Hilde Wernicke

Gertrud Emmy Hilde Wernicke (born November 11, 1899 in Schleswig ; † January 14, 1947 in Berlin-Moabit ) was a German psychiatrist who was involved in Nazi crimes as part of child euthanasia in the Obrawalde sanatorium .

Life

Hilde Wernicke was the daughter of an officer. She finished her school career at the higher girls' school in Mainz in 1919 with the Abitur . She then completed a degree in medicine at the University of Frankfurt am Main , which she completed in 1924 with the first state examination. After her medical internship in Marburg and Regensburg , she was awarded a doctorate at the University of Marburg in 1926. med. PhD .

From 1927 Wernicke worked briefly as an assistant doctor at the Meseritz-Obrawalde sanatorium and practiced as a resident doctor in 1928. From 1929 Wernicke worked at the Meseritz-Obrawalde sanatorium and nursing home as a senior physician until 1945.

After the handover of power to the National Socialists , she joined the NSDAP in May 1933 . From 1937 she belonged to the National Socialist Women's Association , for which she acted as local group leader from 1940. At the Meseritz-Obrawalde sanatorium and nursing home, Wernicke was in charge of the euphemistically children's department called “euthanasia” for children. As a senior physician in the institution, she was responsible for hundreds of killings of inmates in the institution. At the beginning of 1944 she was awarded the War Merit Cross. Between 1943 and 1944, Wernicke selected around 600 prison inmates, adults and children, to be murdered and had them killed by the prison nurses under her control, in particular the head nurse Helene Wieczorek, using morphine-scopolamine injections. Before the Red Army arrived , Wernicke and Wieczorek left for Wernigerode . Members of the Soviet troops found mass graves in addition to 1,000 patients in the institution.

After the end of the Second World War , Wernicke was arrested on August 10, 1945. Together with Wieczorek, she was indicted before the jury court at the Berlin Regional Court of involvement in euthanasia crimes, in particular the selection of the people intended for murder and the administration of lethal injections. On March 25, 1946, the two women accused were sentenced to death in several hundred murder cases for insidiousness and low motives. The death sentence was confirmed on August 24, 1946 by the criminal senate of the Berlin Court of Appeal . During the trial, Wernicke had justified her actions as follows: “My task was to sift out the sick who were still incapable of labor from the bulk of the sick and to take them back from killing. Only really incurable, mentally ill people, some of them afflicted with severe physical ailments, were put to sleep, for whom death was literally a release ”. On January 14, 1947 Wernicke and Wieczorek were in solitary confinement Lehrterstraße with the guillotine executed.

The proceedings against Wernicke and Wieczorek received international media attention.

literature

• Kerstin Freudiger: The legal processing of Nazi crimes . Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2002. ISBN 3-1614-7687-5 .
• 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 .
• LG Berlin, March 25, 1946 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, Vol. I, edited by Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1968, No. 3, pp. 31-43 Selection of the mentally ill to be killed and killing by poison injections

Web links

• Bernd Philipsen: The angel of death in a doctor's robe. In: Schleswiger Nachrichten . Schleswig-Holsteinischer Zeitungsverlag , November 22, 2012, accessed on June 5, 2017 . 
• Judgment of the LG Berlin against Wernicke in the Sigmaringen State Archives

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Bernd Philipsen: The angel of death in a doctor's robe. In: Schleswiger Nachrichten . Schleswig-Holsteinischer Zeitungsverlag , November 22, 2012, accessed on June 5, 2017 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b} Freie Universität Berlin: Documentation: Doctors in the Empire - Wernicke, Hilde  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Kerstin Great things: The legal treatment of Nazi crimes . Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2002, ISBN 3-16-147687-5 , p. 111 .
4. ^ Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 671
5. ↑ Justice and Nazi crimes: Procedure serial number 003 ( Memento of the original from October 22, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Published in Justice and Nazi Crimes Volume I. 
6. ↑ Peter Jacobs: Berlin's last guillotine - four years after the war, heads were still rolling in Moabit. Now the guillotine is in a Swabian museum . In Berliner Zeitung , May 25, 2002
7. ↑ The last execution in the Moabit cell prison. In: Moabit Online. May 21, 2009. Retrieved January 29, 2013 .