Fritz Bernotat

Otto Friedrich Bernotat , known as Fritz Bernotat , (born April 10, 1890 in Mittel Jodupp , East Prussia ; † March 4, 1951 in Neuhof (near Fulda) ) was an SS standard leader in the National Socialist German Empire as well as a regional councilor and department head for the Nassau district association significantly involved in the organization and implementation of the National Socialist "euthanasia" program ( Action T4 ) in his sphere of activity.

origin

Bernotat was born on April 10, 1890 in the East Prussian region of Jodupp (later name Mittelholzeck, Polish: Czarnowo Średnie), district of Goldap . He had five other siblings. After attending the eight-year primary school in Czarnowken (1938 to 1945: Kleinholzeck, submerged town), he worked in his parents' farm in Mittel Jodupp until 1908.

Professional soldier and First World War

On October 2, 1908, Bernotat joined the military and began his service in Uhlan Regiment No. 8 in Gumbinnen . Later he signed up as a professional soldier , came to the Uhlan Regiment No. 7 in Saarbrücken and from October 1913 served in the Telegraph Battalion No. 7 in Koblenz . With this unit he last took part in the First World War as deputy divisional news builder. He suffered 30% war damage and was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd class for his services . After the end of the war, Bernotat was a member of the Corps-Nachrichten-Park 1 in Königsberg , where he was employed as a park administrator.

Due to the downsizing of the Reichswehr enforced by the Versailles Treaty , Bernotat lost his job as a professional soldier in 1919.

In 1920 he found a job as a contract employee at the main pension office in Koblenz and shortly afterwards moved to the pension office in Oberlahnstein . On November 12, 1920, Bernotat married the 22-year-old Auguste R., a farmer's daughter from Erbenheim near Wiesbaden . Two sons were stillborn. The marriage thus remained childless, but lasted until Bernotat's death in 1951.

At the Nassau District Association

On October 2, 1922, he began his service as a military candidate at the Nassau District Association in Wiesbaden . From April 1, 1925, he was hired there as scheduled as a state administrative assistant. On April 1, 1927 he was promoted to state administrative secretary and on April 1, 1929 to state administrative senior secretary.

Membership in NSDAP, SA and SS

Bernotat joined the NSDAP on November 1, 1928 ( membership number 102.710). From 1928 he was a member of the SA . From 1930 he headed the Wiesbaden-Südstadt section (according to other sources, Wiesbaden-Südwest). After an interruption due to the so-called Severing Decree, Bernotat then acted as deputy district leader for civil servant issues until the beginning of 1931. On January 14, 1932, he joined the SS (membership number 22.546) and became a member of the association “ Lebensborn e. V. ". As a squad leader Bernotat worked from March 23, 1932 on in SS-Sturmbann I / 2.

After the National Socialists came to power, Bernotat was appointed political representative of the Gauleiter at the Nassau district association and an adjutant to the governor .

Bernotat continued his party career from the NSDAP local group leader of Wiesbaden-Bahnhof from June 1, 1933 to March 31, 1934, through his function as SS-Obertruppführer in the Sturmbann z. b. V. at the staff of SS Section XI from January 10, 1934 to NSDAP local group leader z. b. V. of the district from April 1, 1934. On July 1, 1934 he became a welfare officer at the staff of SS-Sturmbann I / 78. SS standard. On June 17, 1935, Governor Wilhelm Traupel handed over his function as welfare officer in SS Section XI (Wiesbaden) to Bernotat, who at that time was in the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer.

In 1933 and 1934 Bernotat was a regional church councilor . From August 1, 1936, he was appointed councilor of the city of Wiesbaden for six years . From 1937, he acted as the "head of the association" of the Kalmenhof sanatorium and nursing home in Idstein . From May 7, 1937, he was chairman of the Association for People's Care eV and, from August 8, 1937, chairman of the Schänen sanctuary and nursing home .

In January 1938, Bernotat resigned from the Protestant Church and from then on referred to himself as “ believers in God ”.

A uniform and steeply upward movement could also be seen on the promotion level: from November 9, 1935 (according to other information April 20, 1935) SS-Untersturmführer, from September 13, 1936 SS-Obersturmführer, from July 1, 1937 SS- Hauptsturmführer (according to other information February 1, 1937), from September 12, 1937 SS-Sturmbannführer, from September 10, 1939, SS-Obersturmbannführer and from November 9, 1943 SS-Standartenführer and leader of the staff of the SS Upper Section Rhine-Westmark.

Department head of the Nassau district association

On a professional level, Bernotat had an equally quick career and, with the support of well-known party officials, rose four levels in 1933 from State Secretary to State Office Director on November 1, 1933. On April 1, 1937, the department for the central administration of the entire institutional system of the district association was transferred to him.

Finally, on February 18, 1938, the Upper President appointed him member of the State Council for twelve years. This position was created especially for Bernotat. He also acted as a member of the municipal parliament. Such a career from the middle to the higher administrative service was an exceptional case also for the circumstances at the time.

His position as adjutant to Governor Wilhelm Traupel was even more important than his rank . Especially after the latter had relocated his office to Kassel in 1936 , since he was now head of the district association of Hesse in addition to the Nassau district association, Bernotat, as head of Traupel's Wiesbaden office, was able to maintain his position of power with the backing of the governor, with whom he was "You" and who addressed him with "Berno" were to be continuously expanded. Over the years, Bernotat, described as domineering ( “pronounced will-man” and “very tough” , SS personnel report of August 3, 1939) became the actual ruler in the Nassau district association. He consolidated his position through intrigue and outright terror. His friendship with the Gauleiter of Hesse-Nassau and Reich Governor Jakob Sprenger , whose confidante he was considered within the district association, also represented an essential pillar of his position of power.

In 1940, Bernotat became a student group administrator for the Reich Association of German Civil Servants , who, as a party man, enabled him to influence the personnel policy of the district association.

Already in his first speech as the new department head for the institutional system of the district association, Bernotat made a name for himself as the advocate of a radical austerity policy to the detriment of the sick at a conference held by the German Municipal Council in Munich on September 24, 1937 . From the Hitler quote he quoted: "All our work has to serve the German people " , Bernotat deduced, "that the expenses for the hereditary sickness , anti- social are to be kept as low as possible."

With a maximum occupancy or overcrowding and a change in the "care key" by doubling the number of patients assigned to one attending doctor, he has already initiated the necessary cost-saving measures that he recommended to his colleagues to imitate. In addition, there would be savings in nutrition and the use of straw sacks instead of mattresses. As early as April 5, 1937, at an institution management conference in Schloss Dehrn, he said: “If I had become a doctor, I would kill these sick people” . After the war, the medical director of the Eichberg sanatorium and nursing home , Friedrich Mennecke , quoted Bernotat as saying to the doctors and the nursing staff about the inmates of the asylums: "If you beat them to death, they'll be gone!"

In 1938 the first differences arose between Bernotat and Governor Traupel when he advocated a - ultimately failed - amalgamation of the two district associations in the province of Hesse-Nassau , which would have involved relocating the administration from Wiesbaden to Kassel. Bernotat was therefore delegated to the newly formed " Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia " in the spring of 1939 in order to set up a "land office" there with other employees of the district association in Prague . However, he returned to Wiesbaden in September 1939.

In a power struggle in 1940 between Traupel and Jakob Sprenger, which was about the predominance of political or state or municipal administration, Bernotat instinctively took the side of Sprenger as the winner of this trial of strength, who subsequently received internal information from the district association Bernotat passed on, so that after Traupel's departure he could finally become the strong man of the district association. From May 1941, Bernotat set the tone there and also acted as the extended arm of the Gauleiter.

Support for the T4 campaign

The first phase of the Nazi murders began in January 1940 , known in post-war parlance as " Aktion T4 ". From the beginning, Bernotat provided unusually extensive and intensive help with the recruitment of medical experts ( Friedrich Mennecke ), support with the registration of potential victims through the registration form campaign of the Reich Ministry of the Interior and, above all, with the free provision of the Hadamar sanatorium from November 1940 as a successor to the Nazi killing center in Grafeneck, which closed in autumn 1940 . The result was a unique combination of a gassing facility with a state remedial facility, which was still operated there by the Nassau district association. On the initiative of Bernotat, the district association also assigned at least 25 people from its own staff to the T4 organization for use in what is now called the "Hadamar State Sanatorium and Nursing Institution". The Gauleiter and the provincial governor as well as Bernotat were informed first hand about the purpose of this facility and supported the homicide campaign as much as possible. At the same time, Bernotat ordered the state hospitals Eichberg, Weilmünster and Herborn as well as the private institutions Kalmenhof / Idstein and Schänen, which he directed, to be made available as so-called "intermediate institutions" for the T4 campaign. These served to cover up the murder and took on a “buffer function” for the Hadamar killing center, in that the potential victims were housed there “on demand” and thus ensured continuous “utilization”.

A total of 10,072 people were gassed in Hadamar between January and the end of Operation T4 at the end of August 1941.

Drug and child "euthanasia"

After the gas murders in Hadamar ceased, the Nassau District Association took over the entire institution again and continued to operate it as a sanatorium and nursing home. As part of the decentralized “ Aktion Brandt ”, under the medical direction of Adolf Wahlmann , at least 4,400 sick people were murdered here by drugs combined with malnutrition in the years up to the end of the war. Only in the Meseritz-Obrawalde sanatorium , at least 6,000 more people were killed.

The institutions of the district association also took part in children's “euthanasia” by setting up “ children's departments ” in Eichberg and Kalmenhof in 1941.

In November 1941, Bernotat suffered an embolism due to his chronic cardiovascular disease , which left him temporarily blind . After an operation, however, he was able to return to work with restrictions at the beginning of 1942. He had already controlled the course of his official business by telephone from his apartment at Eichendorffstrasse 1 in Wiesbaden.

At the height of power

In an emerging dispute between the two main directions of future psychiatry and mental health care - on the one hand, the medically determined "psychiatric faction" that wanted to break new ground in cost-intensive healing (or destruction) and the "administrative and party faction", the people with mental or spiritual Diseases labeled as needing or not worthy of treatment - there were personal disputes between Bernotat as the regional protagonist of the “administrative and party faction” and the director of the Eichberg sanatorium, Friedrich Mennecke, on the other hand. In fact, Bernotat retained the upper hand with the view he favored, namely that the " destruction of life unworthy of life " is indispensable in terms of racial hygiene in addition to its economic importance and thus makes psychiatry superfluous in the long term.

At the beginning of 1943, Bernotat was at the zenith of his power. By eliminating the department head for welfare education in the district association, he was able to expand his department to include this area of ​​responsibility. In May 1943, by order of the Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick , he set up an “education home” in a department of the Hadamar State Hospital, to which “ first-degree Jewish mixed race ” were admitted . At least 40 children and adolescents fell victim to drug “euthanasia” there.

His personal services to the SS as well as the provision of space for SS hospitals in the facilities of the district association, which he sponsored, were rewarded by the inclusion of Bernotat in the circle of those prominent SS members, whom the Reichsführer SS for Christmas - in the neo-pagan SS- Jargon referred to as " Yule Festival " - handed over the so-called Julleuchter .

Fritz Bernotat was particularly committed to the murder of Ruth Pappenheimer from Frankfurt am Main , who had a Jewish father and was thus racially persecuted by the Nazi regime. Ruth Pappenheimer was a welfare pupil and, from Frankfurt, was initially housed at the Bad Camberg domestic and agricultural work school in Bad Camberg , and later at Dehrn Castle. After she escaped from there in the autumn of 1944, she was brought to the Kalmenhof . On October 20, 1944, she was killed there on the instructions of Fritz Bernotat by the prison doctor Hermann Wesse with a morphine injection.

After the war

When the US Army approached in March 1945, Bernotat and his wife and secretary moved east. His secretary separated from him in Cottbus . Since then his trail has been lost. An initiated investigation , including against Bernotat, did not lead to criminal proceedings, as he was officially considered missing . In fact, he and his wife went into hiding in Neuhof near Fulda in October 1945 under the false name "Kallweit". As Otto Kallweit , Bernotat was denazified as "not affected" .

He died on April 4, 1951 in Neuhof. His identity and death were only revealed when his widow took his name again in 1954 and applied for a widow's pension.

At the regional level, Bernotat represented the prototype of a convinced and fanatical National Socialist careerist who - politically protected - fought ruthlessly from the bottom up, instinctively always taking the side of the winners of power-political disputes and unscrupulously seeking his personal advantage and maintaining power. Just as he did not know consideration for others in his personal career urge, he also implemented the ideologically justified racial hygiene measures of the Nazi state with an unprecedented radicalism in his sphere of activity. As a representative of an extreme tendency, also in the then state, which regarded the mentally and mentally ill in general as useless for the " national community ", he unreservedly shared the view that such superfluous and economically stressful existences for the community in the sense of effective racial and social hygiene to be eliminated. It helped ensure that 20,000 people in the institutions of the Nassau District Association could be killed by gas, medicine and starvation.

Just like Bernotat, the other responsible persons in the district association were not prosecuted for the crimes that occurred in their sphere of activity.

Awards

• Iron Cross (1914) 2nd class
• SS skull ring
• War Merit Cross (1939) 2nd class in August 1942
• Golden party badge of the NSDAP on January 30, 1943

literature

• Henry Friedlander : The Road to Nazi Genocide. From euthanasia to the final solution. Berlin, Berlin-Verlag, 1997. ISBN 3-8270-0265-6 .
• Ernst Klee : "Euthanasia" in the Nazi state . 11th edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch, Frankfurt / M. 2004, ISBN 3-596-24326-2 .
• Ernst Klee: What they did - what they became. Doctors, lawyers and others involved in the murder of the sick or Jews . 12th edition. Fischer-TB, Frankfurt / M. 2004, ISBN 3-596-24364-5 .
• Jochen Lengemann : MdL Hessen. 1808-1996. Biographical index (= political and parliamentary history of the state of Hesse. Vol. 14 = publications of the Historical Commission for Hesse. Vol. 48, 7). Elwert, Marburg 1996, ISBN 3-7708-1071-6 , p. 72.
• Nassau parliamentarians. Part 2: Barbara Burkardt, Manfred Pult: The municipal parliament of the Wiesbaden administrative district 1868–1933 (= publications of the Historical Commission for Nassau. Vol. 71 = Prehistory and history of parliamentarism in Hesse. Vol. 17). Historical Commission for Nassau, Wiesbaden 2003, ISBN 3-930221-11-X , No. 29.
• Peter Sandner: Administration of the murder of the sick. The Nassau District Association under National Socialism. Psychosocial, Gießen 2003, ISBN 3-89806-320-8 . ( Basically with all evidence )
• Wulf Steglich, Gerhard Kneuker (ed.): Encounter with euthanasia in Hadamar , Psychiatrie-Verlag, Rehburg-Loccum 1985, ISBN 3-88414-068-X / Revised new edition Heimdall Verlag, Rheine 2013, ISBN 978-3-939935- 77-3 .
• "Relocated to Hadamar" , historical series of publications by the State Welfare Association of Hesse, catalogs Volume 2, Kassel 1994, ISBN 3-89203-011-1 .
• Christine Vanja, Steffen Haas, Gabriela Deutschle, Wolfgang Eirund, Peter Sandner (eds.): “Know and err. Psychiatry history from two centuries - Eberbach and Eichberg ” , historical series of publications by the State Welfare Association of Hesse, sources and studies, Volume 6, Kassel 1999, ISBN 3-89203-040-5 .

Web links

• Bernotat, Otto Friedrich. Hessian biography. (As of June 17, 2020). In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).

References and comments

1. ↑ Quoted in: Hans Faulstich: Hungersterben in der Psychiatrie 1914–1949. With a topography of Nazi psychiatry. Lambertus-Verlag, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1998. ISBN 3-7841-0987-X . P. 117
2. ^ Ernst Klee: "Euthanasia" in the Nazi state . Fischer-Taschenbuch, Frankfurt / M. 1985, ISBN 3-596-24326-9 , p. 77.
3. ↑ Quoted from Peter Sandner: Verwaltung des Krankenmordes. The Nassau District Association under National Socialism. Giessen 2003, p. 321.
4. ↑ Document VEJ 11/22 In: Lisa Hauff (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (collection of sources), Volume 11: German Reich and Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, April 1943–1945 . Berlin / Boston 2020, ISBN 978-3-11-036499-6 , pp. 156–157.
5. ↑ HHStaW. Dept. 461. No. 31526
6. ↑ In the literature, October 30 is often mentioned, but the death certificate in the Idstein City Archives (falsified with regard to the cause of death!) Shows October 20, 1944 as the date of death.
7. ^ Rüter-Ehlermann, Adelheit, Rüter, Christiaan. (Editor). Justice and Nazi crimes. Collection of German convictions for Nazi homicide crimes. Volume 1 (1968) p. 239 ff.
8. ↑ Download of the individual chapters ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at the State Welfare Association of Hesse