How can it be that doctors became murderers? The pedagogical professor Annette Eberle explains the deeds with the high connectivity of the profession to the NS ideology and the early dissemination of the theses of inferior genes and unworthy life.
Interviewed by
Bernhard Lohr, hair
On the morning of January 18, 1940, 25 patients from the Eglfing-Haar nursing home boarded a bus and were taken to Grafeneck, near Ulm, in Württemberg, a good 200 kilometers away. There they were murdered in a gas chamber. With the deportation to the killing center, the darkest chapter in the history of today’s Isar-Amper-Klinikum in Haar-Eglfing began, to which around 4,000 patients fell victim. It was also the beginning of hundreds of thousands of murders. More than 250,000 mentally ill and disabled people were killed in the following years by the T4 action ordered by the Nazi regime and by the so-called wild “euthanasia”. The crimes would not have been possible without the help of doctors, orderlies and nurses. After 1945 this was suppressed for a long time. Annette Eberle, Professor of Education in Social Work at the Munich Foundation University, analyzed the deeds and their hesitant processing in a study commissioned by the Bavarian State Medical Association.