Read Online Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder by Gitta Sereny - Free Book Online Page B

necessity for this euthanasia operation, he wasn’t speaking in humane or scientific terms, the way Dr Werner had described it to me. He laughed. He spoke of ‘doing away with useless mouths’ and said that ‘sentimental slobber’ about such people made him ‘puke’.”
    “What about the other people there? What were they like?”
    “There were the two chief medical officers: Dr Renno * and Dr Lohnauer. † And fourteen nurses; seven men and seven women. Dr Lohnauer was a rather aloof sort of man, but very correct. Dr Renno was very nice, friendly.”
    “In the weeks and months to come, did they ever talk to you about what was being done there? ”
    “Often, very often, especially Dr Renno. You know …” he suddenly said, sadly, “you have no idea what the patients were like who were brought there. I had never known there were such people. Oh my God – the children.…” (Dieter Allers said later that he couldn’t understand this reference to children: “No children were killed at Hartheim,” he said. “There were special places for that”; and the Ludwigsburg Central (judiciary) Authority for Nazi Crimes confirmed that if there were children who were killed at Hartheim, it could only have been isolated cases.) ‡
    “But didn’t it ever occur to you to think ‘what if my mother or my child were in this position’?”
    “Ah,” he answered at once, “but they had told us immediately that there were four groups who were exempt: the senile; those who had served in the armed forces; those who had been decorated with the Mutterkreuz [a decoration for women designed to glorify motherhood], and relatives of Euthanasia Aktion staff. Of course, they had to do that.”
    “But aside from that then, did you have any more scruples?”
    “For a long time. After the first two or three days I told Reichleitner that I didn’t think I could stand it. By then I’d heard that the police official who’d had the job before me had been relieved upon his request because he had stomach trouble. I too couldn’t eat – you know, one just couldn’t.”
    “Then it was possible to ask to be relieved?”
    “Yes. But Franz Reichleitner said, ‘What do you think will happen if you do the same? Just remember Ludwig Werner.’ He knew of course about my friend Werner’s being sent to the KZ . * No, I had very little doubt of what would happen to me if I returned to Linz and Prohaska.”
    “You say you saw your wife quite frequently: it must have become obvious to her that you were under strain – it must have shown up somehow. Didn’t she ever ask you again what you were doing? That’s very unlike a wife, isn’t it?”
    “She asked, but only casually you know. She was used to my not being able to discuss service matters.”
    “Do you think the patients at Hartheim knew what was going to happen to them?”
    “No,” he said immediately, with assurance. “It was run as a hospital. After they arrived they were again examined you know. Their temperatures were taken and all that.…”
    “Why would anybody want to take the temperature of people who were mentally sick?”
    “I don’t know. But that’s what they did. They had two tables in a sort of hall the patients were taken to when they arrived; at one of them sat the doctors and at the other nurses. And each arriving patient was examined.”
    “For how long?”
    “Oh, it varied; some just a minute, others a bit longer.”
    “One has read of patients in these ‘institutes’ trying to run away in terror, with nurses or guards pursuing them along the corridors.…”
    “I don’t think that ever happened,” he said, sounding genuinely surprised. “I have certainly never heard of such a thing. You see, even Wirth said, ‘The people must not be allowed to realize that they are going to die. They have to feel at ease. Nothing must be done to frighten them.’ ”
    “Were there any wards? Did it ever happen that any of them stayed – a night, or