Franz Niedermoser

Franz Niedermoser (born December 3, 1901 in Innsbruck ; † October 24, 1946 in Klagenfurt ) was an Austrian psychiatrist and primary physician at the State Infirmary and State Insane Asylum of the Carinthian State Hospital, now the Klagenfurt Clinic on Lake Wörthersee and involved in euthanasia.

Life

Niedermoser was married and had two children. He came on November 1, 1928 as a secondary doctor from the Innsbruck mental hospital to the Klagenfurt sanatorium. From 1938 he was head of the men's department of the state insane asylum and at the same time also the general practitioner of the state infirmary in Klagenfurt, in autumn 1941 he was appointed primary doctor of the state insane asylum.

From 1933 he was a member of the NSDAP , from April 1938 a SA member ( Hauptsturmführer ) and leader of a medical storm .

Participation in euthanasia

In the National Socialist “Carinthian Gau Hospital”, euthanasia was carried out in various ways. Since no longer able to work, bedridden, old or hard-to-care patients were considered “useless eaters” and “unworthy of living ” during the Nazi era , there are also measures in Klagenfurt and the other sanatoriums and care institutions in Carinthia to “ destroy life unworthy of life “Been seized. In a first phase, patients were selected as part of the T4 campaign and gassed in the Hartheim killing center . This began with a visit to a medical commission headed by Werner Heyde , which recorded lists of the mentally and severely physically ill. On the basis of such a list, the first death transport with about 230 patients left for Hartheim on June 29, 1940. During this initial selection, doctors and nurses were still unsure what would happen to the deportees, but this soon changed: In July 1940, the Klagenfurt primary physician Meusburger was ordered to Berlin and initiated into the killing operation; also among the staff and in the z. Word of this quickly got around, partly alarmed by the public. Further death transports followed on August 25, 1940 (260 women), on March 24, 1941 (132 psychiatric and geriatric patients) and on July 7, 1941 (111 patients, including 25 children from the Tainach institution ).

One of the few who took a stand against this killing action, the then Capitular which was Diocese Gurk , Andreas Rohracher . His petitions to the District President Pawlowski were unsuccessful, however, so that Rohracher in a letter to the sisters who looked after the "institution for idiots" in Tainach forbade them to hand over children under threat of excommunication ; the Nazi rulers did not care about this ban. In contrast, in the “Altreich”, a sermon by the Münster bishop, Clemens August Graf von Galen, on August 3, 1941 led to the T4 campaign being ended.

There was no end to the murder of the sick in the “murder clinic” - according to one survivor. Rather, in the course of the “wild euthanasia” in the institutions, sick people were murdered with medication or through reduced diet. These killings began in the fall of 1941 and continued until April 1945. Franz Niedermoser was responsible for this at the Carinthian regional hospital. He himself went to Berlin twice to find out about the details of the planned euthanasia.

In his role as superior, he ordered his subordinates to kill numerous patients. Between 1942 and 1945, he and the sisters and carers he had selected murdered between 700 and 900 people. Noticeable clusters of deaths were avoided or it was ensured that there were no more than four per week. Niedermoser gave the killing instructions on the side during the rounds, for example with the words “Give something” or “Help this out!”, Sometimes with the hand signal to inject a hypodermic needle.

The autopsy instructions after the killings were marked by bending a corner so that the inaugurated prosector of the state hospital, the SS doctor Richard Paltauf, was informed indirectly about the patient's euthanasia and could enter unsuspicious causes of death.

Numerous disabled children and young people from Germany were among the murder victims. On May 27, 1943, the first transport with 60 children and adolescents from Kues on the Moselle reached the Klagenfurt institution, a second transport with 40 children from Mönchengladbach is dated May 20, 1943. Admissions from Carinthian medical officers loyal to the regime can also be documented, as can transfers from other hospital departments and even requests from family members to kill their deformed children.

Judicial processing after 1945

In the so-called Klagenfurt euthanasia trial before the Klagenfurt external senate of the Graz People's Court , Niedermoser was found guilty of ordering the killing of patients in at least 400 cases; In addition, in disregard of human dignity, he initiated the mistreatment of patients, in many cases resulting in death. On April 4, 1946, he was sentenced to death by hanging and collapse . The death sentence was on 24 October 1946 at the Regional Court Klagenfurt enforced .

The court also imposed the death penalty on three other co-defendants, head nurse Eduard Brandstätter, head nurse Antonie Pachner and head nurse Ottilie Schellander . Eduard Brandstätter committed suicide on the day the judgment was pronounced. The death sentence was not carried out on Pachner and Schellander; instead, they were pardoned to long prison terms. The registered nurses Paula Tomasch, Julie Wolf, Ilse Printschler, Maria Cholawa and the head nurse Ladislaus Hribar were also given long prison sentences. Sometimes with financial loss, condemned.

literature

• Nadja Danglmaier & Helge Stromberger: Places of National Socialist Violence in Klagenfurt. Dealing with regional history in secondary schools.
• 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 .
• Herwig Oberlechner & Helge Stromberger: The Klagenfurt Psychiatry in National Socialism. Psychiatry & Psychotherapy, 2011, pp. 7-10.

Individual evidence

1. ^ List of Nazi doctors and those involved in Nazi medical crimes
2. ↑ Danglmaier & Power Berger, S. 65 ff.
3. ↑ Oberlechner & Stromberger, 2011, p. 9.
4. ^ Post-war justice
5. ^ National Socialist Violence Places of National Socialist Violence in Klagenfurt