Antonie Pachner

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Antonie Pachner (born January 16, 1891 in Rattendorf , Hermagor district; † April 8, 1951 in Graz ) was an Austrian head nurse in the State Infirmary and State Insane Asylum of the Carinthian State Hospital, now the State Hospital of Klagenfurt and involved in euthanasia .

Life

Pachner was baptized a Roman Catholic and was single. In Klagenfurt she first attended a five-grade elementary school, then two classes at the community school, and she also successfully passed an evening trading course. After completing school, she first worked in the household, later as a shop assistant and as an unskilled worker in a cleaning shop and a leather factory. In 1922 she completed a midwifery course offered at the Klagenfurt Regional Hospital and then worked as a midwife. In 1931 she moved to the children's ward of the state hospital and worked there as a nurse from 1932 to 1939. In September 1939 she came to the so-called state infirmary as head nurse, where she was responsible for the front building and the rear building (where most of the killings were carried out during the Nazi era). She carried out her work as head nurse until July 30, 1945.

Since August 1, 1938, she was a member of the NSDAP and “block helper”. Pachner, however, is said to have been a problematic member of the NSDAP, and in 1942 party proceedings were initiated against her for defeatist statements. On August 2, 1945, the British military authorities dismissed her from the service of the state hospital because of her membership in the NSDAP.

Participation in euthanasia

In the infirmary, Pachner was involved in the murder of a large number of patients either as a perpetrator or as a client. She had agreed to do so without any coercion being exercised on her. According to her, a total of between 700 and 900 sick people and those in need of care were murdered in the infirmary. The question of whether Pachner was only on the order of the primary physician Dr. Franz Niedermoser killed the patients, could not be finally resolved in the criminal proceedings; however, it suggested that the nurses made their own decisions.

As a particularly blatant case of death, she describes an incident with an alleged dead person who has already been transferred to the pathology department, but who, according to the pathologist, was still breathing. This had to be brought back to the ward by Pachner. But since he was already provided with a footprint with his name and time of death, Pachner no longer wanted to rewrite it and gave him an injection of morphine , whereupon he died. According to her, the killings were carried out in the so-called day room in the rear building and later in a laundry room that was equipped with two beds in order to keep them secret from the other inmates. However, it was well known among the patients that the transfer to the back of the infirmary meant the imminent killing.

Judicial processing after 1945

In the so-called Klagenfurt euthanasia trial before the Klagenfurt external senate of the Graz People's Court , Pachner was accused of killing at least 20 patients himself in the “infirmary” through oral doses of somnifen, morphine or veronal or the injection of morphine, somnifen and modescope. In addition, she confessed to having given others the order to kill and the necessary means.

On April 4, 1946, Pachner was sentenced to death (death by hanging and financial collapse) for deliberately killing at least 20 patients between 1942 and April 1945 and mistreating others in such a way that their death resulted. On October 19, 1946, by resolution of the Federal President, the death sentence was commuted to a hard prison sentence of twenty years. Pachner died in prison on April 8, 1951.

literature

  • Bernhard Gitschtaler (ed.): Erased names. The victims of National Socialism in and out of the Gailtal - A memory book. 2015, Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag, (p. 38ff)
  • Gerhard Fürstler & Peter Malina: "I was only doing my job ": On the history of nursing in Austria . 2004, Vienna: Facultas Verlag, ISBN 3-85076-619-5 .
  • Helge Stromberger: The doctors, the nurses, the SS and death. Carinthia and the produced death in the Nazi state . 2002, Klagenfurt: Drava Verlag, ISBN 3-85435-106-2 . (P. 52).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ List of Nazi doctors and those involved in Nazi medical crimes
  2. ↑ Fürstler & Malina, 2004, p 159th
  3. ^ Antonie Pachner . nachkriegsjustiz.at. Retrieved August 7, 2011.
personal data
SURNAME Pachner, Antonie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian head nurse who was involved in the murders of the sick during the Nazi era
DATE OF BIRTH January 16, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Rattendorf , Hermagor district
DATE OF DEATH April 8, 1951
Place of death Graz