Gerhard Kloos

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Gerhard Kloos (born May 3, 1906 in Sächsisch-Regen ; † April 22, 1988 in Göttingen ) was a German psychiatrist who was involved in National Socialist euthanasia crimes as the director of the Stadtroda state hospital .

Origin, studies and career entry

Gerhard Kloos, son of the Transylvanian- born high school professor Michael Kloos , finished his school career in 1924 with the Abitur . He then studied medicine at the Universities of Graz , Innsbruck and Hamburg . At the University of Hamburg he worked as an assistant at the anatomical institute and passed the medical state examination in 1930. He completed his medical internship at the University Clinic Hamburg, where he turned to psychiatry. With a dissertation in the field of synesthesia , he received his doctorate in 1931. med. He then worked in Munich as an assistant doctor to the psychiatry professor and director of the Munich University Neurological Clinic Oswald Bumke . In July 1933 he also received his doctorate as Dr. phil. From 1934 he was senior physician in Freiburg im Breisgau with the psychiatry professor and director of the Freiburg University Neurological Clinic Kurt Beringer .

time of the nationalsocialism

After the handover of power to the National Socialists , he became a member of the NSDAP on May 1, 1933 . He later joined the SA , from which he was expelled in 1935 for inactivity. He also joined the Nazi Doctors Association and the Nazi Lecturer Association . In Freiburg Kloos was the local group leader of the German Society for Racial Hygiene . In Freiburg, Kloos increasingly shifted his research focus from perception problems to psychiatric heredity. By reading the work The release of the destruction of life unworthy of life. The size and shape of Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding made him a "staunch advocate of negative eugenics and euthanasia".

In October 1935 he enlisted in the Wehrmacht , but soon fell ill with tuberculosis of the lungs and then cured the disease until December 1936 in a sanatorium in Davos . Then he was the first senior physician at the Haina State Hospital .

Kloos had been married to Countess Doris Panowsky-Wehner since the summer of 1938 . Kloos later stated that his wife was classified according to the Nuremberg Laws as a " Jewish mixed race 2nd degree" and that he was thus " Jewish ".

Head of the Thuringian State Hospitals in Stadtroda

From the beginning of July 1939 to the spring of 1945, Kloos headed the Thuringian State Hospitals Stadtroda and the facility later known as the Thuringian State Hospital Stadtroda. Kloos had extermination through work practiced in the asylum ; accordingly, his “tiered treatment plan” provided for “ forced labor , malnutrition and refusal of any therapy”. Although he had suffered from TB himself, he took on the task of treating “anti-social” tuberculosis sufferers, who were more kept than treated in Stadtroda. Kloos successfully encouraged the transfer of difficult youths to the Moringen concentration camp .

Over 970 psychiatric patients died between 1939 and spring 1945 in the Stadtroda State Hospitals, which resulted in a high death rate. From Stadtroda in 1940 in the wake of were T4 60 inmates initially in the intermediate institution Zschadraß and from there to assassinate the Nazi Sonnenstein Euthanasia Center relocated.

In the autumn of 1942, a child euthanasia facility, euphemistically called “ Children's Department ”, was set up at the Thuringian State Hospitals under Kloos's responsibility and leadership , which was headed by Margarete Hielscher . The head of the Jena children's clinic, Jussuf Ibrahim , cooperated with Kloos and from 1941 to 1945 referred a total of seven children from the children's clinic to the children's department in Stadtroda, where they were killed. At least 133 children were killed in the children's department there.

In 1944/45 opponents of the Nazi regime were murdered with poison in the Stadtroda State Hospital.

Lecturer at the University of Jena and assessor at the Hereditary Health Supreme Court

From March 1940 he was a lecturer in neurology and psychiatry at the University of Jena and represented the university professor Berthold Kihn, who worked as a T4 expert , at the medical faculty . His book “Outline of Psychiatry and Neurology with Special Consideration of Examination Techniques”, first published in 1944, was published ten times by 1988 and was standard reading for medical students until 1965. Kloos was an associate judge at the Hereditary Health Supreme Court .

post war period

In mid-May 1945, Kloos was interned in America and was held in several internment camps until the end of October 1946. After his release, he stayed in Heidelberg , where he attended guest lectures at the local university for several weeks and then worked as a visiting doctor at the care hospital for six months. From 1947 he worked as an assistant doctor and lecturer at the professor of neurology and psychiatry Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt at the University Neurological Clinic in Kiel. Although Kloos was revoked his habilitation in the post-war period , he was able to do his habilitation again in Kiel and received an unscheduled professorship at the University of Kiel in 1952.

In mid-May 1951 he took over the management of a department for brain injuries in Bad Pyrmont . From 1954 Kloos headed the State Hospital Göttingen as director and became a judicial expert for reparation matters . From 1958 he also took on teaching positions at the Technical University of Braunschweig and at the University of Göttingen . Kloos retired at the end of December 1968.

After the end of the war, Kloos kept in touch with former protagonists of the T4 campaign, such as Hans Hefelmann and Hans Heinze . At the beginning of October 1959 he made himself available for Heinze as an exonerating witness in his investigative proceedings and advocated this: He referred to Heinze as the “founder of youth psychiatry”, who could not have been guilty of any euthanasia crimes. At the beginning of December 1961, Kloos turned to the Lower Saxony Minister of the Interior regarding Heinze and asked him to lift the block on his pension payments. During the trial against Hefelmann, he was heard as a witness on November 27, 1961 before the Frankfurt am Main regional court . On July 10, 1964, he sent Hefelmann's doctor a medical report in which he certified Hefelmann's incapacity to stand trial.

A preliminary investigation initiated by the Göttingen public prosecutor in 1962 against Kloos on suspicion of euthanasia crimes in the Thuringian state sanatorium in Stadtroda was discontinued in December 1963. In the GDR , the MfS district office in Stadtroda started investigations against Kloos and other former prison staff ( operational process Ausmerzer ). The trigger for this investigation was a complaint by the incumbent clinic director in Stadtroda Erich Drechsler on November 27, 1964 regarding the suspicion of euthanasia crimes in the Stadtroda institution during the Nazi era. However, it was precisely that turner who had recently exonerated Kloos from precisely this accusation with a clean bill of health in his Göttingen investigation.

“Through the Reich Committee, children who were severely mentally fooled were referred to me for treatment. The comment on treatment meant putting the children asleep forever. I had to steam the little idiots who kept tearing their bedclothes up and pooing them up with sedatives, otherwise it would have been unbearable. "

- Gerhard Kloos in a preliminary investigation in the early 1960s.

At the 86th Doctors' Day, which took place in Kassel in May 1983 , the young doctor from Berlin and head of the “Doctors and National Socialism” working group, Helmut Becker (* 1941), publicly complained that medical training was still shaped by former National Socialists. As an example, he cited Kloos' involvement in child “euthanasia” and the fact that his psychiatry textbook would continue to be published. Kloos then reported Becker for insulting. The trial in Berlin-Moabit ended with an acquittal for Becker, whereupon Kloos appealed. The proceedings were only finally concluded with the death of Kloos.

Fonts (selection)

  • Outline of psychiatry and neurology: with special consideration of the examination technique. From 1944 to 1988 published in 10th editions and revised several times, most recently in 1988 by Walter Simon.
  • From the Psychiatric and Nervous Clinic Kiel: The Constitutional Doctrine of Carl Gustav Carus with special consideration of his physiognomics . With an escort by Karl Jaspers, Karger, Basel / New York 1951.
  • Instructions for the intelligence test in hereditary health court proceedings : On behalf of Thuringia. State Office for Racial Affairs, Fischer, Jena. 1941. Published in 1943 under the title addition and its evaluation in the second edition. Published three more times under the title Instructions for Intelligence Testing in Psychiatric Diagnostics in 1952, 1958 and 1965.
  • The awareness of reality in perception and deceptive perception: From the Psychiatric and Nervous Clinic , Freiburg i. Br., G. Thieme, Leipzig 1938.
  • The psychological symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis . With Erwin Näser. With a foreword by Ludolph Brauer and Wilhelm Weygandt , Springer, Berlin 1938.

literature

  • Götz Aly , Karl Friedrich Masuhr , Maria Lehmann, Karl Heinz Roth : Reform and conscience. 'Euthanasia' in the service of progress , contributions to the National Socialist health and social policy, Volume 2, Rotbuch Verlag, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3880229511 .
  • Hanns Hippius (Ed.): University Colloquia on Schizophrenia , Steinkopff, Darmstadt 2003, Volume 1, ISBN 3-7985-1333-3 .
  • Uwe Hoßfeld , Jürgen John , Oliver Lehmuth and Rüdiger Stutz (eds.): "Combative Science". Studies at the University of Jena under National Socialism , Böhlau Verlag, Cologne 2003, ISBN 3-412-04102-5 .
  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
  • Ernst Klee : What they did - what they became. Doctors, lawyers and others involved in the murder of the sick or Jews . 12th edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-596-24364-5 .
  • Andreas Lüddecke: The "Saller case" and racial hygiene. A Göttingen case study on the contradictions of sociological ideology formation. Tectum, Marburg 1995, ISBN 3-89608-918-8 .
  • Matthias Wanitschke (Ed.): Sources for the history of Thuringia. Archived murder: The SED state and the Nazi "euthanasia" crimes in Stadtroda , State Center for Civic Education Thuringia, Erfurt 2005. ( pdf 3.19 MB )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life data from: Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 317.
  2. ^ Place of death according to: Hanns Hippius: Universitätskolloquien zur Schizophrenie , Steinkopff, Darmstadt 2003, Volume 1, p. 183.
  3. ^ A b Götz Aly, Karl Friedrich Masuhr, Maria Lehmann, Karl Heinz Roth: Reform and conscience. 'Euthanasia' in the service of progress , Berlin 1985, p. 82ff.
  4. ↑ a b c d e Hanns Hippius: University Colloquia on Schizophrenia , Darmstadt 2003, Volume 1, p. 183.
  5. ↑ a b c d e Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 317.
  6. ^ A b Götz Aly, Karl Friedrich Masuhr, Maria Lehmann, Karl Heinz Roth: Reform and conscience. 'Euthanasia' in the service of progress , Berlin 1985, p. 84.
  7. ^ A b Hans Halter: The murderers are still with us Nazi doctors: From euthanasia to mass extermination . In: Der Spiegel , issue 25 of June 20, 1988, p. 119.
  8. ↑ a b c d e f g Andreas Lüddecke: The "Saller case" and racial hygiene. A Göttingen case study on the contradictions of sociological ideology formation. , Marburg 1995, p. 102f.
  9. ^ The hearing of Kloos witnesses before the Frankfurt / Main regional court on the murder trial against Hans Hefelmann (November 27, 1961). In: Matthias Wanitschke (Hrsg.): Sources for the history of Thuringia. Archived murder: The SED state and the Nazi “euthanasia” crimes in Stadtroda , State Center for Civic Education Thuringia, Erfurt 2005, p. 135.
  10. ↑ Ernst Klee: What they did - What they became. Doctors, lawyers and others involved in the murder of the sick or Jews , Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 284.
  11. ↑ a b Jennifer Hill: On the fate of male patients at the Jena Psychiatric and Nervous Clinic 1933 to 1945 after being transferred to the state hospitals in Stadtroda and Blankenhain , dissertation at the University of Jena 2008, p. 7f.
  12. ↑ Uwe Hoßfeld, Jürgen John, Oliver Lehmuth and Rüdiger Stutz (eds.): "Combative Science". Studies at the University of Jena under National Socialism , Cologne 2003, p. 438f.
  13. ↑ Katrin Zeiss: No benefactor. Jena has to accept that Yussuf Ibrahim, the well-known pediatrician, was involved in the Nazi euthanasia . In: Die Zeit online from April 27, 2000.
  14. ↑ Ernst Klee: What they did - What they became. Doctors, lawyers and others involved in the murder of the sick or Jews , Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 40.
  15. ↑ Ernst Klee: What they did - What they became. Doctors, lawyers and others involved in the murder of the sick or Jews , Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 132ff.
  16. ^ The hearing of Kloos witnesses before the Frankfurt / Main regional court on the murder trial against Hans Hefelmann (November 27, 1961). In: Matthias Wanitschke (Hrsg.): Sources for the history of Thuringia. Archived murder: The SED state and the Nazi "euthanasia" crimes in Stadtroda , State Center for Civic Education Thuringia, Erfurt 2005, p. 131.
  17. ↑ Ernst Klee: What they did - What they became. Doctors, lawyers and others involved in the murder of the sick or Jews , Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 50f.
  18. ^ The operational process "Ausmerzer" from 1964 to 1966 . In: Matthias Wanitschke (Hrsg.): Sources for the history of Thuringia. Archived murder: The SED state and the Nazi “euthanasia” crimes in Stadtroda , State Center for Civic Education Thuringia, Erfurt 2005, pp. 95–97.
  19. ↑ Quoted in: Annette Wilmes : Child Euthanasia in National Socialism West Berlin. The meat eater does not butcher himself. A psychiatrist still defends his actions today . In: Die Zeit , issue 11 of March 8, 1985.
  20. ↑ Annette Wilmes: Child euthanasia in National Socialism West Berlin. The meat eater does not butcher himself. A psychiatrist still defends his actions today . In: Die Zeit , issue 11 of March 8, 1985.
personal data
SURNAME Kloos, Gerhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German psychiatrist and Nazi euthanasia perpetrator
DATE OF BIRTH May 3, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Saxon rain
DATE OF DEATH April 22, 1988
Place of death Goettingen