Ulrike Winkler and Gerrit Hohendorf
With the opening of the Memorial and Information Point at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin in September 2014, about three hundred thousand mentally ill and disabled people murdered in the National Socialist era were given—after a long period of repression and oblivion—a place in Germany’s culture of remembrance.1 While the “euthanasia” campaigns in Germany and Austria, “Aktion T4,” the “child euthanasia” program and the patient murders through starvation, neglect, and overdoses of medication have, up to now, been well documented and are widely known,2 this does not apply to the patient killings in the German-occupied territories of Poland and the Soviet Union—despite the fact that the National Socialist “euthanasia” program is closely associated with World War II. On September 1, 1939, the National Socialist leadership began not only an external war but also an internal war, one against the parts of the population regarded as economically useless and racially and genetically inferior.
While the active involvement of the Wehrmacht in the various forms of Nazi “euthanasia” in the so-called Altreich (“Old Reich,” i.e., Germany within the borders of 1937) cannot be established, the picture changes if one takes the war against the Soviet Union into consideration.3 This war was not only directed against the enemy’s armed forces, but also against those parts of the civilian population who had previously been defined as racially or genetically inferior and as “useless eaters” (unnütze Esser).
Leaving aside the fact that even before the outbreak of war individual patients in hospitals and nursing homes in the German Reich had died from overdoses of medication, neglect, and starvation, then the first victims of Nazi “euthanasia” were in fact Polish psychiatric patients.4 Three weeks after the German invasion of Poland, on September 22, 1939, the first patients were transported from the institution in Kocborowo (Konradstein) near Gdansk by the SS Wachsturmbann Kurt Eimann (1899–c.1980) and shot in a nearby forest. Until January 1940, between 1,600 and 2,000 people fell victim to this first major murder campaign.5 In the following weeks and months, thousands of institutional patients were murdered by SS-Sonderkommandos, among others in Świecie (Schwetz), Owińska (Treskau), and Dziekanka (Tiegenhof). Tiegenhof was where Baltic German settlers found a place to live, but the “euthanasia” did not spare them either. Moreover, the central office dealing with the patient transfers set up in Tiegenhof served the bureaucratic administration and concealment of the murders. Here, false death certificates were issued for the patients murdered in the “Warthegau” and subsequently dispatched.6
In the former Polish Wartheland, the SS-Sonderkommando of Herbert Lange (1919–1945) initially used an improvised gas chamber in the Fort VII concentration camp in Poznań, where, in October–November 1939, patients from the Owińska institution were murdered with carbon monoxide gas.7 Later, Sonderkommando Lange used mobile gas chambers to kill people: thus the patients of the institutions in Kościan (532 patients), Warta (499 patients), Gostynin (107 patients), and Kochanówka near Łódź (600 patients) were taken to the nearby woods, where they were asphyxiated to death in the gas vans. An infantry battalion was billeted in Kościan; Warta served as an institution that received ethnic Germans from Romania; and, after it had been vacated, Gostynin was placed at the disposal of the Wehrmacht. In the institutions at Tworki, Kulparkow, and Koberzyn, patients were killed mainly by starvation. The Schutzstaffel (SS) units were particularly brutal in the institution in Chełm. In January 1940, they drove the patients out of the wards to ultimately shoot them in front of the entrance door of the hospital. Members of the SS were henceforth accommodated there; it was later used as a military hospital. As with Tiegenhof, Chełm also served as a fictitious place of death for those Jewish psychiatric patients who were gassed as part of “Aktion T4” from the spring of 1940 onward. In this respect, a close connection between the T4 headquarters in Berlin and the SS units in the Occupied Eastern Territories can be established.8 In total, at least 16,500 murdered Polish psychiatric patients—not counting the victims of starvation and neglect—should be assumed.9
The actions against Pomeranian and East Prussian patients were conducted following a similar pattern: selection by German doctors, shooting or gassing of the chronically ill and disabled patients by the SS, and use of the vacated institutions for the purposes of the Wehrmacht and the SS. The NSDAP Gauleiter in Pomerania, Franz Schwede-Coburg (1888–1960), had at least 1,400 supposedly incurable mental patients from the institutions in Stralsund, Lauenburg, Ueckermünde, and Treptow taken by the SS-Wachsturmbann Eimann to a wooded area near Wejherowo (Neustadt) and murdered. Incidentally, selection was carried out here not by the organizational headquarters of the Nazi “euthanasia” campaign, at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin, but was the responsibility of the doctors on site at the institutions.10 The institutions in Lauenburg and Stralsund were placed at the disposal of the SS; the institution in Treptow served thereafter as a Wehrmacht hospital. Even the NSDAP Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich Koch (1896–1986) made use of Sonderkommando Lange to get rid of about 1,600 of his institutional patients, who were deported in May and June 1940 to Soldau concentration camp and murdered in Lange’s gas vans.11
With the intensified air attacks on the German Reich from 1942 onward, the institutions in the Warthegau and the General Government also served as places to where the patients of mental hospitals and nursing homes in the Rhineland, Westphalia and northwestern Germany could be transferred. Thus approximately eight thousand psychiatric patients from the Rhineland alone were transferred to, among other places, Kulparkow, Tiegenhof, and Tworki, in order to make room for “alternative hospitals” (Ausweichkrankenhäuser) for the German civilian population. Most of the transferred patients did not survive the war.12
When the war against the Soviet Union began on June 22, 1941, “Aktion T4” had just reached its peak and was to be extended to cover the people of German origin in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.13 But the campaign of gassing asylum patients to death was halted on August 24, 1941, by order of Hitler after the protest sermon given by the Bishop of Münster Count Clemens August von Galen (1878–1946), presumably to avoid jeopardizing the morale of the German population through a public debate about “euthanasia.”14 Nevertheless, the killings continued in a more decentralized way in the children’s wards, in the Hungerhäuser (hunger houses) and in individual mental hospitals and nursing homes with a particularly high death rate until the war ended. It is, therefore, no wonder that the “euthanasia” program, which was based on a selection of the population according to their Lebenswert (life value), should significantly shape the actions of the SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Wehrmacht in the war against the Soviet Union.
The approach taken by the German occupying forces toward mentally ill people in the territory of the Soviet Union can be compared to the killings in the Polish institutions. However, in the territory of the Soviet Union, there was much greater involvement of Wehrmacht troops and departments. For example, in late August 1941, Wehrmacht units, at the initiative of the medical department of the administrative sub-area headquarters (Feldkommandantur), shot the remaining 450–700 patients of the psychiatric hospital in Choroszcz, which had belonged to the Soviet Union since the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939, and under German occupation became part of the Bezirk Białystok. The majority of the patients had been evacuated to various Soviet institutions before the war began in 1941, where—as it turned out—they were not safe.15
As a rule, the physical annihilation of psychiatric patients was carried out by the operational groups (Einsatzgruppen) and operational commandos (Einsatzkommandos) of the security police and the SD (security service), who were tasked with the political and racial cleansing of the occupied territories behind the front. In the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, four Einsatzgruppen, designated A, B, C, D, and in turn subdivided into operational commandos and special commandos (Sonderkommandos), were assigned to the army groups of the Wehrmacht. Along with the security divisions of the Wehrmacht, they were supposed to ensure the safety and the supply routes of the advancing frontline troops. They were furnished with far-reaching orders: “To be executed are all functionaries of the Comintern (as indeed the Communist professional politicians per se), the senior, middle and radical lower functionaries of the Party, the Central Committee, the regional and district committees, People’s Commissars, Jews in Party and state positions, other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc.).”16
The fact that the murder of the patients of the psychiatric hospitals was also part of the remit of the Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos has, to date, been somewhat neglected in historical research. But the departments of the Wehrmacht in the army rear areas were also significantly involved in decisions regarding the fate of mentally ill people.17 The murder campaigns of the Einsatzgruppen, which were supported by units of the regular police, the reserve police battalions, the Secret Field Police and by local auxiliary forces, were directed against Soviet Jews (initially Jewish men of military service age and as of August 1941, the entire Jewish population), Communist officials, partisans, and their supporters, Roma, so-called antisocial elements and also against the patients of psychiatric hospitals. The patients were not only victims of mass shootings: the Germans also used specially prepared gas vans or set up gas chambers; they poisoned the people with drugs, let them starve or freeze to death and did not hesitate, at least in once known case, to blow them up. Sometimes, these killing methods were combined.
The German occupiers regarded mentally ill people as uncontrollable, dangerous, a source of epidemics, and “useless eaters.” They were a part of the population that could not be economically exploited for the purposes of the occupying forces. This view was widespread—not only within the SS, but also in the Wehrmacht, which assumed the administration of the occupied territories (only the western parts of the occupied Soviet Union were subordinated to the civil administration under Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Alfred Rosenberg in late summer 1941; throughout the occupation period, large territories remained under military administration). Thus, in September 1941, the Chief of the General Staff of the Army, Franz Halder (1884–1972), tersely wrote the following in his war diary regarding the psychiatric hospitals: “mental asylums [in the area of Army Group] North. Russians see the mentally deficient as sacred. Nevertheless, killing necessary.”18
After negotiations with Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945), Sonderkommando Lange, which was familiar with the killing of mentally ill people, was ordered to Novgorod to murder the patients of the local psychiatric hospital.19 In December 1941, the Eighteenth Army of Army Group North requested the liquidation by Einsatzkommando 1b of about 240 women suffering from mental illnesses, syphilis, and epilepsy in the Makarevo asylum on the grounds that the starved women could supposedly break out and would then be a source of disease: “What is more, the inmates of the institution, in terms of the German point of view, also represent objects of life no longer worth living.”20 While the liquidation of the Makarevo institution was justified with the threat to German soldiers, utilitarian considerations played the decisive role in the “elimination” of the roughly 1,300 patients of Kashchenko Psychiatric Hospital in the district of Leningrad by a task force of Einsatzgruppe A at the request of the High Command of the Eighteenth Army: the Wehrmacht was not prepared to feed the inhabitants of the institution, and the buildings were to be used as a hospital.21
Hitherto existing findings show a gradual radicalization of the measures carried out by the Wehrmacht and the SS-Einsatzgruppen against the mentally ill patients in the institutions. First, the military administration reduced the occupants’ meals to below what was needed for subsistence. Thus, for example, the doctors at the psychiatric hospital in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, were instructed by the military government to hand out only 100 g of bread per patient and day. The food supplies of the hospital were confiscated by the Wehrmacht. In response to the doctors’ protests, the Gebietskommissar in charge announced: “For the mentally ill, even 70 g of bread is too much.” In autumn 1941, 800 patients were ultimately shot and 700 more killed by poison infusions. The institute’s premises were finally used as a sanatorium and mess by the Wehrmacht.22 This clearly shows a three-stage approach of the reduction in food rations to the final liquidation of the entire institution via the extermination of patients unfit for work in order to use the premises for the purposes of the Wehrmacht.
Mentally handicapped children were also among those murdered in the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1942, for example, the boys and girls of the orphanage in Jeissk, on the east coast of the Azov Sea, were loaded into gas vans by a commando of Einsatzgruppe D and killed in an agonizing way.23 According to previous (preliminary) investigations, it can be assumed that German forces killed at least 17,000 psychiatric patients in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.24 Precisely how the patient killings took place in the area of the occupied Soviet Union is to be depicted on the basis of newly evaluated sources, using the psychiatric hospital in Mogilev as an example.
The most detailed source materials for the reconstruction of the murders of the patients of the psychiatric hospital in Mogilev and its agricultural colony in the years 1941 and 1942 are the records of interrogation25 from the preliminary proceedings against Georg Frentzel (1914–1979).26 The case of the former driver of Einsatzkommando 8 of Einsatzgruppe B was brought before the District Court of Karl-Marx-Stadt (today: Chemnitz) in 1969. The accused had been investigated because, among other things, he was suspected of being involved in the murders of psychiatric patients in Mogilev. The arrest warrant against Frentzel, who had continued to work unmolested as a miner after his release from Soviet captivity on September 10, 1949, and had been a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED), was preceded by thorough and extensive observations of his family and professional environment by the Ministry of State Security (MfS). The discovery of Frentzel was the result of systematic research by the MfS since the mid- to late-1960s regarding a “series of criminal complexes or units involved in them, especially in the area of the SS-Einsatzgruppen.”27 In the course of these investigations, which are to be viewed in connection with the large concentration camp trials in West Germany—Auschwitz (I 1963–1965, II 1966, III 1973–1976), Sobibór (1965–1966), Treblinka (1964–1965)—the GDR came across with “astonishing regularity several dozen members of the respective Einsatzgruppen . . . who had been living unmolested in East Germany for more than twenty-five years.”28
On December 10, 1971, after a trial that had lasted for more than two years, Frentzel was sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes and crimes against humanity.29 In the course of the taking of evidence by the East German prosecutor at the time, former nurses and doctors from the Mogilev institute were flown to the GDR from Belarus and interrogated in detail. Their statements were also included in our study, as well as the statements made by the indicted and convicted doctors of the Mogilev hospital in July 1944 and November 1948. Written recollections of former doctors and nurses could also be resorted to; they are stored in the State Archives of Public Organizations of Mogilev Region, in the State Archives of the Russian Federation, the State Archives of Mogilev Region and in the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem. All these sources were supplemented by the memories of the victims’ families or villagers who broke their silence and reported on the murder of the patients only when a memorial was established on the hospital grounds in 2009. Finally, the “Operational Situation Reports of the Chief of the Security Police and the SD in the USSR,” the “Incident Reports USSR”30 and some documents of the Mogilev Health Office, copies of which were found in the central investigation proceedings regarding Frentzel, were also used. This extremely heterogeneous collection of sources promised, on the one hand, a detailed description of what happened, but also held in store a special challenge in terms of evaluation. Thus, the reports of the Frentzel trial in particular, in which the testimonies of the Belarusian doctors from the 1940s were incorporated, had to be critically examined, since all those questioned who had been assigned a specific role—either as (formerly) accused people or as witnesses—had testified.31 Their descriptions, therefore, contained not only their subjectively colored memories, which had for the most part been peacefully integrated into the story of their own life, but were also often made with the intention to minimize the scope of their own complicity and to qualify their own responsibility. Even Frentzel, who was facing the threat of the death penalty, initially denied his complicity. Only under the crushing weight of the evidence did he finally admit his involvement in the patient murders and provided details.32 Except for a small film sequence, in which those who were doomed to die are seen shortly before their gassing in mid-September 1941—waving at the camera, friendly and clueless—as well as the names of two, at least temporary, survivors—Antonina Miklashevskaia33 and Natasha—little is known of the men, women, and children of the psychiatric hospital in Mogilev and its agricultural colony.
Mogilev, a town of 99,500 inhabitants, 250 kilometers east of Minsk, was taken by German troops on July 26, 1941, after fierce fighting with the defending Red Army.34 Einsatzkommando 8 had reached Minsk on July 8, 1941,35 where a little later an advance commando (Vorkommando), the so-called Mogilev squad, was set up under the direction of Eugen Fleschütz.36 The task of this squad, to which Frentzel belonged as a driver, was to “make quarters” in Mogilev for the rest of Einsatzkommando 8, which meant in concrete terms that the Jewish residents of the town had to deliver furniture, rugs, lamps, and so on to the German authorities—as was photographed by Frentzel.37 Furthermore, the Jewish workers had to repair the teachers’ training college, into which the “vanguard” had moved its headquarters.38 Early in August 1941, other members of Einsatzkommando 8, which finally made Mogilev its base on September 9, 1941, followed.39 The commando now totaled nearly ninety men, including thirty to forty police officers. Initially employed as a driver of the “Sanka” (ambulances),40 in August 1941, Frentzel was promoted to the post of personal driver of Adolf Prieb (b. 1897), who served Einsatzkommando 8 as chief interpreter. Until early in December 1941, Frentzel drove Prieb through Mogilev, including to the local psychiatric hospital on several occasions.41
Founded in 1804, the “Mogilev Republican Psychiatric Hospital” was located in a suburb of Mogilev.42 Women, men, and children suffering from mental illness lived in multistory buildings on its spacious grounds. While it was probably almost exclusively people who were not fit for work or only to a very limited extent who were admitted to the main institution itself, a few kilometers away, chronically ill people who had been classified as capable of work were employed in the “side business”43 of the “psych. colony,”44 an agricultural estate, established in 1932. The colony had a male and a female section;45 children probably did not live there. The hospital and its affiliated colony could accommodate about a thousand people.
During the twenty-five-day battle for Mogilev, two buildings of the main institution came under German attack and an unknown number of patients was killed. As the German troops were supposed to “live off the land,” little remained for the population of Mogilev and, for the most vulnerable, particularly for patients at the hospital, there was almost nothing left: many of them died of starvation.46 But even the lives of the more resistant patients were in great danger, since they bore—in the National Socialist sense—a two-fold, some even a three-fold stigma. As so-called mentally ill people, they were considered as hereditarily ill, as citizens of the Soviet Union as inferior and, if they were members of the Jewish community, as sub-human. Since many patients were unable to work, they also were considered unnecessary dead weights, who stood in the way of the Wehrmacht’s food and economic policy objectives. In the statements he made in 1970, Frentzel confirmed this view when he stated as the reason for the intended murder of the patients that “all those people who were of Jewish descent or another racial descent—except for the Aryan—were considered . . . as inferior stuff and therefore destroyed.”47 A few days later, he reiterated his statement. He continued: “Through their illness, these people were afflicted with ‘unhealthy hereditary factors,’ therefore inferior, unable to work, and also represented useless eaters.”48
Until the Germans’ arrival in Mogilev, Dr. Meer Moiseevich Kliptsan (b. 1904)49 had been the chief physician of the psychiatric hospital, in which, at that time, there were only a handful of doctors, including A. N. Stepanov and N. A. Pugach.50 An unknown number of doctors at the institution had previously been called up to the Red Army; other doctors had—on the order of the chief physician—accompanied a group of patients to Smolensk,51 thus ensuring at least their temporary survival. Several doctors, however, had left the hospital and fled eastward from the occupiers. After the Germans had arrested Dr. Kliptsan, probably because of his Jewish origin,52 Dr. Stepanov was appointed head of the institution. Pugach became his deputy.53
Apparently, however, the hospital also soon became the focus of attention of the military administration, since shortly after taking office, the new chief physician received an order from the “med. san. department” of the city government of Mogilev “to cut staffing levels” and to sift through and categorize the patients.54 For the selection, in which a doctor of the Feldkommandantur took part,55 and the annihilation of the greater part of the psychiatric patients in Mogilev, there was a whole bundle of motives on the part of the Wehrmacht and Einsatzkommando 8 on site. For example, they assumed there was danger of epidemics. The sick were also regarded as “nauseating”56 by the head of Einsatzkommando 8, Dr. Otto Bradfisch (1903–1994), whereby one must bear in mind that the poor physical condition of the patients had to no small extent been brought about by the deliberate degradation of their living conditions by the occupiers. Finally, the interest in using the building for their own purposes played an important role.
By means of the example of Mogilev, the close hierarchically organized network of relationships between the German military administration that issued orders, the local authorities that passed on these orders, the hospital management that implemented the orders, and finally the staff of the Einsatzkommando that carried out the killings is clearly evident. The categories into which the hospital staff was supposed to divide the patients demonstrate an internal institutional hierarchy of victims, based on utilitarian considerations. The recording and selection of patients proceeded, according to the then chief physician, as follows:
About three weeks prior to the annihilation of the first group of patients, which was effected by gas poisoning in the gas chamber, I called, on the instructions of the head of the med. san. department of Mogilev City Council, who was also called Stepanov, doctors Pugach and Makar Pavlovich Kuvshinov as well as doctor Maria Ivanovna Plotnitskaia together and told them of the instruction that I had received, namely to draw up lists of all patients who were in the hospital for the insane for treatment, and to specify the diagnosis of the disease and the state of health of each patient.57
Owing to supply problems in Mogilev, Stepanov continued, there was an unwillingness to continue to provide for “such a large number of patients.”58
The patients incapable of working were supposedly to be evacuated to other areas; those fit for work were to be incorporated into the work activities and recently diagnosed sufferers allegedly included in the food supply.
In the end, just under 1,500 patients, children among them, were divided into the following categories: chronically ill and incapable of work (550), chronically ill and capable of work (550), as well as recently diagnosed sufferers who “needed treatment” (400).59 The hundred patients in the agricultural colony were dealt with similarly. Fedor Vasil’evich Korso, a worker from Bykhov born in 1905, was also among those registered. Korso had taken part in the Soviet-Finnish War and had developed a psychosis as a result of a head injury. He was then admitted to the psychiatric hospital. His relatives subsequently tried to save him, but arrived too late.60
The lists were handed over to the city council,61 and just one week later, three or four German officers entered the institution to seek out a room for the gassings. They chose the surgery room in hospital building No. 10.62 However, before the first mass murder of patients in the hospital took place, there was apparently something of a trial run. The main indication of this is a film found in the Berlin apartment of Arthur Nebe (1894–1945) at the end of the war; the approximately two-minute sequence shows patients in the Mogilev hospital being transferred to a previously prepared gas chamber.63 Since 1937, Nebe had been Chief of the Reich Criminal Police (since 1939 Office V of the newly formed Reich Security Main Office) and from June to November 1941 head of Einsatzgruppe B, which murdered almost 45,500 people in Belarus during this period.64 When he and Himmler visited the Novinki psychiatric colony near Minsk on August 15, 1941, the latter gave him the task of delivering the patients in the institution. Nebe was predestined for this task not only as head of Einsatzgruppe B, but also by his relevant experience in relation to the murder of patients in the Reich: after 1939, he was an important liaison between the Reich Security Main Office and the “euthanasia” headquarters T4. Among other things, he—along with his chief chemist Dr. Albert Widmann (1912–1986)—was responsible for supplying carbon monoxide gas to the killing centers. During his visit to Minsk, he was instructed by Himmler to try out new, less burdensome methods of killing, since the mass shootings that had been taking place since June had turned out to be very stressful for the members of the Einsatzgruppen and this had led to insubordination, excess drinking and mental stress reactions.65 In addition, the selection and killing of patients at the psychiatric hospitals in Minsk had been coordinated with the new General Commissioner (Generalkommissar) for White Ruthenia, Wilhelm Kube (1887–1943).66 Nebe, however, did not have to call on his men to shoot “mental patients,” which is why he ordered the chemist Widmann and the munitions expert Hans Schmidt to Minsk.67
In mid-September 1941, Nebe, Widmann and Schmidt tried to kill at least twenty-four patients of Minsk Psychiatric Hospital with explosives in a forest near Minsk. The victims were locked in a bunker, which was then blown up. When some patients who had survived the blast crawled out of the bunker, covered in blood, they were returned to it and killed with an even bigger explosive charge. The further use of explosives was subsequently rejected, as this killing method was unsafe for the perpetrators and the widely scattered body parts had to be gathered. The other patients in the psychiatric colony of Novinki were—just like the patients in the Second Clinical Hospital in Minsk—gassed or shot between September and December 1941.68
After the attempt to kill patients with explosives, Nebe and Widmann drove on to the psychiatric hospital in Mogilev,69 which they viewed together with the Austrian SS doctor Dr. Hans Battista (1915–1995) and other unidentified members of staff. According to the judgment of the district court of Stuttgart against Widmann of September 1967, the doctors working there had been informed of the Germans’ plans to kill patients with gas. It was all obviously just a matter of finding a suitable room and preparing it for the killings. On the very same day, the windows of the selected room were bricked up and two pieces of pipe that were to serve as the gas pipes inserted into the wall. The next day some patients were killed with gas in the presence of Nebe, an unidentified police officer as well as some SS officers. The management of these killings was in the hands of Widman, who controlled the gas pipes and “by his own hand smeared fresh mortar around the not quite airtight places around the gas supply nozzle.”70 Then a car of the Adler make was driven backward against the wall, where Widmann used a metal tube to attach the exhaust pipe to the short pieces of connecting pipe set into the wall. After that, the nursing staff had to collect the patients and lead them to the gas chamber. People went obediently and unsuspectingly with their familiar caregivers. As the Regional Court of Stuttgart in the trial against Widmann stated in 1967, an unknown number of women and men died a long and cruel death by suffocation.71 The aforementioned film sequence apparently originates from this operation. It shows not only scantily clad men and women who are led to a building by nurses, but also two cars whose exhaust pipes were connected to a tube protruding from the wall by means of a hose. One of the vehicles (Pol 28545) seen in the film was an Adler car, that is, the make of the vehicle in which Widmann had traveled to Belarus.72
This first trial gassing was followed at the end of September (possibly in early October) by the murder of a large proportion of the patients, the first so-called Aktion. In 1970 Frentzel gave detailed information about how the mass killing proceeded. According to his statement, twenty members of Einsatzkommando 8 were involved in the murder campaign.73 “The fact that the former SS-Sturmbannführer Bratfisch [Bradfisch], former SS-Hauptsturmführer Prieb and the sarge of Einsatzkommando 8, former SS-Oberscharführer Strohammer, Karl, accompanied them was a matter of course.”74 The plans of the Germans had clearly been known in advance: former chief physician Stepanov said in 1948 that he knew about the murder plans and had asked his subordinates “what action they could take in order to save at least some of the patients from death.”75 No one, he said, suggested anything and even he, Stepanov, knew no way out of the “situation that had arisen.”76
On the day of the murders, according to Frentzel’s statement, a truck first went to the Jewish ghetto,77 which had existed in Mogilev since September 25, 1941.78 There, the vehicle picked up about ten to fifteen men between thirty and forty years of age. Some of them were first driven to the vicinity of the village of Polykovichi and left there. They were supposed to wait for the arrival of the bodies from Mogilev in order to bury them in slit trenches and antitank ditches later.79 The remaining six to eight Jewish men were taken to Mogilev hospital.80
The motorcade that included Frentzel had, in the meantime, arrived at that ward building in which the gas chamber had been set up. Frentzel remembered that there were two metal pipes inserted at “knee height”81 in the building to which they connected the exhaust pipes of the parked vehicles. He observed that the patients—clothed only in a shirt or smock—were brought from the other buildings into the building in groups of five to twenty, sometimes more.82 In each case, sixty to eighty of them were then crammed into the “gas chamber.”83 Frentzel noticed that the patients were weak and starving: “Going by the appearance of the patients, they weren’t in very good shape. They were extremely emaciated and virtually feeble. They were a terrible sight.”84 Bradfisch described the patients’ condition even more drastically. They were, he said, “invariably unclothed” and “afflicted with ulcers on which thousands of blowflies had settled.”85
When the “gas chamber” was opened and when the vehicles were changed, a “strong odour” wafted out to the people standing outside.86 The victims died an agonizing death. Natal’ia Nikitichna Kosakova, an employee in the psychiatric hospital, was in an adjoining room during the gassings. She “could hear the loud wailing and screaming of the victims. When the bodies were carried out of the ‘gas chamber,’ almost all of them had an unnatural posture. They were contorted, their clothes torn and they had clawed each other in their death throes. Their veins stood out, their faces had turned purple.”87
On that day in late September or early October, it was not just the patients of the Mogilev institution who were murdered, but also the patients housed in the “colony for the insane.” After the trucks had driven the dead bodies to Polykovichi and dumped them there, these patients were loaded on to the empty trucks and taken to the main hospital, where, according to Frentzel, they “were then annihilated by us in the gas chamber.”88 Subsequently, following the instruction of the “med. san. department” of Mogilev City Council, the word “evacuated”89 was written behind the name of each murdered person in an attempt to conceal the facts.
At the end of this first murder campaign, Stepanov stated in 1948, a German officer, probably Prieb, gave a speech to the staff of the psychiatric hospital. He told his audience that “they [the Germans] were carrying out such exterminations in Germany, too, since the annihilated patients were of no use to anyone, neither to themselves nor to others, and this category of people was only to be destroyed.”90 The precise number of victims of the murder campaign in late September is still unknown. Stepanov testified in 1948 that, besides men and women, there were also “thirty children aged between five and twelve years old”91 in the group. Regarding the total number of victims, he stated that in the “first ‘action’ about 650 people, all chronically ill, whether able to work or not, as well as all patients of Jewish nationality without exception, regardless of the stage of their disease”92 had been gassed. The Jewish death toll was, he said, about sixty.93 Transcripts from Belarusian patient lists say the following about the number of patients in the hospital in Mogilev:
Operational Situation Report No. 6 of the SS-Einsatzgruppen specifies for October 1941, that 836 “mentally ill people” had been shot dead in Mogilev.96 Frentzel attributed the difference of 143 murder victims to the patients in the colony.97 However, he could not explain why the official German report only talked of shootings and not of gassings. He insisted that it must refer to the “first action” mentioned by him,98 and speculated that the verb used—“shot”—was intended to conceal the “actual method of execution.”99
Around 300 to 350 people were very probably exempted from the first action. According to Stepanov, they were “treated further,”100 but the files at hand do not reveal what form this treatment took. Three and a half months later, probably in the “second half of January 1942,”101 Prieb, however, apparently returned to the hospital and explained that the chronically ill now had to be “weeded out [for] evacuation.”102 This time, chief physician Stepanov claimed to have learned of the plans of Einsatzkommando 8 only on the day his patients were murdered.103 Matron Elizaveta Nikolaevna Laktsiutko recalled, however, that, on January 19 or 20, 1942, Germans had once again entered the hospital and measured how thick the walls of the building were.104 The matron informed Dr. Kuvshinov, who thereupon discharged from his ward about forty patients who were able to orient themselves in the hope they would find their way to their families.
Einsatzkommando 8, said Frentzel, was informed of the “Aktion” the day before it took place.105 Prieb, who had played such a leading role in the “first action,” was absent this time.106 In his place, SS-Sturmscharführer Fleschütz led the murder campaign in his role as head of the Mogilev squad. Frentzel and the other drivers were divided up as “sentries”107 and formed—with the support of the policemen—a cordon outside the 2.5 to 3 m high wall of the institution, which was interspersed with boards.108 This security measure was designed not only to prevent patients from escaping. There was also a fear, above all, of partisan raids.109
Since the enclosure around the site was slightly damaged, Frentzel could not see everything that went on, but was probably able to observe details of the procedure.110 The people were, he said, driven out of the buildings to the trucks and loaded on to them.111 The people doomed to die, including children and apparently even infants,112 were in a pitiful state: “it’s also true to say, like with the patients executed during the first ‘Aktion,’ that they were lean, that’s to say emaciated. They were just skin and bones.”113 Although it was “extremely cold”114 and there was a lot of snow on the ground, the “patients [were] driven to their execution without clothes.”115 Frentzel also stated that the patients “[had] to undress completely.”116 The Germans, however, had been dressed “appropriately,” according to Frentzel.117 They had also kept warm with alcohol, he continued. He reported that “we . . . had taken schnapps to keep [us] warm in the course of the ‘Aktion’.” During the evacuation of the patients, the “sentries” had talked about the fact that this had been “the last measure there and that [soon] there would no longer be any sick Soviet citizens in the institution.”118 The people were driven to Pashkovo. The members of Einsatzkommando 8 who were waiting for them there pushed them into a tank ditch and shot them. Use was also made of hand grenades. Frentzel explained that these explosives were needed to loosen the frozen soil so a pit could be dug.119 Nevertheless, one female patient apparently managed to escape. A woman living in Novo-Pashkovo recalled that “a young woman named Natasha” wandered around in the village, sleeping a night here and a night there. Sometimes she hid in the cemetery, sometimes in villagers’ homes. She stayed “quite a long time in the village,” but in the end she “disappeared—no one knew where to.”120
It is unclear how many people were killed in total in the case of the second action, either. Frentzel stated that the trucks had traveled back and forth between the institution and Pashkovo several times: “If it had been a matter of a few patients, then such an effort would certainly not have been ‘necessary’,” he commented. “In such a case we would have driven to the institution with one or two vehicles and loaded up the patients. After this had happened, we would have left the hospital grounds again and the matter would have been sorted.”121
With the murder of the last patients from the Mogilev Psychiatric Hospital, the German occupying forces annihilated not only those whom they regarded as, in principle, unworthy of life. They also derived quite tangible benefits from their crimes. Before Frentzel and the other men left the premises, they took all the food that was still stored in the institution: “flour, legumes, and maybe also potatoes.”122 The looting of the civilian population by the chronically undersupplied troops of the Wehrmacht was—as already mentioned—commonplace and had also been firmly factored in by the military leadership.123 Frentzel stated: “One fact was that when we were carrying out ‘actions’ we were always concerned about finding food in the homes of Soviet citizens. We just took it so we could improve our ‘bill of fare’.”124 The buildings of the “evacuated” institute continued to be used: a German military hospital was set up in the psychiatric hospital; the medical and domestic staff were taken on to a large extent and now had to work for the Germans.125
In the course of 1943, the Red Army moved farther and farther to the west. By the turn of the year 1943–1944, it had reached a line about 20 km east of Vitebsk, Orsha, and Mogilev. Given this development, the German occupying forces attempted to cover up the traces of their crimes, including in Novo-Pashkovo. Stepan Ivanovich Pilunov, a captured partisan, had to help with the disposal of the bodies.126 He reported that he and other detainees in Mogilev prison were loaded on to military trucks and first taken to Pashkovo, where the Germans forced them to dig up the corpses, while other prisoners had to dig shallow pits for their incineration and chop wood for a pyre. This field crematorium was in operation for almost a month, he said. The disposal of the bodies, however, did not succeed entirely: the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission came across mass graves after the liberation of Belarus in September 1944.
The patient killings in the occupied Soviet territories continued the policy of the “annihilation of life unworthy of living” that had already been taking place in the German Reich since 1939. Between this systematic murder of institutional patients under the Nazi “euthanasia” program and the course of action in the German-occupied territories, there was not only an ideological link, but also continuities regarding personnel. This is particularly evident with the example of Mogilev, since the patient murders there, as in Minsk, can be traced back to an initiative of Himmler and Nebe. Nebe, as head of the Reich Criminal Police Office (Reichskriminalpolizeiamt), and his chief chemist Widmann had earlier been responsible for supplying carbon monoxide gas to the killing centers of the T4 program. Although it is true that the SS did not wish to be associated with the euthanasia program in the German Reich and the SS membership of the staff of the six gassing centers on German territory was not supposed to be evident to those on the outside, the killings of patients in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union—as had been going on in Poland already since 1939—show, however, that the SS-Einsatzgruppen basically recognized the alleged necessity of “destroying life unworthy of living” and actively conducted the killing of institutional patients.
The murders not only had ideological objectives, but also served very specific interests. Thus, the patients of the psychiatric hospital in Mogilev became subjects for new methods of killing. The longer the German occupation lasted, the more difficult the procurement of supplies for the German troops (Einsatzkommando 8 among them) became and the more one required food, premises, medical supplies, and specialized personnel for the advancing German soldiers or the wounded, the less the mentally ill possessed—in the eyes of the German military and civil administration—a right to live. As “ballast existences” and “useless eaters,” who were also seen as an alleged source of epidemics, they were completely annihilated in Mogilev, too. The patient murders that were set in motion with the assessment and selection of mentally ill people arranged by the city council served the immediate interests of the German occupying forces in Mogilev as well as in many other places in the occupied territories in the east.
ULRIKE WINKLER is a German historian and political scientist specializing in the history of Nazi Germany, the history of German social welfare, and disability history. Her books include Männliche Diakonie im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Kriegserleben und Kriegserfahrung der Kreuznacher Brüderschaft Paulinum von 1939 bis 1945 im Spiegel ihrer Feldpostbriefe (2007). In 2017, Dr. Winkler was appointed to the advisory board of the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin.
GERRIT HOHENDORF is Associate Professor, MD, psychiatrist, medical historian, and medical ethicist. He holds a permanent teaching position at the Institute for History and Ethics of Medicine, Technical University of Munich. He is jointly responsible for the content of the open-air exhibition at the Information and Memorial Point for the Victims of National Socialist “Euthanasia,” Berlin.
1. See http://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/denkmaeler/gedenk-und-informationsort-fuer-die-opfer-der-ns-euthanasie-morde.html (last accessed on August 11, 2015). The virtual memorial can be found at http://www.gedenkort-t4.eu (last accessed on August 11, 2015). The English catalog appeared under the title: Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, ed., Memorial and Information Point for the Victims of National Socialist “Euthanasia” Killings (Berlin: Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, 2016); see also the catalog in Plain German: Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas und Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, eds., Tiergartenstraße 4: Gedenk-Ort und Informations-Ort für die Opfer der national-sozialitischen “Euthanasie”-Morde, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, 2015).
2. See esp. Ernst Klee, “Euthanasie” im Dritten Reich: Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2010); Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide. From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Gerrit Hohendorf, Der Tod als Erlösung vom Leiden: Geschichte und Ethik der Sterbehilfe seit dem Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013).
3. See Hans-Walter Schmuhl, “Vergessene Opfer. Die Wehrmacht und die Massenmorde an psychisch Kranken, geistig Behinderten und ‘Zigeunern’,” in Wehrmacht und Vernichtungspolitik: Militär im nationalsozialistischen System, ed. Heinrich Pohl (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 115–139.
4. Tadeusz Nasierowski, Zagłada osób z zaburzeniami psychicznymi w okupowanej Polsce: Początek ludobójstwa (Warsaw: Neriton, 2008).
5. Zdzisław Jaroszewski, ed., Die Ermordung der Geisteskranken in Polen 1939–1945 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1993), 57–65; Volker Rieß, Die Anfänge der Vernichtung “lebensunwerten Lebens” in den Reichsgauen Danzig-Westpreußen und Wartheland 1939/1940 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995), 53–55.
6. See Enno Schwanke, Die Landesheil- und Pflegeanstalt Tiegenhof: Die nationalsozialistische Euthanasie in Polen während des Zweiten Weltkriegs (Frankfurt am Main: Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2015).
7. See Klee, “Euthanasie” im Dritten Reich, 99–104.
8. Annette Hinz-Wessels, “Antisemitismus und Krankenmord. Zum Umgang mit jüdischen Anstaltspatienten im Nationalsozialismus,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 61, no. 1 (2013): 65–92, here 81–85.
9. Jaroszewski, ed., Die Ermordung der Geisteskranken, 226–227.
10. Rieß, Die Anfänge, 53–118.
11. Sascha Topp, Petra Fuchs, Gerrit Hohendorf et al., “Die Provinz Ostpreußen und die nationalsozialistische ‘Euthanasie’: SS-‘Aktion Lange’ und ‘Aktion T4’,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 43, (2008): 20–55.
12. Winfried Süß, Der “Volkskörper” im Krieg: Gesundheitspolitik, Gesundheitsverhältnisse und Krankenmord im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland 1939–1945 (Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2003), 327–339.
13. Michal Šimůnek and Dietmar Schulze, eds., Die nationalsozialistische “Euthanasie” im Reichsgau Sudetenland und Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren 1939–1945 (Prague: Trauner, 2008).
14. Heinz Faulstich, Hungersterben in der Psychiatrie 1914–1949. Mit einer Topographie der NS-Psychiatrie (Freiburg: Lambertus, 1998), 273–288; as well as: Süß, “Volkskörper,” 127–151.
15. Jaroszewski, ed., Die Ermordung der Geisteskranken, 147–151; as well as: Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941–1945 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999), 1067–1068.
16. Quoted from: Peter Klein, ed., Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion 1941/42: Die Tätigkeits- und Lageberichte des Chefs der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1997), 325.
17. Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges. Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD 1938–1942 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981), 543–544 and 548–552; Klee, “Euthanasie,” 310–312; Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 1067–1074; Angelika Ebbinghaus and Gerd Preissler, “Die Ermordung psychisch kranker Menschen in der Sowjetunion: Dokumentation,” in Aussonderung und Tod: Die klinische Hinrichtung der Unbrauchbaren, ed. Götz Aly, Angelika Ebbingshaus, Matthias Hamann, Friedemann Pfäfflin, and Gerd Preissler (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1985), 75–107; Johannes Hürter, “Die Wehrmacht vor Leningrad: Krieg und Besatzungspolitik der 18. Armee im Herbst und Winter 1941/42,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 49 (2001): 377–440; as well as the recently published collection of papers: Alexander Friedman and Rainer Hudemann, eds., Diskriminiert—vernichtet—vergessen: Behinderte in der Sowjetunion, unter nationalsozialistischer Besatzung und im Ostblock 1917–1991 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2016).
18. See Franz Halder, Kriegstagebuch, Bd. III: Der Russlandfeldzug bis zum Marsch auf Stalingrad (22.6.1941–24.9.1942), ed. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1964), 252 ff.
19. See Christian Gerlach, “Militärische ‘Versorgungszwänge,’ Besatzungspolitik und Massenverbrechen: Die Rolle des Generalquartiermeisters des Heeres und seiner Dienststellen im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion,” in Ausbeutung, Vernichtung, Öffentlichkeit: Neue Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Lagerpolitik, ed. Norbert Frei, Sybille Steinbacher, and Bernd C. Wagner (Munich: De Gruyter, 2000), 175–208, here 194.
20. Quoted in Ebbinghaus and Preissler, “Die Ermordung,” 78; as well as Hürter, “Wehrmacht,” 435–436.
21. Hürter, “Wehrmacht,” 436–438.
22. See Ebbinghaus and Preissler, “Die Ermordung,” 95–96.
23. See Ebbinghaus and Preissler, “Die Ermordung,” 104–106, as well as Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003), 648–651. For further examples of the patient killings by Einsatzgruppe D, see 644–646.
24. From the sources at our disposal, we have compiled a table with the institutions, the killing units and the number of victims, see Ulrike Winkler and Gerrit Hohendorf, “‘Nun ist Mogiljew frei von Verrückten’: Die Ermordung der PsychiatriepatientInnen in Mogilew 1941/42,” in Krieg und Psychiatrie 1914–1950, ed. Babette Quinkert, Philipp Rauh, and Ulrike Winkler (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010), 75–103, table: 81–83.
25. Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, Berlin (hereafter BStU), MfS, HA IX/11, ZUV 9, Bd. 1–32. Regarding the prosecution of National Socialist criminals, the participation of the Ministry of State Security (MfS) and the formation of Department IX/11 on August 6, 1965, see the summary by Günther Wieland, “Die Ahndung von NS-Verbrechen in Ostdeutschland 1945–1990,” in DDR-Justiz und NS-Verbrechen: Sammlung ostdeutscher Strafurteile wegen nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen, vol. Verfahrensregister (Munich/Amsterdam: De Gruyter Saur, 2002), 12–94, here 73 ff.
26. See the recent: Siegfried Grundmann, Georg Frentzel: PG und Angehöriger der SS-Einsatzgruppe B in der UdSSR—Genosse und Mitglied der Gesellschaft für Deutsch-Sowjetische Freundschaft (Berlin: Nora, 2015).
27. Henry Leide, NS-Verbrecher und Staatssicherheit: Die geheime Vergangenheitspolitik der DDR (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 416, from which the following quotations are also taken.
28. See also the findings of Annette Weinke, Die Verfolgung von NS-Tätern im geteilten Deutschland: Vergangenheitsbewältigungen 1949–1969 oder: Eine deutsch-deutsche Beziehungsgeschichte im Kalten Krieg (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002), 323.
29. See indictment of September 8, 1971, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 16/2, fols. 479–533, and the judgment of December 2, 1971, ibid., Bd. 33, fols. 2–33. Frentzel died in Leipzig prison hospital on June 20, 1979.
30. See Klein, ed., Einsatzgruppen.
31. Ultimately, the question of whether and, if so, under what pressure Frentzel made his statements must remain open. See also the source of critical remarks from Christian Dirks, “Die Verbrechen der anderen”: Auschwitz und der Auschwitz-Prozess der DDR: Das Verfahren gegen den KZ-Arzt Dr. Horst Fischer (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006), 26–27.
32. Almost exemplary is the hearing of Frentzel on July 23, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fols. 122–128. However, it can be assumed that the complicity of Frentzel and its severity was certain, since only those cases were heard for which the maximum range of punishments (death penalty or life imprisonment) was guaranteed, see Leide, NS-Verbrecher, 124.
33. Antonina Miklashevskaia survived at least the first action in the Mogilev hospital in the autumn of 1941. See the interrogation of Matriona Alekseevna Kovaleva on April 7, 1970, BStU, MfS, IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 13/2, fol. 399. The fate of the other female patient is unknown.
34. Israel Gutman, Eberhard Jäckel, Peter Longerich, and Julius H. Schoeps, eds., Enzyklopädie des Holocaust: Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden, vol. II (Berlin: Piper, 1993), 959.
35. Activity report of Einsatzgruppe B for the period from June 23, 1941 to July 13, 1941, BStU, MfS, IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 26, fols. 107–108.
36. Interrogation reports of Frentzel dated July 28, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 174, as well as August 12, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 14/1, fol. 4.
37. See BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 32.
38. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated June 9, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 2/1, fols. 40–41.
39. Krausnick and Wilhelm, Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, 158.
40. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated January 19, 1971, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 1/1.
41. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated July 23, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 1/1, fol. 123.
42. Record of interrogation of N. A. Pugach dated June 12, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 331.
43. Record of interrogation of N. A. Pugach dated June 12, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 331.
44. According to Vera Vikent’evna Levshevich in her hearing on April 9, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fols. 404–408.
45. Record of interrogation of Starovoitova dated June 10, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 13/2, fol. 279.
46. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated November 4, 1948, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 13/2, fol. 312.
47. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 14, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 278.
48. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 25, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 279.
49. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated November 4, 1948, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 13/2, fol. 309. Dr. Kliptsan graduated from medical college in 1934 and started working as chief physician of the City Hospital in Minsk in the same year. Since 1940, he had worked as chief physician at the psychiatric hospital in Mogilev. See “Memoirs of Alla Pavlovna Ulanova,” undated, Yad Vashem Archives, Jerusalem (hereafter YVA), 20012/736–738, 739–742.
50. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated November 4, 1948, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11, ZUV 9, Bd. 13/2, fol. 309.
51. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated November 4, 1948, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11, ZUV 9, Bd. 13/2, fol. 309.
52. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated November 4, 1948, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11, ZUV 9, Bd. 13/2, fol. 310. Alla Pavlovna Ulanova reported that her mother Galina Vasil’evna Ulanova, who worked as a nurse at the Mogilev psychiatric hospital, had told her that Dr. Kliptsan had hidden in the attic of the hospital building. She, Ulanova, and a nurse named Lisa had, she said, supplied Dr. Kliptsan with food. Another employee—Vasilevskii—finally denounced the doctor. See “Memoirs of Alla Pavlovna Ulanova,” undated, YVA, 20012/736–738, 739–742. Dr. Kliptsan was shot soon after; see the testimony of Sonia Grigor’evna Guselevich, a staff member of the canteen of Mogilev Psychiatric Hospital, undated, Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Mogilevskoi Oblasti [State Archives of Mogilev Region, hereafter GAMO], f. 306, o. 1, d. 10, fol. 40.
53. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated November 4, 1948, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11, ZUV 9, Bd. 13/2, fol. 311.
54. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated December 24, 1948, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11, ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 315.
55. See Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 1069.
56. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 1069.
57. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated November 13, 1948, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11, ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 236.
58. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated December 24, 1948, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11, ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 316.
59. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated June 1, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11, ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 249. Regarding the figures: record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated December 24, 1948, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11, ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 317.
60. Information kindly supplied by his daughter Galina Ivanovna Korso.
61. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated December 24, 1948, BstU, MfS, HA IX/11, ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 317.
62. Record of interrogation of Levshevich dated April 9, 1970, BstU, MfS, HA IX/11, ZUV 9, Bd. 13/2, fol. 405. Since July 2009, a memorial in front of this building commemorates the victims. The plaque reads: “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” Regarding the origins of the monument see Gerrit Hohendorf, Roswitha Lauter, Ullrich Lochmann, and Maike Rotzoll,“‘Den erstickten Seelen zum Gedenken’: Ein Mahnmal für die von den deutschen Besatzern ermordeten Patienten des Psychiatrischen Krankenhauses Mogilew,” in Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, ed., Gedenkstätten-Rundbrief no. 152 (December 2009): 3–10.
63. The film fragment found its way into the film Die Lehre von Nürnberg (Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today), a compilation of the Information Services Division of the Office of Military Government of Germany (U.S.) based on authentic footage for the Nuremberg trials from 1945 to 1949, Bundesarchiv/Filmarchiv Berlin, FBW 0003511. The scenes from Mogilev can be seen in the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth minute of the film. See also U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, ed., Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 176–177.
64. Nebe, SS major general since 1941, had contacts with the military resistance and knew of Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt against Hitler on July 20, 1944. After the failed coup, he went into hiding, but was betrayed and sentenced to death on March 2, 1945 and executed. See Ronald Rathert, Verbrechen und Verschwörung: Arthur Nebe, der Kripochef des Dritten Reiches (Münster: LIT, 2001).
65. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 1068; and Ebbinghaus and Preissler, “Die Ermordung,” 83 ff. Himmler’s appointments diary confirms a visit by Himmler to the psychiatric colony in Novinki on the afternoon of August 15, 1941 (“visit to the insane asylum”). According to a statement by Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski (1899–1972), Higher SS and Police Leader for Central Russia, Himmler was said to have entrusted Nebe here with the killing of the mentally ill, see Peter Witte, Michael Wildt, Martina Voigt, Dieter Pohl, Peter Klein, Christian Gerlach, Christoph Dieckmann, and Andrej Angrick, eds., Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42 (Hamburg: Christians, 1999), 195.
66. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 1068.
67. Ebbinghaus and Preissler, “Die Ermordung,” 83 ff.
68. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 1070–1071; and Ebbinghaus and Preissler, “Die Ermordung,” 88–92.
69. Verdict against Dr. Albert Widmann of September 15, 1967, printed in C. F. Rüter and D. W. de Mildt, eds., Justiz und NS-Verbrechen: Sammlung der Strafurteile wegen nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen 1945–1999, vol. 26 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001), 562.
70. Verdict against Dr. Albert Widmann of September 15, 1967, printed in C. F. Rüter and D. W. de Mildt, eds., Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, vol. 26, 562–563.
71. Verdict against Dr. Albert Widmann of September 15, 1967, printed in Rüter and de Mildt, eds., Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, vol. 26, 562.
72. Verdict against Dr. Albert Widmann of September 15, 1967, printed in Rüter and de Mildt, eds., Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, vol. 26, 563.
73. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated July 28, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 173. For the following description, see Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated July 28, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 173.
74. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated July 28, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 174.
75. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated December 24, 1948, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 318.
76. Ibid., in July 1944 Stepanov had claimed that both the mayor and the head of the medical and sanitary department of Mogilev had requested the rescue of the “psychologically sick.” Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated July 20, 1944, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 13/2, fol. 302.
77. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated July 28, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 176.
78. On September 25, 1941, “Order No. 51 of the city council of the city of Mogilev” was issued, which decreed the formation of ghettos; transcript of this order in BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 2/2, fols. 323–324.
79. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated July 28, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 177.
80. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated July 28, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 177.
81. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated July 29, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 182.
82. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 4, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 13/2, fol. 224.
83. Record of interrogation of N. A. Pugach dated July 13, 1944, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 253.
84. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated July 24, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 13/2, fol. 220.
85. According to Bradfisch on the occasion of his hearing on June 26, 1958 in Munich, StA München I 22 Ks 1/61, fol. 185, quoted in Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 1069.
86. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 24, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 282.
87. Witness report of Natal’ia Nikitichna Kosakova, undated, GAMO, f. 306, o. 1, d. 10, fols. 44–45.
88. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 27, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 198.
89. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated November 13, 1948, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 238. Stepanov could not say whether these comments were really entered. At any rate, he said, he had not checked. See also record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated December 24, 1948, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 320.
90. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated December 24, 1948, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 319.
91. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated November 13, 1948, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 236.
92. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated June 1, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 250.
93. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated December 24, 1948, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 320.
94. List of A. N. Stepanov regarding the number of patients in the Mogilev hospital for the mentally ill as per September 3, 1941, copy, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 13/2, fol. 293.
95. List of A. N. Stepanov regarding the number of patients in the Mogilev hospital for the mentally ill as per September 3, 1941, copy, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 13/2, fol. 293.
96. “In Minsk, 632 mentally ill people were shot, and in Mogilev 836”; Operational Situation Report No. 6 of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD in the USSR for the period October 1, 1941 to October 31, 1941, printed in Klein, ed., Einsatzgruppen, 222–241, here 229.
97. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 27, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 208.
98. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 27, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 208.
99. Final report dated June 16, 1971, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 21, fol. 80.
100. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated June 1, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 250.
101. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated November 4, 1948, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 13/2, fol. 313.
102. Record of interrogation of N. A. Pugach dated July 13, 1944, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 254.
103. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated November 13, 1948, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 238.
104. Memories of Elizaveta Nikolaevna Laktsiutko, undated, Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Obshchestvennykh Ob’edinenii Mogilevskoi Oblasti (State Archives of Public Organizations of Mogilev Region), f. 6115, o. 1, d. 145.
105. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 12, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 270.
106. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 12, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 270.
107. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 24, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 279.
108. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 17, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 287.
109. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 17, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 285.
110. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 18, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 291.
111. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 27, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 209; see also record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 14, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 276.
112. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 14, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 291.
113. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 14, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 278.
114. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 27, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 209.
115. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 27, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/1, fol. 209.
116. Report of Frentzel dated July 7, 1971, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 6, fol. 225.
117. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 12, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 269. For the following quotations, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fols. 269–270.
118. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 14, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 276.
119. At least, this was the procedure at the shootings in November 1941, record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 18, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 292.
120. Dennis Dybsky and Katia Iurgeva from the State University of Mogilev recorded the memoir of Tatiana Sergeevna Tishina. We thank them both for their kind support.
121. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 24, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 280.
122. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 14, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, fol. 276.
123. The resources of Belarus were supposed to benefit the eastern army and the German population in the Reich. These goals were subordinated to the German occupation policy that left behind veritable defoliation zones. In early May 1941, it was clear to the planning staffs that: “The war can only be continued if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war. If we take what we need out of the country, there can be no doubt that tens of millions of people will die of starvation.” Note on a meeting of permanent secretaries and members of the Economic Staff East with representatives of the Economic Command Staff East regarding the planned economic plundering of Soviet territories dated May 2, 1941, doc. PS-2718, IMT, vol. 31, 84, reprinted in Gerd R. Ueberschär and Wolfram Wette, eds., Der deutsche Überfall auf die Sowjetunion: “Unternehmen Barbarossa” 1941 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991), 323.
124. Record of interrogation of Frentzel dated August 14, 1970, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 4/2, fol. 276.
125. Record of interrogation of A. N. Stepanov dated July 20, 1944, BStU, MfS, HA IX/11 ZUV 9, Bd. 13/2, fol. 301.
126. The following is according to an chapter by V. Iushkevich published in the Mogilev newspaper Mogilevskie Vedomosti, March 17, 2001, 6. The title of the chapter translates as “In hell we sang ‘Stenka Razin’: Account of the eyewitness Stepan Pilunov.” Stepan Razin, known as Stenka Razin, was a seventeenth-century Cossack leader and is the subject of the well-known folk song “Ponizovaia Volnitsa.”