Good morning and thank you for joining us for today's episode in our Facebook Live series. I'm your host, Edna Friedberg. October is Disability Awareness Month, a moment to reflect on one of the lesser known, but no less important targets of Nazi violence, people with disabilities. Please join me in welcoming today's guest, Dr. Patricia Heberer-Rice. Hi there Patricia. Hi Edna, it's great to see you again. It is, I miss seeing you. Me too Patricia is my friend, my colleague and Museums Senior Historian and has spent many years researching this dark chapter of history. During today's show, we ask that you please submit questions for Patricia by posting them in the comments section, and we'll get to as many of them live in the course of the show as we can. Also, we all experience the occasional technology glitch, don't worry don't stress about it come back it will be available to view on demand on Facebook so you can watch it at your convenience and share it with your friends. Now to start Patricia, I am going to guess that most of our viewers likely know about the 6 million Jewish people killed during the Holocaust, but can you tell us about the Nazi's first victims of mass murder, German children with disabilities, including many so-called Aryan children? Yes, this is part of the Nazi's first program of mass murder of so-called "euthanasia" program, which targeted institutionalized patients with disabilities. It predated the more systematic mass murder of the Jews that we know as the Holocaust by about two years. And the first victims of euthanasia were children. In August of 1939, about two weeks before World War II broke out in Europe, The Reich Interior Ministry ordered doctors and midwives to report infants and toddlers under the age of three who had severe mental or physical disabilities. A few months later that October, parents of children with disabilities were encouraged to bring their children to special pediatric clinics throughout Germany. In reality, these were childrens killing wards where children were murdered with overdoses of medication and sometimes to starvation. About 10,000 physically and mentally disabled German children were murdered as a result of this child euthanasia program during the war years. Now we usually associate mass murder programs in Nazi Germany with the SS, but in this killing program it was carried out by doctors and nurses. People may wonder why. It's hard to make sense of any of the killings from this era. Let's talk about the ideology behind this disturbing program. How did the Nazis frame people with mental or physical disabilities as somehow a threat or a danger to society? A lot of Nazi policies that involved the German medical community came from eugenics. That was a popular scientific movement of the late nineteenth early twentieth century. Today eugenics has been soundly discredited but we have to remember in its day it was seen as cutting edge science by scientists in many countries including here in the United States. Eugenicists believed that society's ills criminality, mental illness, alcoholism, even poverty were heredity. That is nature, not nurture that made you the kind of person you were. It's really the idea of selective breeding. If you can breed a better dog or a better horse, which human beings have done for millennia, centuries, you can breed a better person and a better national body. And here you see someone undergoing a eugenic examination. The Nazis took eugenic ideals to a really deadly extreme with the idea of restoring the racial integrity of Germany. They believed people with disabilities were not only threats to the Nazi state, but they were unworthy of life. And that they were a drain on society. A financial drain, a burden, a biological blemish, if you will. Exactly, Edna. For those who are interested, we invite you to learn more about eugenics and how its pseudoscientific theories shaped Nazi policies by looking in comments section. We'll be posting links to our online Holocaust Encyclopedia where you can go deeper into the subject. We would like to say good morning and welcome to viewers who are watching from around the country. hello to you in Tallahassee, Florida, Miami, and in my hometown of Champagne-Urbana, Illinois. Also we would like to send greetings to our viewers who are watching around the world, hello to you in India, the Philippines, southern Italy, and Athens, Greece. To turn back to our subject at hand, Patricia, we're going to actually show, talking about this way that people with disabilities were portrayed and dehumanized in Nazi society, let's show some disturbing and dehumanizing propaganda that the Nazis created in order to rationalize a sterilization program that targeted people with disabilities. This is very upsetting footage to watch. I'll caution our viewers. But let's have a look. Now, it's important to note that when the narrater uses the term "victims " he means that the individuals we see are victims of their condition. Patricia, could you please just explain some of what we saw, what it was intended to accomplish or communicate? Yes, these kind of films were usually shown as trailers for feature films. This is propaganda which was created for the sterilization program, which began in 1934 under the Nazi regime and sterilized about 400,000 Germans. The Nazi propaganda cherry-picked very specific images to exhibit the worst cases of physical mental disabilities in an effort to dehumanize these individuals. This very radical sterilization program paved the way for the murder of people with disabilities. We began by talking about the murder of children with disabilities, but children did not remain the only targets of this program. Please explain about that. You're completely right, Edna. Nazi planners very quickly moved to extend the program to adults already living in institutional settings. There was a villa in Berlin which really was the nerve center for this program and its street address Tiergartenstraße 4, gave the operation its code name, Operation T4. By the end of the war, 250,000 people with disabilities living in institutions were murdered by the Nazi regime. So this was deliberate, it was centralized, it was planned. Correction. We have a question from a viewer. Would people with disabilities like autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and attention deficit hyperactive disorder have been killed as well? Right. Some things like anxiety disorders or learning disabilities these individuals usually aren't in institutions, and probably weren't in those days either So, they probably wouldn't have been killed. Autism is a little different. At the time nobody understood autism in children and it was misdiagnosed as child's schizophrenia I should say schizophrenia for children is very rare. So what we are seeing in those instances was actually autism. And yes, many children were murdered who had autism to some degree. So, what I'm hearing from you also it's difficult for us not to project back some of our understandings of disability, of mental illness to that time, but that some of the lack of nuance and understanding led people to be classified as in this damaged category. Is that right? Yes, absolutely. And we'll see an example of that in a few minutes actually. Yes, let's actually turn to an example. Let's try to understand the actual human impact of the T4, so called euthanasia program. Please tell us about one of the ordinary people, a young woman named Magdalene Maier-Leibnitz who became a victim of this program. Yeah. So there you see a picture of her Magdalene Maier-Leibnitz She was born in 1916 into a very prominent family in near Stuttgart in southwest Germany. Her father was a professor. Her uncle became a prominent post war politician after 1945 in the Federal Republic of Germany. And her experience really shows that the program didn't spare individuals who came from positions of wealth and power. She attended gymnasium, a kind of prep school in the early 1930s. Most students who go to this school are bound for college, and that wasn't typical for Germans at the time, and certainly not typical for a woman like Magdalene. Family and friends begin to notice that she behaves differently and about in 1935 she had to leave school. In retrospect,she was porbably exhibiting the first symptoms of schizophrenia which she was later diagnosed. About 3 years later in 1938, her family places her in a private clinic near her hometown named Kennenburg. In 1941, along with some other patients from that clinic she was secretely moved to the Hadamar mental health facility near Frankfurt and there she was gassed at the age of 25. Magdalene was one of 10,000 patients who were murdered in a very short timeframe, 8 months at Hadamar, which is a euthanasia killing center. I'm struck hearing Magdalene biography, looking at the photos. She almost looks like a poster girl for the league of German girls. She has long braids. Her family has influential connections, certainly has money. and as you said put her into a private clinic, trying to give her the best possible care. But let's be clear, at Hadamar, the facility to which she was transferred, who were the personnel carrying out gassings at this supposedly medical clinical setting. These are doctors and nurses who at had been at this stage in the program were recruited especially for the killing program. These personnel who were supposed to protect and care for these patients were murdering them. We have a question related to that because these are people with families, people who love them, people who have put them into clinical settings because they think it's a supportive environment. A viewer named Christian is asking how did the general public not notice as people with disabilities started to disappear? And if I can expand on that, can you tell us also did Magdalene's family know what was happening to her and did what were they told of her death. Maybe that will help illustrate Sure. There's an enormous effort to keep this program a secret. It's actually homicide on German soil. There's a massive bureaucracy to try to hide the evidence. Magdalene's family is told she's sent to another facility as a war measure. There was bombing, for instance. This made her difficult to trace. They don't know that she actually want to Hadamar. And after Magdalene was gassed and cremated her family was given false information about her death. The program's operatives provide fictitious dates, places and causes of death on the death certificate for people who are murdered in this program. And Magdalene's parents like other victims families would have received what was called a consolation letter informing them falsely that she had died of tuberculosis so that was made up. Magdalene's family would also have received an urn with what they were told were her ashes, her remains but in reality were taken from a pile of ashes on the crematorium floor which is which is extremely cynical and callous. Look in the comments section, we'll be posting additional links to our online Holocaust Encyclopedia about the coverup about the bureaucratic slipups that alerted people that what they were hearing was probably not the whole entire story. If I remember correctly Patricia that there were sometimes families that erroneously received not one but two urns of supposed remains of their loved one, and sometimes or more than one consolation letter listing different causes. This was a big operation and sometimes there were mistakes. And that actually led to some protests and objections, right? Yes, the families of the victims are among the first people to figure out what's going on. And pretty soon this becomes an open secret. And at least one famous bishop speaks out against euthanasia from the pulpit in August of 1941. And right about that time not only because of that but for other reasons as well, the program actually goes to a pause for the adult killings in the T4 program until they can figure out how to make the program more covert. So the protest actually and the knowledge of the German people about this program actually worked to shut the program down at least for a number of months. I think that's a very significant and enlightening example because it's tempting or maybe even in some ways almost comforting to think that either one the entire German population was brainwashed or hypnotized into buying all parts of the Nazi program, or two, there was absolutely nothing you could do. That there was only terror and the regime was not responsive to public opinion. And this case shows that actually neither of those is true. Right. Counterintuitive. We have another question, I believe, from a student. She's asking were the methods of murdering these people used to test out ways to murder the Jews later? That's a really interesting question. Yes, that's absolutely true. This, as I said, the first mass killing program of the Nazis, the gassing technology developed for this program is later embroidered upon to murder Jews. And the T4 program for adults used at this point used bottled chemically produced carbon monoxide gas to kill its victims. The planners of the Final Solution expand on this technology, using carbon monoxide gas generated from motor engine exhaust to create first the mobile gas vans to kill Jews and other victims in the killing fields in the German occupied Soviet Union. And then in stationary gas chambers at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka: those are 3 killing centers that murdered 1.7 million Jews in German-occupied Poland. And the staff of these three camps who had learned to murder innocent and vulnerable victims in the so-called euthanasia program are deployed there as the main German personnel at these 3 killings centers so there’s this link between the mass murder programs and its a link that both in technology but also in personnel. A testing ground for methods of killing and a proving ground for people who are willing and able and compliant to carry out this kind of mass murder. If you missed our last Facebook Live, actually, about photos that were collected by an SS officer who was high up in one of the killing centers in occupied Poland. Part of his career trajectory was a burner, someone who disposed of bodies at one of these so called euthanasia facilities. And from there we trace how he and his comrades rose through the ranks to the larger killing operations of Jews. We would like to welcome some of our favorite viewers, Teacher Mark Nelson and his 8th grade artists at Central School in Illinois. Nice to have you back Mr. Nelson and crew. Patricia, you have spent many many years trying to add texture important historical detail and personality to this chapter of history and you have previously called those targeted by this program The Nameless Victims of the Nazis. Why don't we know more about them as individuals even today so many years after the fact? Because of the documentation and testimonies we have of survivors and witnesses, we know a lot about the identity of Jewish victims during the Holocaust, but this is not true for euthanasia victims. German privacy laws are very strict. That's pretty common for the entire continent most European countries have very strict privacy laws. Medical records in Germany are generally closed even after the person dies, which isn't always the case here in the States. So, only the medical director of facilities that still retain these records has the right to decide whether the names or content of individual patient files can be opened to scholars. And in the case of one particular facility at Kaufbeuren in southwestern Germany, the medical director at the time Michael von Cranach, became convinced that victims should be memorialized by giving them their names. I'm going to interrupt you. When you say at the time you mean recently not during at the time of Nazism. Right. He was the medical director until I believe just recently from 1980 until the early 2000s. He is in private practice today. And in the year 2000, he gave us access to more than a thousand medical records of patients who were murdered at this facility so now we can learn who these people are. And let's learn about what have we learned because of these records? Right. So, Kaufbeuren, and there you see the photograph there of the main building. Kaufbeuren, it's still a mental health facility today. That's very common actually because they're built to be mental health facilities. It operated since the 1890s as a long-term care facility. In 1941, it became involved in the murder of children under the child euthanasia program. And between summer of 1941 and 1942, I already spoke about there being a pause in the adult killing program because it had become an open secret. But euthanasia facilities begin to kill again adults in 1942. in 1943, Kaufbeuren becomes one of these killing facilities so its killing adults and children. 209 children and about 1350 adults in all were murdered at this facility. So 1500 patients. I'd like to acknowledge that we're seeing comments from a number of viewers who are relating to this history on a very personal and intimate level. Heres one from a viewer named Cathy who writes I would have been killed. I am hearing impaired and have bipolar disorder. Let that sink in. Yes, Cathy. We see you, we understand what you're saying, and others like you who are posting here. That's part of why we feel this is so important to show this. The way that Nazi ideology and Nazi society and doctors and nurses who had taken an oath to care dehumanized people not for anything they did not for anything they believed but simply for who they are and who their biology had created them to be and they felt their life was not worth living. It's painful to look at and offends our sensibilities, as it should. Along those lines, let's continue to put faces and names so we're not just talking about statistics, Patricia. You have pain stakingly worked to do this. Please tell us about one of the patients at Kaufbeuren, a young boy. Yes, I'm thinking of the young boy Ernst Lossa. Ernst Lossa was born into a Jenisch family, you see him there as a very young boy. Jenisch are an ethnic group of what were itinerant peddlers who lived in and still live in central Europe and the Nazis associated them with the so-called gypsies whom they persecuted. And Ernst's mother died when he was just four years old. And after his father and his older brothers are sent to the concentration camps as so-called gypsies, Ernst and his two sisters were sent to a children's home near Augsburg where he was born. Ernst is often caught stealing in the home at this particular home and he is sent to a reform school in 1941. Here he continued to get in trouble with the school authorities. Today we might call him a bit of a juvenile delinquent. But a psychiatrist at the time diagnosed him as a psychopath. That was the diagnosis. Today we think of the term psychopath and we think someone like Ted Bundy, the serial killer. But in those days it meant somebody who committed immoral or illegal acts because they suffered from moral degeneracy and mental illness. There you see a little bit older picture of Ernst a little bit later. Because of his diagnosis he was sent to the pediatric unit at Kaufbeuren mental health facility in April 1942. There he continues to pilfer. But the staff actually considered him to be a funny prankster and he was very helpful and they seemed to have a soft spot for him. But unfortunately, in August of 1944, the director of the facility, Valentin Faltlhauser suspected that Lossa might have figured out that the patients were being murdered at the facility. At this point, it's quite clear to most thinking people in Germany that they're are going to lose the war and perhaps they didn't want this child as a potential witness. At the age of 14, in August 1944 he was killed with a lethal overdose of narcotics. His death certificate says that he dies of bronchial pneumonia, but of course we know those records are falsified. The people who murdered Ernst Lossa were tried by newly reconstructed German courts after the war and received very light sentences. The nurse who is believed to have murdered him for examples got four years. After she was released for time served at about two years went back to nursing and got a state pension in the 1960s. It's hard not to feel a sense of outrage and injustice, not only for the lack of penalty for the medical personnel who killed him, but for Ernst, who was so unlucky in so many ways to lose his mother as a young child, to lose the rest of his family to the Nazi camp system, to be termed a deviant by outside of society just for being a boy. It is really just terrible and to look into his eyes. We have a question from a viewer asking how did the Nazis convince doctors and nurses to cooperate? We saw some of the type of propaganda earlier In your research, you've been able to determine whether or not at some places like Kaufbeuren the staff was enthusiastic. Can you shed some light on that, please? During the gassing program, they recruited individuals to work for the euthanasia program. They brought them to Berlin to that nerve center that I spoke about, swore them to secrecy and asked them if they wanted to participate and more often agreed to participate. Nothing happened incidentally to those who did not. Later at Kaufbeuren, it becomes a little more complicated because the director of the euthanasia center decide overnight this facility is going to be a euthanasia center and the staff is then told. They're not recruited. And suddenly they're in a euthanasia center. Some of the staff felt that this was a mercy to murder, unfortunately, these vulnerable individuals. Some of the staff clearly bought into the eugenics ideas that we spoke about, and others felt a duress to stay that they might be punished if they left For a variety of reasons doctors and nurses participated in this program. And how enthusiastic was the staff at Kaufbeuren? You found in your research some very troubling evidence. Yeah, Kaufbeuren is notorious for this very reason I'm about to tell you. In late April, 1945, American forces occupied the region around Augsburg, and the local townspeople tell them there's a facility and they're killing the patients. And they liberate in essence the facility and take away some of the top officials at Kaufbeuren. Of course, the patients have to remain because they're in a hospital. So, some of the staff remains, too. And when the medical, the Army Medical Corp Unit returns to the facility a month later, they make a gruesome discovery. They discover that the nurses are still killing their patients, the last dying by lethal injection just hours before this inspection. It seems they really bought into this concept that life is not worth living that it became a part of their routine because nearly three weeks after the collapse of Nazi Germany, they're still murdering patients at Kaufbeuren. And who was the last victim of the killing operation there? Yes, a little boy. His name was Richard Jenne. You see him there. Quite a little boy. Vulnerable little boy. He was murdered by a lethal overdose of medication when he was 4 years old on May 29, 1945. Remember Germany surrendered on the 8th of May 1945. He was classified as a feebleminded idiot. That's medical terminology of the day, not ours. He had an intellectual disability. And he was among the 209 minors who were killed at Kaufbeuren between December 1941 and May 1945. And now 75 years after his death, it is a solemn duty to be able to pay tribute put a face and a name to Richard Jenne. We have a question from a viewer named Chuck, what element of the Nazi's actions toward children with disability was rooted in the history of anti-Semitism in Germany? That's an interesting question. Not a lot. These are separate programs. The euthanasia program really comes from a place of eugenics, comes from a place of wanting to cleanse your race. Equally of course the Nazi's final solution is a similar kind of program because you're cleansing the Jews from Germany and German occupied lands. But in this particular program, it was about cleansing ones own race. So very very few, relatively few of the victims of child euthanasia or adult euthanasia are Jews. About 5000 Jews are murdered in the euthanasia program This was a place, this program is really confined to Germany and the territory it directly annexes. And the overwhelming number, the rest of the 250,000 are German Aryans. As you said German Aryans. So, people who otherwise, if not for their disabilities would have been classified as only not inferior, but as part of this superior race. Correct. We have a comment, a woman name Jenny writes in to say my uncle was one of those victims. He was a resident of an institution that he was then secretly transferred and he was murdered in 1940 in the Brandenburg so-called euthanasia center. I found out about the existence of this uncle only three years ago. Brandenburg was the first of the killing centers to open and claimed many of these 5,000 Jewish victims that we talked about and thousands of others. Thank you, Jenny. We're sorry about your uncle. Thank you for sharing that with us today. Before we close, because we are nearly out of time, Patricia, as you mentioned earlier, part of the reason that you're able to share so much about the brutal history of this institution, of Kaufbeuren is because of Dr Michael Von Cranach, the physician who decades later was troubled by the violent complicity of his predecessors and about how you work with this history today with people in the field. Right. Michael Von Cranach was the former medical director. You see him there. I let him know that he would be featured today. Perhaps he's watching us live. Hello Dr Von Cranach. In 2000, he granted us access to the wartime patient records from this facility and they really offer a window in the lives of the 250,000 children and adults killed in the euthanasia program. And Dr Von Cranach was horrified of the role of doctors, some of them very prominent, playing roles in this euthanasia program. And when asked what motivated him to make these records public and give these people their names he said the suffered injustice, the degradation and debasement were so profound that each patient must have wished that this wrong was finally acknowledged and that he or she was personally recognized as a person worthy of life. And that's a direct quote from Dr Von Cranach And here you're looking at the place where today there stands a memorial to the thousands of murdered victims of people with disabilities killed by the Nazi regime. Tiergartenstrasse 4. Today it is right in front of the Berlin philharmonic, hit by bombs at the end of the war, and you see commemoration of the headquarters, which now honors the victims. And how do you adapt this history and share it with people today who are training to be doctors, nurses, medical professionals, Patricia? Right. So, I give a lot of lectures to medical audiences around the country. And here in the Washington area, as well. Working with medical faculty and students to kind of show a worst-case scenario of this particular history. And physicians, obviously they're not Nazi doctors or bad doctors, but they do run into things like peer pressure, the fact that sometimes they have to perform triage in this COVID environment. They may have to decide or physicians like them decide who gets to be on a ventilator, who does not. So, they also face particular difficulties just in doing their jobs. And today, of course, there are front-line heroes. And I think this particular part of the history is interesting to them, compelling to them, and hopefully it will help them to remember that medical ethics are a living code. A living code, indeed. Thank you so much, Patricia for teaching us today about this dark chapter of history and for the work you're doing to help medical students learn about how their counterparts were corrupted during the Nazi era and the critical role of ethics. Thank you. Thank you, Edna. A viewer has written in that to say that we cannot change the past. We have to look to the future to make sure that children with disabilities have a voice. That they are treated with respect. And the same as children without disability. This terrible time in our history should never happen again. And I think those are very appropriate words, Joy, with which to close. We are very grateful to Dr. Michael von Cranach and those who have begun to share the identities of those murdered by the Nazi because of their disabilities so that they are no longer nameless. Through these ongoing efforts, we can tell their stories and honor their lives.For those of you watching here in the Washington DC area, our Museum just two days ago has reopened. for limited visitation. To learn about our health and safety protocols, look in our comment section to find a link and you can also reserve timed passes. Passes are required. We also hope you will join us for our next program on Tuesday November 10th at 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time in the United States. Very important historical anniversary. Our next Facebook live program will be about the night of broken glass, through a survivor's eyes. Our guest, Susan Warsinger, was a nine-year-old girl on Kristallnacht, a night of widespread targeted violence against Jews throughout Germany in 1938. Our program will be held on the anniversary of those terrible events. Until then, thank you again for joining us. Be safe, be well wherever you are. Thank you. Bye-bye.
