Arthur Schreck

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Arthur Josef Schreck (born August 15, 1878 in Baden-Baden ; † October 3, 1963 in Pfullendorf ) was a German psychiatrist , director of the Rastatt nursing home and as a T4 appraiser and deputy director of the Wiesloch sanatorium and head of the children's department there involved in child and adult “euthanasia” in the Third Reich .

Origin and studies

Arthur Schreck was born out of wedlock to Karoline Epp, then 22 years old. Two months after his birth, the general practitioner Josef Schreck, who, in contrast to his mother, was a Catholic denomination, recognized him as his son. Nevertheless, his father did not marry Karoline Epp in Pfullendorf , but a wealthy bourgeois daughter and set up a doctor's office there in 1882.

Arthur Schreck attended elementary school in Freiburg and for three years the secondary school in Überlingen . After the death of his wife in 1891, Josef Schreck finally married Karoline Epp in Freiburg, so that Arthur Schreck was the eldest at the age of 14 and thus the ancestral owner alongside his four half-siblings.

After secondary school, Schreck began training as an apprentice pharmacist, but was accepted into the upper prima of the humanistic grammar school in Konstanz in 1898 , after he had prepared for the Abitur in self-study of Latin, Greek and mathematics against his father's resistance . At the age of 22 he passed his school leaving examination in 1902 and studied medicine in Würzburg , Heidelberg , Munich and Freiburg . He partially financed his studies with representatives of general practitioners and came into contact with the mentally handicapped in the Weinheim district care facility . 1905 was the fright approval and was in 1906 with the theme "Contributions to the serum therapy of Graves' disease " doctorate . His mother died that same year.

Professional beginnings

Schreck initially helped out in his father's practice, worked as a surgical assistant at the City Hospital in Konstanz, and from December 14, 1908 to March 14, 1909, was a trainee doctor at the Schussenried Sanatorium and from July 1, 1909 to October 1, 1909 at the Heidelberg University Psychiatric Clinic .

In 1910 his father, who was a local celebrity in Pfullendorf and was very involved in club and cultural life, married for the third time. He moved to Dresden with his wife, who was twelve years his junior, to take over the management of the Weisser Hirsch physical and dietetic sanatorium as a medical advisor . Even before he remarried, he had already given up a large part of his medical activities to his eldest son. Arthur Schreck was only reluctantly willing to take over his father's practice. In 1909 he continued his father's practice under sole responsibility and in October of that year he also married a daughter from a well-off middle-class family. Two children appeared in quick succession. Already in 1912, where his father was appointed the third honorary citizen of Pfullendorf, to shock applied for a medical position in the mental hospital Illenau in Achern . In his application letter he outlined his motives for this surprising step, for which his father in particular could not muster the slightest understanding:

“I have always had a keen interest in psychiatry and already intended to turn to this subject in 1905, but I encountered the most stubborn resistance on the part of my father, who did not allow it under any circumstances […]. [I] was forced to take over the paternal practice because of my father's poor health. I did this very reluctantly, but it was for the sake of my father [...]. Since I have also kept a keen interest in psychiatry, today, after seven years, I once again come to the decision to definitely turn to this subject. "

Doctor in the Illenau sanatorium

Schreck received a confirmation from the director of Illenau, Heinrich Schüle, and entered the Baden state service on May 16, 1913 as an unscheduled civil servant assistant doctor. In February 1915 he was appointed senior physician on schedule and in August 1924. Since the beginning of the First World War , he independently headed the male healing department of the Illenau sanatorium and was also active as an expert in forensic , civil and military cases.

He was spared from military service due to a hearing loss that he had acquired in childhood. In 1914, Schreck was responsible for the management of a "war hospital for the wounded" and for the hospital pharmacy. In 1916 he was awarded the War Merit Cross for this.

In the Illenau, Schreck was perceived as a “highly esteemed college” and “excellent worker” who was also popular with his patients. In a testimony in 1948 a former doctor colleague stated that Schreck's nickname in Illenau was tellingly "Vati" .

In August 1928 he was awarded the title of Medical Councilor. Like most of his doctor colleagues and the director of Illenau, Hans Römer, Schreck joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1933 (membership no. 3.089.934). He was also a member of the National Socialist Doctors and Air Protection Association and from March 1936 cell leader of the NSV .

Head of the Rastatt nursing home

On April 17, 1934, Schreck took up his post as provisional acting head of the newly established Rastatt nursing home. This institution, which was set up in the former garrison hospital of the Rastatt Fortress, was intended to relieve the four overcrowded Baden sanatoriums and nursing homes from the patients considered incurable as a “special custody facility for permanently mentally ill people in need of asylum seekers” . It was also intended to contribute to the effective implementation of the Act for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases of 14 July 1933. His task was initially to set up and equip the new institution in the shortest possible time and with minimal financial outlay. Schreck was responsible, among other things, for up to 580 institutional and 450 welfare foster persons in four surrounding institutions, the institution pharmacy, monitoring of nursing and care and administration. In addition, he prepared up to 100 reports a year. The establishment and operation of the institution led to a permanent overload of fright. His patients also felt the consequences of their classification as pure nursing patients without any healing measures. Schreck described the situation in his interrogation after the war:

“In Rastatt, I was forced to move from active and positive to passive and negative psychiatry with regard to the majority of the patients [...]. The infinitely sad aspect of my patients on rounds, the impossibility of being able to help them therapeutically, as well as the fact that I am in a much worse financial position in Rastatt than in Illenau, made me very unhappy. I don't know whether I would have stayed in Rastatt if the care of four welfare homes with 450 young children [...] hadn't distracted me from this misery. "

Despite all the shortcomings, Schreck expressed his agreement in principle with the new austerity course in a letter from December 1934:

"The primitiveness of an institution for the mentally ill is undoubtedly justified in today's world."

He showed himself to be extremely correct and, in financial matters, downright a meticulous director. With a practical nursing care key from one nurse to 25 nurses (in contrast to the sanatoriums and nursing homes with an average of 1: 3) he succeeded in lowering the nursing rate to 1.60 RM in the 1936 accounting year (normal was 3.05 RM). Schreck had created the prototype of a closed, pure care facility with the Rastatt nursing home through an extraordinary investment of energy and time.

The continual reduction in the number of nursing staff due to the fact that they were called up for military service ultimately resulted in only six nursing staff remaining for around 650 sick people. Thus the end of the institution was announced at the beginning of 1939. On September 5, 1939, the 579 patients were evacuated to the Zwiefalten sanatorium , where Schreck and his Rastatt staff continued to function as the independent director of his nursing home. Dissatisfied with his personal situation and the completely inadequate accommodation of his patients in Zwiefalten, Schreck often appeared drunk when he was on duty, so that the head of the Illenau sanatorium, Hans Römer, described him as addicted to alcohol, which would be impossible as an institution director.

Action T4

In the autumn of 1939, the National Socialist murder campaign, known as " Aktion T4 ", began with the registration of potential victims . The directors of the Baden institutions were informed in December 1939 by the head of the health department in the Baden Ministry of the Interior, Ministerialrat Ludwig Sprauer , about the purpose and the implementation of the campaign. Schreck was officially inaugurated in Berlin in February 1940.

On February 27, 1940, his patients were first transported to the Grafeneck Nazi killing center . He explained the relocation to his employees for planned economy reasons on the occasion of the war, which had been ordered from above and was subject to the strictest secrecy. Almost all of his 500 patients ended up in the Grafeneck gas chamber .

At his own request, in May 1940 he was given the opportunity to visit the operation of the gas chamber and the incinerator in Grafeneck. He was only critical of the primitive facilities of the killing facility. He did not question the murder of the sick, disguised as "euthanasia" . On August 14, 1947, Schreck testified:

“I looked into the gas chamber through the open door. There were about 50-60 dead people in it, who took up all kinds of positions, some sitting on chairs and benches, some lying on the floor. They were men […]. I came at a time when burns were going on. There was a large outdoor incinerator about 30 meters from the gas room. The furnace was the size of a room and was heated with coke. Guards each carried two dead bodies from the gas compartment [...] and pushed the corpses into the oven. The cremation took about a quarter of an hour, but I left early and gave Dr. Schumann reproached that the kind of cremation seemed primitive to me. I would have imagined a kind of crematorium. Dr. Schumann assured me that they had initially placed the incinerator under the roof, but that the heat was so great that the roof almost caught fire. The stove should therefore have been set up outdoors. In addition, the Grafeneck institution will be closed in a few weeks, and crematoriums have already been set up in other institutions. "

After all patients, with a few exceptions, had been extradited to the killing centers of Operation T4, the Rastatt center (based in Zwiefalten) was closed on June 15, 1940.

T4 reviewer

As early as February 28, 1940, Schreck was also active as a so-called T4 expert , with the task of deciding who should and should be gassed in the killing centers set up specifically for this purpose on the basis of registration forms with the data of sick and disabled people as the potential victims of the action who was allowed to live on. The superficiality with which the life and death of the sick who were not seen by the experts were decided is also clear from the example of Schreck's medical "expert" work:

“In the period from April to the end of December 1940, questionnaires were sent to me from Berlin in registered parcels in Zwiefalten. There were 200 photocopies of each questionnaire. The parcels came about once a week, occasionally at intervals of two to three weeks. The first broadcast essentially comprised cases from institutions in Baden, such as Emmendingen, Reichenau , Hub and a few cases from Herten's children. I wrote to Berlin that in the future I should be assigned cases from institutions outside of Baden. Berlin complied with this request. I didn't want any Baden cases because the first broadcast included some that I knew personally. I am convinced that one can judge more objectively if one does not know a sick person. I examined the first 200 registration forms in addition to my other institutional work. I mainly used my free evenings for this, but I also worked at night [...]. I examined the questionnaires very carefully.

In the period from April to the end of December given above, I examined an estimated 15,000 questionnaires. I note that I often received two packages of 200 questionnaires each week.

I correct the statements I just made so that each package of registration forms contained four folders, each folder probably with 100 registration forms. The individual package then contained 400 registration forms, and not 200 as I just stated. "

The following statement is also indicative of Schreck's carelessness in his "expert" work:

"As Dr. Römer [director of the Illenau sanatorium] told me that Dr. Schreck was so frivolous in his work as an expert that he even processed some of these registration forms in a public economy while he was drinking wine.

In the meantime, the nickname Schrecks had changed from originally "Vati" to "Schreck der Heilanstalten" .

Acting head of the Illenau sanatorium

In the Berlin T4 headquarters on July 3, 1940, at the instigation of the Baden health officer Ludwig Sprauer, instead of joining the Reich Association of Hospitals and Nursing Agencies, Schreck was offered the alternative of participating in a so-called flying doctors' commission (which in the institutions is responsible for filling out the Registration form took over if there were difficulties or delays) or to take over the acting management of the Illenau sanatorium. Director Römer had called in sick there in order to avoid participating in the extradition of his patients to the killing centers. His deputy Hoffer was also absent due to illness. Schreck came back to his previous place of work and, as ordered, reduced the number of patients there by 600 by moving 280 patients to the sanatoriums and nursing homes in Konstanz, Emmendingen and Wiesloch , while the rest was gradually transported to the killing centers via intermediate centers. Schreck reported on his own initiative four patients for the "euthanasia" transports, which he judged to be " ballast existences " which, in times when millions of valuable, sane people would be sacrificed in a war, no longer had any rights from the general public to be fed through.

After the return of the deputy director Hoffer, he completed the evacuation of the Illenau, so that it was closed as a sanatorium on December 19, 1940.

Deputy Director of the Wiesloch Sanatorium

On October 21, 1940, Schreck was transferred to the Wiesloch sanatorium and nursing home by the Baden Minister of the Interior and appointed deputy director. In the same month he resigned from the Catholic Church for reasons that were no longer comprehensible. It can be assumed that Schreck's transfer to Wiesloch was related to her new function as an intermediary for Action T4.

Head of the Wiesloch children's department

When, at the instigation of Ministerialrat Herbert Linden , the head of department for the sanatoriums and nursing homes in the Reich Ministry of the Interior , the Baden health officer Sprauer demanded the establishment of a so-called children's department in Wiesloch, the director there, Wilhelm Möckel, declined to manage it, as he was actively participating in the "Euthanasia" basically refused. However, he suggested his deputy Schreck for this function, so that an informational talk with Schreck durch Sprauer and "two strange gentlemen" took place.

“In mid-December I was called to the management of the Wiesloch facility, where Ministerialrat Dr. Sprauer, I should build a small children's ward in Wiesloch [...]. Dr. Sprauer went on to explain that there were only specially selected children whom I had to examine and liquidate. It used the word 'liquidate' at least in the sense of […]. I probably killed two children in February 1941 by injecting Luminal or morphine - scopolamine . I don't remember the names of both children. I don't know anymore whether it was girls or boys. [...]

The two killings I had carried out had got around in the institution. This had also become known in other institutions. I considered such killings in institutions to be unsuitable and therefore reported to Berlin that I refuse further treatment [...]. After I refused further killings, a Dr. Kühnke […]. He came every three weeks and killed eight to ten children in all […].

I add to my statement that I may have killed three children, not two. I dissected the killed children in all cases […]. In June 1941 I refused to participate in this matter. "

At a further meeting in Berlin at the “ Reich Committee for the Scientific Assessment of Hereditary and Conventional Severe Ailments ” chaired by Richard von Hegener , Schreck was once again conveyed the purpose of the specialist departments and their tasks.

After three children had been killed by luminal injections, Scheck informed the “Reich Committee” that he could no longer continue this activity. The “children's department” remained under the direction of Schreck until the end of June 1941. The pediatrician Fritz Kühnke traveled from Munich every several weeks to kill eight to ten other children.

From April 1942, Schreck headed a department for mentally ill offenders and people in preventive detention. Even after reaching the age limit of 65 in August 1943, Schreck worked in Wiesloch and was awarded the War Merit Cross, 2nd class without swords , on September 1, 1943 . His application for retirement on May 26, 1944 was finally granted.

Arrest and conviction

In October 1945 he was arrested and on 16 November 1948 by the Circuit Court Freiburg for crimes against humanity, legally coincident with tateinheitlich committed aid to the murder of inmates to life in prison and because of manslaughter sentenced in three cases, to a total of ten years in prison . In the same proceedings, the former health officer in the Baden Ministry of the Interior, Ludwig Sprauer, was convicted and when he - in contrast to Schreck - went on appeal , his sentence was reduced to eleven years in 1950. Finally, in April 1951, the court suspended the sentence for incapacity. Schreck returned to Pfullendorf and was accepted into the house of his in-laws.

His pardon by the remainder of the sentence was given by the Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg, Gebhard Müller, in March 1958, after he had already converted the prison sentence into a prison sentence of equal length in 1954. The civil rights were granted from 1 August 1954 re-fright. Although the civil servant-law consequences of his conviction remained, Schreck was granted a maintenance contribution of 450 DM per month from July 1, 1954 .

Arthur Schreck died on October 3, 1963 in Pfullendorf. He was buried in the grave site of his in-laws there. His only son, Werner Schreck, who had already died, was also a medical advisor.

Arthur Schreck was one of the very rare participants in the National Socialist homicide campaign who, even after the end of the Third Reich, stood by his view that the state had the right to end “unworthy lives” in the interests of society, even without the consent of those affected. In 1947 he said:

“[…] In conclusion, I repeat that I have regretted my active participation in the E. [euthanasia] campaign 1,000 and more than 1,000 times, not because of the E. patients, but because of the hospital staff and the odor that I have in church circles unconsciously because of my positive opinion on euthanasia. [...] if we had had to feed 4,000 to 5,000 mentally ill people in Baden since the end of the war, that would have been a difficult, almost insoluble problem at a time when a large part of the mentally healthy population is in a state of considerable malnutrition and in which we are not even able to adequately care for our physically ill because we are still missing important medication and because first-class hospitals with their valuable, almost irreplaceable facilities are in ruins, which can only be rebuilt little by little. [...] If you consider that in the war thousands, even millions of flourishing human lives are murdered for the sake of a few real or imagined economic interests, mostly for a minority, for the selfish thirst for power and power of individuals, even for more or less worthless ideas, so the morality of E., which is a humane granting of a painless death to the poorest of our fellow human beings, is also proven analogously. "

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Personnel file Dr. Schreck, Arthur, Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe, Dept. 466 No. 6625/2, pp. 4–5, cited above. according to Hermann / Middelhoff / Peschke "Arthur Schreck - Attempt to get closer", p. 50
  2. ↑ State Archives Freiburg F 176/15, No. 27 (“Schreck / Faust”), p. 251 ff., Quoted in. according to Hermann / Middelhoff / Peschke "Arthur Schreck - Attempt to get closer", p. 53
  3. ↑ Files of the Rastatt nursing home, I Bausachen, letter of December 4, 1934, cited above. according to Hermann / Middelhoff / Peschke "Arthur Schreck - Attempt to get closer", p. 52
  4. ^ Statement by Dr. Schreck on August 14, 1947, public prosecutor at the Freiburg Regional Court against Dr. Schreck, 1 Ks 5/48, cit. according to Ernst Klee “'Euthanasia' in the Nazi State”, pp. 164/165
  5. ^ Statement by Dr. Schreck on August 8, 1947, public prosecutor at the Freiburg Regional Court against Dr. Schreck, 1 Ks 5/48, cit. according to Ernst Klee “'Euthanasia' in the Nazi State”, p. 121
  6. ^ Statement by Otto Mauthe (Senior Medical Officer, 1936 clerk for insane affairs in the Württemberg Ministry of the Interior) of October 18, 1948, Freiburg Public Prosecutor, 4 AR-428, quoted in according to Ernst Klee “Documents on 'Euthanasia'”, p. 101
  7. ↑ Ernst Klee “'Euthanasia' in the Nazi State”, p. 120
  8. ↑ Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke: "Medicine without humanity", Frankfurt 1978, ISBN 3-596-22003-3 , p. 230
  9. ↑ , zit prosecutor Freiburg F 176/15, no. 27 ( "Schreck / Faust"), page 247 et seq., according to Hermann / Middelhoff / Peschke "Arthur Schreck - Attempt to get closer", p. 53
  10. ↑ Klaus Billmaier, “Selection of the 'useless'. Psychiatry and euthanasia in the Nazi era using the example of the Wiesloch / Baden sanatorium, ”p. 38
  11. ^ Statement by Dr. Schreck on August 14, 1947, public prosecutor at the Freiburg Regional Court against Dr. Schreck, 1 Ks 5/48, cit. according to Ernst Klee “'Euthanasia' in the Nazi State”, p. 302
  12. ^ Judgment of the Freiburg Regional Court of November 16, 1948, Az .: 1 Ks 5/48, quoted in according to Hermann / Middelhoff / Peschke: "Arthur Schreck - Attempt to get closer" , p. 45.
  13. ↑ Schreck's letters to examining magistrate Dr. Rappenecker from 1947, Freiburg State Archives, No. 27 (“Schreck / Faust”), p. 142 ff. And p. 273, cited above. according to Hermann / Middelhoff / Peschke: "Arthur Schreck - Attempt at an Approach" in the series of publications of the working group "The Wiesloch Sanatorium and Nursing Home in the Nazi Era", pp. 65/66
personal data
SURNAME Horror, Arthur
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schreck, Arthur Josef (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German psychiatrist, expert on the National Socialist murders
DATE OF BIRTH August 15, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Baden-Baden
DATE OF DEATH 3rd October 1963
Place of death Pfullendorf