Georg Renno

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Georg Renno (born January 13, 1907 in Strasbourg ; † October 4, 1997 in Neustadt an der Weinstrasse ) was, from 1940, as deputy medical director of the Nazi killing center in Hartheim, jointly responsible for the killing of 28,000 people in the National Socialist euthanasia program T4 .

Origin and career

Georg Renno came as the only child of the Raiffeisen employee Siegmund Renno, who came from Bergzabern , and his wife Victoria nee. Metzinger in Strasbourg in Alsace. Here he attended elementary school from 1913 to 1919, then upper secondary school up to third grade. After the First World War , he was in 1919 because of his German heritage and his family out of the city sold and came to Ludwigshafen , where he attended elementary school and secondary school. After passing the school leaving examination at the secondary school in Ludwigshafen, he studied medicine in Munich and Heidelberg and received his doctorate in 1933 on "The dangers of tonsillectomy ". After joining the NS Student Union in 1929 , he became a member of the NSDAP in 1930 and also joined the SS in 1931 .

In his first marriage from 1934 he was married to the doctor Margarete Kinck from the Palatinate, with whom he had three daughters (* 1937, * 1939, * 1940); the youngest later also studied medicine. The couple separated in 1946 and divorced in 1955. The children grew up with relatives. Renno married a widow in 1958.

Participation in the killing of the disabled

In November 1933 he was employed as an assistant doctor at the Leipzig-Dosen sanatorium . Between 1934 and 1935 he took part in the first race- hygiene course at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in Berlin. In 1940 in the Leipzig-Dosen nursing home, together with Prof. Nitsche, he developed an inconspicuous murder method, the so-called Luminal scheme , in which an overdose of Luminal - a barbiturate and anti-epileptic  - led to death after a few days.

Hartheim killing center

In May 1940, Renno moved to the Niedernhart intermediate facility on behalf of Aktion T4 , which was linked to the Hartheim killing facility. The medical director of both institutions was the neurologist Rudolf Lonauer . In June 1940 Renno became the deputy head of the Hartheim killing facility, which operated as a non-profit facility and “recovery camp”.

In addition, Renno was also a “ T4 expert ” and visited over 50 public and church sanctuaries and nursing homes, old people's homes and infirmaries in the “ Ostmark ” area in order to use registration forms to select the people who should then be gassed in the killing centers.

In cooperation with Lonauer and the Hartheim office manager of Aktion T4, Christian Wirth , Renno organized the murder of mentally handicapped people in Hartheim . His tasks also included gassing, during which he introduced the gas into the gas chamber himself. He then signed standardized "comfort letters" to relatives and the death certificates.

In the summer of 1941, Renno and his superior in Gusen , the twin camp of the Mauthausen concentration camp , made a selection of sick and disabled concentration camp prisoners who were then murdered in Hartheim Castle.

Renno stayed in Hartheim Castle until the official end of Aktion T4 in August 1941. Then he was head of the children's department in Waldniel (North Rhine-Westphalia), a branch of the sanatorium and nursing home Süchteln (North Rhine-Westphalia). In the following year Renno fell ill with pulmonary tuberculosis , so that he handed over the management of the children's department to Hermann Wesse , whose wife Hildegard he had met in Waldniel. After spa stays in the Black Forest and Davos, he returned to Hartheim Castle in the summer of 1943, where he represented Lonauer, who was called up for military service. Now he was responsible for the “ special treatment ” “ Aktion 14f13 ”, during which thousands of sick, disabled or unpopular concentration camp inmates from the Dachau, Mauthausen and Gusen concentration camps were brought to Hartheim Castle and murdered there. From February 1945 Renno stayed again for a cure in Davos because of his lung disease.

Life after the end of the war

After the end of the war, Renno took over under the false name of Dr. Georg Reinig represented doctors and then became a research assistant at the pharmaceutical company Schering AG .

From 1955 he appeared again under his real name, although the Austrian authorities had issued an arrest warrant against him because of his involvement in the “ destruction of life unworthy of life ”. On October 25, 1961, the Frankfurt Attorney General Fritz Bauer had him arrested .

The process

On November 7, 1967, the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor's Office raised against Hans-Joachim Becker (the managing director of the central clearing office of the "T4" organization in Berlin), Friedrich Lorent (since 1942 chief economic manager of the "T4" and procurer of the killing materials such as poison gas and drugs) and against Georg Renno charges of murder .

Hundreds of witnesses, accused and experts were questioned for the trial, the statements of deceased witnesses or accused from earlier trials were used and the names of many victims were determined and their biographical background researched. There was also an intensive exchange with Austrian authorities. Among other things, the statements of the "burner" Vinzenz Nohel were read out, who had admitted to having burned the murdered and was therefore sentenced to death by hanging in the Mauthausen trial in 1946 . The former office manager of the institution Franz Stangl , who later became the commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps , was also questioned extensively.

Renno denied any involvement in the offenses against which he was charged and tried to shift the responsibility onto the already deceased Lonauer and Christian Wirth. Incidentally, he was "not involved in the procedure described" . “I don't know how long the patients stayed in the gassing room after the gas flowed in. Since I have never seen the process myself, I cannot give you any further details. As far as I am informed, no doctor was involved in the immediate gassing of the patients; I definitely don't. Whether Dr. Lonauer has always or occasionally turned on the gas tap, I don't know, as I've rarely been to Hartheim. ” The actual gassing was carried out by the so-called“ burner ”. He himself only lived in the castle and played the flute. When proven otherwise, he only admitted as much as had already been proven. When asked about people who had instructed him in the technique of killing, he replied: “Turning the tap on wasn't a big deal. There was no need for detailed instructions. ” During gassings for demonstration purposes, in which Reich Interior Minister Frick , Reichsärzteführer Conti and the Gauleiter of Upper Danube Eigruber took part, he insisted on standing on the gas tap. In front of guests such as the head of “Aktion T4” Werner Heyde and his deputy Professor Nitsche, he also enjoyed playing works by Mozart and Bach on the flute .

Renno could not see any illegality in his actions. Renno remained unapologetic and callous towards his victims. In the process, he showed himself to be a hypochondriac , possibly targeting an expertly certified incapacity to proceed and citing his allegedly never cured tuberculosis and cardiac arrhythmias.

In October 1973 the Mainz Medical University Clinic certified the defendant with general arteriosclerosis with coronary sclerotic heart disease and cerebral sclerosis , which would lead to permanent incapacity to stand trial. The criminal chamber then finally closed the case on December 19, 1975. The co-defendants Becker and Lorent had already been sentenced on May 27, 1970 for aiding and abetting mass murder to imprisonment of ten and seven years respectively.

Renno spent his twilight years in Bockenheim in the Frankenthal district (today in the Bad Dürkheim district) and said in an interview in 1997: “I myself have a clear conscience. I don't feel guilty in the sense of - yes, like someone who shot someone [...]. After seeing how people died, I have to say to myself that it wasn't torture for them, I would rather say in quotation marks: It was a release. [...] I leave here with this feeling. I'm going back to eternity where I came from. Everything else has not happened. "

literature

  • Ernst Klee : "Euthanasia" in the Nazi state. The "destruction of life unworthy of life". Frankfurt / Main 1997 ISBN 3-596-24326-2
  • Hanno Loewy / Bettina Winter (eds.): Nazi “euthanasia” in court. Fritz Bauer and the limits of legal coping. Frankfurt / Main - New York 1996, ISBN 3-593-35442-X
  • Ulrich Jockusch / Lothar Scholz (eds.): Managed Murder in National Socialism. Entanglement - repression - responsibility of psychiatry and justice . Regensburg 1992
  • Winfried R. Garscha: Euthanasia processes since 1945 in Austria and Germany. Court files as a source on the history of Nazi euthanasia and how post-war society dealt with perpetrators and victims . Presentation on the occasion of the Vienna Talks “Medicine under National Socialism - Ways to come to terms with it”, 5. – 7. November 1998, p. 2 f
  • Walter Kohl : “I don't feel guilty”. Georg Renno. Euthanasia doctor. (Interview) Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna 2000, ISBN 3-552-04973-8
  • Michael H. Kater: Doctors as Hitler's helpers. From the American by Helmut Dierlamm and Renate Weibrecht. Europa Verlag, Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-203-79005-X
  • Christina Altenstrasser, Peter Eigelsberger, Lydia Thanner, Konstantin Putz: “Niedernhart. June 1946. A report “ 2003.
  • Mireille Horsinga-Renno: The doctor from Hartheim: How I found out the truth about my uncle's Nazi past. Rowohlt Taschenbuch, Reinbek 2008, ISBN 978-3-499-62307-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 491.
  2. ↑ so he appears as "Onkel Röno" in Peter Roos : "Love Hitler" (p. 195 ff.), Tübingen 1998, ISBN 3-931402-34-7
  3. ↑ DÖW DÖW yearbook 1999, pp. 80–92. Peter Schwarz: The Georg Renno court file as a source for the Hartheim project
  4. ↑ Justice and Remembrance website in October 2003 (PDF; 194 kB) Testimony of the staff, pages 6 to 13
personal data
SURNAME Renno, Georg
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Clean, Georg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German doctor who was involved in the National Socialist murders
DATE OF BIRTH January 13, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Strasbourg
DATE OF DEATH 4th October 1997
Place of death Neustadt an der Weinstrasse