It was a frosty day in early 1940 when the bus from the non-profit patient transport company drove up to the sanatorium and nursing home in Haar-Eglfing. He had taken the route from Grafeneck in the Swabian Jura to take in 25 patients. What could seem like a group going on a winter trip was a ride to their deaths. On January 18, the 25 men from Haar were taken more than 200 kilometers to Grafeneck near Münsingen – and murdered by gas on the same day in the killing center there. They were the first psychiatric patients to be systematically killed in this way in the Nazi dictatorship on Reich territory. It was the prelude to the infamous T4 euthanasia campaign.
In Haar, January 18 has become a day of remembrance, on which the management of the Isar-Amper-Klinikum, the district and the community remembers all patients who fell victim to the inhuman regime. Memorial sites are currently being set up according to a concept developed by the clinic and district, such as the recent memorial in the Art Nouveau Park. The Psychiatric Museum has been redesigned. “It is our responsibility and obligation to deal with this history of the clinic,” writes clinic spokesman Henner Lüttecke on the occasion of the commemoration this Tuesday, which is taking place on a small scale and online due to Corona.
In Haar, doctors and nurses as well as the hospital chaplain Klaus Rückert first asked questions about the repressed murders of the Nazi era in the 1980s. It was not until 1990 that the first memorial was erected in Haar. In Grafeneck, where a killing center with gas chambers and crematorium had been set up in a former baroque ducal summer residence, a prayer for peace in 1979 was the initial spark. An association was formed which today employs three people full-time at the memorial site, including the historian Thomas Stöckle. A “praise to volunteering,” says Stöckle about the beginnings of the remembrance work, which is now state-sponsored and supported.
According to Stöckle, the fact that the first victims in Grafeneck came from Haar and not from a nearby institution in Württemberg could be due to the fact that the Haar institution director, Hermann Pfannmüller, was a Nazi hardliner who fully supported the so-called racial hygiene ideas. There is evidence that representatives of the Bavarian and Württemberg Ministries of the Interior were present in Berlin when the T4 program was being worked out at the end of 1939. According to Stöckle, the order for the transports went through the interior ministries. So they knew each other there and possibly pulled together.
There should still be many buses commuting between Grafeneck and Haar. Later, the commissioned bus company operated four vehicles, which later became notorious as “grey buses”, with Haar being just one institution of 40 from which patients came to Grafeneck. Up to 11,000 mostly sick people were gassed in Grafeneck, hundreds of them from Haar. Research today assumes that up to 4,000 Haarer patients were murdered; Some also died in the killing center in Hartheim near Linz, and later in Haar itself. Sibylle von Tiedemann, who heads a group of relatives of victims at the NS Documentation Center, calls Haar the largest crime scene in Upper Bavaria in terms of the number of victims to Dachau.
Thanks to the association, which has 200 members, the remembrance work in Grafeneck is intensively and closely interwoven with the local society. Münsingen’s mayor sits on the board. Stöckle counts 400 visitor groups and up to 35,000 visitors a year at the Grafeneck memorial. According to Stöckle, the exchange with hair is very good. When the commemoration day celebrated its 80th anniversary in 2020, Grafeneck was represented with a traveling exhibition in Haar.