Sanatorium Obrawalde

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Administration building of the institution (2011)

The mental hospital Obrawalde , also known as the state hospital Meseritz-Obrawalde , is a mental hospital established in 1904 in the Prussian province of Posen near the district town of Meseritz (today Międzyrzecz , Poland). Today it is called Samodzielny Publiczny Szpital dla Nerwowo i Psychicznie Chorych w Międzyrzeczu.

history

Institution Church (2011)
Mortuary (2011)

The "Provincial Insane Asylum Obrawalde bei Meseritz" was built in 1904 as the fourth insane asylum in the Prussian province of Posen according to plans by the Meseritz architect Kübler. 114 hectares of land belonged to the institution  , on which the patients grew fruit and vegetables as part of occupational therapy, as well as its own weaving workshop, which was operated until the 1970s. Around 27 hectares of the site was claimed by the institutional buildings, which were built in the pavilion style.

The institution was initially designed for 700 patients; there was, however, the possibility of increasing the capacity to 1200 patients, as the supply buildings had been built large enough. These houses were located in the main axis of the institution, which was oriented from south to north. The administration buildings, the church and the doctors 'and officials' houses were located near the main entrance in the south. The pavilions for the patients - two-storey and made of red-yellow clinker bricks - were parallel to the main axis, the area for the men in the eastern part and for the women in the western part.

On each side there was initially the reception house, then to the north the infirmary wards and the military hospitals followed. This was followed by the houses for the half-restful sick, for the restless sick and finally the safe house for particularly dangerous patients. Set back from the main axis, there was a house on the men's side and two houses on the women's side for quiet sick people whose doors were not locked. The nursing staff was housed in six semi-detached houses in the north-east of the extensive site. There was also a corrugated iron barracks in which up to 14 patients could live under the supervision of a carer. The first extensions were completed in 1908 and 1909.

As a result of the Peace Treaty of Versailles , most of the province of Posen came to Poland in 1920 ; the western part, including the reduced district of Meseritz with the sanatorium, was combined in 1922 in the newly formed province of Grenzmark Posen-West Prussia .

Since the former provinces of Posen and West Prussia were now in Poland with the new imperial borders , most of the catchment area was missing, which means that fewer patients came to the clinic. So they looked for new areas in order to better utilize the clinic. In 1921 an old people's home was founded and in 1924 a birth house was opened. Here unmarried women could give birth to their children and leave them in the clinic as well as give them up for adoption .

time of the nationalsocialism

When the province was dissolved in 1938, the district of Meseritz became part of the province of Brandenburg . The Obrawalde state institution, although now located in Brandenburg territory, was added to the Pomeranian Provincial Association . With this, Pomerania took over a modern, high-performance facility that at that time still had eight departments: in addition to the sanatorium and nursing home, there was a retirement home, a gynecological clinic , a children's department, an orthopedic , internal and neurological department, and a pulmonary sanatorium .

In 1939 there were negotiations with the city of Berlin about the future use of the institution, as a result of which it was converted back into a pure institution for the “ mentally ill ”, which was occupied by patients from Berlin. At the beginning of 1939 about 900 patients were accommodated in Obrawalde, by the end of the same year the number rose to more than 2000, for which three doctors were responsible.

With the establishment of the German Community Assembly in December 1933, to which all German communities had to belong, the supervision of the sanatoriums was incumbent on the head president of the respective province , which was carried out in Pomerania by the NSDAP Gauleiter Franz Schwede-Coburg .

Under the pretext of evacuation for purposes important to the war effort or evacuation from bomb-prone areas, Schwede-Coburg ordered the evacuation of the sanatoriums and nursing homes in Treptow an der Rega , Lauenburg , Meseritz-Obrawalde in the autumn of 1939 - independently, independently and prior to Action T4 and the IV. Pomeranian sanatorium and nursing home in Stralsund and had the greater part of the patients murdered. These murders took place between October 1939 and January 1940 in the Piaśnica massacre by the SS guard Eimann , or by the Lange Sonderkommando with gas vans . The later director in Obrawalde, Walter Grabowski , is said to have been involved in these actions .

By 1941, 990 beds in the Pomeranian institutions of Lauenburg, 1150 beds in Stralsund and 1500 beds in Stettin-Kückenmühle were given to the Waffen-SS and the Treptow / Rega institution with 980 beds was set up as a reserve hospital. In the budget of the Provincial Association for 1940 it says: "Further changes arose insofar as, after the end of the Polish campaign , the Pomeranian institutions were able to accommodate over 2,300 mentally ill people outside the province". The "accommodation" of these 2300 mentally ill people in the conquered Polish territories is to be understood as the cover name of an early homicide campaign limited to Pomerania and the Reichsgaue Danzig-West Prussia and Wartheland .

At the same time, from the end of 1939 to August 1941, an unknown number of patients were killed as part of Operation T4 by being transferred to one of the " killing centers " designated for this purpose . In the case histories of patients from Obrawalde, which are in the Berlin State Archives , it is documented that these patients were brought to the Pirna-Sonnenstein and Bernburg killing centers to be murdered there.

With the appointment of Grabowski as "technical director" of the institution, the murders of the sick began in 1941 by order of the Gauleiter Schwede-Coburg. Since November 1941 the reactivated pensioner Hermann Vollheim (born May 28, 1875 in Eisleben ; declared dead on December 31, 1945) was the medical director of the institution. But he refused to take part in the murder, which is why he was replaced in 1942 by Theophil Mootz (born June 2, 1872 in Fischau ; † 1945 or later in the Waldheim prison), who was also retired. This subordinated himself completely to Grabowski and took care of the medical-technical handling of the murders. He made the selection of the victims and later marked the alleged cause of death in the medical histories . The poison injections were carried out by a few selected nurses on his behalf. In addition to the doctors Mootz and Hilde Wernicke , who headed the institution's euphemistically named children's department as part of the children's euthanasia , the nursing staff were Amanda Ratajczak, Helene Wieczorek, Herman Gulke, Kurt Weidemann, Walter Schmidt, Willi Plewa, and 21 "Sisters of Death" involved in the killings.

The systematic killings of the patients probably began in the summer of 1942, immediately after Mootz was appointed medical director of the institution. The earliest cases of patients who were brought to Meseritz from the Wittenau sanatoriums in Berlin (today Karl Bonhoeffer Nervenklinik) are documented for the beginning of August 1942.

The murder of the patients took place in specially equipped death rooms and was described by a nurse as follows: “I accompanied the patient to the treatment room, took three tablespoons of veronal from a bag , dissolved it in a glass of water and gave it to the patient to drink. If the patient resisted, a thin probe was used. Occasionally there was nosebleed ”. For the men's ward, a nurse reported that sick people were called into the death room, given an injection with an overdose of morphine or scopolamine in the thigh and then "died quickly". Some patients were killed or shot by air injections (see air embolism ) . Between January and September 1944 alone, a fictitious registry office created only for the murder institute stated on the death certificate that 3241 patients died of “cardiac or old age”. At first they were transported to the crematorium in Frankfurt (Oder) for cremation , later buried in mass graves on the site.

The institute regularly received new deliveries from the Rhineland and Westphalia , from Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen . These transports usually arrived between 11 p.m. and midnight on the institution's own railroad track and comprised up to 300 people. Those arriving were "selected" at the train station and those unable to work were killed within a few days.

Those able to work were faced with heavy physical labor from malnutrition and abuse, so that many died of exhaustion and chronic malnutrition .

The institution obtained the necessary medication from the " Central Office T4 ", a cover organization of the Führer Chancellery , which was responsible for carrying out the murders of the sick under National Socialism .

In the institution there were not only patients from Germany, but also from Poland and the Soviet Union . There were also prisoners of war from the Netherlands , Belgium , France , Czechoslovakia and other nations as well as people who were imprisoned here because of their political beliefs. Well-known victims are the painter Hans Ralfs , the university professor Gertrud Ferchland , the resistance fighter Alexander von Kameke and the composer Norbert von Hannenheim , who survived but died of other diseases after liberation .

Liberation by the Red Army

When the Red Army approached on January 29, 1945, most of the nursing staff withdrew to the west. With the fleeing population, some of the patients were evacuated to the west and housed in institutions near Berlin. The institution was occupied by the Red Army and the dentist Richard Rosenberg, who had stayed, was appointed as the director of the institution. He describes his experiences during this time in a report that he dedicated to Goldowski, the Soviet doctor and Colonel of the Red Army. On February 16, 1945, a Soviet military commission came to Obrawalde to investigate what was going on in the institution. Based on the files found, it was found that over 10,000 people had been murdered within the last two years, the last two by the head nurse Ratajczak one day before the Red Army took over. Head nurse Amanda Ratajczak, who had fled earlier and was arrested by the Soviet Army, had to demonstrate in a cell how the patients were killed and was filmed.

The director of the institution Walter Grabowski has been missing since May 29, 1945. He presumably committed suicide . The Berlin-Tiergarten District Court issued an arrest warrant for Grabowski in 1961, but it was revoked in 1991 due to the alleged death of Grabowski. Medical director Theophil Mootz is said to have been arrested by the Soviet military in 1945 and was pronounced dead.

Vollheim had not participated in the killings and was given "absolute respect" by the Soviet Commission investigating the killings. He is also said to have been arrested and was declared dead on December 31, 1945.

Nurse Weidemann committed suicide on the third or fourth day after the Red Army marched in.

On July 1, 1945, the institution was taken over by the Polish authorities.

Litigation and judgments

Head Nurse Amanda Ratajczak was arrested by the Soviets and admitted to killing over 2,500 people. She was later brought before a Soviet court martial in Meseritz and shot dead together with the nurse Hermann Guhlke, who was also found guilty .

Hilde Wernicke was arrested on August 10, 1945. She and the nurse Helene Wieczorek were tried at the Berlin Regional Court for involvement in euthanasia crimes, which ended on March 26, 1946 with a death sentence. Both were executed with the guillotine on January 14, 1947 in the Lehrter Strasse cell prison .

In the Munich euthanasia trial of 1965 the charge was the insidious communal killing of people for low motives or aiding and abetting in the communal crime of murder .

The main defendants were:

  • the department head nurse Luise Erdmann, 63, in 210 cases,
  • the forest worker Margarete Tunkowski, 54, in 200 cases,
  • the nurse Erna Elgert, 58, in 200 cases,
  • the nurse Martha Winter, 56, in 150 cases.

The other 14 accused nurses were acquitted of charges of complicity in the murder of approximately 8,000 euthanasia victims. According to the court, the evidence was insufficient.

Use today

Today the Samodzielny Publiczny Szpital dla Nerwowo i Psychicznie Chorych w Międzyrzeczu psychiatric clinic is located here .

Commemoration

memorial

In 1996, a memorial stone was erected on the hospital grounds in memory of the victims of the patient murder in the years 1942–1945. A permanent exhibition in the house reminds of the terrible years in the institution.

On January 26, 2010, the death books of the institution with the names of 5000 victims, mostly from Berlin, found by Polish scientists in 2009, were handed over to the Berlin State Archives .

See also

literature

  • Thomas Beddies: The Meseritz-Obrawalde sanatorium and nursing home in the Third Reich. In: Kristina Hübener (Hrsg.): Brandenburg sanatoriums and nursing homes in the Nazi era (= series of publications on the medical history of the state of Brandenburg. 3). Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-89809-301-8 , pp. 231-258.
  • Thomas Beddies: The Pomeranian sanatorium and nursing home in Obrawalde in Brandenburg near Meseritz. In: Baltic Studies . Volume 84 NF, 1998, ISSN  0067-3099 , pp. 85-114.
  • Susan Benedict, Arthur Caplan, Traute Lafrenz-Page : Duty and 'euthanasia': the nurses of Meseritz-Obrawalde. In: Nursing Ethics. November 2007, 14 (6) pp. 781-794.
  • Thorsten Fuchs: The murder we never talked about. In: Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung from Saturday, September 3, 2016, in the Sunday supplement . My time, my newspaper. HAZ on pages 4-5.

Web links

Commons : Obrzyce Asylum  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.obrzyce.eu/
  2. ↑ Christina Härtel: Transports in den Tod . The relocations from the Wittenauer Heilstätten to Obrawalde near Meseritz. In: Working group to research the history of the Karl Bonhoeffer Nervenklinik (ed.): Totgeschwiegen 1933–1945. The history of the Karl-Bonhoeffer-Nervenklinik (=  sites of the history of Berlin ). 1st edition. tape 17 . Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-926175-08-7 , pp. 191-206 .
  3. ↑ Łukasz Paczkowski: Clinic for Mentally Ill and Nervous Meseritz-Obrawalde. In: dwr.org.pl. Stowarzyszenie Dialog-Współpraca-Rozwój, accessed on November 15, 2012 .
  4. ↑ Hilde Steppe (Ed.): I have always enjoyed being a carer with body and soul . about the participation of nurses in the "euthanasia" campaign in Meseritz-Obrawalde. Mabuse Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-933050-42-1 , p. 19 .
  5. ^ Ernst Klee : "Euthanasia" in the Nazi state. The "destruction of life unworthy of life". S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-10-039303-1 , pp. 95-98.
  6. ^ Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 645.
  7. ^ Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 415 f.
  8. ^ Herbert Henck: Meseritz-Obrawalde, January 1945.
  9. ↑ Experiences of Dr. R. Rosenberg. EUGENIKA
  10. ↑ a b c Hans Canjé : Death books from Meseritz antifa 3-4 / 2010 accessed on December 7, 2012.
  11. ↑ Experiences of Dr. R. Rosenbergs p. 14. EUGENIKA
  12. ↑ Always with love. In: Der Spiegel. 10/1965, March 3, 1965. Report on the Munich euthanasia trial, in the Spiegel archive
  13. ^ Hansjakob Stehle: Files from Meseritz. In: The time. April 2, 1965.
  14. ^ LG Munich I, March 12, 1965 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German convictions for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, Vol. XX, edited by Irene Sagel-Grande, HH Fuchs, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1979, No. 587, pp. 693-714 Subject matter of the proceedings: Participation in the 'euthanasia program' by killing thousands of mentally ill patients using veronal or luminal overdoses or by injecting morphine, scopolamine or air ( Memento of the original of March 14, 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www1.jur.uva.nl
  15. ↑ http://www.obrzyce.eu/
  16. ↑ Handover of the death books of the Meseritz-Obrawalde sanatorium , accessed on August 18, 2019


Coordinates: 52 ° 26 ′ 55.7 ″  N , 15 ° 37 ′ 8 ″  E