Action 14f13

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The action 14f13 , in the language of Nazism as " special treatment 14f13 called" concerned the selection and killing of as "sick", "old" and "unable to work" titled concentration camp prisoners in the German Empire from 1941 to 1944. They was also referred to as " invalid or prisoner euthanasia " and was later extended to other groups of people interned in the concentration camps .

prehistory

In the spring of 1941 the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler met with Philipp Bouhler , the head of the chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP and Hitler's representative for the implementation of the " euthanasia " of the mentally ill , the disabled and the "unable to work" inmates of " healing " and "nursing homes" , an agreement regarding the "relief" of the concentration camps under the rule of the SS of "sick" and "no longer able to work" prisoners, which was managed by the central office T4 and was named " Aktion T4 " after the war . For this purpose, the NS killing centers set up as part of the euthanasia campaign, but which were no longer “busy” after its external stop in August 1941, and their “experienced” staff were to be used in as inconspicuous a form as possible .

organization

Bouhler commissioned the head of Hauptamt II in his office, Senior Service Manager Viktor Brack , to whom the various front organizations of T4 were subordinate, to carry out this new assignment.

The measure ran with the inspector of the concentration camps and with the Reichsführer SS under the designation " Sonderbehäne 14f13". The number and letter combination resulted from the SS standard file plan and consists of the number “14” for the inspector of the concentration camps, the letter “f” for deaths and the number “13” for the type of death; So here for the killing by gas in the killing centers of the T4 organization (natural deaths were designated with the file number “14f1”, suicide or accidental death with “14f2”, shooting while fleeing with “14f3”, etc. The execution of Soviet prisoners of war in the concentration camps was carried out under the file number “14f14”; the sterility of prisoners was given the designation “14h7”). “Special treatment” was the common term for killing (e.g. also by execution).

Selections and beginning of the first phase

Pick-up bus from the Hartheim Castle killing center
List of an "invalid transport" from the Dachau concentration camp with the destination Auschwitz concentration camp

The so-called action began in April 1941. For this purpose, medical commissions made up of the already experienced T4 experts such as Professors Werner Heyde and Hermann Paul Nitsche as well as the doctors Friedrich Mennecke , Curt Schmalenbach , Horst Schumann , Otto Hebold , Rudolf Lonauer , Robert traveled Müller , Theodor Steinmeyer , Gerhard Wischer , Victor Ratka , Hans Bodo Gorgaß and others put together the concentration camps in order to carry out the selections there. In order to speed up the time, the camp commanders were responsible for making a preselection, which they made for the listed prisoners using registration forms, as they were already used in Action T4. However, only individual questions about personal details, date of admission, diagnosis of incurable physical ailments, war damage, offenses during admission based on the criminal code and previous crimes had to be answered. According to the guidelines issued, the so-called “ ballast existences ” - inmates who could no longer be used useful - were to be recorded in a list and presented to the medical committees for removal. This included all prisoners who would not be able to work again for a longer period of time or permanently.

In the pre-selection, the prisoners registered by the respective camp commanders had to appear before the medical commission. No medical examination in the strict sense was made; the prisoners were asked about their participation in the war and any war awards. On the basis of the personnel and medical files, it was then decided in which category the prisoner concerned was to be classified. The final “assessment” of the inmates recorded in this way was done using the content of the registration form and was limited to the decision whether the inmate should be given special treatment 14f13 or not. The registration forms with the corresponding result were sent to the T4 headquarters in Berlin for file registration.

When the prisoners were pre-selected for selection, some of them were asked by the camp administration to report if they felt sick or unable to work. They were led to believe that they were going to a "recovery camp" where they only had to do lighter work. In this way, many prisoners volunteered in order to come to the disability blocks of a concentration camp, from where they were picked up and transported to a killing center. When, after the gassing in the killing centers, the victims' belongings were sent back to the deposit camps and word got around despite the secrecy, the real reason for the selections slowly seeped through, so that prisoners no longer reported serious illnesses.

The first known selection took place in April 1941 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp . By the summer of 1941, at least 400 prisoners had been "retired" from this camp. In the same period 450 prisoners from Buchenwald and 575 from Auschwitz were gassed in the Nazi killing center Sonnenstein . 1,000 prisoners from Mauthausen concentration camp were killed in the Nazi killing center in Hartheim . From September to November 1941, 3,000 prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp and several 1,000 from the Mauthausen concentration camp and its twin camp in Gusen were also gassed in the NS killing center in Hartheim. The same happened to prisoners from Flossenbürg , Neuengamme and Ravensbrück concentration camps . In the period that followed, another 1,000 prisoners from Buchenwald Concentration Camp , 850 from Ravensbrück Concentration Camp and 214 from Gross-Rosen Concentration Camp were killed in the Nazi euthanasia center at Sonnenstein and Bernburg . In March / April 1942 around 1,600 selected women from the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Bernburg were gassed.

The superficiality and cynicism of the so-called appraisals of the prisoners are particularly evident from the content of the surviving letters from the “expert” Friedrich Mennecke . On the occasion of a selection in Buchenwald concentration camp , Mennecke wrote to his wife:

"Weimar, 11/25/41 - 8:58 pm

Hotel Elephant

[...] First there were 40 forms to be completed from a 1st portion of Aryans , which the other two colleagues had already been working on yesterday. Of these 40, I worked on around 15. […] Then the 'examination' of the patient took place, i. H. an idea of ​​the individual u. Comparison of the entries taken from the files. We weren't finished with this by noon, because yesterday the two colleagues only worked theoretically, so I 're-examined' those who Schmalenbach (and myself this morning) had prepared and Müller his own. At 12.00 h we first made lunch break. [...] Then we examined until about 16:00 h , and although I [ienten] 105 Pat, Pat Mueller 78 [ienten] so as thus finally as first rate 183 arches were finished. A total of 1200 Jews followed as the second portion, all of whom are not first 'examined', but for whom it is sufficient to take the reasons for arrest (often very extensive!) From the file and so on. to transfer to the arches. So it is a purely theoretical work that will definitely take us up to and including Monday, maybe even longer. From this second serving (Jews), we therefore still done today: I was 17, Muller 15 point 17 hours , we threw away the trowel 'and went to dinner. […] As I have now described today, the next few days will also proceed - with exactly the same program and the same work. After the Jews, about 300 Aryans follow as the third portion, which have to be 'examined' again [...] "

- Friedrich Mennecke. Interior views of a medical offender under National Socialism. An edition of his letters 1935–1947

Killing centers

The three Nazi killing centers Bernburg (director Irmfried Eberl ), Sonnenstein (director Horst Schumann ) and Hartheim (director Rudolf Lonauer and Georg Renno ) were used for the gassing of the selected prisoners . The institution Hadamar was not included; After the euthanasia freeze on August 24, 1941, Sonnenstein no longer gassed any concentration camp prisoners in contrast to Bernburg and Hartheim, although the gassing facilities were not finally stopped until the summer of 1942.

After prisoners in the individual concentration camps had been named by the medical commissions, the camp administrations had to provide them on request. They were transported either with the vehicles of the " Gemeinnützige Krankentransport GmbH " (Gekrat) or with the Reichsbahn directly to one of the killing centers. There the prisoners were examined for gold teeth by a prison doctor and, if necessary, marked before they were taken into a gas chamber and killed by carbon monoxide . After removing the gold teeth, which were sent to the central office in Berlin, the corpses were burned in the existing crematorium ovens . Individual corpses were previously examined further.

The killing was done in the same way and by the same staff as before with the mentally ill as part of Action T4. Only the administrative aspects were changed, since the deaths of members of the camp administration were recorded themselves. They also notified the relatives. The worker Vinzenz Nohel , who worked as "Brenner" in the NS killing center in Hartheim, reported extensively on the "T4" killing process in his post-war interrogation at the criminal police in Linz in September 1945 . Nohel was sentenced to death in the Dachau Mauthausen Trial in 1946 for the murder of concentration camp prisoners who were sick and unable to work, and was executed in 1947.

Extension of the scope of selection

In the course of time, politically or otherwise unpopular people, Jews and so-called antisocials were increasingly included in the selections . According to the general guidelines of the Bavarian police of August 1, 1936 on the imposition of protective custody , these were " gypsies , rural travelers , vagrants, work-shy, idlers, beggars , prostitutes , troublemakers , habitual criminals , brawlers, traffic offenders, psychopaths and the insane". Due to the armaments industry's increasing demand for labor, the inspection of the concentration camps - which had been incorporated into the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA) on March 16, 1942 as Office Group D under SS Brigade Leader Richard Glücks - had one on March 26, 1942 Circular. The following decree was signed by Arthur Liebehenschel as Glück's representative and distributed to all camp commanders:

“Through a report from a camp commandant, it became known that of 51 prisoners retired for special treatment 14f13, 42 of these prisoners were 'able to work again' after some time and therefore did not need to be given special treatment. From this it can be seen that these prisoners are not selected according to the given regulations. Only those prisoners may be referred to the investigative commission who comply with the given regulations and, above all, are no longer able to work.

In order to be able to carry out the work assigned to the concentration camps, every prisoner worker must be kept in the camp. The camp commanders of the concentration camps are asked to pay special attention to this.

The head of the Central Office

signed Liebehenschel

SS-Obersturmbannführer "

A year later, the worsening war situation required further selection restrictions, which ensured that every worker capable of working in the armaments industry was also employed here. For this reason, Glücks issued a new circular on April 27, 1943 with the instruction that in future only actually mentally ill prisoners should be "retired":

“The Reichsführer SS and chief of the German police decided on a submission that in future only mentally ill prisoners may be retired from action 14f13 by the medical commissions designated for this. All other prisoners who are unable to work (tuberculosis sufferers, bedridden cripples, etc.) are generally excluded from this action. Bedridden inmates should be asked to do an appropriate job that they can do in bed.

The order of the Reichsführer SS must be followed closely in the future. The requirements for fuel for this purpose are therefore not applicable. "

According to these guidelines, only the Hartheim killing facility was needed for the selected prisoners - the Bernburg and Sonnenstein facilities were closed. The first phase of action 14f13 was over.

Second phase

New guidelines following orders of April 11, 1944 initiated the second phase of Operation 14f13. From then on, registration forms were not created, and prisoners were not selected by medical committees. From now on, the selection of the fatalities was the sole responsibility of the camp administrators, i.e. usually the camp doctor. However, this did not rule out the fact that the physically ill who were no longer able to work were also killed. This happened within the camp itself or by transferring the prisoners to a camp equipped with a gas chamber, such as the Mauthausen concentration camp , the Sachsenhausen concentration camp or the Auschwitz concentration camp .

In Hartheim, in addition to the camp inmates, forced laborers from the East who were no longer able to work , Soviet prisoners of war and Hungarian Jews were gassed. Operation 14f13 ended with the last transport of inmates to Hartheim on December 11, 1944. In Hartheim, too, the gas chambers were removed and the traces of their use removed as far as possible. In the following years the castle was used as a children's home.

The number of people killed as part of Operation 14f13 has not been precisely determined. The specialist literature gives figures between 15,000 and 20,000 for the period up to the end of 1943.

Classification in the National Socialist extermination ideology

Action 14f13 represented a further step on the way from discrimination and isolation of politically and racially undesirable people, via utilitarian motivated murder to purely racist mass murder , the so-called final solution . In contrast to Action T4, which was disguised with external motives such as the “granting of a death by grace”, Action 14f13 did without all pseudo-justifications and reduced the prisoners to their sheer usefulness as workers. At the same time, pure racist aspects were mixed in with the selection criteria, for example when Jews, Sinti and Roma were “included in the special treatment” without considering their state of health.

literature

Remarks

  1. ↑ Quoted from Peter Chroust (editor): Friedrich Mennecke. Interior views of a medical offender under National Socialism. An edition of his letters 1935–1947. Volume 1, (= research reports of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, Volume 2.1) 2nd edition, Hamburg, 1988, ISBN 3-926736-01-1 , Document 87. Underlining and quotation marks in the original.
  2. ↑ Brigitte Kepplinger: The Hartheim Killing Center 1940–1945 . In: Brigitte Kepplinger, Gerhart Marckhgott, Hartmut Reese (eds.): Hartheim death center . 3. Edition. Linz 2013, p. 63–116 ( antifa-info.at [PDF; 197 kB ; accessed on February 21, 2020]).
  3. ↑ Federal Archives Coll. Schumacher / 271.
  4. ^ The letter in the Administrative documents from the euthanasia program at Gross Rosen concentration camp, 1941-1942 ( Memento from July 15, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) at the Harvard Law School Library (Nuremberg document PS-1151).