How does a taboo feel? “Like a vague feeling that you shouldn’t ask about it,” says Josef Held. For the 65-year-old, his family taboo had a name and a dry date: Marie Weindl, who died on September 24, 1940 in the Pirna-Sonnenstein nursing home. “Our family rarely talked about grandma,” says Held. He carried the secret of his mentally ill grandmother with him all his life, until he was certain in 2019: Marie Weindl was gassed by the Nazis on September 3, 1940 in the Hartheim killing center near Linz. In order to cover up the circumstances of her death, her file – like many others – was fabricated and sent across Germany. For years, Josef Held had asked his way from archive to archive. At the headquarters of the Haar Clinic, where his grandmother last lived from 1935 to 1940, his request for access to the files was still being brushed off in 2000. Ten years later, he first found his grandmother’s name in black and white in a hospital directory from the government of Upper Bavaria.
Only the children’s generation had access to the 30,000 patient files for the so-called T4 campaign, during which the Nazis murdered at least 70,000 people with disabilities or mental illness between January 1940 and August 1941. “I asked myself for years whether I should ask my mother to do it,” Held recalls. Ultimately, however, he never had the heart to talk to her, who had last seen her mother when she was five, about the murder of Marie Weindl. The taboo only broke after the mother’s death in 2019. Josef Held contacted the Munich memorial initiative for “euthanasia” victims around the historian Sibylle von Tiedemann. Euthanasia means “beautiful death” – for the Nazis this meant the cruel murder of sick, disabled or old people by means of gas, starvation, neglect or overdose. A total of more than 200,000 people died in this way because they were no longer useful for the Nazi system due to a lack of manpower.
“You wanted to get rid of people who were too expensive.”
The historian Tiedemann has been researching the names and stories of the Munich victims of the “euthanasia” program for the NS Documentation Center since 2011. In 2015 she founded the relatives group with overwhelming encouragement. “One in eight Germans has a euthanasia victim in their extended family,” Tiedemann explains. Mental illness is still taboo today, which is why it took a lot of persuasion among relatives, psychiatrists and archives to be able to name the victims. But, emphasizes Tiedemann: “These people belong to us. They would have wanted people to commemorate them as unjustly murdered – not as mentally ill.” The work of the initiative has set a lot in motion: On January 27, 2017, the day of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism, the Bundestag commemorated all those who had been murdered by the Nazi “euthanasia” program for the first time. In 2018, the Archives Act was changed so that descendants can access files more easily.
In the 1930s, anyone who was mentally or spiritually ill had few options: either the family took care of them or – if that was no longer possible – they were treated as inpatients. Medical treatment, therapeutic offers, shared accommodation for those affected? none. “People weren’t in the facilities as punishment, but because they couldn’t live outside,” explains Sibylle von Tiedemann. She understands the curiosity of today’s history buffs about the diagnoses, but her goal is to arouse empathy: “More important than asking what the person had is: Who was the person?” In any case, the central selection criterion for the Nazi ideologues was not the diagnosis, but the ability to work. Anyone who could no longer help in the hospital kitchen, farm or laundry was “useless”. If there was also a high need for care or conspicuous behavior, the death sentence was practically pronounced. “They wanted to get rid of people who were too expensive,” says Tiedemann.
What happened in church institutions has not yet been researched
On January 18, 1940, the first transport with 25 people went from the Eglfing-Haar clinic to a killing center, where the people were killed with gas as part of the notorious T4 operation. The relatives soon realized that there was a murder program going on. But only the sermon of the Munster Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen on August 3, 1941 stopped the T4 program – but not the murder. As a result, the directors of the institution would have brought the patients to death by overdosing on medication, by stopping care or by starving them for weeks. The “euthanasia” victims are “by far the second largest group of victims after the Jews,” emphasizes Tiedemann – and today’s Isar-Amper-Klinikum in Haar has the most victims of Nazi murders in the Munich area after the Dachau concentration camp. Thanks to the files, one can say exactly how many people were murdered in which of the pavilions.
Sibylle von Tiedemann encourages relatives to investigate: “There are still many files.” And although the work on the memorial book for the Munich “euthanasia” victims has ended, many questions remain unanswered: Were old, disabled, sick people really only killed in state institutions? What happened in church care facilities or in old people’s homes? “That has not yet been systematically researched,” says the historian. The last major action of the commemoration initiative before Corona was a group trip to the Hartheim Memorial in June 2019. Josef Held was one of 60 fellow passengers: “For the first time it played a role that I was my grandmother’s grandson,” he recalls. Saying your name out loud in a public setting was difficult for him. But he is glad to know her fate now. “The relationship with the family members has been clearer since then – there is no longer a dark secret in the room,” he says. His grandmother has now found her place in the family and in society.