IN HITLER’S WARPED mind a caricatured image of the mentally ill threatened the purity of the German Volk. In his nightmares he saw patients “bedded on sand or sawdust because they continually befouled themselves,” and he became fascinated with the idea of the elimination of the weak.1
Early in 1939 he called two senior Nazi civil servants to his office in Berlin. One of them was Hans Lammers, chief of the Reich Chancellery and one of Hitler’s most trusted legal advisers. Lammers later recalled that Hitler “considered it to be proper that the ‘life unworthy of life’ of severely mentally ill persons be eliminated by actions [Eingriffe] that bring about death.”2
That October Hitler ordered that certain registered doctors should have the authority to see that “patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgement [menschlichem Ermessen] of their state of health, can be granted a mercy death [Gnadentod].”3 The decree was written on Hitler’s private stationery and would be issued straight to chosen physicians, bypassing the official state bureaucracy and the scrutiny of the public—both of whom it was felt might not be willing to accept such a policy.
There were about one million people in Germany in 1939 who came within the scope of the decree.4
To oversee the new program, a special section of the chancellery was created. The department was camouflaged under the title the Reich Work Group of Sanatoriums and Nursing Homes, or Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft Heil- und Pflegeanstalten (RAG). The program would be referred to by the code name T4, taken from the Tiergartenstrasse 4 address of the chancellery itself.
Questionnaires were sent to psychiatric institutions, hospitals, and homes for chronic patients across the Reich, and one had to be filled in for every patient. It sought to identify people who, because of “specified diseases” such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, “senile diseases,” and encephalitis, might be “not employable”; patients who had been institutionalized for at least five years; those who were criminally insane; and those “who are not German citizens, or are not of German or kindred blood.”5
Doctors were not told the purpose of the forms and were given very little time to complete them. Tragically, some doctors exaggerated patients’ conditions out of compassion as they feared the authorities were seeking to return sick people to work or military service.
The Nazis opened six main killing centers in converted mental hospitals and nursing homes surrounded by high walls. All were isolated buildings so that buses could be brought in without arousing suspicion and the screams of patients would not reach the outside world.
To begin with, the Nazis experimented with killing by injections of various combinations of morphine, scopolamine, curare, and prussic acid (cyanide), but this was found to kill too slowly, with the victim often requiring a second injection.6 Under the guidance of Christian Wirth, a superintendent in the criminal investigation department of the Stuttgart Police, the program then took possession of a gas chamber, which was disguised as a shower room into which “water pipes” were inserted. The gas was pumped in through the pipes.
At the first demonstration of this early Nazi gas chamber, August Becker, an SS chemist, watched through a peephole as eighteen to twenty naked people were led inside. Very quickly they “toppled over or lay on the benches” without “scenes of commotion.” The corpses were then incinerated in a crematory oven.
The macabre blueprint for T4 and the Holocaust had been established.
BETWEEN JANUARY 1940 and August 1941, more than seventy thousand people were murdered as part of the T4 program.
The family of each person received a falsified death certificate so that the authorities could cover up the truth. Common causes of death given were infectious diseases, pneumonia, and heart failure. Trainee doctors joining the scheme were advised on how to make up a reason for death that would be consistent with the patient’s condition.7
Despite Hitler’s wish to keep T4 from the public, it was a secret that was too large to keep. Working at the killing centers caused stress, and many workers ended up drinking in local bars and unburdening themselves on others. People who found themselves working in the kitchens or laundries told friends.
Pastor Paul Gerhard Braune of Berlin was among the first to speak out against the program. A formidable-looking man of Prussian military bearing, he wrote directly to Hitler at the Reich Chancellery about these “intolerable” measures. “Where is the limit to be?” he wrote. “Which is abnormal? Who is anti-social? Which are the hopeless cases? . . . Whom if not the helpless should the law protect?”8
Then a senior Catholic priest was to speak out—and as well as forcing Hitler to temporarily close down T4, he would inspire an even wider resistance against the Nazis.9
CLEMENS AUGUST GRAF von Galen was the bishop of Münster and one of the most outspoken churchmen in the country. Stern and unsmiling, he had turned against the Nazis early on. Then, over three Sundays in July and August 1941, he delivered sermons that shocked his congregation for the vehemence directed against Hitler’s regime. Calling for the rule of law to be restored in Germany, he said: “Unless this call for justice is answered this German folk and Fatherland, despite the heroism of its soldiers and its famous victories, will perish from inner rot and foulness.”10 He then turned on the Nazi T4 policy of euthanasia: “If the principle that man is entitled to kill his unproductive fellow man is established and applied, then woe to all of us when we become aged and infirm . . . It does not bear thinking of, the depravity, the universal mistrust, which will spread even in the bosom of the family, if this terrible doctrine is tolerated, accepted and put into practice.”11
The contents of Galen’s sermons were quickly printed and distributed throughout the country. In Abwehr headquarters in Berlin, when one was shown to Hans Oster, he remarked: “He’s a man of courage and conviction . . . There should be a handful of such people in all our churches, and at least two handfuls in the Wehrmacht! If there were, Germany would look quite different.”12
Hitler took a different view. When the Gestapo brought him a copy, he demanded the bishop’s immediate arrest. It was only wartime considerations that saved the aristocratic priest: Galen was hugely popular across a large part of Germany, having served in a number of parishes and been an adviser to Pope Pius XI (the previous pope) during the 1930s. “If anything is done against this bishop,” the Führer was advised, “all of Münster will have to be written off for the war effort—and the whole of Westphalia, as well.”13
One of the leaflets containing Galen’s words was pushed through the door of the Scholls’ home in a plain brown envelope, and it created a sensation among the family. The euthanasia program had been rumored but not confirmed—to hear it described by a priest was shocking. But more than that, no public figure had spoken like this since Hitler had come to power. People were terrified to criticize the regime in a public house, let alone from the pulpit of a cathedral. “At last,” Hans Scholl said, “somebody has had the courage to speak out.”
Scholl read and reread the Galen leaflets and hung on the words. “Woe to our German people, if the divine commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ . . . is not merely violated but the violation is tolerated and remains unpunished!”14 “An obedience that enslaves souls—that is to say, penetrates to the innermost sanctuary of man’s freedom where his conscience lives—is uttermost slavery.”15 The leaflet writer had added personal comments in the margins and at the bottom asked everyone who read it to make six copies and mail them to friends. Standing in his father’s office with his sister Inge, the leaflet in his hand, Hans said, “One definitely ought to have a duplication machine of one’s own.”16
THE T4 LEAFLET showed Hans Scholl a way in which one might take action against the regime. On active service in France he had tended the wounds of fellow soldiers in a field hospital near Reims. Seeing their suffering, he grew angry at the sickness at the heart of the regime that they were fighting for. At home on leave, he wondered aloud to Sophie how long the “mass murder” would go on for.
Sophie told him that just because Germany was enjoying a series of breathtaking victories did not make what it was doing “right.” Right and wrong, she concluded, have “nothing to do with politics and nationality.”17 Conflicted with the idea of being in love with an army officer, she pushed Fritz Hartnagel in a letter to say whether he had to carry out an order even if he considered it to be wrong. Later she told him that for her “justice takes precedence over all other attachments” and it was wrong for a person—whether they be French or German—to defend their own nation “just because it’s ‘his.’”18
Having graduated as a kindergarten teacher in March 1941 and been accepted on a course to study biology and philosophy at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University, Sophie had been “bursting” with excitement at the thought of being near Hans, whose medical unit alternated periods on active service with months of course work.
Unfortunately, the authorities did not think her time in the kindergarten course was sufficient work for the state and she was instructed to do more. Orders came to present herself at Krauchenwies labor camp—about fifty miles from her home—early the following month.
On the day she arrived, Hitler’s forces attacked Greece and then Yugoslavia, where Hartnagel was now in action. The madness was expanding. Sophie’s new base was a run-down manor house that would provide billets for eighty women, all under the age of twenty-five and nearly all committed National Socialists. To the stern-looking camp leader, each of the women was a “labor maid,” a form of address to which Sophie responded under her breath: “My name is Sophie Scholl—remember that!”19 Although she shared a room with ten others, Scholl did not mix well with the group, remaining aloof—an attitude that some took as shyness, others as middle-class snobbery. When not working in a variety of jobs on nearby farms, she walked alone in a nearby park, reading poetry, Thomas Mann, and the writings of Saint Augustine.
Sophie was on a break from the labor camp when German radio announced news of the attack on the Soviet Union. She had spent the day in the sunshine walking through the valley of the upper Danube with her sister Inge, but when she returned to the manor house, she found many of the labor maids listening intently to Hitler’s proclamation, which Goebbels had German radio repeat throughout the day: “German people! At this moment a march is taking place that, as regards extent, compares with the greatest the world hitherto has seen . . . The German Eastern Front extends from East Prussia . . . to the shores of the Black Sea. The task of this front, therefore, no longer is the protection of single countries, but the safeguarding of Europe and thereby the salvation of us all.”20
The reaction of the labor maids was mixed, reflecting that across Germany. Many Germans had never understood why there had been a treaty with the Soviets in the first place and, having been bombarded with anti-Soviet propaganda, felt they were now “fighting our real enemy.”21 For some, the war now made sense. There were others, though, who felt a terrible sense of shock, and Sophie was one of them. She understood the gravity of turning on Russia and told a friend she feared the war was now having its “full effect.” Sometimes, she said, “I’ve felt that it’s grossly unfair to have to live in an age so filled with momentous events.”22 She worried for Hans: “What does the immediate future hold for you, I wonder?” she wrote to him. “We live in interesting times.”23
Hans Scholl took fresh steps to communicate his anger about the regime.
His sister Inge became friends with a serious but intelligent young man named Otto Aicher, who was known to all as Otl Aicher and became a regular guest at the family home in Ulm. He had taken the same action as Werner Scholl and resigned from the Hitler Youth and was therefore barred from attending the university. Instead, with Inge’s help, he had thrown his energies into the production of a journal that he called Windlicht—Storm Lantern—featuring essays on art, literature, and culture.24 While not outright attacking the Nazis, the journal displayed an intellectual freedom at odds with the regime, which aimed to give readers hope that there were still people who cared for culture beyond that prescribed by Hitler and Goebbels.
When Hans learned about Windlicht, he immediately wrote an article that compared Hitler to Napoleon and ended with the line “Remember what happened to Napoleon and have hope!”25 Inge helped circulate the journal, and she had a copy with Hans’s essay in her handbag when one day she was stopped and questioned by a Gestapo agent. Fortunately she was not searched.26 In another essay Hans Scholl then turned his fire on the Christian churches, which he felt had been apathetic in the face of Nazi practices, in particular the policy of “euthanasia action” to kill the mentally ill, physically handicapped, and terminally sick.
“It’s high time that Christians made up their minds to do something,” he said. “What are we going to show in the way of resistance—as compared to the Communists, for instance—when all this terror is over? We will be standing empty-handed. We will have no answer when we are asked: ‘what did you do about it?’”
ONE DAY AFTER university classes Hans Scholl traveled to the Munich suburb of Solln and knocked on the door of the home of Carl Muth.
Muth was a distinguished Catholic editor whom Aicher felt might be further inspiration for Scholl. Scholl carried a letter of introduction from Aicher. Over the next few weeks the men talked at length, about philosophy, literature, and Germany, and Hans brought Inge and Sophie to meet the seventy-four-year-old scholar as well. They discussed religion, and although the Scholls were Lutheran, they had a deep respect for the Catholic faith and looked through his library of banned books. To Muth these young people represented the “other” Germany that had not been corrupted by Nazism. Muth told them of his belief that freedom of thought, religion, and free speech must be defended, but in a nonviolent manner. There must be a “spiritual resistance” to National Socialism.
When Scholl asked Muth about reports of atrocities in the East, Muth sent him to meet an architect named Manfred Eickemeyer, who as well as having an office in Munich had a studio in Kraków. He had traveled a great deal through the occupied territories as he worked on a number of construction projects in Poland. He had seen Jewish men, women, and children lined up in front of pits on the sides of the road and explained to Hans what an Einsatzgruppen was. He described whole villages being rounded up, stripped of their valuables and clothes, before being led away. He said Russians and Poles were being forced into camps as slave labor, and young girls were being made to work in SS brothels. To Scholl, this treatment of people was an “abomination.” “I could not imagine that after such methods of domination a peaceful reconstruction of Europe would be possible,” he said.27
Through Muth, the young Scholls also met Theodor Haecker, a writer and thinker who had been silenced by the Nazis. Haecker was a sixty-three-year-old widower with penetrating blue eyes and bushy eyebrows, who always wore a bow tie. An exceptional scholar who had been a leading translator and interpreter of Kierkegaard, he had been under Redeverbot since 1935: banned from writing a word in any publication or speaking on a public platform.28 Haecker expressed the powerful notion that Germany would one day be destroyed by God for what it was doing to the Jewish people. He shared with the Scholls his fear that “a time may come when Germans will have to wear a swastika on the left side of their clothing, a sign of the Antichrist. They are crucifying Christ a second time, as a people!”29 Like the Scholls he saw the situation as right and wrong, and feared too few Germans realized that they were on the “wrong road and the wrong side.”30 Nazism, Haecker told them, was a religion opposed to Christianity and therefore should be opposed by every Christian. “An idea achieves its full value and significance only when it is converted into reality by action,” he said.
Eickemeyer and Haecker not only inspired Hans Scholl, they also made him feel like doing nothing was no longer an option: “I could not remain indifferent to the fate of my people. I decided to assert my convictions in deeds, not merely in thoughts.”31
BEFORE HE APPLIED to the Waffen-SS, two pictures had been put into Kurt Gerstein’s mind, and they were both troubling him.
One was a story of atrocities having been committed in Poland, and the other was the story of the T4 euthanasia program. His friend Dr. Theophile Wurm, bishop of Württemberg, told him the “mentally afflicted” were being killed in special hospitals.
Soon after, Gerstein applied to join Hitler’s killing unit, refusing to give his wife any other explanation other than “I have to.” He then traveled to his friend Robert Weiss’s home in Alsace and told him what he had heard.
“It’s quite horrifying,” Gerstein told him. “The poor devils are taken off like cattle to the slaughter-house, their eyes wide with terror, knowing perfectly well what’s going to happen to them.”32
Gerstein appeared anxious and uncertain, and then said he was joining the SS. Weiss did not know what to make of it.
As Gerstein left, he told Weiss: “Germany must not win this war.”
IN FEBRUARY 1941, Kurt Gerstein attended a family funeral, walking behind a small procession carrying the ashes of Berta Ebeling into the tree-lined cemetery in Saarbrücken.
Berta had been the local pastor’s daughter and sister to Karl Gerstein’s wife. Kurt supported his brother Karl and his sister-in-law as they walked, but all the while he felt like he was keeping a terrible secret.
Berta had been taken ill with an unspecified illness and had been treated in the local hospital, until one day her family received a letter to say she had been transferred to a clinic in Hadamar, a small town in Hesse two hundred miles away. The move was a shock to the family and soon after came a more terrible one: Berta had died, apparently of “cerebral thrombosis.”
Berta’s ashes had been delivered to the family, together with a letter from the head of the clinic. “Her severe mental affliction caused her great suffering, and you must therefore accept her death as a merciful release,” it stated. “Owing to the danger of an epidemic in the clinic, the police authorities have ordered the immediate cremation of the body.”33
The family had shown Gerstein the letter before the funeral. He knew what it meant. Hadamar was one of the institutions that those who opposed the euthanasia program had heard all about. It was said that heavy smoke was visible over the crematorium there every day, and local children, without understanding the horror of what they were saying, taunted the buses arriving with new patients with the cry “Here come some more to be gassed!”34
With Berta’s ashes interred in her grave, the group walked slowly back into the town. Kurt Gerstein was agitated, and suddenly turned on his brother. “Do you realise what they did to Berta?” he said. “Hadamar is a slaughter-house. The Nazis are clearing out all the mental hospitals in Germany by systematically exterminating the patients. Berta didn’t die a natural death. She was murdered!”35
Karl shielded his wife and walked her away. What Kurt was saying was insulting rubbish—and on the very day of the funeral! He was listening too much to the British propaganda on the BBC.
As the couple walked off, Gerstein shouted after them: “I intend to know what’s going on!”
Seeking out one of his spiritual leaders, Pastor Kurt Rehling, Gerstein told him: “Those people are so vicious that they must not and cannot win the war. They’re so evil that they will bring down everyone who opposes them with themselves. The only course is to join them, to find out what their plans are and to modify them whenever possible. A person operating within the movement may be able to sidetrack orders or interpret them in his own way. That is why I’ve got to do what I’ve decided to do. I want to know who gives the orders and who carries them out; who sends people to concentration camps, who maltreats them and who kills them . . . And when the end comes I want to be one of those who will testify against them.”36
Gerstein’s mix of religious zeal, obsessive morality, and rebelliousness appeared to be coming together in the most remarkable way. And now it would be hidden under the cloak of ultimate Nazi conformity: the gleaming lightning flashes of the SS collar insignia.
On March 15, 1941—six months after he applied—Kurt Gerstein was accepted into the Waffen-SS and sent to Hamburg for training.
“I am on the trail of so many crimes,” he told Rehling.37