Ernst Lossa

Ernst Lossa (* 1. November 1929 in Augsburg ; † 9. August 1944 in Irsee ) was an orphan from the minority of Yenish , in the second phase of the hospital murders under National Socialism , the action Brandt was assassinated and the processing of this murder after 1945 achieved exemplary fame. He grew up in children's homes and was murdered in the Irsee branch of the Kaufbeuren-Irsee sanatorium at the age of 14 by injecting a lethal drug.

After the Second World War, the Americans determined Lossa's fate and questioned several witnesses. His medical history and his murder were documented and used together with the testimony as an exemplary example in criminal proceedings for crimes of National Socialism .

Life

childhood

Lossa came from Augsburg, where his father Christian Lossa made his living by peddling . His mother Anna Lossa died in 1933 when he was four years old. His parents were Yeniche who, as restorers of church figures, traveled the country as travelers in the warm months of the year. In the era of National Socialism his father, two brothers of the father and other relatives were in 1939 by the Nazis in the concentration camp Dachau concentration camp brought. According to the National Socialist race doctrine , they were persecuted as "gypsies" and "peddlers". According to various reports, Lossa's father died in Mauthausen or Flossenbürg .

The children - Ernst and two sisters - were placed in a children's home in Augsburg-Hochzoll by the National Socialists . Lossa committed many thefts in the school there.

Indersdorf Youth Education Center

On February 15, 1940, Lossa was taken to the Indersdorf youth education center near Dachau on the grounds that he was “uneducable” , where he continued to have problems and, among other things, was accused of numerous thefts. In a psychiatric report prepared by Katharina Hell from the German Research Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, it summarizes that Lossa is "undoubtedly a good-natured, but completely unwilling, unstable, almost average gifted, instinctual psychopath " . "With his strong instinctuality, he will probably not be able to be significantly improved" . The equality of length of the ring and index finger of the right hand was noted as a "sign of degeneration" in the report .

Remedial and nursing home Kaufbeuren

In April 1942, Lossa was forcibly committed to the children's department of the Kaufbeuren sanatorium and nursing home , where after the “official” end of “ Aktion T4 ” for euthanasia murders as part of the so-called “wild euthanasia”, among other things, targeted killing of patients were made. These euthanasia murders were carried out by injections with overdosed medication or by starvation by means of malnutrition in accordance with the hunger food decree .

Lossa was admitted on April 20, 1942; In the anamnesis , the aforementioned psychiatric report was given as the reason for the consignment. He continued to behave conspicuously and inappropriately, but according to later statements by (former) employees of the sanatorium, he was also valued because he was kind and helpful. He often tried to give food to starving sick people that he had previously stolen. "Violence" against other children was noted in the medical file, whereupon Lossa was transferred to a men's ward.

The employees later also stated that Lossa had seen through the entire system in Kaufbeuren and knew about the targeted killings in the institution. They suspected that this had additionally motivated the administrative manager Josef Frick and also the medical director Valentin Faltlhauser to kill Lossa.

Lossa was transferred to the Irsee branch on May 5, 1943 . In the criminal trials of the post-war period, the events of his fate were exemplarily documented.

Irsee branch

On May 5, 1943, Ernst Lossa was transferred to the Irsee branch , where he was murdered on August 9, 1944 with the "lethal injection". In his coronary certificate, “Asocialer Psychopath” was entered as the “basic ailment”, “Bronchopneumonia (107)” as the “cause of death” and the Irsee institution as the place of death. The corpse certificate was issued by the deputy medical director of Kaufbeuren and senior physician from Irsee, Lothar Gärtner.

In his testimony, a male nurse later stated that he had refused to inject Lossa to death with Luminal . He then observed how the nurse Pauline Kneissler gave Lossa an injection in the presence of Faltlhauser and Frick, during which Lossa was persuaded that it was a vaccination against typhus .

Law enforcement in the post-war era

After the end of the Second World War, the Americans also investigated, among other things, the "euthanasia" murders in the Kaufbeuren sanatorium and its branch offices such as the branch in Irsee. Since mid-1945, they have also been investigating Lossa's individual fate and the circumstances surrounding his murder, including by questioning several witnesses such as former nurses. Lossa's medical history and his targeted killing were documented and used together with the testimony as an exemplary example in several criminal trials for crimes of National Socialism . It is unclear whether the entry “Euthanized!” Was written in the medical history during the Nazi era or as part of the preparations for the trial. In any case, Valentin Faltlhauser used the term himself several times, as can be seen from the trial files.

Among other things, Lossa's fate in the 1948 criminal proceedings in Kempten (Allgäu) was an exemplary part of the evidence against the leading Nazi euthanasia doctor Valentin Faltlhauser and other defendants. Faltlhauser was charged with murder by the public prosecutor, and four other charges (Frick, Heichele, Rittler and Wörle) were charged with complicity in murder. In 1949 Faltlhauser was sentenced to three years' imprisonment for "inciting aiding and abetting manslaughter", with 16 months in an American internment camp fully counting towards imprisonment. He never served the remainder of the sentence; it was later issued to him by the state government. From today's perspective, the mild penalties are viewed critically; the historian Hans-Ludwig Siemen states that after the end of the war, "a leaden silence spread over the psychiatric institutions" and that "certain courts were emphatically judged as mildly as possible" . ^{P. 308f.}

The nurse Pauline Kneissler was sentenced in 1948 by the Frankfurt am Main regional court to four years in prison for the Nazi euthanasia killings in Hadamar , Grafeneck , Kaufbeuren and, most recently, from April 1944 in Irsee . The jury justified the low sentence with the fact that it is not the acts themselves that count, but the criminal will. Because Kneissler had subordinated her own will to the criminal will of others, she was only to be condemned as an assistant.

The former co-organizer of the National Socialist “euthanasia”, Walter Schultze , who as State Commissioner in the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior was also responsible for the so-called “hunger decree”, was sentenced to three years imprisonment in 1948 by the Munich District Court I for aiding and abetting manslaughter in at least 260 cases .

Commemoration

A stumbling block in Irsee is reminiscent of Lossa

Stolperstein Kloster Irsee relocated on May 16, 2009

• 1999: Book dedication on page 3: of the book Psychiatry in National Socialism. The Bavarian sanatoriums and nursing homes between 1933 and 1945 .
• Exhibition In Memorian
• 2002: Housing complex for disabled people in Haltern am See was named Ernst-Lossa-Haus.
• 2004: ORF Science report on Ernst Lossa: A case of 200,000 on the occasion of the exhibition In Memorian , Museumsquartier in Vienna.
• 2004: Nursing students from Kaufbeuren donated an Ernst Lossa scholarship for three young people in Romania.
• 2007: The city of Augsburg named a street in the district of Pfersee in the area of ​​the Sheridankaserne on Ernst-Lossa-Straße.
• In 2009 Gunter Demnig laid a stumbling stone in memory of Ernst Lossa in front of the former Irsee monastery (see list of stumbling stones in Irsee ).
• On January 27, 2011, on the occasion of the Holocaust Remembrance Day , the Italian actor Marco Paolini held a three-hour monologue about the murders in the “Paolo Pini” psychiatric clinic in Milan, which was broadcast directly on the TV channel La7. In it he devoted about nine minutes to the story of Ernst Lossa.
• The Toy Museum in Naples was dedicated to the memory of Ernst Lossa.
• 2011: Documentary film In memory of Sina Moslehi
• 2013: The Schwaben & Altbayern series of the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation reported on November 1, 2013 about the fate of Ernst Lossa.

literature

• Michael von Cranach : Psychiatry in the time of National Socialism . Schwabenakademie, Irsee 1990.
• Gernot Römer: For the forgotten. Subcamp in Swabia - Swabia in concentration camps . Wißner-Verlag, Augsburg 1996, ISBN 3-89639-047-3 . (Pp. 18–32: "The gray buses in Swabia" )
• Michael von Cranach, Hans-Ludwig Siemen (Ed.): Psychiatry in National Socialism. The Bavarian sanatoriums and nursing homes between 1933 and 1945 . Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56371-8 . (Collection of articles: pp. 265–325: Heil- und Pflegeeanstalt Kaufbeuren , pp. 475–486: Ernst Lossa: Eine Krankengeschichte )
• Michael von Cranach, L&L, authors and artists: In Memorian (Lossa, Ernst) . Exhibition in memory of the victims of the National Socialist euthanasia program on the occasion of the XI. World Congress for Psychiatry in Hamburg. 1999. Exhibition catalog in German, English. District Hospital D-87600 Kaufbeuren.
• Robert Domes : Fog in August. The life story of Ernst Lossa , with a foreword by Michael von Cranach, cbt-Verlag Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-570-30475-4 .
• Marco Paolini: Eliminate. Vite indegne di essere vissute , Einaudi, Turin 2012, ISBN 978-88-06-21017-5 (DVD: ISBN 978-88-06-21241-4 ).
• 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 .

Film and theater

The 30-minute documentary In Remembrance: On the Life and Dying of Ernst Lossa by the then 16-year-old Sina Moslehi (Germany 2011, first broadcast on television) was awarded the Bertini Prize in 2012.

Nebel im August , the dramatic film adaptation of the novel by Robert Domes, was released in German cinemas on September 29, 2016. The novel by Domes has been revised into a play that premiered on March 16, 2018 at the Schwaben State Theater in Memmingen .

Web links

Commons : Ernst Lossa  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• You are different - online exhibition of the Stiftung Denkmal, u. a. via Ernst Lossa (direct link to his website)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} see literature Michael von Cranach, Hans-Ludwig Siemen (Hrsg.): Psychiatrie im Nationalozialismus. The Bavarian sanatoriums and nursing homes between 1933 and 1945 , pp. 475, 477, 478
2. ↑ von Cranach, 1999, pp. 478 and 479f.
3. ↑ 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. 409-411 .
4. ↑ von Cranach, 1999, p. 478 f.
5. ↑ See the picture on sonderpaedagoge.de ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), a facsimile of the medical history of Ernst Lossa, Kaufbeuren.
6. ↑ von Cranach, 1999, p. 482
7. ↑ von Cranach, 1999, p. 484
8. ↑ Gregor Schöllgen: The power of psychiatrists. In the Bavarian sanatoriums and nursing homes too, patients in the Third Reich were often victims ( Memento from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ). (Review by: Michael von Cranach, Hans-Ludwig Siemen (ed.): Psychiatry in National Socialism. The Bavarian Hospitals and Nursing Agencies between 1933 and 1945 ) In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of March 22, 1999.
9. ↑ von Cranach, 1999, pp. 309f.
10. ↑ von Cranach, 1999, p. 310f.
11. ↑ Ernst-Lossa-Haus ( Memento from September 23, 2005 in the Internet Archive ), residential complex for the disabled in Haltern
12. ↑ Online presence SCIENCE.ORF.at ( Memento from November 5, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) In memorian: Ernst Lossa: A case of 200,000 . Retrieved from wayback.archive.org
13. ↑ Annual report 2004 of the European office in the district of Swabia  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Ernst Lossa Scholarships by and for Nursing Students, page 8.  
14. ↑ Online presence of the Pfersee district ( memento of August 22, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Decision on Ernst-Lossa-Straße.
15. ↑ In ricordo di Ernst Lossa e delle altre vittime come lui , look it up on The Lossa part of the monologue on Youtube
16. ↑ http://www.museodelgiocattolodinapoli.it/index.php?idPage=104&lang=it ( Memento of March 6, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) translated: “The Toy Museum of Naples is a museum dedicated to the memory of Ernst Lossa, the 1944 is dedicated to the gypsy child killed by the Nazi campaign of euthanasia. ”Accessed at archive.org on 26.02.2018
17. ↑ Sina Moslehi: Film homepage "In memory: Of the life and death of Ernst Lossa" (DE 2011)
18. ^ Reminder of Ernst Lossa in Augsburg ( memento from November 5, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), ardmediathek.de.
19. ↑ Robert Domes online presence ( Memento from March 15, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Brief content of the book: Nebel im August.
20. ↑ Brochure Bertini Prize 2012 - Don't be intimidated , in it: Life and Death of Ernst Lossa , page 17 (PDF; 3.69 MB)
21. ^ Studiocanal Nebel im August , Drama, FSK 12, directed by Kai Wessel , Ivo Pietzcker as Ernst Lossa
22. ↑ Klaus-Peter Mayr: Why did Ernst Lossa have to die? In: Allgäuer Zeitung, March 19, 2018.