Emil Gelny

Emil Gelny (born March 28, 1890 in Vienna , † March 28, 1961 in Baghdad ) was an Austrian euthanasia doctor in the Lower Austrian sanatoriums and nursing homes Gugging and Mauer-Öhling .

Life

Gelny had on 13 July 1915 as a doctor of medicine doctorate and then as a general practitioner in Klosterneuburg worked. Based on the indictment in the later Gelny trial, he is said to have carried out illegal abortions there. After a three-month internship at the psychiatric-neurological clinic in Pölzl in the Vienna General Hospital , he was awarded the title of "Specialist in mental and nervous diseases" by the Gau doctor leader Richard Eisenmenger on August 4, 1943. He was an early supporter of National Socialism in Austria , since 1932 a member of the SA and the NSDAP , and later also of the National Socialist Medical Association and the National Socialist People's Welfare . He had also taken part in the preparations for the attempted coup by the National Socialists in July 1934.

Participation in the Nazi euthanasia

Due to the title awarded to him and his good relationships with Gauleiter Hugo Jury and the Gauhauptmann of Niederdonau Josef Mayer, he was entrusted with the management of the two sanatoriums and nursing homes Gugging and Mauer-Öhling on October 1, 1943. As part of the T4 campaign, which ran until 1941 , around 675 patients had been brought to the Hartheim Nazi killing center . The activities of the two previous heads of the institution were limited to administrative tasks and he was assigned the medical service as medical director. The first rumors soon surfaced that Gugging was going to be euthanized. From November 1944 this was also practiced in the Mauer-Öhling asylum. With the help of the head of the department, Josef Utz, and the nursing staff employed there, at least 39 patients were killed with tablets and injections. He spoke unabashedly about the fact that there were “many useless eaters” among the foster people , while thousands of soldiers had to lose their lives and “these useless eaters therefore belonged away” . Gelny enjoyed the backing of the Berlin euthanasia bureaucracy and saw no reason to hide his actions. In the summer of 1944 a meeting of numerous psychiatrists from the "Altreich" took place in Gugging. He used this forum for a demonstration of his electric killing apparatus.

After he returned from Mauer-Öhling to Gugging at the end of 1944, the killing of patients in Mauer-Öhling suddenly stopped. At the beginning of April 1945 he returned to Mauer-Öhling on his bicycle and personally killed another 149 patients by the end of the war with the help of many nurses with an electric stun gun that he converted into a killing instrument. As he informed Scharpf, who was entrusted with administrative tasks, he wanted to murder another 700 to 800 fosterlings; but this was thwarted by the rapid advance of the Russian army. Due to the number of deaths, it can be assumed that a very high number of patients (approx. 600) were murdered in the two institutions.

After the end of the war he went into hiding. As early as 1945, he managed to flee to Syria and on to Iraq , where he practiced as a doctor again. He could not be held accountable by the judiciary. In the proceedings against the other parties involved in the two institutions, the court found that Gelny was "brutal, heartless, unrestrained, with no medical ethos of mind and spirit with his criminal clients" .

literature

• Gerhard Fürstler, Peter Malina: "I was only doing my job " - On the history of nursing in Austria. Facultas Verlag, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-850766-195 .
• Henry Friedlander : The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. The North Carolina University Press, Chapel Hill / London 1995, ISBN 0-8078-4675-9 .

Web links

• Gugging Memorial: The Nazi Medical Crimes