District Hospital Kaufbeuren
The Kaufbeuren District Hospital is a specialist psychiatric clinic in Kaufbeuren in Bavaria . The Schwaben district clinics are responsible for the support .
During the time of National Socialism, the predecessor institution, Heil- und Pflegeeanstalt Kaufbeuren-Irsee, was involved in the murder of numerous patients at its locations in Kaufbeuren and Irsee in the course of " euthanasia ". The then director of the Kaufbeuren main station and its branch Valentin Faltlhauser was an active advocate of the killing of mentally and physically impaired people.
history
In 1182 a group of men, under the care of Margrave Heinrich von Ronsberg , founded a monastic community in the former family castle . Only a few years later, due to the easier access to water, the monks were forced to build a new monastery at the foot of the mountain, the current location. The Benedictine monastery experienced religious and cultural boom over the centuries.
In the course of secularization , however , the Irsee Monastery was dissolved in 1802/1803 and the premises of the complex were used for a time as the Royal Bavarian Rent Office.
On September 1, 1849, the first inpatient psychiatry in Swabia was finally opened in the former Irsee Monastery. This county insane asylum in Irsee was initially only small and offered space for around 80 mentally ill people.
Since the number of patients rose to over 300 in a short time, the district administrator decided in 1869 to move the district insane asylum to Kaufbeuren. In 1872 the construction of the new county insane asylum began in Kaufbeuren. With the completion of the Kaufbeurer institution with around 150 beds on August 1, 1876, the Irsee District Insane Asylum lost its independence and from then on was used as a branch and nursing home for long-term patients.
Kaufbeuren and Irsee in the time of National Socialism
After the seizure of power of the Nazis and numerous regulations, the mental hospital Kaufbeuren-Irsee between 1939 and 1945 was actively involved in the euthanasia killings mentally and physically impaired people. Its significance for the murders of the sick under National Socialism lay primarily in the fact that the institution with 1,200 beds was already the largest facility of its kind in Swabia in the 1930s. From September 1939 people were transferred from Bavaria to the Kaufbeuren-Irsee institution.
Action T4
At the beginning of 1940, the director Valentin Faltlhauser received a list for the first time with the names of those patients who were to be transferred to designated imperial institutions in the course of the T4 campaign and who were to be killed there with gas. A total of 687 patients were transported to the Grafeneck and Hartheim killing centers between August 26, 1940 and August 8, 1941 , and murdered there. It was not until the end of the T4 campaign and the end of the transports that the Kaufbeuren-Irsee sanatorium carried out the killings of the adults and children themselves.
"E-Food"
The "withdrawal diet" used in a targeted manner was the continuation of the T4 action that had been canceled. In Bavaria, the state welfare associations had been pushing for a reduction in accommodation costs since the late 1920s. Even before the war began, Valentin Faltlhauser advocated that patients should be fed according to their workload. In Irsee, the "hungry diet" had therefore been used since August 1942 and in Kaufbeuren since October 1942. On November 30, 1942, Walter Schultze finally signed the “ Hunger Food Decree ” on behalf of the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior , according to which all “unfit for work” patients were undernourished and exhausted due to malnutrition. The majority died of the resulting deficiency symptoms or related secondary diseases. The food given contained no carbohydrates , no fat , no meat and little bread . The change in meals significantly increased the mortality rate in the institution during these years.
TB trials
The senior physician at the Mittelberg children's sanatorium, Georg Hensel, carried out medical experiments on physically and mentally impaired children at the Kaufbeuren-Irsee sanatorium between 1942 and 1944. In order to find a vaccine against tuberculosis , Hensel, in consultation with Valentin Faltlhauser, vaccinated at least 13 children a self-developed vaccine. The medical attempts were fatal for six of the children.
Liberation by US troops
At the end of April, American troops occupied Kaufbeuren, but did not yet intervene in the institution's operations. It was not until July 1, 1945 that the rumors about the infanticide reached the military office, whereupon three soldiers and a photographer broke into the facility and stopped the killing.
In the months after the end of the war, the Allied troops described the liberated institutions and the doctors involved in a report. This report by the American intelligence service bears the handwritten title “Medical extermination camp in Kaufbeuren, Bavaria” and was probably not far from the truth, as the following description shows:
“Almost every inhabitant knew exactly that people there were being used as guinea pigs and systematically slaughtered. The perpetrators or passive contributors were in no way aware of their crimes, they were Germans, not Nazis. There were also Catholic sisters among them. The head nurse, who admitted that she had killed 'about' 210 children by intramuscular injections in two years, simply asked, 'Will something happen to me?' [...] The stinking corpses of men and women who had died twelve hours to three days earlier were found in an unrefrigerated morgue. They weighed between 26 and 33 kilos. Among the children still alive was a ten-year-old boy who weighed less than 10 kilos [!] And whose legs were 6 centimeters in diameter at the ankles […] Dr. Valentin Faltlhauser, 69 years old, Chief Medical Officer since 1919 […], was the director and was arrested. His deputy Dr. Lothar Gärtner, 43 years old, who has been employed there since January 1, 1930, committed suicide by hanging himself with the cord of a bedside lamp. Furthermore, three other doctors were arrested [as well as] the housekeeping manager Franziska Vill, secretary of Dr. Faltlhauser and lover of Dr. Gardener."
The last child to be murdered was recorded by Faltlhauser 33 days after the capture of Kaufbeuren at 1:10 p.m.
Casualty numbers
A total of 1,573 men, women and children were killed in the Kaufbeuren-Irsee sanatorium between 1940 and 1945 as part of the National Socialist euthanasia program. About 780 of them were murdered in the Irsee branch. These were killed by the administration of Luminal , by the administration of the so-called "starvation diet" or by a combination of these two. It was not until 1946 that the number of deaths fell back to pre-war levels.
Processing and commemoration
On the current site of the Swabian Education Center Irsee there are three memorial sites dedicated to the victims of Nazi euthanasia:
On November 22, 1981, a monument by the Allgäu artist Martin Wank was erected on the institutional cemetery used between 1944 and 1972 . Another memorial plaque, which was installed in 2009, is located at the entrance to the prosecution . Also in 2009 the artist Gunter Demnig let three stumbling stones in front of the Irsee Monastery and in September 2015 seven more stumbling stones.
There are three more monuments in the city of Kaufbeuren:
In 1989 the employees of today's district hospital initiated the erection of a three-tonne memorial in front of the hospital's Thomas Church. Since 2006 there has also been a monument by the Irsee artist Peter R. Müller at the former prison cemetery. In 2008, a group of students from Kaufbeuren schools erected a memorial in front of the youth center in Kaufbeuren, which among other things is dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Nazi regime.
Memorial at the Irsee institutional cemetery; Inscription: "Let me sing your sufferings"
Memorial to the former Prosektur Kloster Irsee
Memorial stone district hospital Kaufbeuren
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post war period
The branch in the former Irsee Monastery was closed in 1976. This reduced the number of beds to 1,100.
Facility
The house has the following clinics:
- Clinic for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics (with 222 fully inpatient and 20 partial inpatient treatment places),
- Clinic for Forensic Psychiatry and Psychotherapy (with 185 treatment places),
- Clinic for Neurology with 44 beds and 3 day-clinic places.
See also
literature
- Erich Resch: burial places of the sanatoriums and nursing homes and the district hospital Kaufbeuren and Irsee. In: Bulletin of the Heimatverein Kaufbeuren: Kaufbeurer Geschichtsblätter. Volume 17, No. 8, 2006, pp. 258-278
- Erich Resch, Petra Schweizer-Martinschek: The therapeutic and nursing home Kaufbeuren-Irsee during the Nazi era . In: Stefan Dieter (Ed.): Kaufbeuren under the swastika. Contributions to the history of the city. Volume 14, Thalhofen 2015, ISBN 978-3-95551-072-5 , pp. 114-133
- Ernst Klee (Ed.): Documents on "Euthanasia". Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-596-24327-0
- Ernst T. Mader: The forced death of patients at the Kaufbeuren-Irsee sanatorium, according to documents and reports from eyewitnesses. Blöcktach 1982, ISBN 3-923710-02-X
- Harald Jenner, Joachim Klieme: National Socialist euthanasia crimes and internal mission institutions. An overview. Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-930061-45-7
- Henry Friedlander , Johanna Friedmann (translator): The way to the Nazi genocide. From euthanasia to the final solution. Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-8270-0265-6
- Michael von Cranach : The confrontation with the murders of the sick in Kaufbeuren-Irsee - 1945 to today. A personal report. In: Working group for research into National Socialist "euthanasia" and forced sterilization (ed.): Give the victims their names. Nazi “euthanasia” crimes, historical-political responsibility and culture of remembrance. Volume 7, 2011, ISBN 978-3-86281-033-8 , pp. 33-44
- Michael von Cranach, Petra Schweizer-Martinschek: The Nazi “euthanasia” in the Kaufbeuren-Irsee sanatorium. In: Stefan Dieter (Ed.): Kaufbeuren under the swastika. Contributions to the history of the city. Volume 14, Thalhofen 2015, ISBN 978-3-95551-072-5 , pp. 270-287
- Petra Schweizer-Martinschek: Tbc experiments on disabled children in the Kaufbeuren-Irsee sanatorium 1942–1944. In: Andreas Wirsching (Ed.): National Socialism in Bavarian Swabia. Dominion – administration – culture. Volume 9, Ostfildern 2004, ISBN 978-3-7995-7510-2 , pp. 231-260
- Stefan Raueiser: Irsee Monastery: From the Reichsstift via the district insane asylum to the Swabian education center. In: Working group for research into National Socialist "euthanasia" and forced sterilization (ed.): Give the victims their names. Nazi “euthanasia” crimes, historical-political responsibility and culture of remembrance. Volume 7, 2011, ISBN 978-3-86281-033-8 , pp. 15-32
- Magdalene Heuvelmann : The Irseer Totenbuch - chronological register of the dead of the Irsee sanatorium from 1849 to 1950 . 1st edition. Grizeto Verlag, Irsee 2015, ISBN 978-3-9816678-2-0 , p. 495 .
- Michael von Cranach , Hans-Ludwig Siemen (Ed.): Psychiatry in National Socialism. The Bavarian sanatoriums and nursing homes between 1933 and 1945 . 2nd Edition. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-486-71451-7 , p. 508 .
- Magdalene Heuvelmann: Those who live far away from God are able to clear away every sick person: “Spiritual sources” on the Nazi murders in the Irsee sanatorium . 1st edition. Grizeto Verlag, Irsee 2013, ISBN 978-3-9812731-8-2 , p. 243 .
- LG Augsburg, July 30, 1949 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, Vol. V, edited by Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, CF Rüter . University Press, Amsterdam 1970, No. 162, pp. 175-188, euthanasia campaign doctors HuPA Irsee
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ What doctors in the Third Reich did in the Kaufbeuren sanatorium. In: all-in.de. February 8, 2012, accessed June 8, 2017 .
- ^ Henry Friedlander: The way to the Nazi genocide. From euthanasia to the final solution . Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-8270-0265-6 , pp. 353 .
Coordinates: 47 ° 53 ′ 1.8 ″ N , 10 ° 36 ′ 42.4 ″ E