fragile daughter would be hurt at the hands of strangers, Doctor Illing became quite upset: Do you really believe so ill of us, Mrs D? We are here to help people like you. I am a father myself and I treat every child in this clinic as if he or she were one of my own. But despite his vehemence, Mrs D had not felt wholly convinced. In the days that followed after she had left Martha, she made several visits to the clinic, but every time she asked to see her daughter, the staff told her that it was impossible. Doctor Illing had banned all visits in view of the child’s ‘weak nerves’. After another few failed attempts to see Martha, Mrs D was finally ushered into the ward where Martha’s bed was. Her daughter had changed for the worse:
Her hair had been combed straight back, her lips were blistered, her head lay weakly on the pillow and her tormented body expressed itself in incessant whimpering and weeping. That upset me more than anything else, these tears that kept flowing from her eyes, my girl who had never as much as whimpered a complaint in her entire life. I immediately asked to see the doctor and demanded to know what she had done to my daughter. Then, Doctor Türk answered that, in the first place, your daughter is very ill, her temperature is very high, and that is only to be expected with a child like yours, you must prepare for the worst.
And then, on 23 October 1944 when, after endless waiting, I was finally allowed to see my child, death had already left its mark. Under the thin coverlet, her thin body looked famished, like a skeleton, her eyes were unnaturally large and she no longer had the strength to even lift her head from the pillow. I was close to insanity, out of control. I wanted to speak to the doctor at once but the doctor was unavailable and wouldn’t be back on the ward until the following morning. I had to wait.
Next, Mrs D received a notification of bad news – a Schlechtmeldung. By this stage, Mrs D’s identification with her ill daughter had become so intense that she describes how it felt as if she had herself been given a ‘dose of powder’ by the staff. She was struck down by fever, her temperature rose to forty-two degrees centigrade and, when a doctor was called, he diagnosed ‘nerve fever’. Two days later, the final letter arrived:
It is our tragic duty to convey to you that your daughter Martha passed away this morning at 07.30 a.m.
Dead, after just three and a half weeks in a hospital, Mrs D says, turning to face the dumbstruck public, and at home, with us, she lived for fifteen and a half years!
There are other witnesses to follow Mrs D that day, including the nursing assistant Anny Wödl. Anny Wödl was not at Steinhof but was an employee of the Allgemeines Krankenhaus. She had looked after her little boy Alfred at home for six years and was a single parent throughout. Alfred, according to Wödl, ‘understood everything you said to him but couldn’t speak’. His legs were apparently also not entirely functional because his walking was very poor:
Truth to tell, none of the doctors seemed able to give us a straight account of what was wrong with Alfred. Instead, they recommended that I should place him in care of some sort. And because I’m a single woman who couldn’t work and look after Alfred at the same time, I arranged for him to be taken in at Gugging, which had a good reputation.
But then 1938 arrived, the republic was dissolved and the Nazis took over. Terrible rumours were doing the rounds among people who worked in healthcare, stories about how the new authorities dealt with the old and the mentally ill. One of Wödl’s closest colleagues at the AKH had a son who was mentally retarded and had been at Steinhof since several years back. Now, she visited him as often as she could because she was so worried that something would be done to him. The day came when she arrived at Steinhof only to be told that her son was no longer a patient there. He had been transferred, as part of war-related measures, as they said – kriegsbedingte Massnahme. By then, all official decisions and all newly introduced systems of social order were explained in terms of the war effort and its demands. The boy’s mother was told that he was now in a spa resort on the German Baltic coast. A couple of weeks later, she received a letter telling her that her son had ‘died suddenly’. Around this time, thousands of other women in Wien also received letters speaking of ‘sudden death’ having struck down their children, parents or close relatives. Those who approached the hospital board at Steinhof and demanded to be told more about these deaths, and in particular what caused them, were referred to the city’s main office for public health, the Hauptgesundheitsamt, on Schottenring, but once there, the enquirers were referred on again, this time to various committees within the Ministry for Internal Affairs in Berlin. By then, all important decisions were made in Berlin. One group of distraught women decided to club together and send a representative to Berlin, charged with making enquiries and demanding answers. The women chose Anny Wödl to represent them (even though Wödl herself had not yet shared their experiences; her son Alfred was still in the Gugging home and well cared for). ‘People from Wien plead for their relatives’ – Wiener bitten für Angehörige – is the entry in the visitor’s book at the ministry on Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin on 23 July 1940, the day Nurse Assistant Anny Wödl arrived in the capital of the Reich. She was received by Doctor Herbert Linden, Secretary of State with responsibility for Section IV, which dealt with healthcare and public health – Gesundheitswesen und Volkspflege. This section (abbreviated T4) had final say in decisions about which individuals in the Reich should be weeded out for reasons, as related to racial purity or social medicine, that turned them into so many millstones around the neck of the healthcare system, already under severe strain from the war effort. What must be prioritised, after all, was to make the system ready to serve the essentially healthy and fit for work, whose contributions of course include producing future generations of children in sound mental and physical health and, thus, enhancing the racial stock. Doctor Linden explained all this in precise detail to Anny Wödl and his calm, matter-of-fact kindness included an element of firmness. He also commented on the need for the transport of patients to take place at night since it prevented unnecessary and potentially damaging rumours from spreading among the general public. Furthermore, it must be obvious to all that Wien and Ostmark could not be exempt from a healthcare policy that by definition applied to the entire Reich. There was a war on, after all. Germany must be prepared to strengthen its preparedness on all fronts. That means the internal front as well, he said. How are we to keep up our preparedness to go into battle if, for reasons of sentiment or similar feelings, we end up soiling our race, undermining our morals and weakening our will and our strength of character? And that was that. Wödl had to accept that this message was all she would ever get to bring back from Berlin. She set out for Wien and, in January 1941, half a year later, she learnt in various underhand ways that her son Alfred had been forced to undergo a new medical examination which showed that the boy suffered from what the doctor described as ‘athetotis’. The symptoms are spasmodic, involuntary movements that are often slow and oddly writhing; in addition to the motor effects, co-ordination was also disturbed. The doctor suggested that the condition might have followed an attack of encephalitis, the same inflammation of the membranes around the brain that had also caused Alfred to develop ‘a medium degree of debility’ and meant that he became almost permanently bedridden. On 6 February, Anny Wödl received a card, sent to the AKH ward where she was working at the time. The card stated:
Your son, Alfred Wödl, on the date as shown above, was admitted to the clinic for children under the control of Wiener Städtische Jugendfürsorgeanstalt known as ‘Am Spiegelgrund’, 109/14 Sanatoriumstrasse 2, Wien.
On 15 February, Doctor Heinrich Gross examined Alfred and also took a photograph of him. In the photo, the miracle-boy Alfred Wödl stares with serious, eerily enquiring eyes at the doctor and his camera. Perhaps the child had not quite grasped what an enlightening observation Gross felt that he had just made. The doctor added a triumphant note to Alfred’s record: The child is half Jewish! (15.02.41). Clearly, the pieces had clicked into place: Alfred was born out of wedlock, the Wödl woman had never disclosed who the father was and the boy’s condition had never been ascribed to a credible medical cause. Meanwhile, Anny Wödl succeeded in getting in touch with the Spiegelgrund clinic’s medical director, Doctor Erwin Jekelius. Many years later, she tells the court that she had completely given up on hoping to save her child and says this about the meeting with Jekelius:
All I wanted was to stop them from transferring Alfred to somewhere else. If it was necessary for him to die then I at least wanted to make sure that he wouldn’t suffer. So I asked Doctor Jekelius in case he felt that he could not save my son’s life, he could surely see to it that Alfred’s death was as quick and painless as possible. If he did, or if he passed the task on to someone else and, if so, what that person did – I don’t know.
Anny Wödl sits looking down and crying quietly. The courtroom is still and silent. The chairman of the bench calls the witness Anna Katschenka. The chief witness for the prosecution. Now, the atmosphere among the public changes to outrage. Someone screams murderess! when Katschenka is escorted into the court. She walks at her usual slow pace but to the public it looks as if she tries to resist the two court attendants who hold on to her arms. To those who know her, she seems wearier than before. She will now be asked to testify about the actions of the defendants, who are seated together, Hübsch and Illing on either side of Türk. They all stare at her with inexpressive faces. Faces set in stone. It is impossible to tell whether they feel ill at ease or are supremely indifferent. The prosecutor starts speaking at once about the so-called mercy killing of children. He reads aloud from a text which sets out the events following a child’s admission: the physical examination followed by a report to the committee in Berlin, and the subsequent response by Spiegelgrund staff to the ministry’s decision about the child, including any recommended ‘treatment’.
Have I described all this correctly, Mrs Katschenka?
Anna Katschenka doesn’t know what to say. She looks at the stone faces opposite her, then down at her hands – worn, rough-skinned but clean hands, used to doing what they intend, effectively, be it to tuck in a corner of a sheet or compress a vein before inserting the syringe needle; they are supportive, helpful and sometimes punitive hands and not the kind that are mere tools. You cannot ignore what they have been up to. Sometimes, she has thought that her hands are her: all she is. And sometimes, at night, she has put them on her face and thought that they should stay there, stay for so long that they fuse to her skin. She doesn’t know if this would be a gesture towards expressing shame or grief or abandonment or all of these things at the same time. But she knows that she will sit with her face resting on those hands until the sentence is announced and the stone faces will observe her with their high-minded or indifferent eyes and everyone will think that she is to be punished as it is only what she deserves, given the acts these hands have carried out.
PROSECUTOR: Can you tell me when and by what means you were first informed that the euthanasia – mercy killing – was practised on the clinic’s children?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I had never in my entire professional life seen patients who were as ill as these children and, in no other hospital, experienced anything like this clinic.
PROSECUTOR: That is not what we’re talking about at present. When did you find out that children were euthanised at the clinic where you were working?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I had heard rumours suggesting that adult, mentally ill patients at Steinhof had been killed.
PROSECUTOR: As for the children …
ANNA KATSCHENKA: I knew nothing about that.
CHAIRMAN OF THE BENCH: [interrupts] Mrs Katschenka, you have stated in interviews prior to this trial that even Doctor Jekelius systematically terminated the lives of children who had been deemed unfit to live by the committee in Berlin and that your allotted task was precisely this: to judge who was due for termination and who should continue to be under observation. It was the point of the whole enterprise, if you excuse the levity. Children were subjected to euthanasia in the clinic. Is that not so?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: There might have been certain suspicions.
PROSECUTOR: Suspicions about what?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: About the procedures not being quite right but more …
PROSECUTOR: But more?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: More than that I can’t say.
CHAIRMAN: [interrupts] Excuse me, Mrs Katschenka, but you initially were the Ward Sister and later also Deputy Matron. It was part of your conditions of work – indeed, of your duties – to see to it that the sick children were treated according to doctor’s orders. It is simply not possible that you remained unaware of what the medical staff prescribed for the children.
ANNA KATSCHENKA: Yes … that’s true.
CHAIRMAN: Or are you suggesting the children themselves got hold of these powerful drugs?
[Ripples of nervous laughter in the audience.]
ANNA KATSCHENKA: […]
CHAIRMAN: In the preparatory hearings, you stated the following about how the ‘special treatments’ were carried out: [reads] For those who were able to eat more or less normally, we mixed the medication into the food. For very ill infants who couldn’t swallow, we administered drops of morphine in very small doses. The larger children were mainly given Luminal. Furthermore, in your answer to the question ‘And everyone knew that treatment of this kind would end in a death?’ you replied unconditionally that yes, it would would end in death, and yes, everyone did know. On whose orders did you do these things?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: [weeps]
PROSECUTOR: Were the orders in fact not given by the three defendants, seated here in the courtroom today? the stone faces
ANNA KATSCHENKA: Doctor Illing … and Doctor Türk both paid great attention to the well-being of the children and there were no objections to the manner in which they treated the children.
CHAIRMAN: [speaking sharply] Mrs Katschenka! Who or what has caused you to say these things today which are completely the opposite of what you said in the investigation interviews? During the time that has passed since then, what kinds of pressure you been under? And who has exerted this pressure?
ANNA KATSCHENKA: [weeps] the stone faces
CHAIRMAN: I would like the two court attendants to step forward.
[The court attendants approach hesitatingly.]
Please, Mrs Katschenka, will you stand up now?
[Katschenka attempts to stand.]
I hereby order that this witness is arrested and imprisoned with immediate effect on the grounds that she is suspected of being an accomplice to murder. From now on, this woman is under arrest.
Much celebration in the courtroom. Anna Katschenka does try to stand up but on hearing the words of the most senior judge present, she sinks back onto her seat and almost falls forward, burying her face in her hands. When the attendants put their hands under her arms to support her, her weeping makes her shoulders shake so much it is almost impossible to raise her. For a brief moment, the woman, her face streaming with tears, looks up at the three stone faced doctors on the defendants’ seats: superiors whom she for this last time could not bring herself to betray. When she is led away, the audience is in uproar. This is more than anyone dared to hope for: a murderess who is arrested right in front of witnesses and victims. The three stone faces stay where they are. Illing turns his head slightly away, as if he found the entire performance repulsive.
Atonement The sentence in the separate trial of Anna Katschenka was announced in April 1948. She was condemned to eight years in prison with the additional punishment of three months’ hard labour every year. She was to do her time in Maria Lankowitz, a women’s prison near Graz. The prison housed more than three hundred inmates who had to sleep in cells shared between up to twenty prisoners at a time. The cells lacked toilets and running water. The only source of warmth was a big stove in the middle of the room which was only sparingly supplied with fuel, even in the winter. Of course, tightly packed human bodies give off their own warmth. During the first few months, before her cell was changed, she had nowhere to keep her personal belongings and nowhere to sit except on her bunk. The prison board did not encourage differentiation between inmates on grounds of their offences. Women who had been served more than year-long terms for theft, fraud or falsification of official documents sometimes shared cells with murderers on life sentences. For a while, Anna Katschenka was courted by a younger woman who had poisoned and killed her own daughter. To look at, this woman seemed ordinary enough. She kept clean and neat, was always polite and respectful, if perhaps a little distracted at times. If spoken to, she inclined her head and smiled enigmatically with her eyes fixed on the floor or a nearby wall. Her interest in Katschenka was quite rational: she had read about the Steinhof trials and was simply keen to know how Katschenka and her colleagues had ‘gone about doing it’. They never shared a cell, which was just as well, because Anna Katschenka soon came to dread her like the plague. The woman was a curse that had taken on human shape. Katschenka tried her best to avoid having to pass her in the corridors and always left the prisoners’ canteen as soon the poisoner turned up. She even went to the length of formally asking to be moved to the so-called Labour Building where prostitutes and drug addicts were held. Later on, she withdrew inside herself and deliberately avoided all contact with people, warders and fellow prisoners alike, and stayed silent unless ordered to speak up. She was haunted by a recurring image of herself alone on the defendant’s seat. Again and again, other details from the trial proceedings also came back to her mind. Officially, the prosecution’s case was not just against her but also her colleagues in pavilion 15: Maria Bohlenrath, Erna Storch, Emilie Kragulj and Cläre Kleinschmittger. But she had been given to understand that the police had failed to find and arrest any of them, despite extensive searches. What would have happened if she hadn’t returned to the hospital that day? What would have happened if she had stuck to her original witness statement regardless of Illing and Türk’s confessions and washed her hands of the accusations, insisting, as had Marianne Türk, that what she had done only amounted to carrying out orders given by others. After all, decisions about treating or not treating were made in Berlin and not in the clinic at Spiegelgrund. I only did my duty. Now and then, she forced herself to go even further back in time: what if she hadn’t applied for that post at Spiegelgrund with Jekelius? But at that point, her speculations had to stop. There had been a war on. If she couldn’t earn, what would her family have lived on? She was her father’s supporting arm, her mother’s map of the world. She felt now that, by being locked up, she had let her patients down and betrayed her responsibility towards them. The days went by, and the years, each day being added onto the previous one like a small cog in a wheel that moved a tiny little bit closer to the end of her prison term. All the while, another bigger wheel, whose cogs made it move in the opposite direction towards her own ageing and death, seemed to drive her deeper and deeper into darkness. The burden of punishment never became lighter but instead ever more impossible to endure. Altogether, she was to spend four years, five months and eight days of her life in prison, including the time in police cells. Throughout, she who had spent her professional life watching and judging others had to put up with being watched herself, having every aspect of her body and personality measured and weighed, scrutinised and analysed. Her lawyer’s application for parole led to her being subjected to a wide range of medical examinations in April 1950. The records show that her already sparse hair had thinned further and gone grey. Her body, always a little on the sturdy side, had swelled and hardened. Katschenka cannot stand being touched by strangers and bursts into tears easily. She is said to suffer from cyclical attacks of depression and these pronounced mood swings, together with her enhanced sensitivity and marked secretory activity, were considered by the examining doctor to be symptoms of excess thyroid hormone production, which would also fit with her irritability. From the application for parole, it is also clear that Katschenka has gained exceptionally high approval ratings for good behaviour. She works as an assistant in the prison hospital and is praised by the doctors for her ‘diligence and sober attention to detail, her willingness to help at all times and her gentle and sensible manner’. She is allowed to leave the prison in December 1950, but her release is conditional and the remainder of her sentence has been changed into a five-year-long trial period. She is now allowed to look for real work and manages to land a job after about six months of applying: the post is in a children’s hospital, the St Anna Kinderspital on Kinderspitalgasse in Wien’s 9th Bezirk. Now she can work with children, the kind of nursing she loves better than any other, as she has claimed in her witness statement and parole application. But the St Anna Kinderspital is a private hospital. Her position in the city healthcare system was lost the moment she was sacked from Spiegelgrund. A permanent post, with the possibility of a payout on retirement of what she had saved for her pension, is out of her reach unless she becomes fully rehabilitated. So far, all her applications have been refused. In September 1956, when a last application has again been turned down, she appeals in a letter to the Minister of Justice, Otto Tschadek, pleading that he should intervene on her behalf:
Most highly esteemed Minister,
I believe that I need not try to express how hard this refusal has been for me other than to say that, after all these years of worry and grief, I hoped once more to have the right to feel a worthy human being. The documentation I have enclosed demonstrates that, since my release from prison, I have strenuously devoted myself to return to my previous profession of nursing, and also what difficulties my efforts encountered. I have to support my elderly parents and also build a new existence for myself. My sentence entailed the loss of my post in the Gemeinde Wien after 21 years of service and also my old-age pension since I can work only in privately run institutions. In January 1951, I applied to Gemeinde Wien for reinstatement in the healthcare services but have to this day not had any reply even though influential civil servants have intervened on my behalf.
I grew up in a Socialist family. My father, Otto Katschenka, was a printer and has been a member of the Social Democratic Party since 1895. On his 80th birthday (14 November 1954), the party honoured him in many ways and he was also given a photo of President Doctor Körner, dedicated and signed, as my father and the President worked shoulder to shoulder on the construction of the ski-jump slope in Kobenzl. I was a member of the Social Democratic Party from 1923 to 1934 and re-joined in 1945.
My father had a stroke in July this year and I live alone with him and my mother, who I have to both care for and support with money.
Most revered Minister, I beg you with all my heart to help me so that I no longer have to carry the burden of the legal consequences of the verdict against me. I have received the most laudatory recommendations throughout my years of service and have never been a bad human being, but was dragged into court proceedings due to unfortunate circumstances. I was only the executive arm of the Spiegelgrund board and have surely atoned for the acts that the conditions of my post forced me to carry out.
Please, Herr Minister, help a decent human being and a Socialist who will always be deeply grateful and work hard to be worthy of your support.
With greatest regards,
Anna Katschenka
Also this last application is refused. Anna Katschenka is never rehabilitated. Sixty-one years old, she dies in Wien in February 1966.